If I were a non-Romney non-Paul Republican who believed what the press told me, I’d be kicking the tires on College Republican treasurers.

That out of the way, I just saw this:

There are two ways to read this tweet. I think the more common one is wrongheaded, and I’m going to spend time on it here. That intent being “Bank of America executives made a stupid, greedy decision, when they could have hired people.”

Yes. They could have. But what would have happened? Analysts, looking at their hiring binge, would be looking for a jump in revenue associated with the investment. Bank of America is a business, and a publicly traded one. They can hire when they have reason to believe that hiring will either lead to greater profits or somehow save them money.  If they hire without a plan for usefully turning that labor into revenue or savings, analysts will call them mean names, and their stock prices, bond ratings, and all the rest will suffer.

When they give bonuses, no such expectation exists.  Bonuses (ridiculously?) do not need to be tied to revenue.  Of course, financial industry bonuses of any significant amount are ridiculous right now, and Bank of America should be booed mightily for rewarding failure (or, at best, rewarding morons for investing freely-given government  money in government debt, the single easiest trade in financial history), but they shouldn’t be expected to create jobs with that money. They could lend it out, being, you know, a lending institution, but analysts would call them names for that, too. Or they could pay dividends to investors, I guess.

This is a complicated structural problem. The incentives in our financial system are not currently aligned with the goal of helping the broader economy. The incentives in our financial system are not even aligned with the primary goal of banking: efficiently allocation capital in the broader economy. The incentives in our financial system are aligned with the goal of elevating the profitability of the banking institution and the wealth of the traders and executives that mind that profitability. In a well-coordinated industry in a healthy economy, the profitability of a bank would be intertwined with the healthy spread of capital to useful ends throughout the economy, but we don’t have a well-coordinated industry or a healthy economy.

There is no incentive for Bank of America to hire, and no disincentive for paying bonuses. This is why I prefer a second reading of the tweet, one consistent with the general Occupy ethos, but hard to see through the specificity of this tweet: WHY could Bank of America get away with bonuses like this? What is it about the structure of our economy and the financial sector that is continuing the spread of inequality TWO YEARS after a bust that was supposed to shake the financial industry back to reality? This is a problem well beyond “Nyah, nyah, Bank of America is run by bad guys.” It’s something fundamentally wrong with the way we’re currently practicing capitalism.

I like Occupy because it calls attention to this broader issue. The press is pretty good at calling attention to bonus abuses, but that hasn’t yet lead to significant reform. Occupy stirred people because it offered more than the Gawker-like “look at these assholes.” It said something more like, “how can this be our best option?”

The Book of Right and Wrong, Matt Debenham – Great story collection. The standout involves a 70s-era elementary school mock-presidental debate gone wrong. Debenham’s also worth following on Twitter.

Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow – I’d been meaning to read one of his novels for some time, and this was the one most recommended. I feel like I lived the first two decades of the 20th century, having read this. Shades of today’s Occupy movement in there, too.

A Case of Exploding Mangoes, Mohammed Hanif – I don’t think the whole was as great as the parts, but the parts were excellent. Surprisingly funny. It’s no Catch-22, but I get why people make the comparison.

The Sisters Brothers, Patrick DeWitt – Two years in a row, DeWitt’s on the list, and he only has two books. Of course, my list is THE LIST authors need to be on.

The Corpse Walker, Liao Yiwu – What Doctorow did for my view of early 20th century New York, Liao Yiwu did for my view of modern/contemporary China. This book is a collection of the writing that’s had him on the run from Chinese officials.

How the Dead Dream, Lydia Millet – I thought I’d love Stanley Elkin’s The Franchiser, but I didn’t. This book is all the reasons I thought I would.

Us, Michael Kimball – You can read this one in a single sitting, and you probably will. It’s intensely sad, but not in the way you expect from literary fiction. It’s about an elderly man preparing for his wife’s inevitable death. The writing is astoundingly good.

Life, Inc, Douglas Rushkoff – It’s a bit uneven, but the last few chapters ought to be essential reading if you dislike the amount of corporate interaction in your daily life. His history of currency is fascinating.

