Friday, August 31, 2018
Why Did We Care About John McCain?
As John McCain moved toward the end of his terminal illness, I thought about how I would write about him when he died. I have been a great admirer of McCain’s but also a frequent and sometimes vociferous critic. When someone dies we should focus on the best things we can say about them. But we should, especially after a respectful interval, account for the fullness not only of their lives but the fullness of what we said about them while they lived. This isn’t simply a matter of not glorifying someone in death beyond what they merited in life. It’s also a matter of holding ourselves accountable.
The commentaries on his life have either praised McCain’s unique virtues or pointed out all the ways he never lived up to his billing. For me, the most interesting question to ask is what made McCain such a towering figure in our public life in the first place. Here I mean the term not in an evaluative but in a strictly descriptive sense. He was a towering figure, whether we think he should have been or not. McCain did not have a particularly lengthy or distinguished legislative record. The McCain-Feingold campaign finance law is a critical part of his public reputation. But it’s one law and it’s largely been washed away by Citizens United. Senators are not only legislators. They also have a specific constitutional responsibility for the conduct of foreign affairs. The scion of a distinguished military family, that was clearly his real passion. But the invasion of Iraq, the defense and national security decision he is probably most closely tied to — both before and after 9/11 — is now widely seen as a mistake of catastrophic and historic proportions, a fact even he conceded by the end of his life.
It is often said that a President’s first decision is the choice of a Vice President. In this sense, though McCain never became President, this sole presidential decision turned out to be amazingly and consequentially bad. In bringing Sarah Palin to the center of American public life, McCain played a major part in shaping the resentment-fueled culture-war Tea Party extremism of the early Obama years and the politics we now recognize as Trumpism.
Yet, look at the flood of tributes and retrospectives along with the backdraft of critiques in the wake of his death. I can think of no other political figure (and few public figures), other than Ted Kennedy, who was not a President and got anywhere near this sort of response to his passing. It’s not even close. Kennedy served in the Senate for nearly 50 years and was responsible for numerous pieces of high profile legislation. Critically, he was the last surviving Kennedy brother, so his passing brought a close to an era with all that historical mystique and baggage.
To make sense of this question we have to go back to the 1990s when McCain first became the McCain we’ve known for the last quarter century. For most of his first decade in Congress McCain was a garden variety Republican. Elected to the House in 1982, he served two terms before making the jump to the Senate to replace Barry Goldwater in 1986. He was a hard-edged conservative with an irascible reputation. McCain had no history or family ties to Arizona. He spent the years after his release from captivity in Washington. He divorced his first wife in 1980, married Cindy McCain, an Arizona heiress, a few months later and settled in Arizona. Two years later he won a seat in the House. He was a man on the make.
His first decade was unremarkable and indeed worse than unremarkable since he managed to become the sole Republican to win a named part in the Keating Five scandal, a seminal scandal of the era which presaged the sub-prime financial collapse two decades later. But in the 1990s, and especially with the election of Bill Clinton, McCain became a central player in what is probably best seen as a public conversation men of the baby boom generation were having with themselves about ego, sacrifice and the Vietnam War.
A key pivot point came with Bill Clinton’s push to normalize relations with Vietnam, something that as a Democrat who had conspicuously and cagily evaded the draft made him uniquely vulnerable politically. In a much-discussed exchange, McCain promised Clinton that if he normalized relations he would back him publicly, leveraging his credibility as a veteran and a POW. Clinton did and McCain did. And from this point forward McCain became a symbol of reconciliation, not only about the Vietnam War but also the psychodramas and life experiences of the baby-boomer men who lived through that era.
This was particularly so for men who had not themselves served in Vietnam but found his service and his indisputable sacrifice as a POW something both alien and deeply inspiring. McCain espoused what could seem like an almost archaic form of patriotism but leveraged toward more reconciliation than political division — something that made him seem distinct and attractive compared to the already dominant Gingrich GOP. McCain, of course, was a Vietnam veteran. But it’s important to remember he was a good decade older than the great majority of men who served or didn’t serve in the war. When he returned to the U.S. in 1973 he was a few months shy of his 37th birthday.
Michael Lewis, who was not nearly as prominent a writer as he would become over subsequent decades, likely played a bigger role in birthing this myth of John McCain than any other writer, and perhaps any other person than McCain himself. In the mid-90s he wrote a series of profiles of McCain in a number of different publications. Here is a key one from The New Republic about McCain’s reconciliation with a Vietnam War protester named David Ifshin. Ifshin would later be stricken by a terminal illness. The article revolves around their friendship. Another example is this one from a couple of years later in the New York Times Magazine. Here’s yet another from this genre by James Carroll in The New Yorker.
I should note here that when I use the word “myth” I do not mean it as a fairy tale or cover story. To say something is a myth is not to say it is either true or false. Myths are stories we tell to make sense of and give meaning to the unorganized facts of existence, which themselves are mute and have nothing to tell us. As humans, we can only really understand things through stories. Read those profiles and you’ll see that there was a lot of reality to the story they tell.
The key point in my mind is that the origin of the McCain myth, his towering figure-ness, is this very particular fact: through his story and his actions he had a profound appeal to a generation of men who had guilty or angry or unresolved experiences with the Vietnam War and who were, at this point in McCain’s career, themselves moving into mid-life. (Bill Clinton turned 50 in 1996.) Soon after McCain started to show a political heterodoxy he’d seldom shown much evidence of in the past, particularly in his at first quixotic efforts on behalf of campaign finance reform with former Senator Russ Feingold. Again, he identified with conservative values but seemed unchained from the venality of his own party. This set the stage for his 2000 presidential run which is in many ways the centerpiece of his career. It was always a kind of corny enterprise with his “Straight Talk Express.” But the key here is something that is critical to understanding McCain. Reporters simply liked him. He broke from character, didn’t mind upsetting orthodoxies, even possibly relished it. He was accessible and was always good for a snappy quote. He was also clearly a charmer, something you can see from all the tributes from reporters. This was also clearly a pose and a posture he most enjoyed.
This part of the story is so well known there’s not much for me to add to it. The more interesting point is that after that campaign, the sting of the defeat and what he regarded as dirty tricks against him accelerated his move in an increasingly heterodox direction. People rightly remember his staunch support for the Iraq War. They remember less the fact that he was one of the few Republicans who voted against the Bush tax cut, first in 2001 and again in 2003. There were consistent rumors during Bush’s first term that McCain might switch parties and become a Democrat. It’s never been clear to me how much reality there was to those rumors. But I do know at least that he had real conversations with his friends John Kerry and Joe Biden about doing just that. Whether he was seriously considering it or more humoring or yessing good friends I have no way of telling. The possibility seemed more plausible because a handful of his key advisers did move in this direction.
Of course, McCain didn’t become a Democrat. He remained a Republican. And as the prospect of running for President again came into view he methodically began re-conforming to conservative orthodoxies he’d shunned. When the Bush tax cuts came up again for extension in 2006 he voted for them. In the wake of his death, people have revisited key moments in the 2008 campaign in which he conspicuously refused to tolerate the racist proto-birtherism that would be synonymous with the Republican right during Obama’s presidency. But in a broader sense, McCain’s 2008 effort was a mostly cringe-worthy effort in which he methodically undid or repudiated virtually every heterodox stand or penchant for “straight talk” he’d built his post-90s reputation on. His statements were often canned. He retreated to consultant-speak to make sense of his change of heart on climate change, taxes and a bunch of other issues. The moral was simple. For political power, McCain would once again turn himself into the garden variety Republican politician he’d been for his first decade in Washington. The fact that after all that he lost only made it a sadder spectacle. Throughout Obama’s presidency there were hints of the earlier McCain. But he was mainly back to the conventional Republican of 2008 and years before.
We each have a myth we tell about ourselves. Much of the drama of our lives is played out in how we do or don’t live up to that story we tell, both to ourselves and those around us. For a public figure, this is all the same but played out before a far larger audience. McCain spent a decade and a half building his public myth and then half as many years thoroughly dismantling it. Looking back on McCain’s political life it is hard not to conclude that the public fascination with him was essentially a matter of this conversation baby-boom men have been having for decades about their youth, the Vietnam War and the meaning of their lives. The other is essentially one for Democrats and the reporters whose main political identity is hostility to ideology who were beguiled by his supposed “maverick” status and political heterodoxy — either praising him for it or chiding him for not living up to it.
These folks loved the idea of McCain’s heroism, his sacrifice (all real) and his charm but just wished he wouldn’t support policies they hated. In this sense, it’s hardly surprising that so many Republicans hated McCain. He was a Democrat’s idea of what a Republican should be. For Democrats, being a Republican who consistently voted as Republicans do amounted to a betrayal of who they thought he was supposed to be. But that’s who he was, a fairly conservative Republican. All these contradictions are really to me the root of public fascination with the man, the endless drama of the mismatch between his professed ideals and the actual man. He never really lived up to them but he had enough moments to keep up the tension. He had a deep devotion to country and to service to country. He was an arch-hawk; he was a consistent opponent of torture. He was different and his difference made him interesting and worth listening to.
The public fascination with McCain remains largely an enigma to me, though in many ways I share it. The Myth of McCain as a straight-talking maverick politician was consistently belied by his own actions and votes. I remember him now mostly for that dramatic thumbs down, killing Obamacare repeal in the Senate, leaving Mitch McConnell crestfallen and President Trump enraged. Was it over the human toll of the bill? Its slapdash process? Or simply spite? I’m really not sure. Similarly, I always thought simple anger played a key role in his seeming move to the left during Bush’s first term in office. But somehow his own years of suffering and resilience as a young man remained an anchor, setting him apart from almost every contemporary politician as someone who had experienced and survived something so alien and all but unimaginable to almost all of us. The through-line, as best as I can divine it, through the last two decades was a deep, traditionalist devotion to country, a deep patriotism which for all of McCain’s faults never seemed to be a vehicle for demonizing domestic enemies, something that sets him apart from most of today’s Republican party and certainly from the President who now embodies it.
The commentaries on his life have either praised McCain’s unique virtues or pointed out all the ways he never lived up to his billing. For me, the most interesting question to ask is what made McCain such a towering figure in our public life in the first place. Here I mean the term not in an evaluative but in a strictly descriptive sense. He was a towering figure, whether we think he should have been or not. McCain did not have a particularly lengthy or distinguished legislative record. The McCain-Feingold campaign finance law is a critical part of his public reputation. But it’s one law and it’s largely been washed away by Citizens United. Senators are not only legislators. They also have a specific constitutional responsibility for the conduct of foreign affairs. The scion of a distinguished military family, that was clearly his real passion. But the invasion of Iraq, the defense and national security decision he is probably most closely tied to — both before and after 9/11 — is now widely seen as a mistake of catastrophic and historic proportions, a fact even he conceded by the end of his life.It is often said that a President’s first decision is the choice of a Vice President. In this sense, though McCain never became President, this sole presidential decision turned out to be amazingly and consequentially bad. In bringing Sarah Palin to the center of American public life, McCain played a major part in shaping the resentment-fueled culture-war Tea Party extremism of the early Obama years and the politics we now recognize as Trumpism.
Yet, look at the flood of tributes and retrospectives along with the backdraft of critiques in the wake of his death. I can think of no other political figure (and few public figures), other than Ted Kennedy, who was not a President and got anywhere near this sort of response to his passing. It’s not even close. Kennedy served in the Senate for nearly 50 years and was responsible for numerous pieces of high profile legislation. Critically, he was the last surviving Kennedy brother, so his passing brought a close to an era with all that historical mystique and baggage.
To make sense of this question we have to go back to the 1990s when McCain first became the McCain we’ve known for the last quarter century. For most of his first decade in Congress McCain was a garden variety Republican. Elected to the House in 1982, he served two terms before making the jump to the Senate to replace Barry Goldwater in 1986. He was a hard-edged conservative with an irascible reputation. McCain had no history or family ties to Arizona. He spent the years after his release from captivity in Washington. He divorced his first wife in 1980, married Cindy McCain, an Arizona heiress, a few months later and settled in Arizona. Two years later he won a seat in the House. He was a man on the make.
His first decade was unremarkable and indeed worse than unremarkable since he managed to become the sole Republican to win a named part in the Keating Five scandal, a seminal scandal of the era which presaged the sub-prime financial collapse two decades later. But in the 1990s, and especially with the election of Bill Clinton, McCain became a central player in what is probably best seen as a public conversation men of the baby boom generation were having with themselves about ego, sacrifice and the Vietnam War.
A key pivot point came with Bill Clinton’s push to normalize relations with Vietnam, something that as a Democrat who had conspicuously and cagily evaded the draft made him uniquely vulnerable politically. In a much-discussed exchange, McCain promised Clinton that if he normalized relations he would back him publicly, leveraging his credibility as a veteran and a POW. Clinton did and McCain did. And from this point forward McCain became a symbol of reconciliation, not only about the Vietnam War but also the psychodramas and life experiences of the baby-boomer men who lived through that era.
This was particularly so for men who had not themselves served in Vietnam but found his service and his indisputable sacrifice as a POW something both alien and deeply inspiring. McCain espoused what could seem like an almost archaic form of patriotism but leveraged toward more reconciliation than political division — something that made him seem distinct and attractive compared to the already dominant Gingrich GOP. McCain, of course, was a Vietnam veteran. But it’s important to remember he was a good decade older than the great majority of men who served or didn’t serve in the war. When he returned to the U.S. in 1973 he was a few months shy of his 37th birthday.
Michael Lewis, who was not nearly as prominent a writer as he would become over subsequent decades, likely played a bigger role in birthing this myth of John McCain than any other writer, and perhaps any other person than McCain himself. In the mid-90s he wrote a series of profiles of McCain in a number of different publications. Here is a key one from The New Republic about McCain’s reconciliation with a Vietnam War protester named David Ifshin. Ifshin would later be stricken by a terminal illness. The article revolves around their friendship. Another example is this one from a couple of years later in the New York Times Magazine. Here’s yet another from this genre by James Carroll in The New Yorker.
I should note here that when I use the word “myth” I do not mean it as a fairy tale or cover story. To say something is a myth is not to say it is either true or false. Myths are stories we tell to make sense of and give meaning to the unorganized facts of existence, which themselves are mute and have nothing to tell us. As humans, we can only really understand things through stories. Read those profiles and you’ll see that there was a lot of reality to the story they tell.
