Permanence, Fear…Love

Thoughts on religion in America and the strange case of Kim Davis.

Kim Davis

The strange case of Kim Davis, the elected County Clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky, who on August 31 began refusing marriage licenses to same-sex couples in her county, has gotten me thinking about my own religious odyssey, and the role of religion—and in particular, Christianity—in American life.

Because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that same-sex couples must have the right to marry no matter where they live in the U.S., Davis was jailed for contempt of court, but subsequently released to the delight of thousands of supporters. This chain of events, predictably, has elevated Davis to the position of Culture Warrior Numero Uno in the eyes of Fox News, Christian conservatives, and Republican Presidential candidates. (Ever the opportunists, Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz high-tailed it to Kentucky on news of her release, eager to be on stage with the religious right’s latest cause célèbre.)

And as always and apparently forever, the more one learns about the case of a crusading modern Christian in America, the more bizarre the story gets.

Davis is reportedly an Apostolic Christian, a particularly conservative sect that believes in the literal interpretation of the Bible. Though it is worth mentioning that there seems to be some confusion about her true denomination, and no congregation has stepped forward to claim her. This is strange because Apostolic Christians do the whole laying of hands thing when someone joins up, and given that Davis only converted four years ago, one would think someone would remember her. Whatever the brand of Christianity that has led her to flout the law and in so doing claim the national spotlight, Davis has probably violated its teachings, since she’s been married four times and appears to have birthed her children—including a son who works in her office and, sharing her religious convictions, is also defying a court order and refusing to issue marriage licenses—out of wedlock.

One report says that Davis claims to have been “ordained by God” to do what she’s doing—sitting in jail for five days on the public dime, refusing to do the job she was elected to do, and now claiming that marriage licenses issued by her office against her will are legally null and void—none of which is particularly surprising, since God has long been the go-to excuse for so many people who decide to do dickish things in this world. But…tending to be more of a contemplative type about things like this, I find myself asking the question, Why? Why, in the 21st century, can’t we, as a species, get beyond this? And these are questions that invariably lead me to recall my own long and deep experience with Christianity.

* * *

My own Christian odyssey is pretty much the opposite of the one Kim Davis appears to have traveled. Rather than sowing wild oats for 40 years and then falling under the sway of a conservative brand of Christianity, I was born into and educated in early life under a comparatively liberal brand of Catholicism, the brand that thrived in California and around the country in the 1960s and led so many white Christians of all denominations to march alongside their African-American Southern Baptist counterparts during the Civil Rights Movement. My parents were typical of the Catholic couples wed in the 1950s, eschewing birth control and begetting and raising nine children, seven of whom (including me) were educated in a then-affordable private school under the watchful eyes of Dominican nuns and Franciscan priests. As a student at St. Frances Cabrini School from 1966 to 1973, I don’t remember much talk of hell. I also remember no readings from Leviticus, no talk of sodomy or homosexuality, and in fact nothing that promoted exclusion over inclusion. (This despite the towering presence of our 4th grade lay teacher, Miss Mock, an incorrigible dyke who shocked our nine-year-old sensibilities the day she unabashedly announced, “Not everyone’s a Catholic. I’m not a Catholic.”)

San Francisco Peace March, 1969

Our many masses at St. Frances did of course feature those vivid, realistic, and macabre images of Christ being tortured—getting lanced in the side and nailed to a cross, etc.—but what I remember most of those years (aside from a certain calliope beginning to find tune in my adolescent loins) is lots of love and lots of song. Nonetheless, I distinctly recall that at around the age of 10 or 11, I used the critical thinking skills the nuns and lay teachers had nurtured in me from the beginning to decide on two things: 1. If there is a God, he’s probably not such an insecure wuss that he needs all of his followers to go into a building once a week to “worship” him, and 2. If there is a God, he’s probably not the kind of supreme jerk who would take people that He created and banish them to a tortuous inferno for all of eternity.