Ready Player One, Ernest Cline – I didn’t want to admit how much I enjoyed this book, but I’d have to be dead inside not to. Read the description online. If you think it’ll appeal to you, YOU WILL LIKE IT. If you don’t, IT WON’T. It’s exactly the book everybody says it is.

The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi – If you like Neal Stephenson or near-future dystopic scifi, this is probably a book you’ll enjoy.

Too Close To Miss, John Perich – My friend John’s first novel. If you’re looking to read a well-paced, true-to-Boston thriller with a great, original character, get the ebook for Kindle, Nook, iPad, or whatever electronic device you use.

A Handbook of American Prayer, Lucius Shepard – This reminded me so much of what I love about Charles Portis, with a little David Lynchian twist in it. It’s a dark, thought-provoking satire of spirituality in America, but it’s a satire that’s character driven, not an idea hammer.

This bums me out, far more than I thought it would. When REM broke up a few months back, it didn’t really give me pause, but a lot of my friends–including the one to which I’m legally wed–saw it as a real moment. To me, REM had already stopped being a vital part of the music world: I thought of them in the past tense.

I suspect many, many people feel the same about Sonic Youth. That’s to be expected with any band. Not every fan goes the whole way with them. It’s almost impossible to find an Elvis Costello fan who likes ALL of it. Tom Waits has shed and gained fans as he’s changed styles. The odds of being a fan of a band’s entire career, a band that evolves so much over multiple decades, must be only slightly better than the odds of having a successful marriage to your highschool sweetheart. There’s just no guarantee you’re going to evolve in the same direction.

Well, I didn’t marry my highschool sweetheart, but I think I might have married Sonic Youth. We had our disagreements, especially when they went through their end-of-the-millenium Beat revival thing. But on the big stuff, we stayed in sync.

Quick digression: I’ve always been very uncomfortable with the word and concept “fan.” I’m hesitant to describe myself as a fan of almost anything. Maybe it comes from being disappointed by other artists, whether they were musicians or directors or writers, who lost the magic for me. Maybe it smacks of being uncritical, or just being uncool. My friend Kevin Quigley has made me reconsider this, as he is both simultaneously a committed fan and real critic of his favorites (maybe the definition of a fan is somebody who wants and expects the best from the object of their affection, not somebody who just prepares to like it and won’t hear criticism). Sonic Youth is one of the only bands of which I can unreservedly say “I’m a fan.” 

I loved EVOL. I loved Daydream Nation. I loved Goo and Dirty. “The Diamond Sea” from Washing Machine will go with me to the desert island, and hearing them play it live was one of the best live music experiences I’ve ever had. The last four albums, those from their third decade, are tremendous. More melodic, certainly, and maybe that’s a downer for some early fans. Not for me, though. “Karen Revisited” on Murray Street is another “Diamond Sea.” These four albums also start and end like no others in their history. I’ve always been fascinated by opening and closing tracks, and these four got it so right, in the way that the final Guided By Voices album did, or the way Pink Floyd did on Dark Side of the Moon. Maybe that’s a post of its own.

I don’t know much about them as people. I’ve read Kim Gordon writing about the art and music scene of New York in the 80s. I’ve listened to side projects of Thurston’s and Lee’s. I’ve come to appreciate the role of the drummer everywhere through listening to and watching Steve Shelley. Sonic Youth has shaped and challenged my view of feminism, art and commerce, the persistence and dissolution of subcommunities, and frankly, taught me that a guitar can be a percussion instrument. They’re one of the few bands that I actually think about. When I read that Kim and Thurston were breaking up, my interest wasn’t of the tabloid variety, but like hearing that a favorite writer died. They’ve been altering my brain for a long time. And Kim and Thurston were, more to the tabloid end of things, in my mind, a good model of a couple working together on really interesting creative work, and doing things their way. It’s sad to see that end.

