What's Going On?

Welcome to my project – a website in which I’ll try to write stuff intelligent people would find amusing, hopefully with some regularity, and hopefully amusing enough to get you to come back and read the next piece. Think of it this way; something funny to read for free.

Why? Because I want to, but more broadly, being amusing in an intelligent way strikes me as a very high calling, and is a “now more than ever” kind of thing. The times in which we live are a direct insult to the very essence of amusing. Our society’s deficits – the marginalization of people of color, the profound material inequality among us, our collective inability to invest in a sustainable and rational future – let’s stop there in the interest of brevity -- are no longer things “nice people” don’t discuss, like a loopy aunt’s drinking problem. Our planet’s future is as tenuous as was Krypton’s when Superman’s father rocketed him here to escape its doom -- there’s a bittersweet paradox for you. All of this desolation makes you wonder if there’s a place for humor, for anything resembling light-heartedness.

And then there’s him. I’m amazed Trump didn’t appear until the third paragraph. He’s everywhere. Living in Trump’s world is like living in a world in which an image of a psychotic clown has replaced the sun and travels across the sky all day – ubiquitous, banal, inescapable evil. The ubiquity of his presence as upsetting as the actual wickedness he does – there’s just no escaping his leer, his bloviation, his obliviousness to human wants and needs, his swollen, orange face teasing us with the possibility of a heart attack that’s never delivered. So, this project, dedicated as it is to material that’s amusing in an intelligent way, begins with the premise that making fun of him isn’t very amusing. It’s just another reminder of the odiousness of the whole catastrophe.

I’m not saying I won’t descend into that putrid mire, but if and when I do, I’m going to enforce (my idea of) a high standard. Ditto for the virus. My feeling as a writer and a human is “let sleeping piles of shit lie,” but sometimes being drawn to wallowing is inescapable, like rubbernecking civilization’s car wreck on the highway. But my focus is not to traffic in outrage – it’s been done, and my outraged moral sensitivities aren’t that finer than anyone else’s. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll deal with political life – the post that will get us started (on Thursday) will probably be one -- but the point is not to make a point. It’s to entertain, to be amusing.

And to write. Writing is the point – I don’t want to get all “that way,” but you get to a point when writing tells the writer what it wants. I’ve had two novels in print – Big Government (1998) and Grant Speaks (2000), both by Warner Books – and it was fun to savor the accomplishment, some bucks, and the weird knowledge that The Grateful Dead, Humphrey Bogart, Ry Cooder, and I all had our creative output brought to market by the same greedy conglomerate. But with my career in economics an evermore distant memory (a biography, found elsewhere on this site, provides a full confession to this effect), the writer in me is now unleashed. Since hanging up my slide rule a few years ago, I’ve finished a third novel, The Adventures of Brightthinking McCoy, a satire about land speculation on the colonial frontier (I have an amazing feel for what sells!) and have started a fourth, Birds of America, about Audubon’s late-life search for a rare bird, which leads him on a De Tocqueville-like wandering through America, a rear-guard testament to our society’s character. Maybe those projects will show up here in some form, but that’s not the point right now. In all of these cases, the thrill of writing and creating is as exhilarating as is the little world in which you live with your characters isolated and frustrating. More than any other thing I’ve done in life, writing proves the dictum “there’s a fine line between stupid and clever.” But at some point it almost becomes a biological need – you’ve got to do it, or at least that’s how it feels.

And that’s the bottom line – I’ve got to do this. Admittedly, I’ve done something like this before. I was a commentator on NPR’s Morning Edition for eight years (some of my triumphs can be found elsewhere on this site), and the foremost challenge of that effort was having one or two good ideas a month. The same challenge exists here. And, let me add, I was thrown off the air for using profane Spanish slang to an audience of 10 million people in a commentary on Social Security. So, hopefully, this comes to a better end. But the challenge to have something worth saying remains. It's a challenge worth accepting.

So that’s the deal, or as they say nowadays, “the value creating proposition.” In a few days, I’ll get started, to the extent this isn’t that start. Expect a “first” post (other than this one) on September 9 and then one every ten days or so. Let me know how I’m doing, and give me a few chances. If you like it, stay with me, and let folks who might also like it know about it.

And in the meantime, be well, be safe, and be positive. If you allow yourself to look at it dispassionately, the world is an unholy mess – cue the litany -- Trump, the virus, the culture of intolerance, the death of truth as a virtue, senseless executions on the street, the planet’s descent into a permanent heat wave, the remanding of low-wage workers into modern morlocks who will be forced to risk their lives to make us hamburgers and empty our bedpans, whatever. But to paraphrase Victor Frankl, without a purpose and hope to power us towards it, life is extinguished. That’s the challenge we face – the greater the challenge, the greater our hope must be. And that’s my underlying goal – to help grow the organisms of good feeling and hope in the Petri dish of the human spirit.

Let’s see how I do.