But my own misgivings and eventual fall from the fold aside, the one thing the holy orders at St. Frances Cabrini were able to convince me of was that Catholicism was about inclusion and not exclusion, about unification and not division. And this is the one teaching that has been, beginning in my 10th year and continuing on since then, soundly refuted by both experience and the most basic understanding of world history. Christians kill Muslims and vice versa, Muslims kill Hindus and vice versa, Muslims kill other Muslims and vice versa. It’s a vicious cycle that has persisted for millennia, and when it comes to Christianity in America, you’re either in or you’re out. In the 1960s at St. Frances Cabrini and elsewhere in the nation, that was just fine: you go your way and I’ll go mine and we’ll see how it all shakes out in the next life. In my own family, in fact (and there are dozens of us, four brothers and four sisters, some with large families of their own), we have the Christian and the non. My father is Christian, my mother is not. We nonetheless live with each other and love each other unconditionally as families do all over America. And this is the way it was all over America once, when the division that is inherent in all religion sat comfortably in the back seat and not only didn’t interfere with human progress, but stepped aside so that Christian leaders like Martin Luther King could actually drive human progress. But oh how that has changed. Today we see the term “religious freedom” used to mean my right to deny you your civil rights, my right to deny you services to which you are legally entitled, my right to deny you your basic human dignity. It’s no wonder that—and, ironically, this is the good news—Americans are moving away from religion in record numbers.

* * *

So back to the question, Why? Whether there is a God or not, we—those of us here on this planet—are all humans. There are no gods here, and I suspect there are no prophets either. Some of us are more vociferous than others, more charismatic, more extroverted, more boisterous, etc., but we are all humans. And as humans, we have for millennia, I think, fallen sway for very good reasons to a few key dimensions of religion.

The first is permanence. Religion is forever, so whatever happens today or tomorrow, whatever trials we might endure, from minor frustrations to war and famine, they are trivial by comparison. Saintly knights were gladly drawn and quartered, faithful friars brutally whipped native Californians into submission, and jihadists murder and maim thousands of their countrymen because today is nothing. The real action—the truly permanent—kicks off in the next life, not this one.

The next dimension is fear. Who hasn’t heard the phrase, “a good God-fearing man,” or “a good God-fearing family”? Fear of the wrath of God was instrumental in delivering the species from primitive barbarity to civilization, and even today there are those who believe that without church teachings, their lives would have devolved into thievery, mayhem, and self-abuse.

St. Frances Cabrini Church,
San Jose, CA

And the final dimension I’ll mention is love. As I said before, my own religious experience was awash in love—love not only for our fellow congregants, but for our parents, our families, and our neighbors. Coming up in the 1960s, I recall a youth that had its challenges, but I never recall being very far from a good soak in a warm bath of love. My friends and siblings in our uniforms at St. Frances Cabrini School, my brothers, sisters, and cousins on our weekend beach trips and summer family vacations, the hippies in San Francisco during the peace marches, and of course my own incredible mother and father, who faced down adversities that I will never be able to imagine, all surrounded me with intoxicating vapors of love.

In 1973, as my fellow 8th-graders and I were being prepared for the sacrament of Confirmation, we were visited by a middle-aged couple—about the age I am now—who spoke to us honestly and openly about the challenges they had faced in the course of their long marriage to one another. As we prepared to enter adulthood in the Catholic way, they were giving us a reality check, but they were also sitting before us as a shining example of two people who were desperately in love. Just about a year after this, my own parents split up after 20 years of marriage, but I never lost my faith in the institution or my determination to enter into it in my life, and I have now been happily married to my wife Caroline for more than 23 years.

Strangely, these are the thoughts and images that pass through my mind when I think of the strange case of Kim Davis. Because when I think of the case, I don’t really think of Kim Davis at all. I think of couples like David Moore and David Ermold, who were denied a marriage license by Davis, and the kind of pain and hurt that must have caused them. And I think of the LGBT couples in my life, family members and friends, any of whom could easily be sitting together in 20 or more years just like that couple who sat before us at St. Frances Cabrini in 1973, just two people sharing a long life together, a life full of the trials and frustrations that face all of us, two people who remain desperately in love. Or maybe not. Maybe they’ll end up like my parents, eventually separated and then divorced. But that’s okay. Religion has never solved that problem for heterosexual couples and it’s not going to solve it for same-sex couples either, but what’s undeniable, in my mind, is that these couples deserve a chance.

