The New You of 2010: How to Think About Thinking

As we prepare for the onset of 2010, with the plethora of resolutions which we will make and keep, we hope know,  on past Valentine’s Day and Arbor Day and Groundhog Day and  into the hopeful renaissance of spring, we might want to tinker a bit with the basic intellectual toolkit that we’ll need to become the New And Better Us of the new decade.

To that end, find out here if you’re a “cognitive miser” who may also suffer from “dysrationalia.” The article may help to explain why being really smart, like we are, doesn’t mean we always think clearly, and why many politicians, even those we know are Good (meaning we voted for them),  don’t always think as clearly as they should.

You’ll also find the answer to this tantalizing riddle (and I bet you get it wrong!)

Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?

Yes      No      Cannot be determined

BookChat Man’s Recent Reviews

What’s that?   You want still more ideas for the bookish remnant on your holiday gift list?

As always, I live only to serve. Here are links to  several of my recent book reviews from The Dallas Morning News, all of them  available at remaining book stores everywhere. Don’t settle for the clever summary; click through to the whole review!

1. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer.  I wouldn’t bring this one up while dining with happy carnivores or compromised vegetarians.  Reviewed here.

2. Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton. Even as a midwinter beach read, the last novel completed by the late MegaSellerosaurus  doesn’t stand up to the likes of Jurassic Park or Prey, meaning it may only sell 25 million copies.  Reviewed here.

3. No Impact Man by Colin Beavan. New York City guy and his family try to live lightly on the earth for an entire year–no carbon footprint, no pollution, no waste, no imported food, no. . . life, you say? Actually, this book recalls Thoreau’s still -pressing question:  Do we own our things, or do our things own us? Reviewed here.

4. The Humbling by Philip Roth. The last living face on our literary Mt. Rushmore (after the departure of Mailer, Bellow, and Updike) keeps turning out short, bitter  books like  bracing cups of absinthe. The Bad News: Old age brings bad sleep, blooming  polyps and worse. The Good News:  In Roth novels,  polyp-laden 70-ish guys still land those hot young women. Reviewed here.

Crashers’ Excuses: Who Cares What They Said?

How  does the frightening fact that my daughter now has a beginner’s driving permit connect with the frightening fact that the  White House Party Crashers so easily waltzed in to exchange air-kisses with the most powerful man in the civilized world? Here’s the chain:

1. This morning, she (the daughter, not the sari-wearing blonde crasher)  wanted to drive to breakfast,  but she  did not have her permit or her contacts  with her, so we said no. And no. And no. And no. (That’s one “no” for  each increasingly shrill demand.)

2. She said and said that if she got stopped, she would just tell the officers that she left the permit at home, or lost it,  and that she could see just fine without her contacts.

3. This led me to say what generations of fathers have said: Sweetheart, the police have heard every conceivable excuse for everything. If a cop has  been on patrol for more than a year or so, there is no type of human deceit and creative humbug he has  not heard.

4. Which then brought to mind the Crashers, and their changing repertoire of  excuses about how they were too invited, really, or thought they were invited, or at least thought that there was no reason to think they weren’t invited.

5. So who cares what they said to whichever screener or Secret Service agent waved them by? State functions at the White House have a guest list. There are names on the list. The names on the list are of the people who are invited. Names not on the list belong to people who were not invited.

6. Surely, the Secret Service handlers have heard it all, just like the local cops. They should not be moved by someone, however blonde, who says she left the invitation in her other sari or lost it in the waiting line or  thought she was told by a press secretary’s best friend that he would get her on the list. She is not on the list.

7.   The Crashers  probably had no insidious intent beyond resume-building for reality TV, but so what? Weren’t they at the very least trespassing? At least haul them in for that.

Time for the Annual Best Books List, #1

As your host scrambles to balance his (barely) paying work with the mushrooming demands of his Second Life as an actor–okay, make that, “someone who is acting,” he’s letting dozens of bloggable ideas pile up on his piled-up desk. But at least I can maintain some semblance of a blog for the hardy few who have not migrated to Facebook kick up the holiday merriment by posting the first of the annual Tucker Christmas Book Lists! Get your shopping list going here.

Instant Celebrities: Why We Can’t Just Ignore Them

Somebody–maybe Mark Twain, H. L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Nathaniel West, Joseph Heller, Tom Wolfe, or  John Stewart–once  said that it’s impossible to satirize American life, because by the time you get the satire done, the reality has already eclipsed your fantasy.

