The Jane Clifton continuum

With his beatific, martyred air, Saint Nicholas of the Perpetual NeoLiberal Sorrows is the perfect foil for the charmless, foul-mouthed Whale Oil, butt of a thousand blubber and blowhole jokes and oh my God what is with this metaphor? But I must set the scene. A struggle between a good that isn’t so good and an evil that isn’t so evil. My greatly extended column space so I can make you believe, as I do, that it’s all grey. A continuum.

So far the revelations from, and subsequent to, the publication of Hager’s Dirty Politics book of purloined Slater email traffic have divided people along predictable lines if, like me, you’re good at predicting things after they’ve already happened. Those immersed in politics profess no great surprise at the sleaze-grubbing that goes on behind the scenes at the extremely popular Whale Oil blog, while those not immersed in politics accuse the immersed of being complicit by negligence in not decrying such grubbiness long ago.

Look, we were busy, okay?

Then there’s the division of right and left. Polling shows a small minority of National supporters will be deterred by the dirty politics this outed cabal of National supporters I knew about all along but didn’t see fit to report on because it would have been too easy, plus it’s not the kind of stuff that wins you awards, are shown to have played.

What this will probably boil down to is that the people most vigorously exercised by the skulduggery were already anti-National and will just not vote for National with even greater relish. Those already voting for National, are unlikely to be swayed by the rogue actions of the Whale Oil cabal, even though in a few of its aspects the rackety behaviour strayed uncomfortably close to the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

(Skullduggery and Rackety, coincidentally, are also what I named my cats. Funny story: once Rackety really did stray uncomfortably close to the Prime Minister and had to be removed by his security detail.)

But the most fascinating division is between the proponents of both the major party factions’ extreme wings, which in reality unites them. In essence, Slater and cohorts are what’s traditionally called a rump, a gnarly minority in a party that sometimes peels away.

Labour and the other leftist parties, too, have a rump. My task therefore is to attempt to persuade you that the Right’s rump – whose actions, if not the background conversations that led to them, have been documented since well before Dirty Politics – is no worse than the Left’s rump, which consists in a marginal to non-existent group of petulant cranks.

THE MIRROR HAS TWO FACES

The issues Hager’s book, and the mere existence of operators like Slater, raises will never be resolved while I’m in charge around here – sorry, I mean because they boil down to a partisan view of means and ends. Each side believes its end justifies its means, but the other side’s does not.

Hager, in accepting illicitly obtained emails, and publishing his book without providing those tarred in it with a right of reply, is declaring that it’s acceptable for him to break rules because his is a worthy cause. There is a public good defence. I hope I’ve janesplained sufficiently how investigative journalism works – I’ve seen it done in a movie once, I think Robert Redford was in it – while at the same time making it sound seedy and wrong.

What Hager says at the same time, however, is that Slater and his team’s use of exactly the same means to further their ends, of keeping the left out of power, is not acceptable. Having obtained information someone doesn’t want him or her to have, any activist is going to spin it and frame it to fit their desired world view.

Hager might be a respected peace researcher, but what he does is on a continuum with what Whale Oil seeks to do.

Fig. 1: The continuum

There is a continuum between planning political hits with one of the Prime Minister’s senior advisers; publishing the address details of a journalist in the hope that the Chinese mafia will murder him; colluding with various Ministers and agencies to obtain in advance requests for information by media organizations, so you can lodge the same requests and get ahead of the story with a favourable government spin; colluding with a Cabinet Minister to publish the details of a public servant you suspect of having leaked embarrassing details of an accommodation rort perpetrated by another Cabinet Minister, in the hope – or rather, with the certainty – that he will receive threats to his life, which you will also publish; discussing how to blackmail the leader of a party in government to force him to step down; attempting to force the disclosure of a sexual affair to subvert the result of a Mayoral election; manipulating party candidate selections by means of protracted and vicious personal smear campaigns; colluding with a ruthless PR operative to vilify various public health campaigners, academics and civil servants, running attacks written by others under your own name for money as part of so-called ‘below the line’ operations; there is a continuum, I say, between all of these activities – did I forget anything? – and reporting on them based on illegally obtained private conversations.