* * *

The Road to Mecca, CA

So the rather simplistic answer to the question Why? that I’ve arrived at is, Kim Davis is fixated on permanence and fear, and has lost sight of the importance of love. Religion is not for me, but I know for a fact that there are congregations out there whose faith is grounded in love, and whose actions bear that out. I’m reminded of an afternoon a few years ago that I spent with my Aunt Monessa, a Franciscan nun, at a Catholic food pantry in Mecca, California, distributing food bundles to the poor. Because those congregations exist, I have no problem with religion. We can live with it. It can bring good into the world. But when the faithful fixate on permanence and fear, we get, at the very least, oppression, and at the very worst, certifiably insane people carrying signs reading “God Hates Fags,” and even jihad.

The Gamification Distraction

From video game culture, a broader distraction from the real.





I have for some time had no small degree of discomfort with the whole concept of gamification, an idea and an approach that is now raging—as these things are wont to do—across industry, education, and institutions both governmental and non. The thinking seems to be that gamifying things has the power to radically accelerate the move from intention to action, and there are plenty of good examples that bear this out. In fact, I experienced one such example in my professional life recently, where gamification played a huge role in driving the success of a development program I had designed. More on that later, but the fact is my discomfort remained, which is why I was so thrilled to read Nathan Heller’s excellent review in this week’s NewYorker. It demystifies my discomfort and, I think, clarifies the whole issue.


Heller reviews the new book SuperBetter by Institute for the Future tank-thinker and repeat TedTalker Jane McGonigal. The book is, like most of McGonigal’s career, a celebration of the power of gaming to change lives for the better—nay, the superbetter! It is a prescription for a gamified lifestyle wherein the struggling human adopts McGonigal’s seven principles of the game and thereby transforms daily trials into fun and rewarding challenges one can conquer—kind of like reaching level 80 in World of Warcraft. This SuperBetter lifestyle prescription moves the popular concept of gamification out of the business, commercial, educational, and institutional spheres and into the sphere of daily life. But in doing so, as Heller adeptly explains, McGonigal runs into trouble.

My own brush with the power of gamification was in a business context, where results tend to be funneled toward the positive. Everyone wants the team to succeed. Everyone wants to be able to tell the team they succeeded. And, of course, everyone on the team wants to feel like they succeeded. In my case, my Sales Operations team succeeded in increasing what we called Sales DNA, a term we coined to describe the Operations team’s level of understanding of the Field Sales teams it is charged with supporting. We made little videos that told true stories from the field, packaged these up on a flashy, easy-to-use website, added in lessons, character bios, and thinly disguised quizzes, and gave the team a relatively persuasive management nudge (i.e., an e-mail from the VP) to go check it out. All that might have been enough—the presentation had a cool factor and the content was intriguing and important—but the thing that really drove the traffic to the site was the gamification element: We awarded “Sales DNA Points” for various activities on the site, offered cash awards to the top three point earners, and posted the points rankings twice a week. The results could not be described as anything but a success: Just shy of 100% of team members consumed 100% of the content, performance on quizzes was exceedingly high, and most importantly, a team that is widely dispersed across the globe generated a frenetic  amount of viral activity, posting hundreds of blogs and discussions, many of which generated long threads of commentary and questioning. In the end our metrics showed that Sales DNA had increased dramatically, and I personally received a barrage of accolades and awards for the program’s success.

So why the discomfort? First and foremost, there were some outliers, a few people on the team for whom earning Sales DNA Points became much more important than the true intended goal of increasing Sales DNA. This tilted focus led these people into behaviors uncharacteristic of the professionalism and integrity they normally demonstrate, and it left me discouraged. Despite the fact that the vast majority of the team acted in the spirit of the program, these few individuals required the erection, refinement, and maintenance of guardrails—a huge drain on me and on the organization as a whole.