The key point in my mind is that the origin of the McCain myth, his towering figure-ness, is this very particular fact: through his story and his actions he had a profound appeal to a generation of men who had guilty or angry or unresolved experiences with the Vietnam War and who were, at this point in McCain’s career, themselves moving into mid-life. (Bill Clinton turned 50 in 1996.) Soon after McCain started to show a political heterodoxy he’d seldom shown much evidence of in the past, particularly in his at first quixotic efforts on behalf of campaign finance reform with former Senator Russ Feingold. Again, he identified with conservative values but seemed unchained from the venality of his own party. This set the stage for his 2000 presidential run which is in many ways the centerpiece of his career. It was always a kind of corny enterprise with his “Straight Talk Express.” But the key here is something that is critical to understanding McCain. Reporters simply liked him. He broke from character, didn’t mind upsetting orthodoxies, even possibly relished it. He was accessible and was always good for a snappy quote. He was also clearly a charmer, something you can see from all the tributes from reporters. This was also clearly a pose and a posture he most enjoyed.
This part of the story is so well known there’s not much for me to add to it. The more interesting point is that after that campaign, the sting of the defeat and what he regarded as dirty tricks against him accelerated his move in an increasingly heterodox direction. People rightly remember his staunch support for the Iraq War. They remember less the fact that he was one of the few Republicans who voted against the Bush tax cut, first in 2001 and again in 2003. There were consistent rumors during Bush’s first term that McCain might switch parties and become a Democrat. It’s never been clear to me how much reality there was to those rumors. But I do know at least that he had real conversations with his friends John Kerry and Joe Biden about doing just that. Whether he was seriously considering it or more humoring or yessing good friends I have no way of telling. The possibility seemed more plausible because a handful of his key advisers did move in this direction.
Of course, McCain didn’t become a Democrat. He remained a Republican. And as the prospect of running for President again came into view he methodically began re-conforming to conservative orthodoxies he’d shunned. When the Bush tax cuts came up again for extension in 2006 he voted for them. In the wake of his death, people have revisited key moments in the 2008 campaign in which he conspicuously refused to tolerate the racist proto-birtherism that would be synonymous with the Republican right during Obama’s presidency. But in a broader sense, McCain’s 2008 effort was a mostly cringe-worthy effort in which he methodically undid or repudiated virtually every heterodox stand or penchant for “straight talk” he’d built his post-90s reputation on. His statements were often canned. He retreated to consultant-speak to make sense of his change of heart on climate change, taxes and a bunch of other issues. The moral was simple. For political power, McCain would once again turn himself into the garden variety Republican politician he’d been for his first decade in Washington. The fact that after all that he lost only made it a sadder spectacle. Throughout Obama’s presidency there were hints of the earlier McCain. But he was mainly back to the conventional Republican of 2008 and years before.
We each have a myth we tell about ourselves. Much of the drama of our lives is played out in how we do or don’t live up to that story we tell, both to ourselves and those around us. For a public figure, this is all the same but played out before a far larger audience. McCain spent a decade and a half building his public myth and then half as many years thoroughly dismantling it. Looking back on McCain’s political life it is hard not to conclude that the public fascination with him was essentially a matter of this conversation baby-boom men have been having for decades about their youth, the Vietnam War and the meaning of their lives. The other is essentially one for Democrats and the reporters whose main political identity is hostility to ideology who were beguiled by his supposed “maverick” status and political heterodoxy — either praising him for it or chiding him for not living up to it.
These folks loved the idea of McCain’s heroism, his sacrifice (all real) and his charm but just wished he wouldn’t support policies they hated. In this sense, it’s hardly surprising that so many Republicans hated McCain. He was a Democrat’s idea of what a Republican should be. For Democrats, being a Republican who consistently voted as Republicans do amounted to a betrayal of who they thought he was supposed to be. But that’s who he was, a fairly conservative Republican. All these contradictions are really to me the root of public fascination with the man, the endless drama of the mismatch between his professed ideals and the actual man. He never really lived up to them but he had enough moments to keep up the tension. He had a deep devotion to country and to service to country. He was an arch-hawk; he was a consistent opponent of torture. He was different and his difference made him interesting and worth listening to.
The public fascination with McCain remains largely an enigma to me, though in many ways I share it. The Myth of McCain as a straight-talking maverick politician was consistently belied by his own actions and votes. I remember him now mostly for that dramatic thumbs down, killing Obamacare repeal in the Senate, leaving Mitch McConnell crestfallen and President Trump enraged. Was it over the human toll of the bill? Its slapdash process? Or simply spite? I’m really not sure. Similarly, I always thought simple anger played a key role in his seeming move to the left during Bush’s first term in office. But somehow his own years of suffering and resilience as a young man remained an anchor, setting him apart from almost every contemporary politician as someone who had experienced and survived something so alien and all but unimaginable to almost all of us. The through-line, as best as I can divine it, through the last two decades was a deep, traditionalist devotion to country, a deep patriotism which for all of McCain’s faults never seemed to be a vehicle for demonizing domestic enemies, something that sets him apart from most of today’s Republican party and certainly from the President who now embodies it.
by Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo | Read more:
Image: Tobias Hase/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images
"It Seems Like Iowa in 2007": Beto O'Rourke
By now you’ve probably heard a lot about Beto O’Rourke and his surprisingly durable challenge against Ted Cruz in bright red Texas. You’ve heard about how he’s visited all 254 Texas counties in his Toyota Tundra. You’ve seen videos of him sweating through a button-down shirt at one of his jam-packed town halls. You’ve watched the rangy 45-year-old congressman skateboard through a Whataburger parking lot in Brownsville. And if you’re following the 2018 midterms, you know that O’Rourke only trails Cruz by a single digit while running an unabashedly progressive campaign, making Democrats around the country salivate at the prospect of a blue wave crashing everywhere from Galveston to El Paso.
That’s still a long shot. Texas is Texas, after all. But the hype emerging from the Democrat’s campaign points to something rather obvious: O’Rourke is good at this, way better than most of the Democrats sniffing around the next presidential race from the boring hallways of Capitol Hill. Whether he wins or loses his race—and yes, even if he loses—O’Rourke should be included in every conversation about the 2020 Democratic primary. That’s because, unlike most of the paint-by-numbers politicians in his party, O’Rourke actually understands how politics should be conducted in the Donald Trump era: authentic, full of energy, stripped of consultant-driven sterility, and waged at all times with a social-media-primed video screen in mind. O’Rourke is making a bet that running on his gut and giving voters a clear choice against Cruz, rather than just a mushy alternative, offers not just a path to victory in Texas but an antidote to the entire stupid artifice of American politics in the Trump era.
The most appealing thing about O’Rourke is both delightfully uncomplicated and extremely powerful: he talks about politics like you and your friends do. “I am so sick of the stuff that’s been made safe for politics,” O’Rourke told me earlier this month as we drove in his truck through South Texas, between a pair of town halls in Beeville and Corpus Christi. “It’s so bad. It has no impact. It doesn’t register. It doesn’t excite me. I want to do what excites me. That’s my goal at least.”
“Democrats in Texas have been losing statewide elections for Senate for 30 years,” he said. “So you can keep doing the same things, talk to the same consultants, run the same polls, focus-group drive the message. Or you can run like you’ve got nothing to lose. That’s what my wife, Amy, and I decided at the outset. What do we have to lose? Let’s do this the right way, the way that feels good to us. We don’t have a pollster. Let’s talk about the things that are important to us, regardless of how they poll. Let’s not even know how they poll.”
I was following O’Rourke and Cruz around Texas for an episode of Good Luck America, Snapchat’s political documentary series. Cruz, too, is working hard and not taking the race for granted. He’s accessible to the media and packing in supporters at meat ’n’ threes across the state. Cruz’s theory of the race is that Texas is fundamentally red, that there simply aren’t enough Democrats in the state for him to lose. “There are many more conservatives than liberals, and many more common-sense Texans,” he told me. And he has a point: in modern times, no Democratic candidate has hit more than 42 percent in a statewide election. But O’Rourke’s theory is that he can yank new voters out of the woodwork, and when we arrived in Corpus Christi after our drive, on a muggy Wednesday afternoon, there were some 4,000 people waiting for him in a bingo hall on the outskirts of town. For a midterm candidate. In August.
O’Rourke riffed on climate change, background checks, teacher pay, health care for veterans, cost-of-living adjustments for public-sector retirees, and the importance of a free press. He lashed the idea of a border wall and the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents. And unlike Washington consultants who say that Democrats should only be talking about health care this election season, and not the scandals swirling around Trump, O’Rourke seems to understand that it isn’t really that hard to do both. Because Democrats want to hear about both, and it would be silly to pretend otherwise. He blasted Trump’s obsequious press conference with Vladimir Putinin Helsinki. “He actively, on a stage in another country, defends the interests of another country against the interests of the United States of America,” O’Rourke said. “The collusion in action taking place right in front of our eyes.” It was the second-biggest applause line of the night, after his boast about refusing to take corporate campaign donations.
“I would like Texas to be the example, to be the bridge over the small stuff, the partisanship, the bickering, the pettiness, the meanness, the name-calling, the bigotry, the racism, the hatred, the anxiety, and the paranoia that dominates so much of the national conversation today,” he implored them, catching his breath. “I would love for us to be the big, bold, confident, ambitious, big-hearted, aspirational answer to all that small, weak crap that dominates the national news every single night that has kept us from who we are supposed to be as a country.”
His communications director, Chris Evans, live-streamed shaky, grainy video of the whole event, as he does with every town hall, as the crowd rose with applause. There were college kids and veterans and old women standing up out of their wheelchairs to catch a glimpse of him. One woman cried at the touch of his hand. Afterward, O’Rourke stayed for more than an hour posing for selfies with giddy fans, as he does after every event, then stayed even longer to chat with a local reporter. A few days later, I e-mailed a Texas beat-reporter friend to ask her about O’Rourke’s crowds. It seemed like a silly question. In our data-focused world, crowd sizes aren’t supposed to be meaningful political guideposts. But that’s also the same logic all of us smarty-pants reporters used to dismiss Trump’s early crowds.
“I wasn’t in Iowa in 2007,” she responded, a reference to the early buzz around Barack Obama back then. “But it seems like Iowa in 2007.”
I was in Iowa in 2007. And yeah, it feels a lot like that.
O’Rourke’s growing appeal to Democrats beyond Texas was confirmed once again last week when a NowThis video of him defending the N.F.L. player protests rocketed around the Internet. “I can think of nothing more American,” he said of the protests, responding to a Fort Worth voter who was clearly uncomfortable with the idea of players taking a knee. The O’Rourke clip was viewed over 44 million times across Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube as of Tuesday, according to a NowThis spokeswoman.
The clip simply captured O’Rourke speaking off the cuff at one of his town-hall meetings, all without pandering or poll-tested varnish, and it was enough to land him a re-tweet from LeBron James and a guest spot on Ellen next month. The Legend of Beto is growing bigger than Texas. He’s already a bona fide political celebrity among Democrats, and he’s just a candidate for Senate in a state that shouldn’t be competitive. It’s not a stretch to say that he’s more famous among Democrats than probably 95 U.S. senators, most of his fellow congressmen, and pretty much every sitting governor in the country. Which is exactly why he can’t be ignored in conversations about the next presidential race.
Ask yourself this question: today, looking at the likely Democratic primary field, who is the person most able to fill stadiums, command attention in both traditional and social media, sell T-shirts, suck in small-dollar donations, stir up genuine excitement among millennials, and throw a haymaker at Trump in the process? Is it a U.S. senator who occasionally sends out sternly worded e-mails about Mitch McConnell? Or is it the cool Texas guy you read about in your News Feed who used to play in a punk band and who’s now taking the fight to Ted Cruz in the deep red cradle of American conservatism? (...)
[ed. See also: House Republicans Have a Secret List of Trump Scandals They’re Covering
Up and Republicans Secretly Study Their Coming Hell.]
That’s still a long shot. Texas is Texas, after all. But the hype emerging from the Democrat’s campaign points to something rather obvious: O’Rourke is good at this, way better than most of the Democrats sniffing around the next presidential race from the boring hallways of Capitol Hill. Whether he wins or loses his race—and yes, even if he loses—O’Rourke should be included in every conversation about the 2020 Democratic primary. That’s because, unlike most of the paint-by-numbers politicians in his party, O’Rourke actually understands how politics should be conducted in the Donald Trump era: authentic, full of energy, stripped of consultant-driven sterility, and waged at all times with a social-media-primed video screen in mind. O’Rourke is making a bet that running on his gut and giving voters a clear choice against Cruz, rather than just a mushy alternative, offers not just a path to victory in Texas but an antidote to the entire stupid artifice of American politics in the Trump era.The most appealing thing about O’Rourke is both delightfully uncomplicated and extremely powerful: he talks about politics like you and your friends do. “I am so sick of the stuff that’s been made safe for politics,” O’Rourke told me earlier this month as we drove in his truck through South Texas, between a pair of town halls in Beeville and Corpus Christi. “It’s so bad. It has no impact. It doesn’t register. It doesn’t excite me. I want to do what excites me. That’s my goal at least.”
“Democrats in Texas have been losing statewide elections for Senate for 30 years,” he said. “So you can keep doing the same things, talk to the same consultants, run the same polls, focus-group drive the message. Or you can run like you’ve got nothing to lose. That’s what my wife, Amy, and I decided at the outset. What do we have to lose? Let’s do this the right way, the way that feels good to us. We don’t have a pollster. Let’s talk about the things that are important to us, regardless of how they poll. Let’s not even know how they poll.”
I was following O’Rourke and Cruz around Texas for an episode of Good Luck America, Snapchat’s political documentary series. Cruz, too, is working hard and not taking the race for granted. He’s accessible to the media and packing in supporters at meat ’n’ threes across the state. Cruz’s theory of the race is that Texas is fundamentally red, that there simply aren’t enough Democrats in the state for him to lose. “There are many more conservatives than liberals, and many more common-sense Texans,” he told me. And he has a point: in modern times, no Democratic candidate has hit more than 42 percent in a statewide election. But O’Rourke’s theory is that he can yank new voters out of the woodwork, and when we arrived in Corpus Christi after our drive, on a muggy Wednesday afternoon, there were some 4,000 people waiting for him in a bingo hall on the outskirts of town. For a midterm candidate. In August.