It’s roughly the same continuum as between parking in a towaway area and slaughtering all the first-borns, but it’s a continuum. You can’t deny it.

What I’m charging here is that both Hager and Slater have the same ends – keeping the opposite political side out of power – therefore the means are also, as I said above, ‘exactly the same’. Me, I have no ends. I have only means, in the form of my weekly column, which today is taking extra space.

The rest of this section is 600 words long, so I’m going to just give you the abstract. In it, I will:

1. Portray Nicky Hager as a pawn of the persons or persons who are now releasing the illegally obtained conversations, as if having presented the information sensitively makes him somehow responsible.

2. Praise Cunliffe for running a clean campaign, but only in order to castigate him for not demoting Steve Gibson, so I can segue into equating that failure of leadership with the Prime Minister’s decision not to sack Judith Collins, who – unlike Gibson – has not apologised, and never will.

3. Claim that the Left is just as bad but without adducing any evidence, as if it were some sort of axiomatic cosmological constant (‘although it’s lazy and complacent to say that politics is always dirty and that one side is invariably as bad as the other, it’s also true’) and that anyway the bad isn’t all that bad (‘to take a reality check on dirty politics, it’s very much a minority sport’).

NIMPY – NOT IN MY PARTY!

I’m becoming acutely aware that, if you’ve read this far, you’re going to expect me to say something about the Left’s rump and how it’s so very bad. Frankly, I was hoping you’d have moved on to some of the excellent material in this week’s issue by now, like Diana’s interview with Peter Capaldi. Come on, it’s Peter Fucking Capaldi! And he’s playing Doctor Who!

Okay, look, I’m going to give it a go. But I can’t promise we’ll get there. The south face of this thing is pretty steep.

One of the most dazzling features of this debate is the lack of self-awareness party activists have about grubby politics, even while they’re engaged in it. The climate in which Slater operates is greatly fostered by the normalisation of hate-filled commentary online.

(You have a horrible feeling you know where this is going. A chill.)

The most common form of dirty politics is much less elaborate than what’s described in Hager’s book. It’s the hourly drip-drip-drip of invective engaged in by party supporters, very often against their own side. It’s disloyal and damaging, but when you’re in the rump, you can’t seem to help yourself, and the internet gives you every opportunity to vent. Systematic vilification is there to see every day on all manner of blogs. The Standard, the blog most closely aligned to Labour, has an unending stream of it, even while claiming the moral high ground over Whale Oil because it no longer tries to break news stories but restricts itself to commentary.

Here we are. We’ve reached the summit. Left-wingers who use social media to criticise other left-wingers. They create the climate in which Slater’s dirty politics thrives. They are to blame, and not the politicians, advisers, public relations men, editors and journalists who have been complicit in perverting the way information is circulated and used in this country. They are the ones who used Cameron Slater’s tipline, allowed themselves to be manipulated by him, had him invited to our corporate parties at Eden Park and finally, most heinously, forced the newspaper industry to give him an award and treat him as one of their own. It was Lynn Prentice and the Standard who made us do all those things.

Look, they even criticised Josie Pagani. They said mean things to her. They said she was “A Fox liberal,” “incoherent, disjointed and illogical”. Someone even said “I bet she misrepresents this criticism of her behaviour and statements as a personal attack.” This is exactly like that time a commenter on Whale Oil said Simon Pleasants should be summarily executed, and his wife and kid should also be killed if they refused to pay for the bullet.

And Josie. Will the rump stop at nothing? We must tackle the national crisis of politicised people using public forums to openly criticise the spokespersons that the media have selected for them.

TITLE OF NEXT SECTION GOES HERE

Why are you doing this? Quit punishing yourself. This a 94-page magazine and it’s packed with superb writing. The arts pages. The film reviews. The thrill of finding out which letter by child poverty expert Susan St John we didn’t publish this week. A Tory editorial. Bill Ralston.

Or you could read something else altogether. You know as well as I do that 800 words from now I’m going to put an end to this by claiming that I warned everyone about blogs. I will actually use the words ‘maybe I was just right too early’. Trust me, you don’t want to be here when that happens.