Just after watching the footage of their final concert (embedded below; a concert which drew on their catalog in surprising breadth and impressive omissions), I decided to listen to all of their albums, in order. Don’t worry, I’m not going to liveblog it. But I’ve just hit a transition point, as “Teenage Riot” started playing as I started this post. Maybe their most-loved song, and the first track on probably their most-loved album. I’m still mid-process, but Daydream Nation is sounding like both the beginning and the end of Sonic Youth. The band on Confusion is Sex could be a different group from the one that recorded The Eternal. But from Daydream Nation, you can see both horizons. It seemed a decent moment to post some first thoughts. In a separate post, I’ll just make some observations on listening to it in order. I haven’t heard some of these in years, and I’m genuinely surprised by some of what I’m hearing.

For now, I’ll leave off with a pretty unremarkable observation: there are Sonic Youth fans who hate “Kim songs” and some who can’t figure out why Thurston sings at all. There are Sonic Youth fans who love them as a noise band, and others who love the relatively unsnarling clean pop of Dirty, and though I don’t know them, I’m sure there are some who found them in the last decade, the years they started to really sing, when they were composing distortion-laced dreamscape soundtracks and pulling relentless and driving songs and melodies Magic Eye-like from screaming fields of sonic fuzz. I’d take any of these Sonic Youths, and they’d be a favorite band. I’m glad I’ve got them all.

The first Sonic Youth video I ever watched (on MTV’s “120 Minutes” which was once guest hosted by Thurston Moore, who that night interviewed an unknown young man named Beck who was releasing a single called “Loser”):

And heck, here’s that Thurston/Beck interview:

Joshua Holland takes it apart. (h/t Ted Leo, @tedleo on Twitter)

Over the past couple years I’ve become exactly the type of political creature I fear most: the cynical, dejected type. I still follow the news (too closely), and still like a handful of elected officials. I’m occasionally surprised and encouraged by somebody crossing party lines or saying something plainly true but politically unwise. But these are exceptional, not typical, moments of enthusiasm.

I like the President. I really do.* I think he understood the danger of a broken political system and (perhaps unfortunately) felt he had sufficient mandate to chart a new path of cooperation between the parties to get us out of the terrible mire we were in at the beginning of 2009. Maybe he overestimated the strength of his argument, especially up against the power of corporate money in politics. Maybe he underestimated how much of his governance would be constrained by his own need to raise dollars of his own in a few short years. Regardless, I think he understood the problem.

But I worry he’s too cautious to solve it. Remember all those articles in the early months, when members of his administration were leaking to everybody they could that he was reading a mountain of books about “transformative presidencies?” Bet they wish they could take those leaks back. (Cheerleaders, lead us in the cliche now: UNDERPROMISE! YEAH YEAH! OVERDELIVER! YEAH YEAH!) I haven’t read that mountain of books, but I wonder how many of their subjects were as timid and polite and deferential in their leadership as President Obama is. If his goal was to transform politics, then his strategy was to negotiate with a hurricane. I’m not talking just about the Republicans (although their complete failure to recognize–let alone address–the common good makes them the Marlo Stanfield of negotiating partners); the whole of Washington is currently structured to hear and respond to the complaints of those with money and access (occasionally someone without money gets access, but only if they’ve been funded by someone with money, like the Gates Foundation). He tried to fix our broken politics by flattering the practitioners of our broken politics.

One example of how this works: Paulson and Bernanke, and then Geithner and Bernanke, called urgent meetings of Congressional leadership to demand unprecedented action on behalf of Wall Street, and truly, the moment was dire. A collapse of the banking system would have been catastrophic. Great Depression Part II level catastrophic. So, we benefited from urgent government action. But the second part of the urgent action, correcting the underlying problems so that we a) are safe and b) don’t have to do something so unfair and unpalatable again, was never pursued so vigorously. That effort was compromised from the beginning because every seat at the table was filled by big money, employed by big money, or elected with the support of big big money. With that team, it was inevitable that the stimulus would be watered down with tax breaks and corporate incentives and that the financial reform would be toothless.

