Thursday, August 13, 2009

Reinvent Thyself!

Daniel Boorstin wrote in The Discoverers (1983): "The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge." And, the illusion of knowledge deludes us to this day. Start again! Live the dream! To hell with the naysayers! If this is (fair & balanced) whistling past the graveyard, so be it.

[x Time]
The Avenging Amateur
By Kurt Andersen

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The financial crisis came about because we got complacent, depending on all-knowing financial experts — mortgage lenders, Wall Street sharpers, the Federal Reserve — to run our system expertly. But then the experts did the same thing, imagining that they had laid off all their risks on other experts. Until finally the last expert down the line turned out to be just another greater fool, and the system crashed.

We still need experts. But we can no longer abdicate judgment to them or to the system they've cobbled together. This country, after all, was created by passionately engaged amateurs. The American spirit really is the amateur spirit. The great mass of European settlers were amateur explorers, and their grandchildren and great-grandchildren who created the U.S. were amateur politicians. "I see democracy," the late historian Daniel Boorstin wrote, as "government by amateurs, as a way of confessing the limits of our knowledge." In the early 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville approvingly noted the absence of "public careers" in America — that is, the scarcity of professional politicians.

Back then, amateur was an entirely positive adjective. An amateur pursuit meant something that one pursued — a field of study, an artistic enterprise, a craft — not unseriously, but out of love rather than merely to earn a living.

Amateurs do the things they want to do in the ways they want to do them. They don't worry too much about breaking rules and aren't paralyzed by a fear of imperfection or even failure. Active citizenship is all about tapping into one's amateur spirit. "But hold on," you say. "I will never understand credit-default swaps or know how to determine the correct leverage ratio for banks." Me neither, and I don't want to depend on an amateur physician telling me how to manage my health. But we can trust our reality-based hunches about fishy-looking procedures and unsustainable projects and demand that the supposed experts explain their supposed expertise in ways we do understand The American character is two-sided to an extreme and paradoxical degree. On the one hand, we are sober and practical and commonsensical, but on the other hand, we are wild and crazy speculators. The full-blown amateur spirit derives from this same paradox. Even as we indulge our native chutzpah — Live the dream! To hell with the naysayers! — as a practical matter, it also requires a profound humility, since the amateur must throw himself into situations where he's uncertain and even ignorant, and therefore obliged to figure out new ways of seeing problems and fresh ways of solving them. At this particular American inflection point, after the crash and before the rebuild, frankly admitting that we aren't absolutely certain how to proceed is liberating, and crucial. I like paradoxes, which is why, even though I'm not particularly religious, Zen Buddhism has always appealed to me. Take the paradoxical state that Buddhists seek to achieve, what they call sho-shin, or "beginner's mind." The 20th century Japanese Zen master Shunryu Suzuki, who spent the last dozen years of his life in America, famously wrote that "in the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few." Which sounds to me very much like the core of Boorstin's amateur spirit. "The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance," Boorstin wrote, "but the illusion of knowledge."

This isn't just airy-fairy philosophy: it's real, and it works. A decade after Steve Jobs co-founded Apple, he was purged by his own board, but after the sense of betrayal passed, and he went on to build Pixar and oversee Apple's glorious renewal, he realized his personal reset had been a blessing in disguise. "The heaviness of being successful," Jobs has said of his firing, "was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life." I happen to know what Jobs means: my sacking as editor of New York magazine 13 years ago freed me to reinvent myself as a novelist and public-radio host. Getting fired was traumatic. Finding my way since has been thrilling and immensely gratifying. May America and Americans have such good luck figuring out how to climb out of the holes we find ourselves in now. Ω

[Kurt Andersen graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, where he was an editor of the Lampoon. He received an honorary doctorate from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2005, and in 2003, New York magazine named him one of the 100 People Who Changed New York. Andersen is the author of several books, the latest of which is Reset: How This Crisis Can Restore Our Values and Renew America (2009).]

Copyright © 2009 Time, Inc.

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Copyright © 2009 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

More From The DOD (Department Of Dumb)

According to George Lopez, the Dumbos are gonna pay — big time — for their 31 votes against the confirmation of Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor. In his one-man show in San Antonio last weekend, Lopez was snarling at John Cornball and Kay Bailey Cheerleader, the two U.S. Senators from Texas. Cornball couldn't get past the "wise Latina" references and Cheerleader voted against Sotomayor because the "wise Latina" was opposed by the National Rifle Association. Lopez snarled that the Texas Dumbos were gonna pay in 2010. This blogger is going to hang around and see what happens to the Dumbos in the blowback from the Sotomayor confirmation. If this is (fair & balanced) anticipation, so be it.

