| Dear AR-15s (since apparently an AR-15 can be just about anything these days), This morning, on my predawn patrol with my canine sidekick, I listened to a piece on NPR about this study showing that fans of losing football teams tend to get fatter than fans of winning franchises. Fans who feel dejected over their team's loss tend to consume much larger amounts of saturated fats ("So have you been watching the 2008 Detroit Lions highlight reel over and over?" -- The Couch). What caught my ear was this bit of advice from the study's authors: Indeed, Chandon and Cornil find that asking people to think about other things in their life that are valuable to them diminish the impacts of sports defeats on losing. Putting a sports loss into perspective, in other words, reduces how miserable you feel -- and how much comfort food you crave. What I like about this is that it proves Curly was wrong. I don't mean Curly from the Three Stooges (he can never be wrong!), I mean the Jack Palance character from City Slickers. There's a great scene with Palance. I know what you're going to say, "Is there any other kind of scene with Jack Palance?" And, sadly, the answer is yes. But that's not important right now. In City Slickers, Palance has this classic piece of advice for Mitch, played by Billy Crystal (not Bill Kristol, which would change the scene dramatically): Curly: Do you know what the secret of life is?
[holds up one finger]
Curly: This.
Mitch: Your finger?
Curly: One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and the rest don't mean s***.
Mitch: But, what is the "one thing?"
Curly: [smiles] That's what you have to find out. Well, here's the thing. Curly's wrong. He should have held up five fingers, maybe even ten. The key to life, society, the universe, and everything is: plastics. Just kidding. But it is something that sounds just as ploddingly bourgeois: portfolio management. You shouldn't have to study peoples' diets to find out that making football your "one thing" is a bad idea. I don't mean this as a slight on football. I mean it as an indictment of one-thingism. The idea that all of your life can be boiled down to one thing strikes me as what Alexis de Tocqueville would call a "clear but false idea." The real trick in life is managing competing priorities. Love Isn't All You Need It's true there have been people who've dedicated their whole lives to one thing -- scientific discoveries, a great novel, theater, the law, "Social Justice," whatever -- and history remembers some of these people fondly. But almost invariably when you read their biographies you find out they had pretty miserable lives outside the lab, off stage, or home from the battlefield. Their kids are often a mess, trying to make something out of the wreckage and detritus of the "great" lives their parents led, like Third World urchins stringing together a hovel out of cast-off trash. In love, as some of us learn the hard way, there's a really thin line between romantic and creepy. We all know that sometimes when a woman really likes a guy, it's adorable when he sneaks into her apartment and covers her bed in rose petals and maybe leaves a love poem on her pillow. When Arnold from accounting does it, after being repeatedly told by the love of his life that she just wants to be friends, it's grounds for a restraining order. Similarly, if you're John Cusack playing "In Your Eyes" on a boom box outside a teenager's window, it's adorable. But when Anthony Weiner does it, not so much. And don't even think about making the object of your affection a diorama of Han and Leia kissing in the storage room on Hoth made entirely from your own body hair. Trust me. Similarly, my guess is that no wife or husband truly wants to be the "one thing" in his or her spouse's life. The most important thing? Sure, okay. At least until you have kids, and then most married couples I know agree that children get the title of "the most important thing." Or at least they should be the most important thing -- a lesson Ayelet Waldman learned the hard way when she boasted that she loves her husband more than her children. And she wonders why every Mother's Day she gets a half-empty can of Safeway-brand cheese whiz. But "the most important thing" and "the only thing" are very different. In fact, they are very close to opposites. One allows for balancing different worthy priorities. The other says that everything else must bend to a single all-encompassing priority. The former is pluralistic, the latter, totalitarian. Most people care about a lot of different things: family, career, politics, community, food, sports -- the list is almost literally endless. The trick to a good life is figuring out where you can make sacrifices you can live with and where you can't. It's portfolio management. Put too much of yourself into football and you shortchange yourself somewhere else, like Steve Guttenberg in Diner when he almost refused to marry his true love because she failed his quiz on the Baltimore Colts ("It's out of my hands," he says when he decides to break off the engagement). Put too much of yourself into your career and you shortchange your family, your health, your friends, or your hobbies. If your career is everything, fine. But at least know the life part of your portfolio will be awfully light. If chicken wings are your favorite food, I hear you brother. If