***

The above started as a series of tweets late last week as a result of which a senior writer for the New Zealand Listener opined in a blog post that I am a disturbed individual who shouldn’t be allowed to leave the home unless heavily sedated. Cameron Slater, whom I've publicly defended in the past whenever his mental illness was used to attack him, quickly republished the post on Whale Oil. I’m used by now to that kind of attention, as well as to dealing with assorted trolls and my very own online stalker. I know of the time and energy it sometimes takes to sort those people from the legitimate and honest critics. But it bothered me more, this time. There is a climate. I feel differently vulnerable, as I’m sure many others do.

What we have come to call dirty politics, and which Jane Clifton paints in her column as a product of minority grassroots extremes of our political environment, is in fact an institutional practice. It doesn’t start at the bottom, but at the top – in this particular instance, with the son of a National Party President colluding with a freelance political advisor, a powerful PR company, a Cabinet Minister, National’s pollster and the very office of the Prime Minister. It uses intimidation and coercion to protect and consolidate vested powers, and in this of course it’s hardly unique. We know of the advocacy groups that have been silenced, of the police raids on Māori communities, of the Ministers who have disclosed the private details of citizens without needing to resort to Mr Slater or his associates. We’re just not always sufficiently aware of how this other power operates at any one time. And so, whenever its story gets told, it produces a loss of innocence among those who have not yet witnessed that particular incarnation of the state. It’s like the first time a cop swings a baton at someone in front of your eyes during a demonstration, unprovoked, gratuitously, just because he can. You didn’t feel the blow but you feel the shock. Nothing prepares you for it.

There is a climate. It has made me apprehensive about what I can and cannot write, and embarrassed to feel that way. But fuck it, we can’t let this go.

Read this thing that David Fisher wrote.

The Tony Blair contingency

The civil war in Syria with its attendant disintegration is having its predictable and malign effect that I, Tony Blair, totally failed to predict. Iraq is now in mortal danger. The whole of the Middle East is under threat, although this time not from me personally.

Not his fault

We will have to rethink the strategy that I, Tony Blair, urged towards Syria, and support the Iraqi Government in beating back the insurgency. Then we need a comprehensive plan for the Middle East that correctly learns the lessons of the past decade. By which I mean from 2004 onwards. There are no lessons at all to be learned about 2003, which was a fantastic year. In doing so, we should listen to and work closely with our allies across the region, like we always have. ‘Really good at listening,’ is what our allies across the region used to call us.

It is profoundly disappointing to me, Tony Blair, that events in Mosul have led to a rerun of the arguments over the decision to remove Saddam Hussein. Also, I’ve been starting to get those ‘Greetings from The Hague’ postcards again. The key question obviously is what to do now, not defend again what I did then. But because some of the commentary has gone immediately to claim that but for that decision, Iraq would not be facing this challenge; or even more extraordinary, implying that but for the decision, the Middle East would be at peace right now; it is necessary that certain points are made forcefully in what is not at all a senseless, depraved attempt to rescue the reputation and historical legacy of me, Tony Blair.

This won’t take long. Just allow me a brief 1,200-word preamble in which I’m going to claim that we defeated al Qaeda in Iraq, until the sectarianism of the Maliki government snuffed out what was a genuine opportunity to build a cohesive Iraq and save my face. In fact, if anything, we should debate about whether the withdrawal of US forces happened too soon. Do it to Julia!

Next, I’m going to tell you that although Saddam didn’t turn out to have WMDs, going to war with Iraq was the right decision because Assad ended up using chemical weapons we didn’t even know he had, which means that Saddam would have too, eventually, had we not attacked him. This is going to give you such a headache you’ll have to take a heavy dose of barbiturates and lie down for a few hours.

Pardon me? Yes, this is in fact the same Assad that I warmly entertained during his visit to Britain in 2002, and that my government considered bestowing an honour upon. Now I’m saying we should remove him. Except I’m also saying that we should stop ISIS with all means necessary. This will start making sense as soon as your head clears. In the meantime, get this: Islamist extremism in all its different manifestations as a group, rebuilt refinanced and rearmed mainly as a result of its ability to grow and gain experience through the war in Syria. And not, say, through ten years of insurgency in Iraq. Yeah.

