DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES

Ladies and germs, 

I’m in the process of modifying my approach to online discussion. I assume you’re all on pins and needles already, so I won’t keep you in suspense. 

  Here’s my system. If I have a problem with something someone says, I’ll try to find some common ground while making it clear to them how and why I object. I’ll spend serious time and effort reading what they wrote, and serious time making my point in a way that shows how much I understand the serious nature of telling someone online that they’re full of shit. 

  I’m fine, absolutely fine, with disagreement. I’m even fine with it if the other person is wrong. (All of us should be fine with that, and you may consider those two sentences to be a schoolmarmish lecture.) 

  What I’m not fine with is people not reading and paying attention to what I’m saying. If I make a point at length, and you respond with a lazy and glib reiteration of what you already said, that’s where I stop having time to engage with you. I’m cool with it if I don’t win you over, but if you’re not listening to me, you’re not worth my time or my respect. I try to give people my time and my respect when we don’t agree, and even that amount of civility strikes some people as an unacceptable coddling of the enemy. 

  So be it. But if you can’t listen the way I’m listening to you, then I’m out. I know listening is hard. It’s also vital. I tell my son that the main reason I’m smart is because I’ve always been a good listener. I’m actually interested in what other people have to say. And I learn from people even when we don’t agree. 

Everybody— I mean everybody— thinks they’ve arrived at the correct interpretation of reality through thoughtful, hard-won effort. So there’s no particular virtue in believing that you are correct. 

There is actual virtue involved in developing your ability to listen. If you’re a good listener, I admire you for that. Keep it up, and teach your kids to do it, and maybe we’ll find our way out of the mess we’re in. 

  

THE PENCIL CASE AS LARGE AS CHARLES BUKOWSKI’S LIVER

  I knew a kid in elementary school named Robert Riddell. According to schoolyard legend, he was related in some way to the Riddell company that made football helmets. This was the only cool thing about him. 

  Robert kept two amazing items at his desk. They were containers, one a metal lunchbox, and the other a zippered vinyl affair that was stuffed way beyond what it was designed to hold, and bulged like Bukowski’s liver. 

  What did he keep in these containers, you ask? Keep your shirts on, ladies and germs, I’m getting around to that. 

  Riddell had packed these containers to the gills with pencils and pens. I know that kids exaggerate, and the years distort our memories even more, and between the telescope perception of a little boy and the tendency of middle-aged men to recollect everything from their youth as if it were the size of Paul Bunyan’s hat, my statement here will be questioned by some of you Doubting Thomases out there, but rest assured— Riddell carried around more pens and pencils during the week than the number of bearded youths who surrendered at Appomattox. 

  We sometimes speculated about how he had acquired such a vast empire of writing implements. Presumably he’d begun with a large number, supplied by the same people who’d purchased the containers for him. But that couldn’t possibly account for all of it. Like rubes staring at Rockefeller’s mansion, we jealously trafficked in slandering assumptions. A guy named Kevin told me that if you dropped a pencil or pen on the floor, you should pick it up right away, because anytime Riddell saw one on the floor he’d grab it, and it would get absorbed into his collection. It was as if our third grade classroom was a fish tank, and he was an algae eater.

TONS O’GUNS

  It feels like something’s shifted in our national debate on guns. I say “debate,” though I’m not sure that’s quite exactly what we have on our hands. As usual, I have a naive idealist’s notion of what a debate is— I think of debates as honorable situations where people are expected to avoid logical fallacies, rely upon facts and reason, etc. 

  Increasingly, the anti-gun control line feels like a chutney of “common sense” rationalizations, deflection, ignorance of the world outside America, and petulance. Helping keep all of this dubious rhetoric alive is a mountain of cash, the life’s blood of American democracy. 

  Thus, “debate” feels inapt. It’s more like a hostage standoff, where all of us outside the house have to tiptoe around, because while we might be correct, they have a gun. 

  Let us examine, casually, an argument we’ve enjoyed hearing in recent years. 

  “Gun control won’t stop these shootings.” 

This one, I fear, is one of the strongest, but not for the reasons generally implied. Our country already owns an appalling percentage of the world’s guns. Even if gun manufacture ended today, our stockpile of weapons would remain brobdingnagian for generations— for it is one of the few things in this world truly deserving of the adjective  “awesome.” Amazingly, our gun control debate hinges to a great extent on the notion that this unholy number, large enough that few living people can even process it, is not nearly high enough. It’s like a guy looking at the multitude of grains of sand on a beach, and getting his dander up because it’s only ONE multitude. This is the kind of weird anger that I associate with Billy Joel, a man who could look at an unfathomable integer representing his worldwide fan base, but still be frustrated that the number wasn’t even higher.

AS LONG AS I GAZE ON RAY DAVIES

  “They kinda chized,” said my son, cryptically. 

  “Hmmm?” I offered, looking up from my navel and stalling for time. 

  “They said, ‘I feel all right, from morning til the end of the day.’ Shoulda been night.” 

   I could make neither head nor tail of this baffling utterance, until it occurred to me he must be referring to the Kinks. Had a third party been present, perhaps crushed into the back seat where I store my used coffee stirrers and tax records, that individual would likely have cracked the case earlier than I did, as my car’s speakers were in fact blasting the quaint vintage rock and roll at that very moment. The obvious conclusion was briefly obscured to me, as I’d forgotten my son still possessed the ability to interact with culture from the long-ago days when waitresses smoked while they handed you a plate of gluten-packed waffles, and rowhomes and townhomes were called “rowhouses and townhouses.” Nowadays, waitresses know better, and I believe whorehouses prefer to be called “whorehomes.”