But I can’t lay my discomfort on the wanderings of a few strays. What disturbs me more is something larger, which is that we in the developed Western world seem to be transforming into a species that requires some surface-level titillation in order to get important things done. The state government here in California, for example, is charged with funding and maintaining a public education system. Why do we need a state lottery—essentially a tax on the poor—to fund public education? Why can’t we all just decide to fund public education—without the games? Another example is the Stock Market, which exists to capitalize companies. Why do we need gambling bets like derivatives, short selling, long positions, and the rest on Wall Street? Why can’t we just decide to capitalize companies for growth—without the games? And in my much less consequential case of Sales DNA, we have a team in Sales Operations whose job it is to help Field Sales. Why isn’t that motivation enough to watch some videos, review some content, and learn about the day-to-day lives of those we’re charged to serve—without the games?

All of this, of course, expresses little more than a bias: a wish that humanity were something other than what it is. In these realms, games are here to stay, but what is encouraging about Nathan Heller’s review is that it makes a compelling case that, in spreading into the realm of self-help, gamification may have finally overstepped. SuperBetter charges authoritatively into the world of self-help, Heller explains, mainly because we are in an era of Fitbits and smartphone weight tracking apps:

Previously banished to the back shelves of the bookstore…self-help is cool again, because it comes with numbers. Progress is trackable, like Venus through the night sky. Data has become our diet.

It turns out, though, that McGonigal’s most compelling data in support of life gamification is actually self-contradictory. One study indicates that P.T.S.D. could be avoided by putting a Tetris game in front of a soldier, first responder, or assault victim soon after the traumatic experience, thus occupying the visual-processing centers of the brain so that the disturbing images cannot attach themselves. In another study, burn victims play a 3-D virtual-reality game while their wounds are being treated, monopolizing their cerebral resources and resulting in a 35−50% reduction in the pain they experience. But far from proving that gamification improves life experience, these examples show the opposite: that it improves life by distracting from the immediate experience. This is not to invalidate the findings or diminish their clinical potential; it is just to point out that it is folly to apply gamification across the whole of life experience, which is for most of us anything but harrowing, and is in fact well worth experiencing closely, mindfully, and free of distraction.

McGonigal will undoubtedly have lots of people gamifying their lives in short order. She is a compelling cult figure who has captivated intellectual sanctuaries like Ted and NPR to the point where I will undoubtedly think of her each time my local public radio station offers the Lumosity brain enhancement game during pledge week. (“Why not just read a freaking book?!” I typically shout at the car radio.) But while Nathan Heller’s review might not have given me vindication for my anti-game bias, it does at least place limits on the spread of the game—limits that will, as more and more lotteries and Lumosities and Freerice.com’s  parade before me, give me some amount of solace.

Marco Rubio Finds a New Low

Marco Rubio, in a single comment on a debate stage, personifies every base debility known to American politics.

It’s no surprise that Senator Marco Rubio is a tool of his Big Money donors, but it is surprising to see the lengths he has gone to lately to keep the donations flowing.

When asked in the first Republican Presidential debate on August 6th about ways to help struggling small business, Rubio decided to use the occasion to attack a favorite bogeyman of Finance Industry–financed Republican candidates, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. These were Rubio’s words:

We need to repeal Dodd-Frank. It is eviscerating small businesses and small banks. 20 — over 40 percent of small and mid-size banks that loan money to small businesses have been wiped out over the — since Dodd-Frank has passed.

He fumbled a bit there, but this time it had nothing to do with cottonmouth. His mind was undoubtedly ruminating for a microsecond a couple of times on whether he should actually go ahead with the bald-faced lie he was about to utter.

His first fumble was whether to say 20 percent or 40 percent, and he tucked away the 20 and chose to go with “…over 40 percent.” This was the Big Lie.

(His second was whether to say “…over the Dodd-Frank law…” or “…since Dodd-Frank has passed…,” and he tucked away the “over” and chose to go with “since,” but this was inconsequential, since it was clear he was blaming the loss of community banks on Dodd-Frank.)