You don’t have to believe that they all sit around the urgent meeting table chuckling and stroking white cats (well, not all of them). If you want to give them the benefit of the doubt**, try this: when they think about the effects of reform, their first thoughts are of what happens to the world as they see it and experience it. Big money makes big money off of low interest rates, unregulated markets, and mortgage loans staying on the books rather than being accepted as losses. Higher interest rates squeeze profit margins, regulation of markets reduces their information advantage, and having to face the sad reality of the bad loans they issued will lead to actual nearterm losses.  They feel that they’d already experienced pain, and plenty of it (I suspect that bankers also believe they have a *right to profit*, rather than a *right to seek profit*, but that’s probably a post for another day).  And all of that additional pain, and shareholder revolts, and all the rest that powerful people fear is avoidable if they just draaaaaaaag their damn feet. Of course, we’re not getting out of this mess until we stop lending the banks free money for them to lend back to us at a profit, until we slow their ability to inflate speculative bubbles, and start to thrash our way through the reality of home prices and loan losses. Every person at the urgent meeting table probably knows this. But they’re either a)benefiting or b)constrained by those who are benefiting. Unless we had a generation of elected politicians willing to commit mass electoral suicide, they will be constrained.

And this, to bring it full circle, is why I’ve been so dejected. One party is now utterly devoted to fulfilling the needs of the wealthiest individuals and the most powerful corporations, and the other is mostly devoted to fulfilling the needs of the semi-wealthy and the most powerful corporations, hoping the pennies they squeeze from them can ease our slide into national obsolescence through a combination of Head Start and windmills. Our political problems are mostly self-reinforcing.

We need actual transformation, and I don’t think it can come from the political class. As much as I like President Obama, I think he should have kept the campaign approach, not the campaign staff. At least when campaigning he talked about audacity. Now, audacious is something the other side does, daily pissing away the principles and values the country is built on. Only they do it so regularly it’s mundane. Mundane audacity. There’s something.

What are our options?

President Obama: I’m pulling for him, because he still could do it, and do it the fastest. But he has to transform our politics before he can transform our economy, and he has to transform his politics before he can transform our politics. He continues to bargain with bullies, thinking they’ll see reason.

Elizabeth Warren: She’s great. Can we elect 33 (and 218) of her next year? That might make a dent.

Occupy Wall Street/Boston/Los Angeles/Toontown: I’m hopeful. Not optimistic, but hopeful. I’m not ready to live in a tent with them, but that’s just because I haven’t been laid off yet, and have to defend my desk and paycheck from the marauding 99%. (See, it’s pernicious, this perspective we bring to the urgent meeting table). Seriously, I’m all for this movement. They have almost cracked my cynical, dejected shell. Their success is in some ways dependent on the emergence of spines in politicians, or the election of new politicians, so it’s a long road ahead of us if this is the road.*** Since the road is long no matter, I probably ought to start shopping for a tent, or at least drop off some supplies soon.

DIY: Occupy Wall Street is probably a part of this, although I have something more practical, slower, quieter, and less relevant in mind. Something that, even if it makes no difference at the macro level, will improve my life. I want to link to the last two chapters and the new appendix to Douglas Rushkoff‘s Life Inc., but they’re, uh, in a book, and I don’t like to type that much. What I recommend is that you read those chapters and that appendix, and then you don’t have to read my considerably shorter, but less useful next few paragraphs.

I want to join a CSA. I want to buy local. I want to purchase fewer goods and services from branded players I’ve never met and who know me as an account number. I want to bank with a credit union and invest in neighborhood shops and get involved in neighborhood issues. I want to push good people to run for public office. If someone other than an enormous telecom wants to sell me good internet access, I’ll take that local. I’m all ears.

Is this hippie naivety? Maybe, but I don’t think so. Our politicians mostly maintain a system that helps those who’ve accumulated wealth write and enforce rules to protect and accelerate that accumulation. I can’t spend enough to be heard in that system. But I can direct more of my spending away from that accumulation, to build little pockets of capital in places that don’t disgust me. I can work with people to cooperate and compromise on important matters in which Washington is irrelevant, and live a pretty good life feeling good about actual accomplishments instead of  feeling rage that I can’t get my way on a national scale.