[x San Diego Fishwrap]
It Took The GOP Just 31 Petty Votes To Lose A Constituency
By Ruben Navarrette Jr.

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During his recent HBO special, "Tall, Dark and Chicano," comedian George Lopez tore a hole in the Big Tent. Incensed that 31 Senate Republicans had voted against Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court, Lopez informed the GOP that it would never again get the votes of Latinos. In fact, he said, given changing demographics, Republicans might as well get used to losing in the years to come because "you won't win a ... pie-eating contest."

That's harsh, but fair. Republicans know not what they did. They're only fooling themselves if they think they won't pay a price for their petty opposition to the nation's first Latina justice.

Remember when Republicans used to say that people should take responsibility for their actions? Never mind. They didn't mean it. Not when it comes to Senate Republicans trying to dodge responsibility for voting against Sotomayor. They might be able to stand behind their votes if they weren't afraid that they were standing on quicksand. They're terrified that Hispanics will be sore winners and take retribution at the ballot box — starting in 2010 and possibly lasting for decades.

In fact, Republicans are so desperate to avoid incurring the wrath of one of the fastest-growing parts of the electorate that they've pulled a page from the Democrats' playbook. The left is always trying to camouflage its true agenda with flowery rhetoric. Liberals talk about increasing Latino representation

on the federal bench but then torpedo a highly qualified Latino Republican such as Miguel Estrada, President George W. Bush's choice for the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. With the left, forget what they say and watch what they do.

It's the same thing with the Republican senators who voted against Sotomayor. They say all the right things, before proceeding to do the wrong thing. Many of them went to great lengths to praise the nominee's qualifications, then voted against her because, they said, they were concerned about her speeches or afraid that she was a judicial activist.

The critics need new material. You'd think the senators had never given a speech they wish they could take back. Sotomayor isn't a judicial activist, as anyone who watched the confirmation hearings knows. But what if she were? She'd fit right in with her new colleagues on the Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy flexed their judicial activism in the New Haven firefighters case and in earlier cases involving the expansion of executive power.

Here's the real reason those Republicans opposed Sotomayor. They were catering to the white males who are still in the party and now account for most of its base. Those voters were miffed by the "wise Latina," and they're not about to vote for anyone who backed her. It's also interesting that many of the senators who voted "no" come from states with large Hispanic populations, such as Arizona and Texas. You would think that they might worry about a backlash from Hispanic voters. But, it is also in those states that white voters are especially nervous about what they see as racially antagonistic rhetoric from Hispanics, who are coming to greater prominence because of changing demographics.

At the same time, by singing Sotomayor's praises, Republicans must think that they covered their tracks. If they ever have to explain themselves, they can pull out a copy of their floor speeches and hope that no one bothers to look at how they actually voted.

First, the Republicans insult Sotomayor, as when Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma mistook the judge for Lucille Ball, telling her that she "had lots of 'splaining to do." And now they're insulting the intelligence of 48 million Latinos in the United States.

Christmas may be coming early for Democrats. After several generations of taking Hispanics for granted and offering little more than mariachis and salsa, how did Democrats get so lucky as to draw opponents who are so skilled at absolutely repelling this constituency?

Perhaps the biggest disappointment to many of us who like to believe in kinder, gentler Republicans is that Sotomayor's opponents included none other than Sen. John McCain. During last year's presidential campaign, McCain's record of serving the Latino community far surpassed that of Barack Obama. Now, thanks to a historic nomination to the Supreme Court, and how badly McCain and his fellow Republicans bungled it, I'd say that Obama is all caught up. Ω

[Ruben Navarrette Jr. graduated from Harvard in 1990 and returned to his native Fresno, CA, where he began a free-lance writing career that produced more than 200 articles in such publications as the Los Angeles Times, The Fresno Bee, and the Chicago Tribune. In 1997 he joined the staff of The Arizona Republic, first as a reporter and then as a twice-weekly columnist, before returning to Harvard in the fall of 1999 to earn a master's in public administration from the Kennedy School of Government. He joined the editorial board of The Dallas Morning News in July 2000, and in 2005, moved to the San Diego Union-Tribune. His column has been in syndication since 2001.]

Copyright © 2009 The Washington Post Writers Group

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