O’Rourke riffed on climate change, background checks, teacher pay, health care for veterans, cost-of-living adjustments for public-sector retirees, and the importance of a free press. He lashed the idea of a border wall and the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents. And unlike Washington consultants who say that Democrats should only be talking about health care this election season, and not the scandals swirling around Trump, O’Rourke seems to understand that it isn’t really that hard to do both. Because Democrats want to hear about both, and it would be silly to pretend otherwise. He blasted Trump’s obsequious press conference with Vladimir Putinin Helsinki. “He actively, on a stage in another country, defends the interests of another country against the interests of the United States of America,” O’Rourke said. “The collusion in action taking place right in front of our eyes.” It was the second-biggest applause line of the night, after his boast about refusing to take corporate campaign donations.
“I would like Texas to be the example, to be the bridge over the small stuff, the partisanship, the bickering, the pettiness, the meanness, the name-calling, the bigotry, the racism, the hatred, the anxiety, and the paranoia that dominates so much of the national conversation today,” he implored them, catching his breath. “I would love for us to be the big, bold, confident, ambitious, big-hearted, aspirational answer to all that small, weak crap that dominates the national news every single night that has kept us from who we are supposed to be as a country.”
His communications director, Chris Evans, live-streamed shaky, grainy video of the whole event, as he does with every town hall, as the crowd rose with applause. There were college kids and veterans and old women standing up out of their wheelchairs to catch a glimpse of him. One woman cried at the touch of his hand. Afterward, O’Rourke stayed for more than an hour posing for selfies with giddy fans, as he does after every event, then stayed even longer to chat with a local reporter. A few days later, I e-mailed a Texas beat-reporter friend to ask her about O’Rourke’s crowds. It seemed like a silly question. In our data-focused world, crowd sizes aren’t supposed to be meaningful political guideposts. But that’s also the same logic all of us smarty-pants reporters used to dismiss Trump’s early crowds.
“I wasn’t in Iowa in 2007,” she responded, a reference to the early buzz around Barack Obama back then. “But it seems like Iowa in 2007.”
I was in Iowa in 2007. And yeah, it feels a lot like that.
O’Rourke’s growing appeal to Democrats beyond Texas was confirmed once again last week when a NowThis video of him defending the N.F.L. player protests rocketed around the Internet. “I can think of nothing more American,” he said of the protests, responding to a Fort Worth voter who was clearly uncomfortable with the idea of players taking a knee. The O’Rourke clip was viewed over 44 million times across Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube as of Tuesday, according to a NowThis spokeswoman.
The clip simply captured O’Rourke speaking off the cuff at one of his town-hall meetings, all without pandering or poll-tested varnish, and it was enough to land him a re-tweet from LeBron James and a guest spot on Ellen next month. The Legend of Beto is growing bigger than Texas. He’s already a bona fide political celebrity among Democrats, and he’s just a candidate for Senate in a state that shouldn’t be competitive. It’s not a stretch to say that he’s more famous among Democrats than probably 95 U.S. senators, most of his fellow congressmen, and pretty much every sitting governor in the country. Which is exactly why he can’t be ignored in conversations about the next presidential race.
Ask yourself this question: today, looking at the likely Democratic primary field, who is the person most able to fill stadiums, command attention in both traditional and social media, sell T-shirts, suck in small-dollar donations, stir up genuine excitement among millennials, and throw a haymaker at Trump in the process? Is it a U.S. senator who occasionally sends out sternly worded e-mails about Mitch McConnell? Or is it the cool Texas guy you read about in your News Feed who used to play in a punk band and who’s now taking the fight to Ted Cruz in the deep red cradle of American conservatism? (...)
In little over a year, O’Rourke has built a thriving political movement in the country’s second-largest state, with a strategy built purely on hustle, grassroots organizing, and his hunch that the standard-issue campaign playbook met its final demise in 2016. O’Rourke has raised over $23 million so far, all from small donors and a lot it from out of state. But his campaign money hasn’t gone to television ads or consultants. It’s gone to online advertising (Sanders’s digital firm, to be precise) and a T-shirt vendor in Austin tasked with pumping out thousands of heather gray “Beto for Senate” shirts. He’s Spanish-fluent and hails from a border city, El Paso, in a moment when immigration has become the hottest-burning political issue in the country. And at a time when Americans view politics through their mobile screens, O’Rourke passes the ever-fetishized “authenticity” test by a mile. That’s partly because he has a habit of sharing almost every moment of his day, from his morning runs to his burrito lunches, on Snapchat and Instagram and Facebook. But it’s also because, so far, O’Rourke doesn’t appear to be performing a version of himself. Nothing feels practiced. The voters I spoke with in East Texas all said the same thing when I asked why they liked him: he seems “real.”
by Peter Hamby, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Image: Suzanne Cordeiro/REX/Shutterstock.[ed. See also: House Republicans Have a Secret List of Trump Scandals They’re Covering
Up and Republicans Secretly Study Their Coming Hell.]
Programming My Child
and errors can happen to you and computers
’cause you are . . . a computer!
go and do it! program yourself!
just do it!
explore your toes, explore your nose,
explore everything you have goes
and if you don’t want to do that
you can’t even live
not even houses, ’cause houses are us
—Eleanor Auerbach (age four), “The Blah Blah Blah Song”A few years after leaving Google, I had a daughter, and thus began another long-term engineering project—one that is still ongoing. Parents program their children, after all—and vice versa—and it was in those early months of parenting that my child—unable to make a facial expression, unable to express anything but varying levels of comfort or discomfort—seemed most like a machine. Her responses were, if not predictable, closely circumscribed. I imagined coding up a stochastic algorithm, one that relies partly on chance, to cause her to move her arms and legs jerkily, cry when hungry or uncomfortable, sleep nonstop, and nurse—not completely predictable, but rarely doing the wholly unexpected.
The stimulus-response cycle is out in the open with a child, at least initially, and the feedback loop created between parent and child is tight, controlled, and frequently comprehensible. I trained my child to know that certain behaviors would get her fed, put to sleep, hugged, rocked, burped, and entertained. And my child trained me, in turn, to respond to her cries with what she wanted. You come to an accommodation; both your systems have synchronized, at least roughly, for mutual benefit (though mostly, for hers).So much of that behavior in infancy appears hard-coded, from crying to nursing to crawling to grabbing everything in sight, that I often felt like we were playing out a scripted pageant of upbringing that had been drawn up over many millennia and delivered to me through the telegrams of my DNA.
Yet programming is an iterative process. When I wrote software, I would code, test, and debug my code. After fixing a bug, I would recompile my code and start it again in its uncorrupted state, before the next bug emerged. The idea of initial conditions—the ability to restart as many times as you like—is integral to software development and to algorithms. An algorithmic recipe presumes a set of initial conditions and inputs. When an algorithm terminates, only the outputs remain. The algorithmic process itself comes to an end. Every time an algorithm runs, it starts afresh with new inputs. Colloquially, we can call this the reset button.
The scientific process depends on the reset button: the ability to conduct an experiment multiple times from identical starting conditions. In the absence of precisely identical starting conditions—whether in the study of distant stars or extremely rare circumstances or many varied human beings—the goal is that initial conditions are as close as possible in all relevant aspects.
But you cannot reset a human being. A child is not an algorithm. It is a persistent, evolving system. Software too is becoming a persistent system. Algorithms themselves may remain static, but they are increasingly acting on large, persistent systems that are now as important to computing as the algorithms themselves. The names of these systems include Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter. These companies write software, but the products they create are systems or networks. While Microsoft had to carry over a fair amount of code from one version of Windows to the next to ensure backward compatibility, each version of Windows was a discrete program. Every time a user started up Windows, the memory of the computer was cleared and reassembled from scratch, based on the state that had been saved to disk. If Windows got into a strange state and stopped behaving well, I could reboot and, more often than not, the problem fixed itself. In the worst cases, I could reinstall Windows and have a completely fresh start.
That’s not possible with systems. Constituent pieces of Google’s search engine are replaced, rebooted, and subject to constant failures, but the overall system must be up all the time. There is no restarting from scratch. Google, Amazon, and Facebook are less valuable for their algorithms than for their state: the sum total of all the data the system contains and manipulates. None of these companies can clear out its systems and “start over,” algorithmically.
As with children, we don’t debug these networks; we educate them.
***
In the first months of her life, I kept a spreadsheet of my daughter’s milestones. Hardware upgrades to her height and weight were ongoing, but I declared a new “version” whenever my wife and I deemed her sufficiently different to appear as though a software upgrade had been installed.It was tempting to see these changes as upgrades because I wasn’t doing anything to trigger them. My daughter was just figuring it out on her own. Having spent two decades of our lives in front of computers, my wife and I weren’t used to seeing our “projects” alter their behavior without long and hard intervention. “Maintenance” was required (nutrition came in, waste went out), but there was no clear connection between these efforts and the changes taking place in our daughter.
The “upgrades,” however, became more difficult to track as my daughter’s skills expanded and her comprehension of the world around her developed. As she learned more sounds and began to experiment with using words to mean more than just “I want that!” I let go of the fantasy that any sort of “upgrades” were taking place at all and I came to see her as a mysterious, ever-evolving network.
The leap from observational data to thought is one of the most amazing and incomprehensible processes in nature. Any parent will know how baffling it is to see this happening in stages. There are limits past which a child cannot go in understanding, until one day those limits mysteriously vanish, replaced by new and deeper ones. When, at two and a half, my daughter said, “Worms and noodles are related by long skinny things,” she lumped together two entities based on superficial appearance, but she hadn’t yet learned what a relation was.
Before long, she had learned to use logic to argue her position when she needed to. Sometimes it took the form of threats, particularly at bedtime: “If you don’t give me any milk, I’ll stay awake all night. Then you’ll never get any sleep and you’ll die sooner.”
And then, by three and a half, Eleanor was modeling our motives, and not always flatteringly, as when she said to her blanket, “Now I will raspberry you. You will not like it but I enjoy it and that is why we will do it.” At this point, she was able to determine that everyone around her had goals and that sometimes those goals conflicted with hers. She couldn’t necessarily determine others’ motivations, but she knew they were there.
Eventually, most children come to the same shared understanding that we all possess. But what remains a puzzle to me, and to researchers in general, is how children leap from superficial imitation and free association to reasoning. The brain grows and develops, with billions of neurons added year after year—but no matter how much memory or processing power I add to my desktop server, it never gains any new reasoning capabilities.
As an ever-evolving network, there are algorithms that guide the development of the child, chief among them the workings of DNA. But those algorithms are the builders, not the building itself, and they are hidden from us. Some small clues to what is happening, however, may lie in thinking about what happens to software programs when we don’t shut them down and restart them, but let them linger on and evolve.
***
Algorithmic systems or networks such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter create a persistent system (or network) that modifies its behavior over time, in response to how it is used. In essence, these systems rely on feedback: their outputs affect the environment in which these systems exist, and the systemic environment—its users and also other algorithmic systems like it—provides new inputs that change the system further.
Algorithms establish and maintain these systems, but they can’t predict how a system will behave at a given point in time. For that, one must know the ongoing state of the system. The result is an evolving ecosystem. Once a network is in play, evolving over time and never reset to its initial state, it gains a complex existence independent of the algorithms that produced it, just as our bodies and minds gain a complex existence independent of the DNA that spawned them. These independent systems are not coded. Rather, they are trained, and they learn. This means that these networks are not fundamentally algorithmic and they cannot be wholly reset, for to do so would be to return the system to its starting point of ignorance and inexperience.
There are many different types of networks coming into existence besides giant informational systems such as Google and Facebook. There are neural networks, deep learning networks, and belief networks, among others. All these fall under the broad rubric of machine learning.
There are many different types of networks coming into existence besides giant informational systems such as Google and Facebook. There are neural networks, deep learning networks, and belief networks, among others. All these fall under the broad rubric of machine learning.
by David Auerbach, Boston Review | Read more:
Image: Na Kim/NY Times
[ed. See also: Attempting the Impossible: A Thoughtful Meditation on Technology]
Wednesday, August 29, 2018
How Flat Tummy Co Gamed Instagram to Sell Women the Unattainable Ideal
Got Cravings?” asked the billboard from its perch above a Times Square pizzeria. “Girl, Tell Them To #SUCKIT”.
The image was arresting: a pretty young woman sucking an “appetite suppressant” lollipop splashed across a canvas of millennial pink. Flat Tummy Co, an online retailer that had previously existed almost exclusively within the digital confines of Instagram, arrived in New York City like Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita updated into a 21st-century boss babe.
The product for sale – 35 calories worth of flavored cane sugar laced with an extract of saffron that supposedly curbs hunger – sparked immediate backlash for a company that had built its brand selling so-called “detox” teas. Good Place actor Jameela Jamil called out Kim Kardashian West for promoting the lollipops to her 116 million Instagram followers (“You terrible and toxic influence on young girls,” Jamil tweeted), and more than 100,000 people signed an online petition calling for the billboard’s removal.
Flat Tummy Co’s response has been to keep calm and ’gram on. The company is the ultimate Instagram brand success story: a perfect example of how unregulated social media marketing practices can repackage questionable science in the feelgood trappings of a wellness brand and spin women’s insecurities into cash. And Instagram, which claims to want to be “one of the most kind and safe” places on the internet, has neither the power nor the will to police it.
Indeed, Instagram is such a crucial factor in Flat Tummy Co’s value that when the company was sold for $10m in 2015, its “significant social media presence” was highlighted in a press release ahead of actual assets or sales figures. Armies of “influencers” – including Kim, Khloe and Kourtney Kardashian and Kylie and Kris Jenner – promote its products to their followers. Most of the influencers are strictly Instagram-famous: semi-professional models with tens of thousands of female followers who almost always fail to disclose that their endorsements are bought and paid for.
“It’s not a positive message for women, is it? It’s pretty bad,” said one former Flat Tummy Co employee, who spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity, about the company’s move into selling appetite suppressants. “The ex-employees are all quite close … Everyone’s just kind of, ‘Ugh, we were a part of that.’”
The former employee argued that the outrage toward the Kardashians was misdirected: “Why is no one calling out the company? This isn’t about them. It’s the company that’s the problem.”
‘We thought we’d struck gold’
Flat Tummy Tea debuted on Instagram on 14 June 2013. It took time for the company to develop its current Instaesthetic: the tea was originally sold in transparent plastic bags that showed off the product’s earthiness; the label was a purplish blue; the font had yet to lose its serifs.
But the beginnings of a brand identity were apparent from the outset: aspirational images of beautiful women with tiny stomachs and big butts, before and after shots of customers’ bloated and deflated bellies, and a studied mix of pseudo-feminist millennial boss bitch attitude: mason jar smoothies, jokes about alcohol, girl power slogans, an assortment of healthy-ish dishes, junk food and pink workout gear, and the odd inspirational quote from Nelson Mandela. (...)