That seems truer and truer each day. Just think of recent celebrity eruptions, for example: The pathetic wannabees mocked on American Idol; the Octomom–who’s now signed for a reality TV show, of course; the Balloon Boy family; and now the White House gate crashers. You could make this stuff up, but why bother? Just check the morning headlines. For them, the unpublicized life is not worth living.

These people worm their way into your consciousness, taking up valuable mental real estate even in the minds of those who loathe them.  You don’t have to be a “consumer” of their actual product, whatever that is, to wallow in their trashy lives.  They pervade society, a constant and depressing low-grade fever that never quite goes away.

What to do? I’ve got more thoughts on Celeb Overload in a radio commentary here.

Quote of the Day

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”

–Marcus Tullius Cicero

200,000 Slaughtered Animals Say: Who’s This Gadhimai, Anyway?

BARIYAPUR, Nepal (AP) — The ceremony began with prayers in a temple by tens of thousands of Hindus before dawn Tuesday. Then it shifted to a nearby corral, where in the cold morning mist, scores of butchers wielding curved swords began slaughtering buffalo calves by hacking off their heads.

Over two days, 200,000 buffaloes, goats, chickens and pigeons will be killed as part of a blood-soaked festival held every five years to honor Gadhimai, a Hindu goddess of power.

This is even more bizarre than the item I recently blogged about here. Why would a god require the senseless slaughter of animals?

Here’s how one observer defended the killings:  ”It is their tradition and it is fine if they continue to follow it. No one should try to tell them they can’t follow what their ancestors did,” he said.

Precisely the same argument could be made, and no doubt was, in favor of slavery.

Anyway,  Happy Turkey Day Thanksgiving! Remember: tofu and gravy. . .tofu and dressing. . . tofunkin pie. . .candied stuffed tofu. . .

9-11 Plotters’ Trial: An Incoherent Strategy?

Clive Crook in The Financial Times writes  the best stuff  I’ve seen so far on the decision to try the 9-11 planners in a civilian courtroom, raising a number of provocative questions about the Obama administration’s strategy here and tackling one of Attorney General Holder’s  weakest points, in my judgment. Key quote:

Officials have suggested that whatever happens,  Mr. Mohammed will not be let go: he will be detained indefinitely, regardless. So this exemplary trial either brings in the correct verdict, or else is annulled. This rather dulls the declaration of justice for all that the administration believes it is making to the world.

Exactly. If the point is to give these monsters a fair and open trial, then they also deserve the outcome of a fair and open trial, which might include acquittal. And if  ”Mr” Mohammed is acquitted, shouldn’t he walk–even though that walk would spell the end of the Obama presidency? I sense a case of having it both ways.

Crook’s  full piece is here.

Amazing, Heroic Consistency

Readers here (those who have not decamped to Facebook) know that I’m awed by great feats of consistency, sticking with it, keeping some worthwhile project going day after day after day until the creator has done what he set out to do.

Persistence seems like a mundane, shopkeeper’s virtue, but what good thing ever got done without it? How many people do we all know who brim with marvelous ideas and do almost nothing with them? Or they make a great start on a diet, an exercise plan, a journal, or a new life plan,  and fizzle out a few days or weeks later for reasons they can rarely articulate.

Great starts, let me tell you, are easy. It’s the follow-through that gets most of us. When we wistfully look back at the musician or painter or ballerina we once hoped to be, we too easily blame a lack of blazing genius for our failure. Perhaps we weren’t gifted like Eric Clapton or Picasso. . . or perhaps we just didn’t stay with it like they did.

My admiration for this unglamorous quality of stickwithitness led me to praise Art Garfunkle’s astonishing 40-year reading list. It led me to read and applaud Bob Greene’s Be True to Your School: a Diary of 1964, not because Greene is any rival of Faulkner or Proust, but because, as a high school student, he set out to keep a diary of an entire year, writing on every one of its 365 days, and did it. I’d give anything to have a diary of one of my high school or college years, or my first year as a teacher, or my first year as a professional writer. Alas, I’ve tried journals probably five or six times but never made it past a month.

Now here’s another awe-inspiring example of heroic consistency. This woman set out to read–and review!–a book every day for a year. And she did it. I stand in awe:

http://www.readallday.org/the365project.html

And here is a NY Times piece  about her project.

Quote of the Week

It’s rare to come across a quote that’s simultaneously exhilirating and frightening, but here’s one:

“It’s not naive to think you can change the world.  It’s naive to think you can possibly be in the world and not change it.  Everything you do changes the world whether you like it or not.”

– David LaMotte

National Book Award Winners: How Many Have You Read?