chicken wings are the only thing you eat, I will pour some buffalo sauce gangster-style on the sidewalk in your memory. Pandas only eat bamboo. They're cute ("too cute to live" as my wife likes to say), but they need huge teams of Chinese dudes to keep them from going extinct. Rats eat everything. And, to paraphrase Whitey Bulger in a completely different context, "There are a lot of rats out there." As you get older you change the mix in your portfolio, in the same way people near retirement move more heavily into bonds and away from stocks. In the epic philosophical battle between Curly and Mr. Miyagi, Mr. Miyagi wins hands down. "Lesson not just karate only," Mr. Miyagi explains to Daniel-san. "Lesson for whole life. Whole life have a balance. Everything be better. Understand?" Politics Isn't Everything and Everything Isn't Political Now I could swear there was a real point I was building up to. Gimme a second. Fellini made movies about clowns! No, that's not it. ("Look at the subhead, Deepak" -- The Couch). Oh, right, politics isn't everything and everything isn't political. What is true for individual people is often true for groups of them (except when it isn't). I recently read Violence and Social Orders -- a book as terribly written as it is brilliant -- and one of the things that just smashes you in the face like a machine that smashes you in the face like a Hell's Angel when you paint kittens and rainbows on his Harley without permission is the importance of institutions. Lots and lots and lots of institutions. Natural societies are organized along kinship. Your tribe is the "one thing" that matters. Modern societies have lots of institutions -- a whole ecosystem of clubs, businesses, associations, guilds, unions, churches, local governments etc. -- and when people, particularly elites, are cycled through these institutions they develop a diversity of loyalties and perspectives. What keeps everyone from killing each other is the rule of law (and a minimal level of dogmatic patriotic loyalty to the greater good), which keeps the competition between these institutions non-violent. Without long-lived and diverse institutions democracy is a pointless exercise in swapping one clique of autocrats and kleptocrats for another. The true danger of progressivism is that it is "one thingism" hiding in the camouflage of diversity talk. Every institution is free to do its thing, so long as its thing is defined in progressive terms and guided by the State. Diversity means lots of people with different skin colors and dangly bits, who all think the same way. Or to paraphrase Barbra Streisand's angry letter partly aimed at yours truly, "diversity" means agreeing with people like Barbra Streisand. For conservatives, diversity actually means different people, individually and in communities, pursuing different things. You can't believe in the individual pursuit of happiness if you subscribe to "one thing" thinking. Because, as Curly himself admits, that means thinking everything else is "s***." That's a harmless attitude for a misanthropic ranch hand, I guess. It's a frigging terrifying one for a political movement backed up by the State. What Is Conservatism? Eight years ago, I wrote a G-File asking this question. Part of my tentative answer was that conservatism, rightly understood, must be "comfortable with contradiction" because that's the only way to embrace what Russell Kirk called the "the variety and mystery of human existence." This is just another way of saying that conservatism must embrace the portfolio-management approach. I mean this in the broadest metaphysical sense and the narrowest practical way. Think of any leftish ideology and at its core you will find a faith that circles can be closed, conflicts resolved. Marxism held that in a truly socialist society, contradictions would be destroyed. Freudianism led the Left to the idea that the conflicts between the inner and outer self were the cause of unnecessary repressions. Dewey believed that society could be made whole if we jettisoned dogma and embraced a natural, organic understanding of the society where everyone worked together. This was an Americanized version of a German idea, where concepts of the Volkgeist -- spirit of the people -- had been elevated to the point where society was seen to have its own separate spirit. All of this comes in big bunches from Hegel who, after all, had his conflicting thesis and antithesis merging into a glorious thesis. (It's worth noting that Whittaker Chambers said he could not qualify as a conservative -- he called himself a "man of the right" -- because he could never jettison his faith in the dialectical nature of history.) But move away from philosophy and down to earth. Liberals and leftists are constantly denouncing "false choices" of one kind or another. In our debate, Jonathan Chait kept hinting, hoping, and haranguing that -- one day -- we could have a socialized health-care system without any tradeoffs of any kind. Environmentalists loathe the introduction of free-market principles into the policy-making debate because, as Steven Landsburg puts it, economics is the science of competing preferences. Pursuing some good things might cost us other good things. But environmentalists reject the very idea. They believe that all good things can go together and that anything suggesting otherwise is