‘You’re not worth that much money’
In interviews with the Guardian, two former Flat Tummy Co employees described the process by which the company flooded Instagram with thousands of paid-for posts.
Each week, they were tasked with identifying and contacting between 150 and 200 new influencers, with the goal of getting 50 to 60 of them on board for a series of four promotional posts each. The ideal model was a woman with at least 100,000 followers.
“They had a rating system, depending on how ‘on brand’ you were,” explained one of the former employees. “You don’t want someone who already has a six pack. You want a mum who is on her fit journey trying to lose weight after having kids.”
African American and Latina models were prized because their posts “converted” well into sales, while models were downgraded if they were too “slutty” on the assumption that their followers would be mostly male.
“If someone is a little bit bigger, they get a higher rating than if someone’s skinny,” one former employee said. “No one is going to a listen to a skinny white girl say that she bought this tea and it’s great.”
Added the other former employee: “If they were sexier, showed a lot of skin, or showed too much boobs, it was like, ‘Don’t pay them, try to get free posts.’”
Valentina Barron, a spokeswoman for Flat Tummy Co, told the Guardian by email: “The ambassadors we collaborate with are a mix of all different types of women, because that’s what our customers are. Women can experience bloating, digestive issues or anything else in between no matter what their size.”
The former employees said they were pressured to keep the cost of influencer posts down. While the Kardashians reportedly earn six-figure fees for their Instagram ads, the influencers that the former employees worked with were “lucky to get $25 to $50”, one of the former employees said. “You basically had to cut them down and say, ‘You’re not worth that much money.’”
The image was arresting: a pretty young woman sucking an “appetite suppressant” lollipop splashed across a canvas of millennial pink. Flat Tummy Co, an online retailer that had previously existed almost exclusively within the digital confines of Instagram, arrived in New York City like Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita updated into a 21st-century boss babe.
The product for sale – 35 calories worth of flavored cane sugar laced with an extract of saffron that supposedly curbs hunger – sparked immediate backlash for a company that had built its brand selling so-called “detox” teas. Good Place actor Jameela Jamil called out Kim Kardashian West for promoting the lollipops to her 116 million Instagram followers (“You terrible and toxic influence on young girls,” Jamil tweeted), and more than 100,000 people signed an online petition calling for the billboard’s removal.Flat Tummy Co’s response has been to keep calm and ’gram on. The company is the ultimate Instagram brand success story: a perfect example of how unregulated social media marketing practices can repackage questionable science in the feelgood trappings of a wellness brand and spin women’s insecurities into cash. And Instagram, which claims to want to be “one of the most kind and safe” places on the internet, has neither the power nor the will to police it.
Indeed, Instagram is such a crucial factor in Flat Tummy Co’s value that when the company was sold for $10m in 2015, its “significant social media presence” was highlighted in a press release ahead of actual assets or sales figures. Armies of “influencers” – including Kim, Khloe and Kourtney Kardashian and Kylie and Kris Jenner – promote its products to their followers. Most of the influencers are strictly Instagram-famous: semi-professional models with tens of thousands of female followers who almost always fail to disclose that their endorsements are bought and paid for.
“It’s not a positive message for women, is it? It’s pretty bad,” said one former Flat Tummy Co employee, who spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity, about the company’s move into selling appetite suppressants. “The ex-employees are all quite close … Everyone’s just kind of, ‘Ugh, we were a part of that.’”
The former employee argued that the outrage toward the Kardashians was misdirected: “Why is no one calling out the company? This isn’t about them. It’s the company that’s the problem.”
‘We thought we’d struck gold’
Flat Tummy Tea debuted on Instagram on 14 June 2013. It took time for the company to develop its current Instaesthetic: the tea was originally sold in transparent plastic bags that showed off the product’s earthiness; the label was a purplish blue; the font had yet to lose its serifs.
But the beginnings of a brand identity were apparent from the outset: aspirational images of beautiful women with tiny stomachs and big butts, before and after shots of customers’ bloated and deflated bellies, and a studied mix of pseudo-feminist millennial boss bitch attitude: mason jar smoothies, jokes about alcohol, girl power slogans, an assortment of healthy-ish dishes, junk food and pink workout gear, and the odd inspirational quote from Nelson Mandela. (...)
‘You’re not worth that much money’
In interviews with the Guardian, two former Flat Tummy Co employees described the process by which the company flooded Instagram with thousands of paid-for posts.
Each week, they were tasked with identifying and contacting between 150 and 200 new influencers, with the goal of getting 50 to 60 of them on board for a series of four promotional posts each. The ideal model was a woman with at least 100,000 followers.
“They had a rating system, depending on how ‘on brand’ you were,” explained one of the former employees. “You don’t want someone who already has a six pack. You want a mum who is on her fit journey trying to lose weight after having kids.”
African American and Latina models were prized because their posts “converted” well into sales, while models were downgraded if they were too “slutty” on the assumption that their followers would be mostly male.
“If someone is a little bit bigger, they get a higher rating than if someone’s skinny,” one former employee said. “No one is going to a listen to a skinny white girl say that she bought this tea and it’s great.”
Added the other former employee: “If they were sexier, showed a lot of skin, or showed too much boobs, it was like, ‘Don’t pay them, try to get free posts.’”
Valentina Barron, a spokeswoman for Flat Tummy Co, told the Guardian by email: “The ambassadors we collaborate with are a mix of all different types of women, because that’s what our customers are. Women can experience bloating, digestive issues or anything else in between no matter what their size.”
The former employees said they were pressured to keep the cost of influencer posts down. While the Kardashians reportedly earn six-figure fees for their Instagram ads, the influencers that the former employees worked with were “lucky to get $25 to $50”, one of the former employees said. “You basically had to cut them down and say, ‘You’re not worth that much money.’”
by Julia Carrie Wong, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Sophie Vershbow
Tuesday, August 28, 2018
Emoji, Part 1: In the Beginning
Sex! Conflict! International standards bodies! The brief history of emoji is far more interesting than it has any right to be, and over the next few months I’ll be taking a look at where the world’s newest language* came from, how it works and where it’s going.
It started with a heart.
In the mid-1990s, Japan found itself in the grip of a pager boom. Sales of “pocket bells”, or poke beru, ran at over a million per year, with the country’s largest mobile network, NTT DOCOMO, taking the lion’s share. Elsewhere in the world, pagers were the preserve of businesses and hospitals where they called trauma surgeons to the emergency room or managers to the telephone. In Japan, however, pocket bells were increasingly sought after by teenagers: by 1996, almost half of all female high school students owned one, and peak pager hours had shifted from during the working day to the late evening, when the airwaves buzzed with teenagers’ illicit messages.
The first pagers were simple devices, designed only to receive numeric messages. The idea was that a sender would call a recipient’s pager at its own dedicated telephone number and then tap in their desired message as another string of numbers. This in turn would appear on the pager’s LCD display. Often, the message was as simple as the sender’s telephone number, but in the usa, where pagers had originated, younger users created a loosely-codified dialect comprising numeric codes, in-jokes, and more. “6000*843” can be just about read as “good bye”, for example; “99” meant “nighty night”; “831” (eight letters, three words, one meaning) stood for “I love you”; and so on.
Across the Pacific, Japanese high schoolers had their own pager-cipher in which numbers could be pronounced either in Japanese or English to form sound-alike phrases. “724106” translated to “What are you doing?”, for example, while “114106” meant “I love you”. Still, though, there was demand for a more sophisticated pager experience. As such, when one of DOCOMO’s smaller rivals launched a 1995 model that could translate pairs of digits directly into Japanese characters, demand was so high that the company had to temporarily stop accepting new customers.
DOCOMO had to respond. A year later, the larger company added a heart symbol to the repertoire of some of its pager models, and their younger customers went wild for it. Accessed by dialling “88” or “89” when leaving a message on a recipient’s pager, the heart became a fixture in high schoolers’ messages — but those same pager addicts were left bereft when, a few short years later, the “❤” abruptly disappeared from the newest pagers. Some claim that DOCOMO ditched the symbol in order to attract more serious-minded business customers; others say that the heart took up valuable memory that was better used to support Japan’s expansive kanji script and the Latin alphabet. Subscribers did not care. They deserted DOCOMO in droves.
In the event, DOCOMO’s unwonted heart surgery was the catalyst for something much larger. Elsewhere in the company, and aware that DOCOMO needed a new killer feature to replace the erstwhile “❤”, an engineer named Shigetaka Kurita was in the midst of developing the first mobile internet service for the operator’s cellphones. Kurita was disappointed by the drab, text-only applications available in the USA and elsewhere and dreamed of somehow elevating DOCOMO’s nascent “i-mode” internet service above these distinctly lo-fi offerings. But how? He looked to his environment for inspiration.
More so than in some other countries, Japanese culture and public life are suffused with visual symbolism. Comic books, or manga, are read avidly and universally, and many of them make use of common visual tropes that express concepts or states of being. An oversized drop of sweat on a character’s face represents anxiety or confusion; a lightbulb above their head is a moment of enlightenment. As the first host country in the modern Olympic era to use a non-alphabetic script, the Tokyo games of 1964 pioneered the use of symbols (🚴︎, 🚻︎, ⛵︎) rather than text to help foreign visitors find their way. And that same non-alphabetic script itself provided inspiration: in kanji, the ideographic script that Japan inherited from China, Kurita saw how powerful it was to be able to express complex ideas like “love” in a single character.
Drawing on all these influences and more, Shigetaka Kurita designed a font containing one hundred and seventy-six monochromatic but lively icons — symbols such as smiley faces, thunderous clouds, cartoonish bombs and gibbous moons — and embedded it into DOCOMO’s new i-mode internet system. Emoji was born.
Eyecatching though they were, Kurita’s creations were also a pragmatic addition to i-mode’s online services. On-screen menus used emoji to highlight paid services or train tickets; weather applications employed suns, clouds, umbrellas, snowmen and lightning bolts to provide comprehensive weather reports in a few lines of text; and 250-character limits on emails could be mitigated by judicious use of an emoji or two.
Each symbol measured just twelve pixels by twelve — a scant one hundred and forty-four dots to represent a hospital, an incoming fax, or a movie camera — and some icons came out of Kurita’s digital wash cycle either shrunken or simply inscrutable. As such, when Kurita sent his finished designs to docomo’s hardware partners for inclusion on their mobile phones, the response was tepid: Sharp, Panasonic, Fujitsu and others were more concerned with getting i-mode right than they were in polishing Kurita’s icons of cocktail glasses and snowmen. When emoji went out into the wider world as part of the launch of the i-mode platform, each of its symbols retained the same quirky, pixelated design in which Kurita had first drawn it.
By contrast, DOCOMO’s competitors understood the promise of emoji right from the start and, moreover, saw that Kurita’s symbols could benefit from a nip here and a tuck there. Responding to the 1999 launch of the Fujitsu F501i, DOCOMO’s first i-mode smartphone and the first phone anywhere to support emoji, rival networks KDDI AU and J-Phone each duplicated Kurita’s uncopyrightable 12 × 12 icons before giving them fresh coats of paint and adding a few new symbols of their own. The rest is history: after a wildly popular debut, DOCOMO’s i-mode service finds itself today to be the AOL of Japanese mobile internet providers, active only in its home market and largely the preserve of the over-50s. Emoji, on the other hand, were a bona fide hit. The affair of the heart was forgiven.
It started with a heart.
In the mid-1990s, Japan found itself in the grip of a pager boom. Sales of “pocket bells”, or poke beru, ran at over a million per year, with the country’s largest mobile network, NTT DOCOMO, taking the lion’s share. Elsewhere in the world, pagers were the preserve of businesses and hospitals where they called trauma surgeons to the emergency room or managers to the telephone. In Japan, however, pocket bells were increasingly sought after by teenagers: by 1996, almost half of all female high school students owned one, and peak pager hours had shifted from during the working day to the late evening, when the airwaves buzzed with teenagers’ illicit messages.
The first pagers were simple devices, designed only to receive numeric messages. The idea was that a sender would call a recipient’s pager at its own dedicated telephone number and then tap in their desired message as another string of numbers. This in turn would appear on the pager’s LCD display. Often, the message was as simple as the sender’s telephone number, but in the usa, where pagers had originated, younger users created a loosely-codified dialect comprising numeric codes, in-jokes, and more. “6000*843” can be just about read as “good bye”, for example; “99” meant “nighty night”; “831” (eight letters, three words, one meaning) stood for “I love you”; and so on.Across the Pacific, Japanese high schoolers had their own pager-cipher in which numbers could be pronounced either in Japanese or English to form sound-alike phrases. “724106” translated to “What are you doing?”, for example, while “114106” meant “I love you”. Still, though, there was demand for a more sophisticated pager experience. As such, when one of DOCOMO’s smaller rivals launched a 1995 model that could translate pairs of digits directly into Japanese characters, demand was so high that the company had to temporarily stop accepting new customers.
DOCOMO had to respond. A year later, the larger company added a heart symbol to the repertoire of some of its pager models, and their younger customers went wild for it. Accessed by dialling “88” or “89” when leaving a message on a recipient’s pager, the heart became a fixture in high schoolers’ messages — but those same pager addicts were left bereft when, a few short years later, the “❤” abruptly disappeared from the newest pagers. Some claim that DOCOMO ditched the symbol in order to attract more serious-minded business customers; others say that the heart took up valuable memory that was better used to support Japan’s expansive kanji script and the Latin alphabet. Subscribers did not care. They deserted DOCOMO in droves.
In the event, DOCOMO’s unwonted heart surgery was the catalyst for something much larger. Elsewhere in the company, and aware that DOCOMO needed a new killer feature to replace the erstwhile “❤”, an engineer named Shigetaka Kurita was in the midst of developing the first mobile internet service for the operator’s cellphones. Kurita was disappointed by the drab, text-only applications available in the USA and elsewhere and dreamed of somehow elevating DOCOMO’s nascent “i-mode” internet service above these distinctly lo-fi offerings. But how? He looked to his environment for inspiration.