Will these first steps fix the economy? No. Hell no. No and no. And if lots of people don’t do them, they won’t ever. But here’s why I’m a little bit guardedly optimistic: I’m a pretty normal guy. I’m feeling very, very detached from the things that the major media tells me I’m supposed to care about a lot. I suspect that most people are feeling that detachment. This is part of Occupy Wall Street’s fuel. We know we’re not supposed to be living like this. We know it shouldn’t all be so desperate and impersonal. We know only a stranger or an asshole would cheat us on a mortgage, and as we get to know people well, we discover that few of them are really, truly assholes. You can only be easily treated with crass dismissal if  you are a single ballot or a line on a spreadsheet. But if you build more of your life tighter with people who know you as more, you won’t be crassly dismissed. And as an upshot, your local economy will be healthier. It’s not hippie crap: it’s Adam Smith.

Nobody at the urgent meeting table in Washington has any of us in mind, not truly. They probably think they do. But they’re not allowed. Their days are filled meeting with people who don’t have us in mind, and their calendars are filled with the follow-up meetings to brief those people on results. The rest of us are treated like barn cats: not overtly abused, but generally left to our own devices, fed some scraps if they’d otherwise be wasted, and yelled at when we get underfoot.

If we want a recovery, I think we have to do it ourselves.

—-

*I am at a complete loss on how to reconcile his continuation and enhancement of Bush/Cheney era war and surveillance policies with the rest of his presidency. If we face an “existential threat” from the enemies we’re pursuing, it is we, not they, that will end our own existence. We’re eroding the best of ourselves to defend the worst of ourselves. But again, another post for another day.

**I actually do, most of them, most of the time.

***The other way they can change things fast is to change the vocabulary, to inject new ideas and thoughts into the mainstream. The standard media coverage of them right now frames them as G8-summit-style protesters, but increasingly you can’t ignore that they’re more demographically interesting than that. It’ll be harder and harder to ignore the words coming from mouths that look like your neighbors’. No matter what neighborhood you’re from, your neighbors are starting to show up.  Well, unless your neighborhood has a gate. In that case, your guards are starting to show up. Getting these ideas into circulation is long overdue: we can only expect so much airtime for Vermont senators.

Inevitably, I get distracted, or have an appointment, or nature calls. And some of those tabs remain open. For WEEKS. I don’t close them, because I’m sure I’m going to come back to them. I’m imperfect until I’ve read, understood, and acted appropriately on the information they hold.

And this isn’t possible to do, because in the meantime, I’ve gone on three more info-fishing expeditions: shortwave radio; 1940s cultural critics; artificial intelligence theories; geothermal heating installations; Canadian Intelligence agencies; changes in league batting average over time; Cow Clicker; learning object-oriented programming; dystopic novels involving robots; realistic plans for colonizing space; whatever it is. The tabs remain because of some combination of striving, self-delusion, laziness, curiosity, and distraction.

And I end up, in the best case scenario, with a situation like this (in addition to these, I usually have 5 or 6 of the standard tabs open: Gmail, FB, Twitter, an active project of some sort, fantasy baseball if it’s in season, the New York Times…)

What are these tabs called? And why can’t I just learn to use bookmarks or a remembering app like everybody else?

While John’s logic is good, I think he’s doing the economic equivalent of New Criticism here, reading into the quote a perspective that I don’t think is really there, and which ignores the historical context in which it was said. I don’t think that Warren is proposing tax policy, or even suggesting the type of transactional theory of government that John describes. I don’t think her statement is about economics at all, at least not the economics textbooks cover.

Instead, I think her statement is purely and usefully political (“usefully” being a rare modifier in contemporary Democratic politics), meant to counter a very specific, powerfully-ingrained perspective. Her point isn’t that a business owner who derived 1.2 million dollars of profit owes the government a percentage based on the specific infrastructural projects that supported that profit, as if the federal government is a vendor hired by entrepreneurs, selling road mileage, police manpower, to-order servicing of tariffs on competitors and such.