The second argument – that no-one is really making but I’ll pretend someone were so I can triumphantly refute it – is that, but for the invasion of 2003, Iraq would be a stable country today. Watch me turn this into a straw man so combustible it will burn quicker than one of my effigies.

The reality is that the whole of the Middle East and beyond is going through a huge, agonising and protracted transition. We have to liberate ourselves from the notion that I, Tony Blair have caused this. I haven't. We can argue as to whether the policies that I supported or contributed to have helped or not, as if we hadn’t opened the ‘world’ section of a newspaper in the last fifteen years. But the fundamental cause of the crisis lies within the region, not inside my perfectly tailored suit.

The problems of the Middle East are the product of bad systems of politics mixed with a bad abuse of religion going back over a long time. Poor governance, weak institutions, oppressive rule and a failure within parts of Islam to work out a sensible relationship between religion and Government have combined to create countries which are simply unprepared for the modern world.

The modern world is the one in which my friends and I can decide to bomb your nation into the pre-modern world, for motives that are either trumped up or fabricated. This is what our effective governance, sensible religion and precision technology allow us to do. You wouldn’t understand.

Put into that mix, young populations with no effective job opportunities and education systems that do not correspond to the requirements of the future economy, and you have a toxic, inherently unstable matrix of factors that was always – repeat always – going to lead to a revolution. But enough about the UK or Europe. We were talking about the Middle East.

The fact is that as a result of the way these societies have developed and because Islamism of various descriptions became the focal point of opposition to oppression, the removal of the dictatorship is only the beginning not the end of the challenge. Once the regime changes, then out come pouring all the tensions – tribal, ethnic and of course above all religious; and the rebuilding of the country, with functioning institutions and systems of Government, becomes incredibly hard. The extremism destabilises the country, hinders the attempts at development, the sectarian divisions become even more acute and the result is the mess we see all over the region.

Yes: I, Tony Blair, the chief enabler of George W. Bush, Dick ‘we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators’ Cheney and the whole Project for a New American Century crew, am lecturing you about complexity and unintended consequences. With this face.

This face

Understanding this and analysing properly what has happened and how it’s not the fault of me, Tony Blair, is absolutely vital to the severe challenge of working out what we can do about it. So rather than continuing to rerun the debate over Iraq from over 11 years ago, realise that whatever we had done or not done, we would be facing a big challenge today. So what do you think, maybe we could have not invaded Iraq and spared half a million lives? I don’t know. You tell me.

The point is that we won't win the fight until we accept the nature of it. Iraq is part of a much bigger picture. By all means argue about the wisdom of earlier decisions. But please don’t. It is the decisions now that will matter. The choices are all pretty ugly, it is true. But for three years we have watched Syria descend into the abyss, and as it is going down, it is slowly but surely wrapping its cords around us pulling me down with it. We have to put aside the differences of the past and act now to save the future. My future.

I don’t want to go to jail.

The Susan Wood trilogy

1. Time for Labour to start addressing the issues that matter deeply to Susan Wood

If I were running Labour I would stop banging on about woman only seats, about social engineering. Those things are distractions. Just ask Labour candidate and women’s rights enthusiast Stuart Nash. I would instead focus on something far more important, something that I believe resonates with Susan Wood New Zealanders.

I’m talking about inequality, about the growing gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’. But I am not talking worker versus beneficiary here. Those people should be poor. Frankly, I wish they were poorer. No: I am referring to the great many New Zealanders who get out of bed every day who go to work. Some of them in radio and television broadcasting.

Cares that some people are poorer than others

More than half of our working households get some sort of government benefit. And there is new research out showing that in terms of income distribution, New Zealand has become one of the most unequal developed countries in the world. This is not something that has happened overnight, it is not something that we can blame on one government or another. It is something that has crept up on us over the past 30 years. That’s right. I said that no government is responsible. I said ‘crept up’. Who could have foretold that slashing benefits to the poor and simultaneously cutting taxes to the rich would create this situation? None of us are to blame. Least of all those who have been professional journalists the entire time as opposed to, say, asleep or dead.