More so than in some other countries, Japanese culture and public life are suffused with visual symbolism. Comic books, or manga, are read avidly and universally, and many of them make use of common visual tropes that express concepts or states of being. An oversized drop of sweat on a character’s face represents anxiety or confusion; a lightbulb above their head is a moment of enlightenment. As the first host country in the modern Olympic era to use a non-alphabetic script, the Tokyo games of 1964 pioneered the use of symbols (🚴︎, 🚻︎, ⛵︎) rather than text to help foreign visitors find their way. And that same non-alphabetic script itself provided inspiration: in kanji, the ideographic script that Japan inherited from China, Kurita saw how powerful it was to be able to express complex ideas like “love” in a single character.
Drawing on all these influences and more, Shigetaka Kurita designed a font containing one hundred and seventy-six monochromatic but lively icons — symbols such as smiley faces, thunderous clouds, cartoonish bombs and gibbous moons — and embedded it into DOCOMO’s new i-mode internet system. Emoji was born.
Eyecatching though they were, Kurita’s creations were also a pragmatic addition to i-mode’s online services. On-screen menus used emoji to highlight paid services or train tickets; weather applications employed suns, clouds, umbrellas, snowmen and lightning bolts to provide comprehensive weather reports in a few lines of text; and 250-character limits on emails could be mitigated by judicious use of an emoji or two.
Each symbol measured just twelve pixels by twelve — a scant one hundred and forty-four dots to represent a hospital, an incoming fax, or a movie camera — and some icons came out of Kurita’s digital wash cycle either shrunken or simply inscrutable. As such, when Kurita sent his finished designs to docomo’s hardware partners for inclusion on their mobile phones, the response was tepid: Sharp, Panasonic, Fujitsu and others were more concerned with getting i-mode right than they were in polishing Kurita’s icons of cocktail glasses and snowmen. When emoji went out into the wider world as part of the launch of the i-mode platform, each of its symbols retained the same quirky, pixelated design in which Kurita had first drawn it.
By contrast, DOCOMO’s competitors understood the promise of emoji right from the start and, moreover, saw that Kurita’s symbols could benefit from a nip here and a tuck there. Responding to the 1999 launch of the Fujitsu F501i, DOCOMO’s first i-mode smartphone and the first phone anywhere to support emoji, rival networks KDDI AU and J-Phone each duplicated Kurita’s uncopyrightable 12 × 12 icons before giving them fresh coats of paint and adding a few new symbols of their own. The rest is history: after a wildly popular debut, DOCOMO’s i-mode service finds itself today to be the AOL of Japanese mobile internet providers, active only in its home market and largely the preserve of the over-50s. Emoji, on the other hand, were a bona fide hit. The affair of the heart was forgiven.
by Keith Houston, Shady Characters | Read more:
Image: NTT DOCOMO, Inc.
The Wind Cave
When I was fifteen, my younger sister died. It happened very suddenly. She was twelve then, in her first year of junior high. She had been born with a congenital heart problem, but since her last surgeries, in the upper grades of elementary school, she hadn’t shown any more symptoms, and our family had felt reassured, holding on to the faint hope that her life would go on without incident. But, in May of that year, her heartbeat became more irregular. It was especially bad when she lay down, and she suffered many sleepless nights. She underwent tests at the university hospital, but no matter how detailed the tests the doctors couldn’t pinpoint any changes in her physical condition. The basic issue had ostensibly been resolved by the operations, and they were baffled.
“Avoid strenuous exercise and follow a regular routine, and things should settle down soon,” her doctor said. That was probably all he could say. And he wrote out a few prescriptions for her.
But her arrhythmia didn’t settle down. As I sat across from her at the dining table I often looked at her chest and imagined the heart inside it. Her breasts were beginning to develop noticeably. Yet, within that chest, my sister’s heart was defective. And even a specialist couldn’t locate the defect. That fact alone had my brain in constant turmoil. I spent my adolescence in a state of anxiety, fearful that, at any moment, I might lose my little sister.
My parents told me to watch over her, since her body was so delicate. While we were attending the same elementary school, I always kept my eye on her. If need be, I was willing to risk my life to protect her and her tiny heart. But the opportunity never presented itself.
She was on her way home from school one day when she collapsed. She lost consciousness while climbing the stairs at Seibu Shinjuku Station and was rushed by ambulance to the nearest emergency room. When I heard, I raced to the hospital, but by the time I got there her heart had already stopped. It all happened in the blink of an eye. That morning we’d eaten breakfast together, said goodbye to each other at the front door, me going off to high school, she to junior high. The next time I saw her, she’d stopped breathing. Her large eyes were closed forever, her mouth slightly open, as if she were about to say something.
And the next time I saw her she was in a coffin. She was wearing her favorite black velvet dress, with a touch of makeup and her hair neatly combed; she had on black patent-leather shoes and lay face up in the modestly sized coffin. The dress had a white lace collar, so white it looked unnatural.
Lying there, she appeared to be peacefully sleeping. Shake her lightly and she’d wake up, it seemed. But that was an illusion. Shake her all you want—she would never awaken again.
I didn’t want my sister’s delicate little body to be stuffed into that cramped, confining box. I felt that her body should be laid to rest in a much more spacious place. In the middle of a meadow, for instance. We would wordlessly go to visit her, pushing our way through the lush green grass as we went. The wind would slowly rustle the grass, and birds and insects would call out all around her. The raw smell of wildflowers would fill the air, pollen swirling. When night fell, the sky above her would be dotted with countless silvery stars. In the morning, a new sun would make the dew on the blades of grass sparkle like jewels. But, in reality, she was packed away in some ridiculous coffin. The only decorations around her coffin were ominous white flowers that had been snipped and stuck in vases. The narrow room had fluorescent lighting and was drained of color. From a small speaker set into the ceiling came the artificial strains of organ music.
I couldn’t stand to see her be cremated. When the coffin lid was shut and locked, I left the room. I didn’t help when my family ritually placed her bones inside an urn. I went out into the crematorium courtyard and cried soundlessly by myself. During her all too short life, I’d never once helped my little sister, a thought that hurt me deeply.
After my sister’s death, our family changed. My father became even more taciturn, my mother even more nervous and jumpy. Basically, I kept on with the same life as always. I joined the mountaineering club at school, which kept me busy, and when I wasn’t doing that I started oil painting. My art teacher recommended that I find a good instructor and really study painting. And when I finally did start attending art classes my interest became serious. I think I was trying to keep myself busy so I wouldn’t think about my dead sister.
For a long time—I’m not sure how many years—my parents kept her room exactly as it was. Textbooks and study guides, pens, erasers, and paper clips piled on her desk, sheets, blankets, and pillows on her bed, her laundered and folded pajamas, her junior-high-school uniform hanging in the closet—all untouched. The calendar on the wall still had her schedule noted in her minute writing. Itwas left at the month she died, as if time had frozen solid at that point. It felt as if the door could open at any moment and she’d come in. When no one else was at home, I’d sometimes go into her room, sit down gently on the neatly made bed, and gaze around me. But I never touched anything. I didn’t want to disturb, even a little, any of the silent objects left behind, signs that my sister had once been among the living.
I often tried to imagine what sort of life my sister would have had if she hadn’t died at twelve. Though there was no way I could know. I couldn’t even picture how my own life would turn out, so I had no idea what her future would have held. But I knew that if only she hadn’t had a problem with one of her heart valves she would have grown up to be a capable, attractive adult. I’m sure many men would have loved her, and held her in their arms. But I couldn’t picture any of that in detail. For me, she was forever my little sister, three years younger, who needed my protection. (...)
When I was thirteen and my little sister was ten, the two of us travelled by ourselves to Yamanashi Prefecture during summer vacation. Our mother’s brother worked in a research lab at a university in Yamanashi and we went to stay with him. This was the first trip we kids had taken by ourselves. My sister was feeling relatively good then, so our parents gave us permission to travel alone.
Our uncle was single (and still is single, even now), and had just turned thirty, I think. He was doing gene research (and still is), was very quiet and kind of unworldly, though an open, straightforward person. He loved reading and knew everything about nature. He enjoyed taking walks in the mountains more than anything, which, he said, was why he had taken a university job in rural, mountainous Yamanashi. My sister and I liked our uncle a lot.
Backpacks on our backs, we boarded an express train at Shinjuku Station bound for Matsumoto, and got off at Kofu. Our uncle came to pick us up at Kofu Station. He was spectacularly tall, and even in the crowded station we spotted him right away. He was renting a small house in Kofu along with a friend of his, but his roommate was abroad so we were given our own room to sleep in. We stayed in that house for a week. And almost every day we took walks with our uncle in the nearby mountains. He taught us the names of all kinds of flowers and insects. We cherished our memories of that summer.
One day we hiked a bit farther than usual and visited a wind cave near Mt. Fuji. Among the numerous wind caves around Mt. Fuji this one was the largest. Our uncle told us about how these caves were formed. They were made of basalt, so inside them you heard hardly any echoes at all, he said. Even in the summer the temperature remained low; in the past people stored ice they’d cut in the winter inside the caves. He explained the distinction between the two types of caves: fuketsu, the larger ones that were big enough for people to go into, and kaza-ana, the smaller ones that people couldn’t enter. Both terms were alternate readings of the same Chinese characters meaning “wind” and “hole.” Our uncle seemed to know everything.
At the large wind cave, you paid an entrance fee and went inside. Our uncle didn’t go with us. He’d been there numerous times, plus he was so tall and the ceiling of the cave so low he’d end up with a backache. “It’s not dangerous,” he said, “so you two go on ahead. I’ll stay by the entrance and read a book.” At the entrance the person in charge handed us each a flashlight and put yellow plastic helmets on us. There were lights on the ceiling of the cave, but it was still pretty dark inside. The deeper into the cave we went, the lower the ceiling got. No wonder our lanky uncle had stayed behind.
My kid sister and I shone the flashlights at our feet as we went. It was midsummer outside—ninety degrees Fahrenheit—but inside the cave it was chilly, below fifty. Following our uncle’s advice, we were both wearing thick windbreakers we’d brought along. My sister held my hand tightly, either wanting me to protect her or else hoping to protect me (or maybe she just didn’t want to get separated). The whole time we were inside the cave that small, warm hand was in mine. The only other visitors were a middle-aged couple. But they soon left, and it was just the two of us.
My little sister’s name was Komichi, but everyone in the family called her Komi. Her friends called her Micchi or Micchan. As far as I know, no one called her by her full name, Komichi. She was a small, slim girl. She had straight black hair, neatly cut just above her shoulders. Her eyes were big for the size of her face (with large pupils), which made her resemble a fairy. That day she was wearing a white T-shirt, faded jeans, and pink sneakers.
After we’d made our way deeper into the cave, my sister discovered a small side cave a little way off the prescribed path. Its mouth was hidden in the shadows of the rocks. She was very interested in that little cave. “Don’t you think it looks like Alice’s rabbit hole?” she asked me.
My sister was a big fan of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” I don’t know how many times she had me read the book to her. Must have been at least a hundred. She had been able to read since she was little, but she liked me to read that book aloud to her. She’d memorized the story, yet, still, each time I read it she got excited. Her favorite part was the Lobster Quadrille. Even now I remember that part, word for word.
“No rabbit, though,” I said.
“I’m going to peek inside,” she said.
“Be careful,” I said.
It really was a narrow hole (close to a kaza-ana, in my uncle’s definition), but my little sister was able to slip through it with no trouble. Most of her was inside, just the bottom half of her legs sticking out. She seemed to be shining her flashlight inside the hole. Then she slowly edged out backward.
“It gets really deep in back,” she reported. “The floor drops off sharply. Just like Alice’s rabbit hole. I’m going to check out the far end.”
“No, don’t do it. It’s too dangerous,” I said.
“It’s O.K. I’m small and I can get out O.K.”
She took off her windbreaker, so that she was wearing just her T-shirt, and handed the jacket to me along with her helmet. Before I could get in a word of protest, she’d wriggled into the cave, flashlight in hand. In an instant she’d vanished.
by Haruki Murakami, New Yorker | Read more:
“Avoid strenuous exercise and follow a regular routine, and things should settle down soon,” her doctor said. That was probably all he could say. And he wrote out a few prescriptions for her.
But her arrhythmia didn’t settle down. As I sat across from her at the dining table I often looked at her chest and imagined the heart inside it. Her breasts were beginning to develop noticeably. Yet, within that chest, my sister’s heart was defective. And even a specialist couldn’t locate the defect. That fact alone had my brain in constant turmoil. I spent my adolescence in a state of anxiety, fearful that, at any moment, I might lose my little sister.
My parents told me to watch over her, since her body was so delicate. While we were attending the same elementary school, I always kept my eye on her. If need be, I was willing to risk my life to protect her and her tiny heart. But the opportunity never presented itself.She was on her way home from school one day when she collapsed. She lost consciousness while climbing the stairs at Seibu Shinjuku Station and was rushed by ambulance to the nearest emergency room. When I heard, I raced to the hospital, but by the time I got there her heart had already stopped. It all happened in the blink of an eye. That morning we’d eaten breakfast together, said goodbye to each other at the front door, me going off to high school, she to junior high. The next time I saw her, she’d stopped breathing. Her large eyes were closed forever, her mouth slightly open, as if she were about to say something.
And the next time I saw her she was in a coffin. She was wearing her favorite black velvet dress, with a touch of makeup and her hair neatly combed; she had on black patent-leather shoes and lay face up in the modestly sized coffin. The dress had a white lace collar, so white it looked unnatural.
Lying there, she appeared to be peacefully sleeping. Shake her lightly and she’d wake up, it seemed. But that was an illusion. Shake her all you want—she would never awaken again.
I didn’t want my sister’s delicate little body to be stuffed into that cramped, confining box. I felt that her body should be laid to rest in a much more spacious place. In the middle of a meadow, for instance. We would wordlessly go to visit her, pushing our way through the lush green grass as we went. The wind would slowly rustle the grass, and birds and insects would call out all around her. The raw smell of wildflowers would fill the air, pollen swirling. When night fell, the sky above her would be dotted with countless silvery stars. In the morning, a new sun would make the dew on the blades of grass sparkle like jewels. But, in reality, she was packed away in some ridiculous coffin. The only decorations around her coffin were ominous white flowers that had been snipped and stuck in vases. The narrow room had fluorescent lighting and was drained of color. From a small speaker set into the ceiling came the artificial strains of organ music.
I couldn’t stand to see her be cremated. When the coffin lid was shut and locked, I left the room. I didn’t help when my family ritually placed her bones inside an urn. I went out into the crematorium courtyard and cried soundlessly by myself. During her all too short life, I’d never once helped my little sister, a thought that hurt me deeply.