Her point, as I read it, is to dispel a myth, the myth of the purely self-made millionaire. That myth justifies a lot of other ones. It serves to create heroic, genius characters who we should venerate, ignoring the role luck, public investment in research, military funding, or anything else might have played in the creation of their fortunes. It underwrites the claim that “only the private sector creates jobs,” a myth Republicans–and increasingly, Democrats–use to tip the tax system towards greater inequity.

Its counterpoint is the myth that those who haven’t made fortunes have only themselves to blame, and that state efforts to help them are throwing good money after bad. We’re unraveling the safety net and entrenching multi-generational wealth mostly around financial speculation. And part of the reason we’re doing it is because of this mythology that tells us it’s punishing success to tax the wealthy, to whom we owe whatever fortune we have, rather than vice versa. It’s an old story, and we’re telling it better than we’ve ever told it before. Warren is one of the people trying to remind us that it’s just a story. And that there’s a story that ought to seem truer to us.

I suspect the last sentence of that quote is what irks John:

 But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

Factually, this is, as John says, incorrect. We don’t have an underlying social contract in America that requires this. And honestly, the consequences of requiring it in a rigid way would lead to an outcome as unjust as a world in which nobody who’d been successful “paid it forward.” I’d be shocked if Warren wanted to literally make this “underlying social contract” a “contract,” to implement such a requirement, and I’d be skeptical that anyone in Washington would let her propose taxation more progressive than what we had during the Reagan era, a regime that looks Soviet compared to what current dogma calls for.

John acknowledges this, saying “This is a great theory! I don’t object to it, stated that far and no farther.”  So we’re not really far apart. But where John sees a fallacious economic claim, I see only a political one. I’m glad to see somebody arguing  it’s time to reverse course on the billionaire conservative dreamquest we’ve been on for 30 years.

I. The recent rape-confession-cum-comedy-monologue at the Del Close Marathon.

An email exchange about it reminded me of:

II. the Penny Arcade “Dickwolves” controversy,

Both of these reminded me of:

III. Ta–Nehisi Coates’ response to Rick Santorum’s comparison of abortion and slavery.

Hey, what??? Maybe this seems bizarre, but there it is. Let’s quickly break the three down.

I. A man tells a story, very publicly, about committing a rape. He tells it, very clearly, because he believes it is entertaining. The story may better be understood as a public confession to a crime. Best case scenario for him: he’s a liar and has an absolutely terrible sense of humor. No metaphor here: this is a joke about rape.

II. Cartoonists write a joke that mentions rape. The rape mentioned in the joke is incidental, not central to the main joke of the cartoon. The spot filled by “rape”, logically, could have been torture or boredom or teen pop, but the cartoonists chose rape. Essentially, “rape” is a metaphor for suffering that must be relieved. Once it was brought to their attention that some of their readers were troubled by the rape joke, they could have responded a number of ways. Rather than apologize or ignore the criticism, they doubled down, saying essentially, “don’t get so bent out of shape about a rape joke.”

III. A politician compares abortion to slavery. A pundit logically supports his analogy. A more thoughtful pundit (on this topic, at least (and is it fair to call Coates a pundit?)), sets them straight: the analogy is inaccurate and diminishes our understanding of what slavery really was.

I truly hope I’m not making the same mistake myself here. I know that I’m equating three very particular horrors (rape, the Holocaust, and slavery), but I hope that I’m equating them in one respect only, and only from the perspective of a comedian and writer: these three topics cannot serve as metaphors. No matter how much something might seem to be rape, or slavery, or the Holocaust, it isn’t. People compare taxation and gas prices and ticket processing fees to rape. It’s cringe-inducing. Your relationship to your boss is not equivalent to the societal compact to build a culture on the enslavement of fellow humans. Anybody who would dare compare whatever it is to the Holocaust, it’s not. It’s simply not. An attempt to use them in metaphor only calls attention to the weakness of your metaphor. It does you no credit as a writer.

And second to that, but related, they are EXTREMELY difficult territory for jokes. Not impossible: extremely difficult. I believe that they are impossible metaphors, not impossible jokes (I don’t think anything is off limits in comedy). This is part of what makes them difficult ground for jokes: you can’t be talking about rape as anything other than rape. If you refer to a holocaust, you are talking about The Holocaust. Unless you’re telling a very specific joke about contemporary white slavery, your slave joke is probably about slavery. And if it’s not, it’s about rape. So, uh, that’s difficult.