a false choice. Listen to Democratic politicians when they wax righteous about social policy. Invariably it goes something like this: "I simply reject the notion that in a good society X should have to come at the expense of Y." X can be security and Y can be civil liberties. Or X can be food safety and Y can be the cost to the pocketbook of poor people. Whatever X and Y are, the underlying premise is that in a healthy society we do not have tradeoffs between good things. In healthy societies all good things join hands and walk up the hillside singing I'd like to buy the world a coke. A Word about Cosmo Those who follow me on Twitter may have noticed that I made a cryptic announcement last week about how there'd be no G-File partly for personal reasons. I keep getting asked about it, so I thought I'd let you know. Cosmo's not doing great. In fact, he's a hot mess. We had scheduled a home visit from a vet last week to send him on his way and that looming decision hung over the Goldbergs like a kind of death sentence on our souls. It was almost like Cosmo knew and willed himself into somewhat better shape. With the spirit of "I can still play, coach!" he started chasing the neighbor's evil cat again and fulfilling some of his other duties. So we called it off. We don't want him to suffer and his heart is still willing even as he gets ever creakier. But if he's able, we'll cope. But the awful day is coming and that knowledge is an almost unbearable weight. I know for lots of people, it's just a dog. But he was our trial-run baby (the Fair Jessica and I have had Cosmo for 13 years and our daughter for ten) and he owns a piece of our hearts like a family member in full. Just writing this much is very difficult for me (which is why I wrote it last). But I know he's got a lot of well-wishers and fans out there and I thought you should know. Various & Sundry Last night I moderated a panel hosted by National Review and the Independent Women's Forum. I actually had a fun time, even though it looked like I was pretty miserable. There will be video later. The day before I was on a panel for my friend Tevi Troy's new book, What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched and Obama Tweeted. It was a really interesting conversation about a really interesting book, and I planned to write about it here but got waylaid by the above rant ("Defund NPR!" -- The Couch). C-SPAN taped it. So be on the look out for that -- and buy the book. Last week I dashed off a column on my flight out to Seattle. To my pleasant surprise it got a huge positive response from readers. The themes will be very familiar to readers of this "news"letter. My first column this week was a small meditation on a variant of one-thingism: how the obsession with chemical weapons once again eclipsed every other foreign-policy imperative. I'll be on Special Report tonight. (Oh, and thank you very much to all the folks who've politely asked the gang over there -- mostly on Twitter as far as I know -- to have me on. I don't know if it means anything to them, but it means a lot to me. It is after all the best news show on TV.) I have a couple speaking gigs coming up. One is in Minnesota but I don't have details yet. The other is in Pennsylvania at Wilkes University. It's open to the public and I would love it if any Dear Readers in the area could show up. It's always more fun when I have friendlies in the audience and -- I won't lie -- it's always good to have a good crowd. It's the evening of October 3. I also meant to discuss this engaging piece by Lee Stranahan on the Frankfurt School, which is totally in my wheelhouse. I'll try to get to it another time, but you should read it nonetheless. Oh, one more piece of housecleaning. If you don't like the G-File, I completely understand. Some of my best furniture hates it too ("Damn straight" -- The Couch). But the solution to that is -- wait for it! -- unsubscribe yourself. Or as William F. Buckley would say, "Cancel your own damn subscription." There's an unsubscribe button at the bottom of this "news"letter. I didn't sign you up, I don't know how to undo that, and I don't really need to hear all of your passionate reasons for why you must not get it anymore or why I must act on your request right away. Cut the drama and just unsubscribe. Also, again, if you don't get the G-File check my Twitter account for the phrase that pays that will get me to personally send you a copy. Hopefully, this practice will be discontinued soon once we've found the glitch in the pneumatic tubes. Enough with the various and on with the sundries. This piece saying critics of wind energy are living in the "stone age." Matt Ridley's Twitter response says it all: Champion of an expensive 13thC technology accuses champions of a cheap 21stC technology of living in the stone age! The molemen want smart cars! Dog girlfriend vs. Cat girlfriend. This is a lot of awesome: every original Star Trek episode as a vintage poster. Here's Conan O'Brien's first monologue from 20 years ago. Eleven Disturbingly Weird Snakes (Don't worry, no Anthony Weiner pics). The ten best fictional laboratories. Happy Unification Day, Firefly fans. Who wants Walter White's tighty-whiteys? Ten psychological experiments that could never happen today. This is better than being all thumbs, I guess. | 
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