After my sister’s death, our family changed. My father became even more taciturn, my mother even more nervous and jumpy. Basically, I kept on with the same life as always. I joined the mountaineering club at school, which kept me busy, and when I wasn’t doing that I started oil painting. My art teacher recommended that I find a good instructor and really study painting. And when I finally did start attending art classes my interest became serious. I think I was trying to keep myself busy so I wouldn’t think about my dead sister.
For a long time—I’m not sure how many years—my parents kept her room exactly as it was. Textbooks and study guides, pens, erasers, and paper clips piled on her desk, sheets, blankets, and pillows on her bed, her laundered and folded pajamas, her junior-high-school uniform hanging in the closet—all untouched. The calendar on the wall still had her schedule noted in her minute writing. Itwas left at the month she died, as if time had frozen solid at that point. It felt as if the door could open at any moment and she’d come in. When no one else was at home, I’d sometimes go into her room, sit down gently on the neatly made bed, and gaze around me. But I never touched anything. I didn’t want to disturb, even a little, any of the silent objects left behind, signs that my sister had once been among the living.
I often tried to imagine what sort of life my sister would have had if she hadn’t died at twelve. Though there was no way I could know. I couldn’t even picture how my own life would turn out, so I had no idea what her future would have held. But I knew that if only she hadn’t had a problem with one of her heart valves she would have grown up to be a capable, attractive adult. I’m sure many men would have loved her, and held her in their arms. But I couldn’t picture any of that in detail. For me, she was forever my little sister, three years younger, who needed my protection. (...)
When I was thirteen and my little sister was ten, the two of us travelled by ourselves to Yamanashi Prefecture during summer vacation. Our mother’s brother worked in a research lab at a university in Yamanashi and we went to stay with him. This was the first trip we kids had taken by ourselves. My sister was feeling relatively good then, so our parents gave us permission to travel alone.
Our uncle was single (and still is single, even now), and had just turned thirty, I think. He was doing gene research (and still is), was very quiet and kind of unworldly, though an open, straightforward person. He loved reading and knew everything about nature. He enjoyed taking walks in the mountains more than anything, which, he said, was why he had taken a university job in rural, mountainous Yamanashi. My sister and I liked our uncle a lot.
Backpacks on our backs, we boarded an express train at Shinjuku Station bound for Matsumoto, and got off at Kofu. Our uncle came to pick us up at Kofu Station. He was spectacularly tall, and even in the crowded station we spotted him right away. He was renting a small house in Kofu along with a friend of his, but his roommate was abroad so we were given our own room to sleep in. We stayed in that house for a week. And almost every day we took walks with our uncle in the nearby mountains. He taught us the names of all kinds of flowers and insects. We cherished our memories of that summer.
One day we hiked a bit farther than usual and visited a wind cave near Mt. Fuji. Among the numerous wind caves around Mt. Fuji this one was the largest. Our uncle told us about how these caves were formed. They were made of basalt, so inside them you heard hardly any echoes at all, he said. Even in the summer the temperature remained low; in the past people stored ice they’d cut in the winter inside the caves. He explained the distinction between the two types of caves: fuketsu, the larger ones that were big enough for people to go into, and kaza-ana, the smaller ones that people couldn’t enter. Both terms were alternate readings of the same Chinese characters meaning “wind” and “hole.” Our uncle seemed to know everything.
At the large wind cave, you paid an entrance fee and went inside. Our uncle didn’t go with us. He’d been there numerous times, plus he was so tall and the ceiling of the cave so low he’d end up with a backache. “It’s not dangerous,” he said, “so you two go on ahead. I’ll stay by the entrance and read a book.” At the entrance the person in charge handed us each a flashlight and put yellow plastic helmets on us. There were lights on the ceiling of the cave, but it was still pretty dark inside. The deeper into the cave we went, the lower the ceiling got. No wonder our lanky uncle had stayed behind.
My kid sister and I shone the flashlights at our feet as we went. It was midsummer outside—ninety degrees Fahrenheit—but inside the cave it was chilly, below fifty. Following our uncle’s advice, we were both wearing thick windbreakers we’d brought along. My sister held my hand tightly, either wanting me to protect her or else hoping to protect me (or maybe she just didn’t want to get separated). The whole time we were inside the cave that small, warm hand was in mine. The only other visitors were a middle-aged couple. But they soon left, and it was just the two of us.
My little sister’s name was Komichi, but everyone in the family called her Komi. Her friends called her Micchi or Micchan. As far as I know, no one called her by her full name, Komichi. She was a small, slim girl. She had straight black hair, neatly cut just above her shoulders. Her eyes were big for the size of her face (with large pupils), which made her resemble a fairy. That day she was wearing a white T-shirt, faded jeans, and pink sneakers.
After we’d made our way deeper into the cave, my sister discovered a small side cave a little way off the prescribed path. Its mouth was hidden in the shadows of the rocks. She was very interested in that little cave. “Don’t you think it looks like Alice’s rabbit hole?” she asked me.
My sister was a big fan of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” I don’t know how many times she had me read the book to her. Must have been at least a hundred. She had been able to read since she was little, but she liked me to read that book aloud to her. She’d memorized the story, yet, still, each time I read it she got excited. Her favorite part was the Lobster Quadrille. Even now I remember that part, word for word.
“No rabbit, though,” I said.
“I’m going to peek inside,” she said.
“Be careful,” I said.
It really was a narrow hole (close to a kaza-ana, in my uncle’s definition), but my little sister was able to slip through it with no trouble. Most of her was inside, just the bottom half of her legs sticking out. She seemed to be shining her flashlight inside the hole. Then she slowly edged out backward.
“It gets really deep in back,” she reported. “The floor drops off sharply. Just like Alice’s rabbit hole. I’m going to check out the far end.”
“No, don’t do it. It’s too dangerous,” I said.
“It’s O.K. I’m small and I can get out O.K.”
She took off her windbreaker, so that she was wearing just her T-shirt, and handed the jacket to me along with her helmet. Before I could get in a word of protest, she’d wriggled into the cave, flashlight in hand. In an instant she’d vanished.
by Haruki Murakami, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Bianca Bagnarelli
Is Literature Dead?
One evening not long ago, my fifteen-year-old son, Noah, told me that literature was dead. We were at the dinner table, discussing The Great Gatsby, which he was reading for a ninth-grade humanities class. Part of the class structure involved annotation, which Noah detested; it kept pulling him out of the story to stop every few lines and make a note, mark a citation, to demonstrate that he’d been paying attention to what he read. “It would be so much easier if they’d let me read it,” he lamented, and listening to him, I couldn’t help but recall my own classroom experiences, the endless scansion of poetry, the sentence diagramming, the excavation of metaphor and form. I remembered reading, in junior high school, Lord of the Flies—a novel Noah had read (and loved) at summer camp, writing to me in a Facebook message that it was “seriously messed up”—and thinking, as my teacher detailed the symbolic structure, finding hidden nuance in literally every sentence, that what she was saying was impossible. How, I wondered, could William Golding have seeded his narrative so consciously and still have managed to write? How could he have kept track of it all? Even then, I knew I wanted to be a writer, had begun to read with an eye toward how a book or story was built, and if this was what it took, this overriding sense of consciousness, then I would never be smart enough.
Now, I recognize this as one of the fallacies of teaching literature in the classroom, the need to seek a reckoning with everything, to imagine a framework, a rubric, in which each little piece makes sense. Literature—at least the literature to which I respond—doesn’t work that way; it is conscious, yes, but with room for serendipity, a delicate balance between craft and art. This is why it’s often difficult for writers to talk about their process, because the connections, the flow of storytelling, remain mysterious even to them. “I have to say that, for me, it evolved spontaneously. I didn’t have any plan,” Philip Roth once said of a scene in his 2006 novel Everyman, and if such a revelation can be frustrating to those who want to see the trick, the magic behind the magic, it is the only answer for a writer, who works for reasons that are, at their essence, the opposite of schematic: emotional, murky, not wholly identifiable—at least, if the writing’s any good. That kind of writing, though, is difficult to teach, leaving us with scansion, annotation, all that sound and fury, a buzz of explication that obscures the elusive heartbeat of a book.
For Noah, I should say, this was not the issue—not on those terms, anyway. He merely wanted to finish the assignment so he could move on to something he preferred. As he is the first to admit, he is not a reader, which is to say that, unlike me, he does not frame the world through books. He reads when it moves him, but this is hardly constant; like many of his friends, his inner life is entwined within the circuits of his laptop, its electronic speed and hum. He was unmoved by my argument that The Great Gatsby was a terrific book; yeah, yeah, yeah, his hooded eyes seemed to tell me, that’s what you always say. He was unmoved by my vague noises about Fitzgerald and modernity, by the notion that among the peculiar tensions of reading the novel now, as opposed to when it first came out, is an inevitable double vision, which suggests both how much and how little the society has changed. He was unmoved by my observation that, whatever else it might be, The Great Gatsby had been, and remains, a piece of popular fiction, defining its era in a way a novel would be hard-pressed to do today.
This is the conundrum, the gorilla in the midst of any conversation about literature in contemporary culture, the question of dilution and refraction, of whether and how books matter, of the impact they can have. We talk about the need to read, about reading at risk, about reluctant readers (mostly preadolescent and adolescent boys such as Noah), but we seem unwilling to confront the fallout of one simple observation: literature doesn’t, can’t, have the influence it once did. For Kurt Vonnegut, the writer who made me want to be a writer, the culprit was television. “When I started out,” he recalled in 1997, “it was possible to make a living as a freelance writer of fiction, and live out of your mailbox, because it was still the golden age of magazines, and it looked as though that could go on forever … Then television, with no malice whatsoever—just a better buy for advertisers—knocked the magazines out of business.” For new media reactionaries such as Lee Siegel and Andrew Keen, the problem is technology, the endless distractions of the internet, the breakdown of authority in an age of blogs and Twitter, the collapse of narrative in a hyperlinked, multi-networked world. What this argument overlooks, of course, is that literary culture as we know it was the product of a technological revolution, one that began with Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of movable type. We take books and mass literacy for granted, but in reality, they are a recent iteration, going back not even a millennium. Less than four hundred years ago—barely a century and a half after Gutenberg—John Milton could still pride himself without exaggeration on having read every book then available, the entire history of written thought accessible to a single mind. When I was in college, a friend and I worked on a short film, never finished, in which Milton somehow found himself brought forward in time to lower Manhattan’s Strand bookstore, where the sheer volume of titles (“18 Miles of Books” is the store’s slogan) provoked a kind of mental overload, causing him to run screaming from the store out into Broadway, only to be struck down by a New York City bus.
Milton (the real one, anyway) was part of a lineage, a conversation, in which books—indeed, print itself— made a difference in the world. The same might be said of Thomas Paine, who in January 1776 published Common Sense as an anonymous pamphlet and in so doing lighted the fuse of the American Revolution. Colonial America was a hotbed of print insurrectionism, with an active pamphlet culture that I imagine as the blogosphere of its day. Here we have another refutation to the anti-technology reactionaries, since one reason for print’s primacy was that it was on the technological cutting edge. Like the blogs they resemble, most pamphlets came and went, selling a few hundred copies, speaking to a self-selected audience. Common Sense, on the other hand, became a colonial bestseller, racking up sales of 150,000; it was also widely disseminated and read aloud, which exposed it to hundreds of thousands more. The work was so influential that Thomas Jefferson used it as a template when he sat down a few months later to write the Declaration of Independence, distilling many of Paine’s ideas (the natural dignity of humanity, the right to self- determination) in both content and form.
Given this level of saturation, it’s not hard to make a case for Common Sense as the most important book ever published in America, but from the vantage point of the present, it raises questions that are less easily resolved. Could a book, any book, have this kind of impact in contemporary society? What about a movie or a website? Yes, the Daily Kos and FiveThirtyEight.com attracted devoted and obsessive traffic in the lead-up to the 2008 presidential election, but the percentages (and the effect) were nowhere near what Paine achieved. Even Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11, released barely six months before the 2004 election to packed theaters and impassioned public debate, came and went in the figurative blink of an eye. Partly, that’s because Moore is a propagandist and Paine a philosopher; the key to Common Sense is the elegance of its argument, the way it balances polemic and persuasion, addressing those on both sides of the independence issue, always careful to seek common ground. Yet equally important is the speed and fragmentation of our public conversation, which quickly moved along to Swift Boats and other issues, leaving Moore behind. By November, Fahrenheit 9/11 was little more than an afterthought, and six years later, if we remember it at all, it’s as a dated artifact, a project whose shelf life did not even last as long as the election it sought to change.
This, in an elliptical way, is what Noah was getting at. How do things stick to us in a culture where information and ideas are up so quickly that we have no time to assess one before another takes its place? How does reading maintain its hold on our imagination, or is that question even worth asking anymore?
by David L. Ulin, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: William Michael Harnett, To This Favor, 1879
Now, I recognize this as one of the fallacies of teaching literature in the classroom, the need to seek a reckoning with everything, to imagine a framework, a rubric, in which each little piece makes sense. Literature—at least the literature to which I respond—doesn’t work that way; it is conscious, yes, but with room for serendipity, a delicate balance between craft and art. This is why it’s often difficult for writers to talk about their process, because the connections, the flow of storytelling, remain mysterious even to them. “I have to say that, for me, it evolved spontaneously. I didn’t have any plan,” Philip Roth once said of a scene in his 2006 novel Everyman, and if such a revelation can be frustrating to those who want to see the trick, the magic behind the magic, it is the only answer for a writer, who works for reasons that are, at their essence, the opposite of schematic: emotional, murky, not wholly identifiable—at least, if the writing’s any good. That kind of writing, though, is difficult to teach, leaving us with scansion, annotation, all that sound and fury, a buzz of explication that obscures the elusive heartbeat of a book.For Noah, I should say, this was not the issue—not on those terms, anyway. He merely wanted to finish the assignment so he could move on to something he preferred. As he is the first to admit, he is not a reader, which is to say that, unlike me, he does not frame the world through books. He reads when it moves him, but this is hardly constant; like many of his friends, his inner life is entwined within the circuits of his laptop, its electronic speed and hum. He was unmoved by my argument that The Great Gatsby was a terrific book; yeah, yeah, yeah, his hooded eyes seemed to tell me, that’s what you always say. He was unmoved by my vague noises about Fitzgerald and modernity, by the notion that among the peculiar tensions of reading the novel now, as opposed to when it first came out, is an inevitable double vision, which suggests both how much and how little the society has changed. He was unmoved by my observation that, whatever else it might be, The Great Gatsby had been, and remains, a piece of popular fiction, defining its era in a way a novel would be hard-pressed to do today.