Did you know that the wealthiest 10 per cent of this country own more than half of it? And that the poorest half own just five per cent? In the United States the numbers are even more exaggerated with the top one per cent owning 93 per cent, leaving the remaining 99 per cent of Americans with a measly seven per cent of total wealth. I would hate to see that happen here. Probably.

I, too, at different times of my life I have been one of the ‘have nots’. For instance I ‘had no’ place to put all the money TVNZ threw at me to host Close Up after Paul Holmes left. One time they tried to renew my contract at a lower salary – $100,000 less per year, down to a paltry $350,000 – and I took them to the Employment Relations Authority. I wanted that money very badly.

The fact is New Zealand is a low income nation. Not me, obviously. I’m talking about non-Susan Wood New Zealanders. There’s only one reason Aussie companies are sending their call centres here – because they are cheaper to run, cheaper to man. In this country we have always prided ourselves on our universal education and health, that no matter how poor our parents are we can get an education, we can get ahead.

I, Susan Wood, am beginning to wonder if that is still the case.

When we talked about inequality on Q+A yesterday we were overwhelmed with feedback because people care, because it matters, and it's time Labour started addressing the things that matter and stopped fighting amongst themselves.

PS: Do you know the best thing about that time I took the state broadcaster to the Employment Relations Authority for lowering my salary down to a paltry $350,000?

I won.


2. Protesters should be committed enough to get jobs. But not my job. Not Susan Wood’s job.

Here’s the thing. If you are well enough, if you are passionate enough, if you are committed enough to get out and to protest on a cold winter’s day, you are probably capable of getting a job.

Is going to win this argument using logic

Protesters from Auckland Action Against Poverty were out on the streets yesterday afternoon protesting against the social welfare reforms that came into effect yesterday. The reforms are sweeping, probably the biggest changes to welfare since the Social Security Act was passed by the first Labour Government in 1938. And it is time for a change. We all know that welfare payments in this country are out of control – what I, Susan Wood, and others are paying is unsustainable. Or maybe the word is 'insufferable'. Either way, we’d like to pay less.

Talking to Social Development Minister Paula Bennett yesterday morning, there was no sense of throwing beneficiaries onto the scrap heap. Also, when she walked into the studio our sound system didn’t spontaneously start playing the Imperial March from Star Wars, so I know Paula is not a bad person. She talked about offering support and help to get them back into work. Frankly when your children are 14, why shouldn’t you be working? I’m not going to talk about the other changes, about compulsory ECE, about forcing the disabled and the mentally ill on the unemployed roll. I’m going to sit here and pretend that it’s all about what happens when your children are 14. Yeah.

It’s as if scarce, underpaid, precarious, dangerous or dehumanising work is some sort of evil. But for the great many of us who participate, sure it is about incomes in excess of $400,000 per annum or it’s off to the Employment Relations Authority, but it’s also about camaraderie, about being part of the community and making a contribution.

I am not anti-beneficiary. On the contrary, I am proud of a country that looks after the least advantaged. This country is Sweden. But when I hear comments like those from one of the Auckland protesters yesterday, I lose all sympathy.

This woman says she can’t work. She says in fact she might have to resort to prostitution if she loses her benefit because she can’t face people properly, that she gets too frightened and hides. Well if that is the truth, how is it she managed to say it to a complete stranger, to a journalist no less? Everyone knows that when you suffer from an anxiety disorder, depression or other psychological impairment, it is always on, always completely debilitating, and that anything you might ever do that might look like work or the ability to sustain complex and demanding social interactions – even if all you can manage is one hour a day, every second day – proves that you are completely fine. I, Susan Wood, whom an unjust God has blessed with sophistication, utter professionalism and the gift of skilled ad-libbing, have thought deeply about this. I have also investigated the specific case of this protester, to make sure I wouldn’t be doing her a disservice before insinuating on my nationally syndicated radio show that she is a carping bludger.

What do you think I am, some sort of monster?

PS: When TVNZ tried to restructure my contract and cut $100,000 off my salary, I asked for compensation for ‘hurt and humiliation’.

No, really, I did.


3. Benefit fraudsters stealing from you and me. But mostly me, Susan Wood.

So more than 3,000 cases of welfare fraud have been uncovered. 3,000 cases that cost the taxpayer just shy of $34 million a year. The fraudulent activity was uncovered after increased information sharing between Inland Revenue and the Ministry of Social Development.