Note, I said difficult. Not impossible. But you’ve got to be pretty confident. And it wouldn’t hurt to check with someone who a)knows what they’re talking about, and b) will be honest with you. Because sometimes when you’re pretty confident, it’s because you’re pretty wrong. We’re all wrong sometimes. It’s OK. Then we learn. As a teenager, I said something stupid to a gay friend and his response was historically gracious: he gave me an icy stare and walked away. I pretty quickly realized how stupid I was. We’re not born with full awareness of our stupidity. Hopefully we learn without insulting, but if we do insult, we should have a good think about it. Maybe we decide we’re right. Maybe we decide we’re wrong. But we owe it to them to think. Maybe the worst thing we can do is to go with our gut reaction.

Unless your goal is to start an argument, the gut, the hip, and the ego are terrible places from which to write comedy about complicated issues. Because our guts, hips, and egos are deep in a mire that is filthy and constrained and maybe a little bit angry. And it’s tremendously stupid: if you take the time to process that shit through your brain, you’ll get one of two outcomes: a) my gut is right, or b) holy shit, life just got more interesting. My two cents: stupid comedy is the comedy of dumb guts and bullies. Smart comedy is the comedy of “life just got more interesting.” Louis C.K. has engaged on the word “faggot,” and with his brain, he’d made a joke that uses the word. Maybe you think it’s offensive, but it’s not dumb guts. Sarah Silverman has made conscious and controversial jokes around race, gender, and the word “retarded.” Same thing. Neither of them is doing cheap old material. They’re taking risks, and what they’re doing is difficult. It’s not “shooting from the hip.” And it’s not metaphor. It’s never metaphor.

But most people working this territory aren’t putting the same level of thought into it that Louis C.K. and Sarah Silverman have. Most are telling offensive jokes because offensive jokes get laughs. Some people love gay bashing jokes and some people love racist jokes, and some people think rape jokes are hilarious. The guy at the Del Close Marathon was getting laughs. He was also getting boos. But he was getting laughs. And that’s why he was so confident that his story was hilarious: that shit always gets some laughs. His decision was being reinforced as a good idea. Even in an audience where statistically there were bound to be rape survivors, a story about rape got laughs. If you, as a comic, are aware of that balance–of the cheap laughs you get for exploiting pain versus the pain itself and the role your joke plays in normalizing an ongoing culture of acceptable criminal brutality–and don’t care, then you’re opting for the comedy of dumb guts and bullies. If you, as a comic, engage on these topics in a way that makes us question that norm, well, you’re back into “this is really difficult.” Good luck to you. Have a good long think, give it a try, run it by some comics you trust, and be prepared to apologize. If you get it right, you’ve done something semi-heroic.

I don’t want to be a censor. I just want people to think about the effect of their words. I’m reminded of the adage about newspapers comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. I don’t think comedy’s job is to comfort anybody. But if you’re afflicting the afflicted, you’re doing it wrong. That’s just bullying and inciting.

Race isn’t impossible as a metaphor. Homosexuality isn’t taboo in comedy, and isn’t impossible as a metaphor. They’re both difficult in comedy: high risk, usually low reward. Mitchell and Webb have a great series of sketches (one embedded below) about Nazis that don’t use the Holocaust as a metaphor and don’t use it as a joke. Their sketches aren’t about exterminating Jews. They’re about the nature of the Nazis themselves, of squaring the Nazi identity with the basics of being an average guy, and how hard that is to square. There’s a TON of good Nazi humor from Monty Python to Tarantino.