This is the conundrum, the gorilla in the midst of any conversation about literature in contemporary culture, the question of dilution and refraction, of whether and how books matter, of the impact they can have. We talk about the need to read, about reading at risk, about reluctant readers (mostly preadolescent and adolescent boys such as Noah), but we seem unwilling to confront the fallout of one simple observation: literature doesn’t, can’t, have the influence it once did. For Kurt Vonnegut, the writer who made me want to be a writer, the culprit was television. “When I started out,” he recalled in 1997, “it was possible to make a living as a freelance writer of fiction, and live out of your mailbox, because it was still the golden age of magazines, and it looked as though that could go on forever … Then television, with no malice whatsoever—just a better buy for advertisers—knocked the magazines out of business.” For new media reactionaries such as Lee Siegel and Andrew Keen, the problem is technology, the endless distractions of the internet, the breakdown of authority in an age of blogs and Twitter, the collapse of narrative in a hyperlinked, multi-networked world. What this argument overlooks, of course, is that literary culture as we know it was the product of a technological revolution, one that began with Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of movable type. We take books and mass literacy for granted, but in reality, they are a recent iteration, going back not even a millennium. Less than four hundred years ago—barely a century and a half after Gutenberg—John Milton could still pride himself without exaggeration on having read every book then available, the entire history of written thought accessible to a single mind. When I was in college, a friend and I worked on a short film, never finished, in which Milton somehow found himself brought forward in time to lower Manhattan’s Strand bookstore, where the sheer volume of titles (“18 Miles of Books” is the store’s slogan) provoked a kind of mental overload, causing him to run screaming from the store out into Broadway, only to be struck down by a New York City bus.
Milton (the real one, anyway) was part of a lineage, a conversation, in which books—indeed, print itself— made a difference in the world. The same might be said of Thomas Paine, who in January 1776 published Common Sense as an anonymous pamphlet and in so doing lighted the fuse of the American Revolution. Colonial America was a hotbed of print insurrectionism, with an active pamphlet culture that I imagine as the blogosphere of its day. Here we have another refutation to the anti-technology reactionaries, since one reason for print’s primacy was that it was on the technological cutting edge. Like the blogs they resemble, most pamphlets came and went, selling a few hundred copies, speaking to a self-selected audience. Common Sense, on the other hand, became a colonial bestseller, racking up sales of 150,000; it was also widely disseminated and read aloud, which exposed it to hundreds of thousands more. The work was so influential that Thomas Jefferson used it as a template when he sat down a few months later to write the Declaration of Independence, distilling many of Paine’s ideas (the natural dignity of humanity, the right to self- determination) in both content and form.
Given this level of saturation, it’s not hard to make a case for Common Sense as the most important book ever published in America, but from the vantage point of the present, it raises questions that are less easily resolved. Could a book, any book, have this kind of impact in contemporary society? What about a movie or a website? Yes, the Daily Kos and FiveThirtyEight.com attracted devoted and obsessive traffic in the lead-up to the 2008 presidential election, but the percentages (and the effect) were nowhere near what Paine achieved. Even Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11, released barely six months before the 2004 election to packed theaters and impassioned public debate, came and went in the figurative blink of an eye. Partly, that’s because Moore is a propagandist and Paine a philosopher; the key to Common Sense is the elegance of its argument, the way it balances polemic and persuasion, addressing those on both sides of the independence issue, always careful to seek common ground. Yet equally important is the speed and fragmentation of our public conversation, which quickly moved along to Swift Boats and other issues, leaving Moore behind. By November, Fahrenheit 9/11 was little more than an afterthought, and six years later, if we remember it at all, it’s as a dated artifact, a project whose shelf life did not even last as long as the election it sought to change.
This, in an elliptical way, is what Noah was getting at. How do things stick to us in a culture where information and ideas are up so quickly that we have no time to assess one before another takes its place? How does reading maintain its hold on our imagination, or is that question even worth asking anymore?
by David L. Ulin, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: William Michael Harnett, To This Favor, 1879
Monday, August 27, 2018
The Philanthropy Racket
As Anand Giridharadas argues in his indispensable new book, Winners Take All, “There is no denying that today’s elite may be among the more socially concerned elites in history. But it is also, by the cold logic of numbers, among the most predatory.”
As wages stagnate and decline, and income and housing supports are viciously winnowed away, a new brand of philanthropic do-goodism aims to transform social relief into entrepreneurial opportunity. In big-name corporate consultancies like McKinsey, at global meeting grounds like Davos, Aspen and Doha, within the warm self-admiring glow of the Clinton Global Initiatives (CGI), the very class profiting from global inequality convenes in search of ways to ameliorate its symptoms—profitably, of course, via a stable of “disruptive” market-driven interventions in healthcare, transportation, housing and other spheres that are sold to investors as ingenious ways of hacking society.
The perverse dogma behind such initiatives is the mantra “win-win”—the notion that social reform need never entail any cost to corporate bottom lines. As one of its chief theorists, former TechCrunch reporter Greg Ferenstein explains, if you assume the public sector is fundamentally at odds with the market:
Giridharadas supplies a lacerating critique of this quisling rationale by virtue of knowing it firsthand; he’s a former McKinsey consultant and Aspen Institute fellow who’s done the rounds of TED talks. His insider access allows him to tease out the intellectual and moral failures of our Optimist overlords in a devastating portrait of the “network and community” and “culture and state of mind” he calls “MarketWorld”:
Reporting from the last convocation of the CGI, Giridharadas quotes former President Bill Clinton’s valedictory address to this High Church of MarketWorld. “Good people, committed to creative cooperation, have almost unlimited positive impact to help people today and give our kids better tomorrows,” Clinton intoned. “This is all that does work in the modern world.” Giridharadas rightly dubs this latter claim “astonishing”—it’s redolent of Margaret Thatcher’s insistence that there was simply “no alternative” to untrammeled capitalist rule.
Giussani suggests that such Olympian narratives of elite reassurance serve to dismiss any critical perspective as backward and unenlightened: “Your problems don’t really matter compared to the past’s, and your problems are not really problems, because things are getting better.”
by Chris Lehmann, Jacobin | Read more:
Image: Jamie McCarthy/Getty
As wages stagnate and decline, and income and housing supports are viciously winnowed away, a new brand of philanthropic do-goodism aims to transform social relief into entrepreneurial opportunity. In big-name corporate consultancies like McKinsey, at global meeting grounds like Davos, Aspen and Doha, within the warm self-admiring glow of the Clinton Global Initiatives (CGI), the very class profiting from global inequality convenes in search of ways to ameliorate its symptoms—profitably, of course, via a stable of “disruptive” market-driven interventions in healthcare, transportation, housing and other spheres that are sold to investors as ingenious ways of hacking society.The perverse dogma behind such initiatives is the mantra “win-win”—the notion that social reform need never entail any cost to corporate bottom lines. As one of its chief theorists, former TechCrunch reporter Greg Ferenstein explains, if you assume the public sector is fundamentally at odds with the market:
You worry about disparities in wealth. You want labor unions to protect workers from corporations. You want a smaller government to get out of the way of business. If you don’t make that assumption, and you believe that every institution needs to do well, and they all work with each other, you don’t want unions or regulation or sovereignty or any of the other things that protect people from each other.He sums up this government-market synergy, daftly, as “Optimism.” After all, the neoliberal elite has found a remedy for the savage inequalities of the market—a suite of cosmetic social fixes that abide by market logic, such as micro-loans and school vouchers.
Giridharadas supplies a lacerating critique of this quisling rationale by virtue of knowing it firsthand; he’s a former McKinsey consultant and Aspen Institute fellow who’s done the rounds of TED talks. His insider access allows him to tease out the intellectual and moral failures of our Optimist overlords in a devastating portrait of the “network and community” and “culture and state of mind” he calls “MarketWorld”:
These elites believe and promote the idea that social change should be pursued principally through the free market and voluntary action, not public life and the law and the reform of the systems that people share in common; that it should be supervised by the winners of capitalism and their allies, and not be antagonistic to their needs; and that the biggest beneficiaries of the status quo should play a leading role in the status quo’s reform.As Giridharadas notes, defending MarketWorld requires no end of distortions and diminutions of social thought. The social psychologist Amy Cuddy, for instance, delivered one of the most successful TED talks in history by presenting feminist activism largely as a matter of adopting tweaks to personal comportment in the workplace, such as “power postures.” Such glosses on social conflict, Giridharadas writes, “have given rise to watered-down theories of change that are personal, individual, depoliticized, respectful of the status quo and the system, and not in the least bit disruptive.” Bruno Giussani, the TED official who hosted Cuddy’s talk, concedes as much, noting he’d even coined a term for the elite evasion of social conflict: “Pinkering,” after the Harvard linguist Steven Pinker’s argument that the arc of history is bending ineluctably toward world peace.
Reporting from the last convocation of the CGI, Giridharadas quotes former President Bill Clinton’s valedictory address to this High Church of MarketWorld. “Good people, committed to creative cooperation, have almost unlimited positive impact to help people today and give our kids better tomorrows,” Clinton intoned. “This is all that does work in the modern world.” Giridharadas rightly dubs this latter claim “astonishing”—it’s redolent of Margaret Thatcher’s insistence that there was simply “no alternative” to untrammeled capitalist rule.
Giussani suggests that such Olympian narratives of elite reassurance serve to dismiss any critical perspective as backward and unenlightened: “Your problems don’t really matter compared to the past’s, and your problems are not really problems, because things are getting better.”
by Chris Lehmann, Jacobin | Read more:
Image: Jamie McCarthy/Getty
[ed. Investment idea: Pitchforks. See also: Milken, Mnuchin Join Blankfein in the Hamptons to Fix World.]
Harley-Davidson Needs a New Generation of Riders
The first thing you should do when you meet a Harley-Davidson rider is check the back of his—or her, but let’s be honest, it’s probably his—jacket. The patches tell you who you’re dealing with. First, there’s the insignia. It might be a bald eagle atop the company’s logo to let everyone know this is a Harley guy—not a Honda guy, not a BMW guy, but a red-blooded, flag-waving American patriot. If this particular Harley guy belongs to one of 1,400 company-sponsored Harley Owners Group (H.O.G.) chapters around the world, the insignia will be coupled with a second patch that specifies which H.O.G. he belongs to: the Duluth H.O.G.s, the Waco H.O.G.s., or, today, the H.O.G.s of Long Island.
Sometimes there’s a third patch, for bikers who belong to an independent club—the Blue Knights are cops, the Hells Angels hate cops—but two-patch groups tend not to associate with them. “It’s a different mindset,” says Frank Pellegrino, who on weekdays is a vice president for a plastics outsourcing company and on weekends a Long Island H.O.G.
Pellegrino, who got his first Harley for his 65th birthday last year, is about to spend this cloudless summer Sunday exploring 100 miles along the back roads of New York and Connecticut with about 25 other Harley guys.
With him today are Joe, Marty, Dennis, Grover, Richie, Bob and his girlfriend, Dawn, and two Mikes, one with an American flag bandanna tied around his head. No one is younger than 45; many are well past 60. They’ve gathered behind a BP station at 8 a.m. in mid-July, sipping coffee and admiring one another’s bikes. At one point, Dennis talks politics with Joe and one of the Mikes.
“What’s the deal with all this fake news about a Europe plant?” Mike without a bandanna asks. “Harley was already going to build overseas, and now they’re just blaming it on the president.”
In June the European Union slapped what’s effectively a 31 percent retaliatory tariff on Harley in response to President Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs. To avoid them, Joe says, Harley will stop making the bikes it sells to Europe in the U.S. The company already has plants in Brazil and India and is in the process of opening one in Thailand.
“Oh, is that the case?” Mike asks. He swears he read something different on the internet.
“I see where they’re coming from,” Dennis says, crossing his arms over his We Stand For The Flag T-shirt. “How are they going to sell over there with millions in tariffs placed on them?”
“I still don’t like it,” Mike says. “Harley ought to be focused on us.”
Three weeks later, and about 1,000 miles away at its headquarters in Milwaukee, Harley-Davidson Inc. announced what executives called the most ambitious overhaul in its 115-year history with a plan that, for the first time in decades, wasn’t focused on riders like Frank or Dennis or the Mikes.
In the next few years, Harley will release more than a dozen motorcycles, many of them small, lightweight, even electric. The new Harleys are intended to reverse years of declining sales and appeal to a new rider: young, urban, and not necessarily American. Harley wants international riders to be half its business in the next 10 years. “We are turning a page in the history of the company,” says Matthew Levatich, chief executive officer. “We’re opening our arms to the next generation.”
The two-patch H.O.G. clubs and three-patch biker gangs that made the brand famous have saddled the company with an uninviting reputation that Harleys are only for older white men who roam the highways on rumbling, two-wheeled beasts. Young riders, women, people of color, or anyone who lives in a city and wants a motorcycle for commuting rather than joyrides—the bikers send the message that Harley isn’t for them.
And without new customers, the company can’t grow. Nor can it fully recover from the Great Recession. It’s shipping almost a third fewer motorcycles to its dealers than at its prerecession peak in 2006. After rebounding slightly, retail sales have steadily declined again since 2014, tumbling almost 14 percent in the U.S. The average Harley rider’s age has inched up to almost 50. “It’s not just the brand, but the people associated with the brand,” says Heather Malenshek, Harley’s vice president for global marketing. “We’ve made a tonal shift to think about ourselves as being more inclusive.”
Among motorcycle fans, Harley’s new image met with astonished enthusiasm. “We looked at pictures of the new bikes and were like, Harley did this? That’s pretty wild,” says Zack Courts, features editor of Motorcyclist magazine. Riders who generally preferred Honda or Yamaha said maybe they’d try a Harley. It should have been a marketing coup.
Then the president of the United States called on motorcyclists to boycott the company. (...)
Harley has been selling bikes overseas since 1912 and today has 800 international dealerships, more than in the U.S. Still, its image and reputation remain thoroughly American. Harley-Davidson motorcycles are one of those rare products, like Coca-Cola or Mickey Mouse, that have become shorthand for 20th century America. They show up in pictures of civil rights marches, as part of President John Kennedy’s Dallas motorcade, and at the Apollo 11 astronauts’ ticker-tape parade. The company supplied military motorcycles in both world wars. Marlon Brando, Elvis Presley, and the Terminator rode Harleys. Evel Knievel broke so many bones stunt-riding Harleys that for a while the company paid his medical bills.