So, cleaned up, we end up with:

We need to repeal Dodd-Frank. It is eviscerating small businesses and small banks. Over 40 percent of small and mid-size banks that loan money to small businesses have been wiped out since Dodd-Frank has passed.

If you’re one of Rubio’s Big Money Wall Street donors, the senator chose wisely in issuing this statement. It blames the loss of the helpless little guy on the Big Bad Government. But if you’re someone interested in truth and in actually doing something to help America’s struggling middle class, the senator did not choose wisely at all, and he certainly isn’t choosing wisely in calling for the repeal of the single most important economic legislation of at least the last 30 years.

Because there is no data anywhere that shows 40%, much less “over 40%” of small banks in America being “eviscerated” at all, not by any force in the universe and certainly not by the Dodd-Frank law. It is true that somewhere between 16% and 22% of small banks in America have disappeared since 2010, but this is just a continuation of a trend that started in the early days of the Reagan administration, when deregulation made it irresistible for Big Banks to gobble up the small ones.

Both Congressional Republicans and their Wall Street financiers have been gunning for Dodd-Frank since Day 1, and even scored a stinging victory just last December, but rarely does one hear a call for out-and-out repeal. In order to issue one, Rubio not only had to fabricate his “over 40%” doomsday (a.k.a. right wing wet dream) fantasy, he had to deftly shift blame for the doom from the perpetrators to his victim. Because Dodd-Frank—even as toothless as Congressional Republicans have rendered it—remains the only weapon We the People have to prevent Wall Street from driving us headlong into another Great Recession, and the law does that by regulating the activities of Big Banks—those same Big Banks that have been gobbling up their smaller competition since the days of Reagan.

Small banks and businesses are not the victims of Dodd-Frank, they’re the victims of unfettered Big Banks—the same Big Banks whose nefarious activities Dodd-Frank is designed to curtail.

Marco Rubio is a relatively young man who has learned well from the masters of subterfuge who dominate American politics. What he is not is a qualified candidate for the highest office in the land.

Don't Be a Dumb-Ass

New Years Resolutions, 2015...

As I look ahead to the New Year, I like many people find myself in a reflective mood. We ask ourselves, How to make the next year better than the last? How to reduce the stress? How to reduce the frustration and anger?

In previous years (like last year), I would address these questions with fantasy: Like, load the entire Republican Congressional Caucus onto a smuggler’s ship in a Turkish port, point them toward Italy, and set them afloat. But I’m 55 now and getting smarter about these things, so I’ve decided on a much more practical approach, which basically amounts to, Don’t be a dumb-ass. Put more succinctly, Quit doing just some of the dumb-ass shit you’ve been doing on a regular basis these 50+ years, causing yourself untold momentary bouts of, yeah, frustration and anger.

I’ve landed on three things I will no longer do in 2015:

Don’t hesitate to ask for water. It’s a very strange thing I do, whether at a relative’s house or in a restaurant or café, feeling inhibited about asking for water. Red wine and seasoned food leave me feeling like a salted carp lying in the sun, but do I seek the easy relief of a cool flow? No, I suffer, not only for the moment but also afterward, when every organ in my petri dish of a body begins to exact its bloated revenge. Oddly, I do this without very much imagination. Do I conjure scenarios in my head, images of my server or host chiding me, “What are you, a wuss? I got whiskey, I got tequila, I got vodka and gin, but water?? That’s for little girls!” Nope. No imagination at all. I just sit silently with my parched throat, awaiting an Armageddon that could easily be tamed with a tip of the tap. In 2015, no more. Brace yourselves, servers and hosts, and have your tumblers ready.

Don’t drink water from a glass with lots of ice without shaking it first. Okay, so sometimes they give me water without my asking. And if it’s a restaurant, they typically include no less than ¾ of a glass full of ice. This leads to one of the strangest dumb-ass moves ever, which I personally have repeated thousands of times this half-century past: The glass half-empty, the ice cresting what little fluid remains, I tip the glass knowing—just knowing—there’s no way that clod of ice will release and come crashing into my face. But of course it does, because despite the fact that I’ve seen wiser friends and relatives do it thousands of times, I do not shake that glass to loosen the ice before tipping, a simple act that would undoubtedly reduce my blood pressure a few dozen points at least over time. Or—and now we’re getting into crazy talk here—ask for water with no ice! Can it be done? Do they let you do that? Buy a recreational vehicle and drive from state to state? No papers? Of course they do, dumb-ass.