Mitchell and Webb could do an hour on the Nazis and it’d be hilarious. But I bet they’d have a tough time doing 20 minutes on the Holocaust. Part of it is their perspective: unless you can make that personal, it’s often exploitative. It’s easier to get smart laughs with a slavery joke if you’re descended from slaves. It’s easier to get smart laughs with a Holocaust joke if you’re descended from survivors. And it’s easier to get smart laughs with a rape joke if you yourself are a survivor. It’s easier to be smart on these topics when they’re a part of your life, because you’ve done the thinking and the coping and suffering and the adjusting to a larger culture that doesn’t see things from your perspective. You’ve got the ingredients for smart comedy (and it’ll still be extremely difficult).

There’s no real advice in this post for how to do this hard work, and why would there be? I’m just figuring this stuff out myself. Despite my heritage, I don’t do Holocaust jokes, because even with my relatively high access level, I haven’t found the funny yet. And despite what I’ve told my students, I don’t think anybody should be prohibited from trying: I just think they need to double, triple, and quadruple question themselves. Because as much as it sucks to have to follow your punchline with an apology, it doesn’t suck even the slightest bit as much as it sucks to have a comedian make a joke out of your deepest wound and hear the people around you laugh. As a comic, if you get credit for the laugh, you also have responsibility for the pain you cause.

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I don’t typically write drafts of blog posts, but this one is much improved for time and the attention of others. Thanks to Sara Faith Alterman, Pete Fenzel, and Erik Volkert for checking my lazy thinking as I wrote this. My post doesn’t reflect their views, but is much better for having had their eyes on it.

That, in and of itself, isn’t particularly noteworthy. But I also noticed that I’ve hardly posted to Facebook or Twitter since signing up for Google+. It’s as if the moment I completed my most recent social media profile, I lost interest in all of them.

(Now, there are factors that have nothing to do with the services: it’s been an unusual couple of weeks. I was unexpectedly away from home for a few days. Out of my routine, I could easily go quiet for a while. But here’s the thing: I had my phone in my hand almost the entire time. Twitter app, Facebook app, G+ app a search away. But I didn’t.)

I have — not a theory — let’s call it a theorito. A little baby theory-like notion that may grow into something more. It’s something like this: the easier it is to share, the less urgent it is to share. The less fun it is to share. Like everything once wonderful and new, it’s routine, and it’s a burden.

The empty page begs us to share. When we join a new service, the begging is very, very loud. It’s a rare reminder: the service needs us. We’ve done this before. We’ve built the profile, started the networks, poked at the new features, had the meta-conversations. We’re over the wonder of it. Each service is a flavorful novelty, not a new food group.

Maybe we even remember that we don’t need to feed the service constantly. We realize with a sigh that feeding it will take time and effort. Maybe we pause and think we only have this option because Google wants to grow its company. That growing Google means conversing with friends as much as possible, perhaps more than we would if Google wasn’t trying to grow. Perhaps we’re using our vitality on something that isn’t particularly vital. Maybe we’re talking because someone asked us to talk.*

I love what I get from the people I’m connected to on Facebook and Twitter, and I like that when I have something I genuinely want to share, I get a response. But I find myself sometimes staring at an input box, thinking “time to update.” And with a brand new service, that input box is sitting on a blank page, just screaming for something to be said. And frankly, I don’t care to hear it scream.

Google+, I’m rooting for you. But put me in the Acquaintance circle. Not a friend, fan, partner, or a regular, at least for now. Thanks for the opportunity to start fresh, to think about this as an old hand, rather than a complete novice. I’ll let you know when I have something to share.

* This is not to say I have anything against Google+. Given the choice, I’d switch entirely from Facebook to Google+ today. I dislike the ethos of Facebook leadership and don’t trust them. I think Zuck and Co. are legalistic, loophole-minded, self-important jerkwads with no sense of history and — despite their massive database of the evidence of human sentiment — little understanding of the parts of human desire that they can’t coax algorithmically. Facebook is handy, my friends and family are there, and I’m happy to let Facebook use me as part of their product so long as I get more than I give, which I believe is the case. But if G+ proves solid and safe and grows enough for me to sign off FB entirely, that’s great. I’d love to see Facebook wither, and to see Facebook’s privileged investors become acquainted with the concept of loss. (This is not to say I trust Google implicitly. They seem more robotic than human, but better a robot than a human who lies to you or hides the details of your agreement.)