“From a practical perspective, riding a Harley doesn’t make sense,” Courts says. “It’s heavy. It’s expensive. But when you talk to Harley people, they don’t talk about how the motorcycle performs. They talk about what it represents.” As Michael Abiles, a Harley owner from Brooklyn, says, “You don’t get a tattoo of Honda.”
Trump embraced the motorcycle’s mystique. Two weeks after taking office, he invited Harley executives to the White House and held them up as an example of American manufacturing at its finest. “In this administration, our allegiance will be to the American workers and to American businesses like Harley-Davidson,” he said in February 2017.
Trump embraced the motorcycle’s mystique. Two weeks after taking office, he invited Harley executives to the White House and held them up as an example of American manufacturing at its finest. “In this administration, our allegiance will be to the American workers and to American businesses like Harley-Davidson,” he said in February 2017.
It was a shrewd move on the president’s part. “Most of us are just right of Attila the Hun,” jokes Pellegrino, the Long Island H.O.G. Republicans have long courted the biker vote: Ronald Reagan visited a Harley factory, and John McCain attended the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in 2008. During the 2016 election, some of Trump’s most vocal supporters belonged to a 30,000-member group called Bikers for Trump. As the president said recently, “I guarantee you everybody that ever bought a Harley-Davidson voted for Trump.”
Maybe, but not that many people in the U.S. are buying Harleys—or any motorcycle. (This is a chicken-or-egg situation. Harley accounts for about half of U.S. motorcycle sales, so it’s hard to tell which one is dragging the other down.) In the U.S., motorcycles are generally used as leisure vehicles, costing from $5,000 to $45,000. Harleys average about $15,800. The baby boomers who want them already have them, and since the 2008 recession, that price is something younger people—especially millennials, who’re now in their early 30s and should be getting into the hobby—are unwilling to pay. According to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, the average millennial household owes almost $15,000 in student loans. Throw in a mortgage, children, and frozen purchasing power—it’s barely budged for 40 years in the U.S.—and what was once a middle-class luxury is out of reach. “For young adults, especially, we’re finding there’s a financial pressure that might not have been there in the past,” says Harley’s Malenshek.
Add that to the unappealing stereotype, and the problem becomes even more intractable. “That whole biker-with-his-T-shirt-sleeves-cut-off image has finally caught up with them,” says Randy McBee, author of the motorcycle history book Born to Be Wild. According to the Motorcycle Industry Council, only a quarter of all riders are age 25 to 40; just 14 percent are women. “I’m concerned about the core business, the hobby itself,” says Kevin Tynan, a Bloomberg Intelligence senior analyst. “I just don’t think young people are connecting with motorcycles the way previous generations did.”
While ridership has declined in the U.S., it’s growing in Europe and Asia. People in crowded Asian cities are turning to small, lightweight motorcycles for daily transportation. According to the Pew Research Center, 80 percent of households in Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam own a motorcycle or scooter. Europe is similarly promising. The number of motorcyclists there is larger than in the U.S. That’s good news for Harley, because Europeans use bikes to commute and for long-distance touring. Today, Europe accounts for 16 percent of the company’s business, and that number is growing. Last year, Harley’s sales in Europe rose 8 percent. (...)
The recession changed Harley’s perception of itself. Until then, it had never done much consumer research. “We’d mostly gone on gut feel. We thought we knew our existing customer base and what they wanted,” says Michelle Kumbier, Harley’s chief operating officer. She’s been with the company for almost 21 years and riding for more than a decade.
That gut feel led to some embarrassing oversights. In 2011, Harley’s top engineers and executives were at its test track in Arizona trying out new versions of its luxury touring bikes—ones designed for long-distance travel—when somebody remarked that couples rode 70 percent of touring motorcycles. When Levatich, who was COO at the time, heard that, he blanched. Neither he nor the engineers had considered the passenger, who is still generally a male rider’s wife or girlfriend. Kumbier was the only woman there. “She was the only one who’d ever been a passenger,” Levatich says. “We realized we were designing a product, but only listening to half the customer.”
Harley needed to do some emergency passenger-testing. The company is deeply proud of, and notoriously secretive about, its designs and technology. It won’t even let curators display old prototypes in the company museum. Harley wasn’t about to just show people its bikes—that would be ludicrous. Instead, it asked employees to try its motorcycles with a passenger. They returned with a lot of opinions: The armrest wasn’t right. The seat was too small to comfortably fit a rider and passenger, especially those made of “hardy Midwestern stock,” as Levatich says. A decorative bar around the saddlebags rubbed against the passenger’s leg. Later, Levatich’s wife, Brenda, attended the redesigned bikes’ unveiling. “When they announced the bar change, I get this jab in my ribs,” Levatich says. It was Brenda, who was thrilled they had redesigned it. “She’d never mentioned, ‘Hey, you need to fix this bar, it’s rubbing my leg all day long,’ ” he says. “We learned so much.”
Harley was supposed to be the master of touring bikes. If it could improve them that drastically, what else was it doing wrong? “We needed to talk to people in a more constructive way. In the past, we’d just go talk to customers at rallies,” Kumbier says. But those people already owned Harleys. If the company wanted new riders, it was going to have to court them, even if they didn’t like Harleys, or didn’t ride motorcycles at all.
by Claire Suddath, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Julian Berman
Sometimes there’s a third patch, for bikers who belong to an independent club—the Blue Knights are cops, the Hells Angels hate cops—but two-patch groups tend not to associate with them. “It’s a different mindset,” says Frank Pellegrino, who on weekdays is a vice president for a plastics outsourcing company and on weekends a Long Island H.O.G.
Pellegrino, who got his first Harley for his 65th birthday last year, is about to spend this cloudless summer Sunday exploring 100 miles along the back roads of New York and Connecticut with about 25 other Harley guys. With him today are Joe, Marty, Dennis, Grover, Richie, Bob and his girlfriend, Dawn, and two Mikes, one with an American flag bandanna tied around his head. No one is younger than 45; many are well past 60. They’ve gathered behind a BP station at 8 a.m. in mid-July, sipping coffee and admiring one another’s bikes. At one point, Dennis talks politics with Joe and one of the Mikes.
“What’s the deal with all this fake news about a Europe plant?” Mike without a bandanna asks. “Harley was already going to build overseas, and now they’re just blaming it on the president.”
In June the European Union slapped what’s effectively a 31 percent retaliatory tariff on Harley in response to President Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs. To avoid them, Joe says, Harley will stop making the bikes it sells to Europe in the U.S. The company already has plants in Brazil and India and is in the process of opening one in Thailand.
“Oh, is that the case?” Mike asks. He swears he read something different on the internet.
“I see where they’re coming from,” Dennis says, crossing his arms over his We Stand For The Flag T-shirt. “How are they going to sell over there with millions in tariffs placed on them?”
“I still don’t like it,” Mike says. “Harley ought to be focused on us.”
Three weeks later, and about 1,000 miles away at its headquarters in Milwaukee, Harley-Davidson Inc. announced what executives called the most ambitious overhaul in its 115-year history with a plan that, for the first time in decades, wasn’t focused on riders like Frank or Dennis or the Mikes.
In the next few years, Harley will release more than a dozen motorcycles, many of them small, lightweight, even electric. The new Harleys are intended to reverse years of declining sales and appeal to a new rider: young, urban, and not necessarily American. Harley wants international riders to be half its business in the next 10 years. “We are turning a page in the history of the company,” says Matthew Levatich, chief executive officer. “We’re opening our arms to the next generation.”
The two-patch H.O.G. clubs and three-patch biker gangs that made the brand famous have saddled the company with an uninviting reputation that Harleys are only for older white men who roam the highways on rumbling, two-wheeled beasts. Young riders, women, people of color, or anyone who lives in a city and wants a motorcycle for commuting rather than joyrides—the bikers send the message that Harley isn’t for them.
And without new customers, the company can’t grow. Nor can it fully recover from the Great Recession. It’s shipping almost a third fewer motorcycles to its dealers than at its prerecession peak in 2006. After rebounding slightly, retail sales have steadily declined again since 2014, tumbling almost 14 percent in the U.S. The average Harley rider’s age has inched up to almost 50. “It’s not just the brand, but the people associated with the brand,” says Heather Malenshek, Harley’s vice president for global marketing. “We’ve made a tonal shift to think about ourselves as being more inclusive.”
Among motorcycle fans, Harley’s new image met with astonished enthusiasm. “We looked at pictures of the new bikes and were like, Harley did this? That’s pretty wild,” says Zack Courts, features editor of Motorcyclist magazine. Riders who generally preferred Honda or Yamaha said maybe they’d try a Harley. It should have been a marketing coup.
Then the president of the United States called on motorcyclists to boycott the company. (...)
Harley has been selling bikes overseas since 1912 and today has 800 international dealerships, more than in the U.S. Still, its image and reputation remain thoroughly American. Harley-Davidson motorcycles are one of those rare products, like Coca-Cola or Mickey Mouse, that have become shorthand for 20th century America. They show up in pictures of civil rights marches, as part of President John Kennedy’s Dallas motorcade, and at the Apollo 11 astronauts’ ticker-tape parade. The company supplied military motorcycles in both world wars. Marlon Brando, Elvis Presley, and the Terminator rode Harleys. Evel Knievel broke so many bones stunt-riding Harleys that for a while the company paid his medical bills.
“From a practical perspective, riding a Harley doesn’t make sense,” Courts says. “It’s heavy. It’s expensive. But when you talk to Harley people, they don’t talk about how the motorcycle performs. They talk about what it represents.” As Michael Abiles, a Harley owner from Brooklyn, says, “You don’t get a tattoo of Honda.”
Trump embraced the motorcycle’s mystique. Two weeks after taking office, he invited Harley executives to the White House and held them up as an example of American manufacturing at its finest. “In this administration, our allegiance will be to the American workers and to American businesses like Harley-Davidson,” he said in February 2017.
Trump embraced the motorcycle’s mystique. Two weeks after taking office, he invited Harley executives to the White House and held them up as an example of American manufacturing at its finest. “In this administration, our allegiance will be to the American workers and to American businesses like Harley-Davidson,” he said in February 2017.
It was a shrewd move on the president’s part. “Most of us are just right of Attila the Hun,” jokes Pellegrino, the Long Island H.O.G. Republicans have long courted the biker vote: Ronald Reagan visited a Harley factory, and John McCain attended the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in 2008. During the 2016 election, some of Trump’s most vocal supporters belonged to a 30,000-member group called Bikers for Trump. As the president said recently, “I guarantee you everybody that ever bought a Harley-Davidson voted for Trump.”
Maybe, but not that many people in the U.S. are buying Harleys—or any motorcycle. (This is a chicken-or-egg situation. Harley accounts for about half of U.S. motorcycle sales, so it’s hard to tell which one is dragging the other down.) In the U.S., motorcycles are generally used as leisure vehicles, costing from $5,000 to $45,000. Harleys average about $15,800. The baby boomers who want them already have them, and since the 2008 recession, that price is something younger people—especially millennials, who’re now in their early 30s and should be getting into the hobby—are unwilling to pay. According to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, the average millennial household owes almost $15,000 in student loans. Throw in a mortgage, children, and frozen purchasing power—it’s barely budged for 40 years in the U.S.—and what was once a middle-class luxury is out of reach. “For young adults, especially, we’re finding there’s a financial pressure that might not have been there in the past,” says Harley’s Malenshek.
Add that to the unappealing stereotype, and the problem becomes even more intractable. “That whole biker-with-his-T-shirt-sleeves-cut-off image has finally caught up with them,” says Randy McBee, author of the motorcycle history book Born to Be Wild. According to the Motorcycle Industry Council, only a quarter of all riders are age 25 to 40; just 14 percent are women. “I’m concerned about the core business, the hobby itself,” says Kevin Tynan, a Bloomberg Intelligence senior analyst. “I just don’t think young people are connecting with motorcycles the way previous generations did.”
While ridership has declined in the U.S., it’s growing in Europe and Asia. People in crowded Asian cities are turning to small, lightweight motorcycles for daily transportation. According to the Pew Research Center, 80 percent of households in Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam own a motorcycle or scooter. Europe is similarly promising. The number of motorcyclists there is larger than in the U.S. That’s good news for Harley, because Europeans use bikes to commute and for long-distance touring. Today, Europe accounts for 16 percent of the company’s business, and that number is growing. Last year, Harley’s sales in Europe rose 8 percent. (...)
The recession changed Harley’s perception of itself. Until then, it had never done much consumer research. “We’d mostly gone on gut feel. We thought we knew our existing customer base and what they wanted,” says Michelle Kumbier, Harley’s chief operating officer. She’s been with the company for almost 21 years and riding for more than a decade.
That gut feel led to some embarrassing oversights. In 2011, Harley’s top engineers and executives were at its test track in Arizona trying out new versions of its luxury touring bikes—ones designed for long-distance travel—when somebody remarked that couples rode 70 percent of touring motorcycles. When Levatich, who was COO at the time, heard that, he blanched. Neither he nor the engineers had considered the passenger, who is still generally a male rider’s wife or girlfriend. Kumbier was the only woman there. “She was the only one who’d ever been a passenger,” Levatich says. “We realized we were designing a product, but only listening to half the customer.”
Harley needed to do some emergency passenger-testing. The company is deeply proud of, and notoriously secretive about, its designs and technology. It won’t even let curators display old prototypes in the company museum. Harley wasn’t about to just show people its bikes—that would be ludicrous. Instead, it asked employees to try its motorcycles with a passenger. They returned with a lot of opinions: The armrest wasn’t right. The seat was too small to comfortably fit a rider and passenger, especially those made of “hardy Midwestern stock,” as Levatich says. A decorative bar around the saddlebags rubbed against the passenger’s leg. Later, Levatich’s wife, Brenda, attended the redesigned bikes’ unveiling. “When they announced the bar change, I get this jab in my ribs,” Levatich says. It was Brenda, who was thrilled they had redesigned it. “She’d never mentioned, ‘Hey, you need to fix this bar, it’s rubbing my leg all day long,’ ” he says. “We learned so much.”
Harley was supposed to be the master of touring bikes. If it could improve them that drastically, what else was it doing wrong? “We needed to talk to people in a more constructive way. In the past, we’d just go talk to customers at rallies,” Kumbier says. But those people already owned Harleys. If the company wanted new riders, it was going to have to court them, even if they didn’t like Harleys, or didn’t ride motorcycles at all.
by Claire Suddath, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Julian Berman
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