Don’t try to dump four packets of sugar into a cup of coffee all at once. Yeah, you’ve seen me, I’m in Peet’s or the Palace Café (where I sit at this very moment), and I get my big old glass of joe, and it’s strong so I need lots of sugar, four packets at least, and I tear open all four at once and tip them, balancing them in my hand like a surgeon’s scalpel, squeezing just enough to hold them but not so much that the sugar cannot sprinkle gently into my cup, watching it sprinkle, sprinkle. But no, that’s not what happens, is it. Because you’ve seen my surgeon’s grip fail me, releasing at least two of those sugar packets right into the cup, forcing me to dig them out, burning my fingers in the hot joe, trying desperately to calculate how much of that sugar might have actually made it into the cup and how much is now clotted in the soaking sugar packets in my hand. And then, of course, it’s “now what”? And the first answer to that question is always the same: Get pissed at myself for being such a dumb-ass.

Little things, for sure, but added up together, I expect they’ll end up reducing my overall frustration and anger in 2015 by about 10%. And with that kind of emotional capacity freed up, I might even be able to figure out how to get those goddamn Republicans onto that boat.

Recipe: Spicy Baked Eggs with Refritos

An easy morning repast that is golden, fluffy, and spicy...

Those of you who have read my Huevodillas Recipe know that I have an affection for Mexican-inspired morning egg dishes. This baked egg concoction, which my wife and I discovered at a Wine Country Bed & Breakfast some years ago, is another good example of that. Because it's baked, it takes a bit longer to make than huevodillas, but you'll still have it in front of you in less than 40 minutes.

These are the ingredients, which like the huevodilla ingredients, are simple but flavor- and texture-rich:

• Two large eggs
• 1/2 cup of refried beans
• Two tablespoons of your favorite salsa
• 1/4 cup of shredded cheddar cheese
• Salt and pepper to taste

Ingredients for Spicy Baked Eggs with Refritos

The very simple preparation involves layering all these ingredients into a 12-oz. ceramic baking crock, then sliding it all into the oven:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Beat the eggs, season to taste, and set aside. (The eggs are the last thing to go into the crock.)

Spoon the refried beans into the crock and smooth them out evenly with a spoon.

Now spoon in the salsa, and again, smooth it out into an even layer.

Next drop in the shredded cheese and pat it into place.

Finally, pour the beaten eggs over the top of the entire concoction.

Slide the crock into the preheated oven for 35-45 minutes, until the eggs are thoroughly cooked.

As with any baked egg dish, this one will look spectacularly fluffy coming out of the oven, but will flatten out in the first minutes after it is taken out. No matter, the taste will be plenty scrumptious!

The King is Confused

How LeBron James failed to learn the one lesson he should have from the Heat's trip to the San Antonio woodshed. 

The news is old by now, but just as much as it was an ending to a great NBA season, it was also the thing the NBA loves the most: the beginning of a story that will keep the league in the news cycles, perhaps through the entirety of the off-season. The vaunted Mami Heat star LeBron James, fresh from having his ass handed to him by the more-disciplined and more experienced San Antionio Spurs, chose to opt out of his contract, become a free agent, and, should the long rows of zeroes fall into the right places, perhaps seek another city to host his dreams of many championships to come. The evidence of how completely insane this is comes from two directions: The first is the amazing success LeBron has enjoyed in his years with the Heat, and the second is the real lesson he should have learned from the San Antonio Spurs.

In just four years with Miami, LeBron has won, along with his usual complement of All-Star Game and All-Defensive Team appearances, two NBA titles, an NBA Most Valuable Player Award, two NBA Finals MVP Awards, and the AP Athlete of the Year, USA Basketball Male Athlete of the Year, Sporting News Athlete of the Year, and Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year awards. Has the man already wiped from his memory the seven years of exile he endured in Cleveland? 