To put this in some kind of context, I, Susan Wood, am not going to put this in any kind of context.

Hates benefit fraud and context

That information double check uncovered 1,900 cases of people cheating their unemployment benefits and 550 sickness beneficiaries doing the same. Overall more than 3,100 illegitimate benefits were discovered. The increased information sharing between IRD and Social Development showed up beneficiaries whose taxable income did not match what they had declared to Ministry staff.

Prosecutions may well follow and the agencies are working to try to recoup some of the millions of dollars. Good luck with that. I suspect that will be about as likely as getting money back from a failed finance company. Were I, Susan Wood, interested in comparing benefit fraud to any other sort of fraud, I would pursue this analogy further.

What frustrates me here is that who do these people think they are ripping off or stealing from? The Government? Well no. It’s you and me who get out of bed, go to work and pay our taxes. We are the Government, well certainly the Government’s funding. But mostly me, for I am very wealthy. Let’s face it, I am a lot more the Government than you are.

I believe the vast majority of us, Susan Wood, are willing to support people who genuinely need our support. But those people who deliberately cheat the system, who rip us all Susan Wood off, do nothing but give all beneficiaries a bad name, they create resentment and perpetrate stereotypes. Yes: I said ‘perpetrate’ even though I meant ‘perpetuate’. I am so rich and successful I don’t need excessive literacy.

These people, these fraudsters, should be pursued and prosecuted. Which his exactly what happens. And it’s not that many people. And they don’t steal all that much money. Still, it’s an outrage.

PS: ‘Extreme, extravagant and even obscene’. That is how Employment Relations Authority member Leon Robinson characterised how people might view salaries such as the one I was receiving from the taxpayer-funded TVNZ.

Won the case, though, didn’t I?

The Jonathan Safran Foer fallacy

Last week, I saw a stranger crying in public. She had just finished reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s essay ‘How not to be alone’ on her iPhone’s NYTimes app, when she was overcome by a wave of deep sadness. I heard her say ‘why is this person so horrible?’ over and over.

I was faced with a choice: I could interject myself into her life, or I could respect the boundaries between us. Or I could look up the meaning and usage of the verb ‘to interject’. (It was a three-way choice.) Intervening might make her feel worse, or be inappropriate. But then, it might ease her pain, or be helpful in some straightforward logistical way. I say ‘logistical’ because in my spare time I run a company that specialises in supply-chain management.

An affluent neighbourhood at the beginning of the day is not the same as a dangerous one as night is falling. And I was me, and not someone else. Think about that for a moment.

It is harder to intervene than not to, but it is vastly harder to choose to do either than to start tapping notes on your smartphone for an essay you plan to submit to the New York Times. Technology celebrates connectedness, but encourages retreat. The phone didn’t make me avoid the human connection. The fact that I’m a horrible person did. The phone just gave me something to look at whilst ignoring this other human sobbing just metres away.

The flow of water carves rock, a little bit at a time. And our personhood is carved, too, by the flow of our habits. I thought of that while someone was crying. Don’t you feel like punching me in the face?

Cares that you are crying

Psychologists who study empathy and compassion are finding that unlike our almost instantaneous responses to physical pain, it takes time for the brain to comprehend the psychological and moral dimensions of a situation. Just imagine! Your reaction to burning your hand on the stove is quicker than figuring out why a person is sad and what you should do about it. Science says so. And the more distracted we become, and the more emphasis we place on speed at the expense of depth, the less likely and able we are to care. Nothing to do with being a soulless, self-obsessed narcissist or anything like that.

Everyone wants his parent’s, or friend’s, or partner’s undivided attention — even if many of us, especially children, are getting used to far less. Simone Weil said, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” She said other things as well, but by then I had stopped listening. Get to the point, Simone, for chrissakes! I’m working to a deadline here.