As we approach the Sixtieth Handing Out of the National Book Awards, here’s a list of all the winners. The Big Names are predictable: Updike, Styron, Bellow, Cheever, Roth, Powers. But I never knew, or had forgotten, that William F. Buckley won for one of his Blackford Oakes  spy novels ( Stained Glass,  1980 ), and John D. McDonald took the 1981  prize for  The Green Ripper ,  one of several Travis McGee novels that blur the lines between detective genre fiction, sharp social criticism and rewarding  literature.

How many have you read? Check them all  out here; each winner is accompanied by a thoughtful essay evaluating the book.

Modern Warfare 2: Digging that “Murder Simulator”

If you’re not part of the multi-billion dollar video game world, and you’ve never played one of those “first-person shooter” games in which you take the POV of a killer, this Slate magazine article may leave you baffled, as it does me.

And you may have the same question I do:  Is it really possible that people can devote countless hours to this kind of virtual mayhem–and not have their real-world minds and hearts affected in any way by it?

Key quote from the author, Chris Suellentrop, who is a real, grownup journalist, not a nipple-pierced wack living in his parents’ basement:

As part of a group of four men with guns, you walk toward a security line full of civilians at a Russian airport. And then you kill them.

I’ll admit it—I pulled the trigger. The game had instructed me to follow the lead of my fellow terrorists, and I had been told that preserving my undercover status was important for the country. But after an introductory gun burst, I couldn’t do it anymore. It was the most powerful emotional experience any video game has ever given me. I don’t know that I cried, but I was knocked off balance by emotions that I thought I had tucked away. As the travelers screamed and fled from the indiscriminate slaughter, I strolled through the airport. I didn’t fire my weapon anymore, but I watched the three Russian terrorists kill. One of the men shot a passenger as he crawled along the blood-streaked floor and pleaded for his life.

This is a game, remember. Suellentrop has a fairly complex reaction, describing a kind of tug-of-war between the kick of killing and the regrets brought on by the game’s amoral plotting. In his case, revulsion over the slaughter seems to win out–barely.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” And some of them, dark and strange indeed, seem to make  a ton of money.

Kudos to Amazon: No More “Wrap Rage”

With the shopping frenzy upon us, Amazon has  a great idea. Why can’t all businesses be so sensible? (Especially those blasted electronics people!)

It shouldn’t take a screwdriver, a pair of scissors and a cat burglar’s skills to open a $9  memory chip sealed in several inches of undecomposable, landfill-bound polywhatever. Amazon gets it.

Check out their new initiative here .

Fort Hood Shooter: Can We at Least WALK to Judgment?

Okay. We’ve now been told 12,000 times that we can’t rush to judgment on the Fort Hood shooter. We can’t assume that just because he had numerous contacts with a raving jihadist firebrand, or gave an anti-American lecture, that he was in any way influenced by said firebrand or might have been a dangerous ideologue. We have to take it slow, wait for more evidence, sift it carefully, etc.

Looks like that’s what the Army was doing all those years as they missed a number of warning signs on the future shooter.

Of course it would be stupid and wrong to broad-brush Muslims as a group. There is no group guilt, only individual guilt. The shooter alone did what he did. And he may have acted for a number of reasons. We should look at each of those reasons and give each the weight it deserves. And we shouldn’t let the fear of religious profiling, or some myth of a  post-Sept. 11 crackdown, which never happened,  prevent us from seeing whatever truth is there.

In that connection, it’s nice to see two nationally syndicated columnists from very different political perspectives agree. David Brooks and Eugene Robinson both say that we can’t let an admirable impulse–not wanting to paint  all Muslims with a bloody brush–blind us to the dangers of a radical few.

Don’t Hold Your Breath for Book Biz Bailout

Somehow  I don’t think Washington will ride to the rescue of the ailing book business, as the age of pulp fiction and nonfiction gives way to the Kindlezoic Era.

By the way, I saw several Kindlers Kindling (Christmas lyric?)  on the plane to New York last week, and–Updike help me!–I must admit they looked pretty darn cool, though I lamented the loss of pulp-powered history and aesthetics in a recent radio commentary. Sample tease:

Books are also cultural touchstones, part of the timeline of our lives. Even cheap, lurid crime and Sci-fi paperbacks from the Forties and Fifties speak volumes about what people valued, what they desired and what they feared.

Books have an individual character, a tactile reality, a smell, a life span, that make them precious and loveable in ways no collection of bytes can be. They take up space, they react to moisture and heat and light. Mortal and tattered, they age along with us.