Or perhaps LeBron learned a lesson from the San Antonio Spurs. Perhaps he learned that his Heat team is, in fact, just a tired old dog destined never to run again, or worse, just a loser outfit that has all this time been posing as an NBA Champion. If that's the case, certainly, it's time to move on. But the thing is, that most certainly is not the case, and if there's anyone who exemplifies that--and exemplifies what the Heat can become--it's the San Antonio Spurs.

The Spurs have won five titles over a 15-year period that started in 1999. During that time, under the tutelage of their Coach Gregg Popovich and the leadership of their star Tim Duncan, they have always been competitive, one of the class acts of the NBA, and often the envy of the rest of the league. They transitioned from the Twin Towers to the Big Three, continually reinvented themselves, and kept coming back for more titles. For that perseverance, if you're Duncan or Popovich, you got five championships out of the deal, if you're David Robinson, you got two, if you're Tony Parker or Manu Ginobli, you got four, and if you're Kawhi Leonard, you've got one and counting. Add to that the titles collected by the likes of Robert Horry, Steve Kerr, and others who brought their NBA Champion pedigrees with them to the Spurs, and what you have is the NBA dream: individual performances, yes, but more importantly, a franchise, nay, an institution whose name, like the Boston Celtics, Los Angeles Lakers, and Chicago Bulls before them, will forever embody the words NBA Champion. The lesson of the San Antonio Spurs is that, despite the prevailing view that the NBA has devolved into a place for superstars, highlight-reel slam dunks, and obscene-money contracts, there is still a place for the simple things like perseverance, give-and-go layups, and yes, team loyalty. And if you can put those things into a package, you might just walk away with not two, but four, five, ten NBA titles.

Amazingly, the Spurs have done this in an era when no one thought it could be done anymore. The double three-peats of the 1990s Chicago Bulls were supposed to be the last dynasty, but here we have an NBA institution that has just put an exclamation point on a 15-year run, not just by beating the Heat, but by embarrassing them. Still, there is no reason the Miami Heat of today cannot be a team like the San Antonio Spurs in five or ten years. In fact, I would challenge anyone to look around the league now and name another team that is more likely to achieve that kind of success over the next five or ten years. But opting for free agency and calling the whole team into question now is no way to start.

Results, Not Causes

Reflections on John Steinbeck and The Grapes of Wrath

I took a bit of a John Steinbeck sojourn last weekend, traveling to the Salinas to visit the National Steinbeck Center museum, reading much about John Steinbeck’s life and career, and then retiring to our family cabin at Arroyo Seco for a brief and much needed writing retreat. I am also 200 or so pages into The Grapes of Wrath, the only Steinbeck I will have really read beyond the much shorter and more easily digested Of Mice and Men. On my trip, I learned for the first time (or perhaps had just forgotten) the degree to which Steinbeck was vilified not only for his politics, as encapsulated so clearly in The Grapes of Wrath, but also for the way he allowed these views to hijack his writing. Oklahoma state and Kern County officials protested loudly, as did many reviewers, against the content of The Grapes of Wrath, and critics the world over lambasted the Nobel Committee for granting Steinbeck the Nobel Prize in 1962. Such was the impact on the author that he never published another word of fiction in his life after 1962. (He died in 1968 at the age of 66.)

National Steinbeck Center, Salinas, CA

Steinbeck was obviously a great writer. One critic astutely observed that the Nobel Committee needed Steinbeck in 1962 much more than he needed them. In fact, asked the day after the prize was awarded whether he deserved it, Steinbeck himself answered, “Well, no.” But looking at the since released Nobel records showing who he was up against, you’ll come upon the names of four authors of the time you have likely never heard of, and most certainly have never heard from since. Steinbeck, in contrast, has been thrust in front of every high school and college certainly in the western states for decades and is the subject of the only museum in America dedicated to a single author.

