We Learn Nothing
Page 21
4. Ryota Kanai et al., “Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults,” Current Biology 21:8 (April 2011): 677–80. Researchers cautioned that they hadn’t established causality here; that is, people who are more fearful might come to have larger amygdalas rather than the other way around.
Escape from Pony Island
1. Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 463. “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war was largely about oil.” Maybe everyone Alan Greenspan hangs out with knows this, but it would sound like the most treasonous liberal faggotry at my local bar in rural Maryland, where freedom fries remained on the menu for a decade.
2. David Kushner, “Cormac McCarthy’s Apocalypse,” Rolling Stone, December 27, 2007.
3. Kim Stanley Robinson, Forty Days of Rain (New York: Bantam Books, 2004), 238.
4. Nate Hagens, “Enter the Elephant,” November 15, 2009, http://campfire.theoildrum.com/node/5967.
5. Ibid.
6. Michael Anderson, director, Logan’s Run (1976). This citation not to be construed as a recommendation.
7. Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (New York: Viking, 2009).
8. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kauffman (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 58.
9. Joel Coen, director, The Big Lebowski, 1998.
10. Rebecca Solnit, ‘Why Fanaticism Can Be a Good Thing,” December 1, 2009, http://www.alternet.org/story/144251/why_fanaticism_can_be_a_good_thing/.
The Referendum
1. James Salter, Light Years (New York: Vintage, 1995), 8.
Bad People
1. Peter A. Jay, letter to the editor, Ægis, August 7, 1991.
2. Ibid.
3. Delaware State News, August 30, 1981.
4. Sarasota-Herald Tribune, 26 July 1994. This story appears on the same page as an item about the attempted contract killing of a carnival performer called Lobster Boy.
Chutes and Candyland
1. James Boylan, “The Love Starter,” Remind Me to Murder You Later (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 84.
An Insult to the Brain
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Holling-dale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 238–39.
2. Cf. “Cornish Game Clams: A False Start in Five Parts,” by B. Kliban, a cartoonist Mom and I both enjoyed. B. Kliban, Two Guys Fooling Around with the Moon (New York: Workman, 1982).
3. Lawrence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, introduction by Christopher Morley, illustrations by T. M. Cleland (New York: Heritage Press, rept. 1935; orig pub. 1925), 102.
4. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 239. (Nietzsche loved Tristram Shandy.)
5. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 188.
6. Ibid., 291.
7. Ibid., 191.
8. Cf. Thomas Pynchon’s syllogism: “As long as I don’t sleep, he decided, I won’t shave. . . . That must mean, he pursued the thought, that as soon as I fall asleep, I’ll start shaving!” Thomas Pynchon, Vineland (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990), 160.
9. Cf. Dunbar in Catch-22, who tries to make every moment as boring as possible order to make his life seem to last longer. Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1989), 9.
Sister World
1. Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (New York: Picador, 2004), 136.
Acknowledgments
The way that you write a book is to cultivate friendships with people who are smarter, funnier, saner, and wiser than you, and then steal everything they say. Both this book and I are better than they would have been without the benefit of my conversations and correspondence with Chris Beck, Jim and Jenny Boylan, Claire, Emma, and Susan Connolly, David Dudley, Jim Fisher, Michelle Gienow, Sarah Glidden, Myla Goldberg, Nell Greenfieldboyce, Lisa Gwilliam, Lisa Hanawalt, Tom Hart, Dave Israel, Megan Kelso, Libby Kessman, Mildred Kreider, Steve McLoughlin, John Patton, Matt Taibbi, Bart Taylor, Ellen Twaddell, the evil Ben Walker, and Boyd White. Thanks in particular to Myla, Megan, Ellen, and Boyd for serving as my readers. I also owe thanks to Hope Lassen for her research and to Ray Villard of the Hubble Space Telescope Institute for his consultation.
It is also helpful to have a team of professionals whose job is to ensure that your book does not suck. I was fortunate to have two astute editors, Alessandra Bastagli and Amber Qureshi, to whom I am deeply indebted. Thanks also to Sydney Tanigawa for her advice. Peter Catapano of the New York Times gave me a forum and unerring editorial guidance for the earliest of these essays. I would never have undertaken to draw the cartoon essay “The Stabbing Story” had David Dudley not commissioned it. And inexpressible thanks are due to my agent, Meg Thompson, without whom I might still be a cartoonist.
About the Author
Tim Kreider was born and educated in Baltimore. His cartoon The Pain—When Will It End? ran in the Baltimore City Paper for twelve years, and has been collected in three books published by Fantagraphics. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Film Quarterly, the Comics Journal, and on nerve.com. He divides his time between New York City and the Chesapeake Bay.
* That astronaut’s lawyer was at pains to dispute the diaper claim, which seems like a curious detail to fixate on, given the other items in her possession.
* By the time you read this, these stories will be as old as the Nan Britton scandal or Fatty Arbuckle trials, but new faces will have replaced theirs in the national pillory.
* Throughout this essay I’m afraid I’ll be using the terms liberal, progressive, and the left not quite interchangeably but pretty indistinctly, since they all now denote extinct or hypothetical entities rather than active political factions. Liberal is a term used almost exclusively by conservatives, and is loosely synonymous with queerbait; progressives are what liberals call themselves now that liberal is a slur (it’s what developmentally delayed is to retarded); and as far as I can tell leftists are liberals who get mad if you call them liberals because liberals are all bourgeois patsies of The Man.
* A “Moby” is defined by urbandictionary.com as “an insidious and specialized type of left-wing troll who visits blogs and impersonates a conservative for the purpose of either spreading false rumors intended to sow dissension among conservative voters, or who purposely posts inflammatory and offensive comments for the purpose of discrediting the blog in question.” (It is in fact etymologically derived from the name of the musician, who advocated the tactic in an interview.) Looking this up later made me feel it was just as well that I hadn’t followed through on that morning’s impulse to paint a sign saying “KILL THE HIPPIES.”
* As with a lot of these figures, it depends on how you calculate it. According to the Congressional Budget Office, Delia’s claims are essentially correct, although it’s also true that when Obama took office he inherited a deficit of about $1.2 trillion, so it’s not like this is all the result of typical liberal tax-’n’-spend policies run amok. (All information from CNN Factcheck, January 30, 2010.) Actually getting to the bottom of these factoids is so boring and hard to follow—especially for someone like me who’s not clear on the difference between annual deficits and the national debt or what the economy even is, exactly—that it’s no wonder most of us just stick to reciting whichever talking points support our side.
* Department of Labor classification for “Shit Out of Luck.”
* I learned only while this book was being copyedited that this was an allusion to Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker. That fuckin’ guy.
* Please do not poison your children based on this information without at least conducting a little independent research of your own first. Bear in mind that I am simply parroting what Ken and other sources told me and do not actually know what I am talking about.
* Charles Colson, former special counsel t
o President Nixon, once described as “the meanest man in politics,” later a convert to Christianity and founder of the nonprofit Prison Fellowship.
* Pronoun trouble noted but insoluble. This will only get worse before it gets better.
* Max insists that we mostly talk about our feelings and food. Maybe what’s significant here is that she remembers the feelings while I remember the flying aces.
* Cf. every eccentric family in comedic history: James Thurber’s brother faking a fever dream and standing over his father’s bed saying “Get up, Buck [not his father’s name]. Your time has come,” Jean Shepard’s father being bizarrely elated when the family car has a blowout at the chance to demonstrate he can change a tire in under eight minutes, etc.
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