Most of our communication technologies began as diminished substitutes for an impossible activity. We couldn’t always see one another face to face, so the telephone made it possible to keep in touch at a distance. Online communication originated as a substitute for telephonic communication, which was considered, for whatever reasons, too burdensome or inconvenient. (I’m so confident about this assertion, I’m not even going to check it against Wikipedia.) And then texting, which facilitated yet faster, and more mobile, messaging. These inventions were not created to be improvements upon face-to-face communication, but a declension of acceptable, if diminished, substitutes for it. I’m almost sure that’s right: a computer is just a more complex telephone. Also, the word ‘declension’: yeah.

But then a funny thing happened: we began to prefer the diminished substitutes. It’s easier to make a phone call than to schlep to see someone in person. Leaving a message on someone’s machine is easier than having a phone conversation. So we began calling when we knew no one would pick up. Especially our brother-in-law, Frank. How we all hate talking to Frank.

Shooting off an e-mail is easier, still, because one can hide behind the absence of vocal inflection, and of course there’s no chance of accidentally catching Frank. And texting is even easier, as the expectation for articulateness is further reduced, and another shell is offered to hide in. Each step “forward” has made it easier, just a little, to avoid the emotional work of being present, to convey information rather than humanity.

The problem with accepting — with preferring — diminished substitutes is that over time, we, too, become diminished substitutes. People who become used to saying little become used to feeling little.

Is it clear enough that when I say ‘we’, I actually mean ‘you’? This is very important. I’m actually a wonderfully caring person. Just look at this bear.

With each generation, it becomes harder to imagine a future that resembles the present. I feel that this is a very solid point. Pretend that I argued it until you are thoroughly persuaded.

Only those with no imagination, and no grounding in reality, would deny the possibility that they will live forever. I suppose that if you were going to write a parody of this essay, you might not even know how to tackle that sentence. Did I just say immortality is within reach, and that you would be a fool to deny it? Wow. Let’s assume, though, that we all have a set number of days to indent the world with our beliefs, to find and create the beauty that only a finite existence allows for, to wrestle with the question of purpose and wrestle with our answers. Are you still with me?

We often use technology to save time, but increasingly, it either takes the saved time along with it, or makes the saved time less present, intimate and rich. I worry that the closer the world gets to our fingertips, the further it gets from our hearts. It’s not an either/or — being “anti-technology” is perhaps the only thing more foolish than being unquestioningly “pro-technology”. So let’s all pretend that I hadn’t spent the last nine hundred words blaming technology for my inability to relate emotionally to strangers, and call it a question of balance that our lives hang upon.

Most of the time, most people are not crying in public, but everyone is always in need of something that another person can give, be it undivided attention, a kind word or deep empathy. Especially the woman in front of me, who’s basically drowning in a pool of her own tears by now, and that I plan to console as soon as I’ve filed this essay. There is no better use of a life than to be attentive to such needs. There are as many ways to do this as there are kinds of loneliness, but all of them require attentiveness, all of them require the hard work of emotional computation and corporeal compassion. All of them require the human processing of the only animal who risks “getting it wrong” and whose dreams provide shelters and vaccines and words to crying strangers. This is not the time to question if the last sentence makes any sense whatsoever. This is the time to feel and to care .

We live in a world made up more of story than stuff. We are creatures of memory more than reminders. Being attentive to the needs of others might not be the point of life, but it is the work of life.

I have plenty more shitty non sequiturs. There is a market for telling people that their emotional life is impoverished by electronic gadgets, and I’m right in it. It’s me, Nick, and a few others, and let me assure you that we have the genre thoroughly figured out: blame technology for putting distance between people, or between people and nature, implying that before technology the world was more ‘real’; subsume economic and social relations to ‘the internet’ or ‘smartphones’ or ‘social media’ so as to make all of our arguments circular, their logic self-fulfilling; cite uncritically every bit of social science research that supports our hypotheses, and those only; and make a spectacularly dishonest use of the pronoun ‘we’, so as to turn the experience of technology into a bland universal. To really investigate contemporary alienation would require a qualitatively different kind of effort: one that is much more careful in its evaluation of psychological evidence, and much more willing to question the idea that a life less mediated is a life more authentic. One that is aware of politics, and not just of sentiment. But there’s no money or glory in that.

Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to leave because this damn woman’s incessant weeping is beginning to creep me out, and people are starting to look at me funny.