Steinbeck is also a Northern Californian, a native son born in Salinas who set most of his work in and around the Monterey Bay Area. As such, I have an impulse to leap to his defense, particularly given that the world did experience the Great Depression, that the forces of commerce were largely responsible for it, and that social and government action were needed at the time, and were, in retrospect, incredibly successful. However, reading the pages of The Grapes of Wrath, I have to admit that the critics who have accused Steinbeck of crossing over from writing into preaching do have a point. Take for instance this passage from page 194 of my 1976 Penguin paperback edition:

One man, one family driven from the land; this rusty car creaking along the highway to the west. I lost my land, a single tractor took my land. I am alone and I am bewildered. And in the night one family camps in a ditch and another family pulls in and the tents come out. The two men squat on their hams and the women and children listen. Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution….This is the beginning—from “I” to “we.

If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results; if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into “I,” and cuts you off forever from the “we.”

I’d be surprised if one could find a clearer or more urgent call to collective action published anywhere in the world in the 1930s. Setting aside the fact that The Grapes of Wrath was such a wildly successful book, and that it was published at the height of both fascism in Europe and communism in Russia, the simple and observable fact is, Steinbeck is preaching an idea here. I personally believe it’s an idea that is not the sole purview of communism or socialism but can in fact be compatible with American capitalism, but that’s not the point. The point is, the fiction writer is most certainly becoming the social critic here, stepping outside the story to make a point—in fact, to preach a point. As great a writer as he was, the critics who accuse him of this have a leg on which to stand.

So what does all this mean to writers writing, as Steinbeck did, about work, family, and society in a time of tumultuous change—writers doing so, but doing so today, in a very different time?

The first thing to realize, of course, is that The Grapes of Wrath was written in a time of superlatives, a time when deprivation was so widespread that extremes could be convincingly portrayed in the black-and-white terms of good and evil. The work of a writer like Steinbeck, with its sermons and wistful descriptions of the great unwashed innocents, could find and sate an audience in 1930s America. Today, society’s trials are different. We live in a time of relative plenty, the country is populated largely with knowledge workers, not laborers, and the conflicts that touch our work lives—and thus our families and our society as a whole—are anything but superlative. They are subtle and confusing, offering no black-and-white, but only gray. Our characters, typically, will not be the downtrodden Joads of Oklahoma. In my case, in fact, since I was born in Silicon Valley and have lived here my entire life, I am often writing about characters who are the lucky ones, human beings placed by circumstance and personal initiative into the center of an aberration of good fortune. The question for characters like these is not, how does a man respond when pushed to the brink? The question is, how does a human being respond when the brass ring is there, but sacrifices must be made? An offering must be made, a series of choices, and it is in those choices, with all their complexities and hidden, even invisible elements, that the story lies.

Furthermore, The Grapes of Wrath was written in a time when American literature was accepting of sentimentality and melodrama—I think of them as the “pre-Salinger years”—when an author could simply write this about a character:

He had never been angry in his life. He looked in wonder at angry people, wonder and uneasiness, as normal people look at the insane.

It was a time before the great burden of ambiguity was heaped onto the shoulders of serious American writers by authors like Bellow and Updike, Carver and Cheever, Dee and Strout. Writing in a simpler time makes for simpler writing, and Steinbeck’s career is a good example of that, but you also have to recognize that this point in the endless drama where we 21^st century writers have walked onto the stage also presents some great advantages. A fiction that needs ambiguity is a good fiction for the subtle and complex dramas of our complicated world. We are freed from portraying good guys and bad guys, and while we still need to create the tension that for millennia came from binary narratives of good vs. evil, we can place much of that work onto the reader: we can create active engagements with the characters, occasions to understand what’s going on (with little effort if we’re successful), and then choose a side and begin rooting (with much effort if we’re successful). A string of these dramas does not need to lead the reader to a political position, it just needs to lead them to a deeper understanding both of the particular drama we are portraying and similar dramas that unfold all over the world every day, and in the life experiences of everyone. A breach in the family occurs at the end of The Grapes of Wrath, and there will often be breaches at the ends of our stories as well. But these breaches will not be sentimental and melodramatic endings to small stories with torches to carry. They will be common—almost universal—endings to stories that could happen at any time: today, tomorrow, and every day thereafter.