Connecting the Dots:

Things I’ve Been Thinking About Lately

This is a new column that I’ll be including once every week or two. As you can see below, it’s going to be a listicle of things that have been on my mind. Thoughts I find myself coming back to repeatedly. Ideas I’d like to write about, but, for the moment, don’t have the time to dig into and/or expand into a proper essay. So, rather than add them to my ever-expanding “to do” list, I’m going to mention them briefly and solicit your help in turning these ideas into essays by asking you to send me, if you have them, your thoughts or questions about them.

Freedom and Equality. I am beginning to see every significant political, social, and economic conflict today as a contest between two core values: freedom and equality. This includes disagreements about such otherwise unconnected controversies as racism and CRT, sexism and the pay gap, trans rights vs. transphobia, and socialism vs. capitalism. To name just a few. Think about any current issue. For example, the expanding gap, even in developed countries, between the rich and the poor. It can’t be fully understood unless examined through this perspective. Try it and let me know if you agree.

Sam Bankman-Fried. I’ve not had any special interest in this story. Scammers abound in the financial world. So, I’ve always been perfectly willing to believe that this fat-faced kid was a sleezy, unscrupulous dirtbag. But when I read about the verdict – that he was convicted of seven counts of wire fraud, securities fraud, and money laundering, and was facing 110 years in jail – it gave me pause. I know from experience that these three “crimes” are not, in and of themselves, descriptions of actual criminal behavior. Like RICO, they are only crimes when they are attached to actual crimes. I can’t prove this now, but I’m pretty sure they are technicalities that were invented by lawmakers years ago to put bad guys – mobsters and drug dealers – in jail for crimes the Feds could not prove. Do you see what I’m getting at?

Culture Is Everything. This is a big theme for me. I’ve wanted to write a book about it for at least 10 years. If you are a regular reader, you know that I’ve touched on it in past books and essays. But I don’t know that I’ve ever stated it clearly as a thesis. The idea is that culture – not wealth, or nationality, or race, or ethnicity, or religion – is what unites and, more importantly, divides us all. Like the conflict between freedom and equality, it lies beneath so many social and political conflicts – from war and peace, to wealth and poverty, to the most notable examples of human achievement and failure. Also like the freedom/equality conflict, unless you understand how deeply cultural ideas and values permeate everything we think, say, and do, it’s impossible to make sense of the world. It’s going to be a challenge to develop this idea, but I’m very motivated to work on it. Because so far at least, I can’t think of anything important happening in the world today (or in history) that doesn’t have culture at its foundation. I’m going to push forward on this idea. If you like what I’m doing, you can help me flesh it out with examples from your own experience and observations.

How to Understand Modern Art. Learning about art used to be like learning about any academic subject. You read books written by people who had read earlier books written by earlier people who had ideas about it. Most of those ideas had to do with how one school or style of art was developed and then went on to influence another school or style. Essentially, art appreciation was art history. And that worked well until the late 19th century, because virtually all art produced until then was representational. But when some artists started experimenting with expressionism and abstraction and eventually “found objects” and performance, it changed everything. Art became both incomprehensible and inexplicable, which could have ended it. But thanks to some very clever intellectuals, art, like physics, was reinvented for the modern world.

Question: Who Are the People That Had the Greatest Positive Impact on You?

In a video interview recently, I was asked to name the people that had “the greatest positive impact” on my life. The general topic of the interview was “business building.” So I first thought about the businesspeople I had worked for and/or with – savvy CEOs, executives, and entrepreneurs that had revealed important secrets to me or trained me in certain valuable skills.

I came up with three or four. (Which I’ll mention in a minute.) But upon reflection, I realized that the answer to that question had to go beyond my career. There were about a dozen people that had a major effect on the way I approached everything I did in every aspect of my life.

And by the way, I think this is true of everyone. Including you! So I urge you to spend some time making a list of the people that had the greatest positive impact on your life. I think you’ll find it interesting. Even eye-opening. At the very least, it will remind you of some stories you can tell your grandchildren when you’re my age. (And if your list is like mine, you may be surprised to find that a fair number of the people on your list did what they did by criticizing you.)

My List 

1. My parents. Number one. As is true of most people, they, of course, were the most influential people in my life. And I’m very lucky in that they were mostly positive and inspiring. I am still amazed when I think about how they managed to accomplish what they did in life while raising eight children. It amazes me more every time I think about it.

My mother valued art and poetry and dance and the theater. She valued honesty and frankness, hated hypocrisy, and didn’t suffer fools. She cared for and was kind to people in our neighborhood that were incapacitated.

The bulk of my father’s influence on my life came on later, after I left home. He was a literary scholar who read four or five languages and could quote Homer in Greek. He was also a dramatist, an English literature professor, and a secret math genius. He was not at all interested in sports, which irked me when I was young enough to want to play them. And he was amazingly absent-minded, which is something that has passed on to me in the last several years.

2. My fourth-grade teacher – whose name I forget, but who suggested to me that I could become a writer and challenged me to write an historical account of the Iroquois Indians, who, if I remember correctly, were native to Long Island, where we lived at the time.

3. My ninth-grade homeroom teacher, Ms. Growe – who, after making me stand up in class, said to my fellow students, “If you want to know the definition of ‘underachiever,’ Mr. Ford is a living example.” (Oddly, I don’t remember this bothering me. I was sort of proud of it. Probably because I knew it was true.)

4. Coach Dick Caproni, my high school football coach – who apparently admired the way I could run, at full-speed and head-first into just about anything he asked me to. I loved that guy. Although I’m sure I lost a few IQ points heeding his commands.

5. Lillian Feder, a classicist at Queens College – with whom I took two undergraduate courses in Greek and Latin culture. She taught me the importance of grammar and punctuation, and once allowed me to take a test over again (which she should not have) because she believed in me.

6. Harriet Zinnes, another teacher at Queens College – who taught me how to read poetry, pushed me to study Ezra Pound in depth, and made it clear to me how common it is for people that haven’t earned the right to call themselves writers, nevertheless do.

7. Peter Mustapha Lopa, my French teacher and later student and friend during my two-year sojourn in Chad, Africa – who taught me how possible it is to bridge, in friendship, insurmountable distances.

8. Leo Welt, a WWII war orphan and the founder of Welt Publishing – who hired me for the first legitimate writing job I ever had. Leo was not especially charming. In fact, he was often rude. But when it came to accomplishing any notion that came to his mind, he was a force of nature. Nothing could stop him. Leo taught me the amazing power of brute persistence.

9. Joel Nadel, a Florida-based newsletter publisher – who gave me my second writing job. And taught me how money is made and wealth is created. And gave me the chance to become wealthy myself. Joel didn’t treat everyone the same, but he treated me like family.

10. Bill Bonner, a Baltimore-based newsletter publisher – who gave me my third writing job. Bill was, in almost every respect I can think of, the opposite of Joel. And because of that, he was able to teach me that there is always more than one way to skin a cat. In other words, that every truth in life has an equal and opposite truth – i.e., don’t let someone else’s truth get in your way.

Political Culture in America Today

In my college years, I saw America’s university curriculum as a smorgasbord of diverse and delectable ideas. A cornucopia of philosophical, political, and social ideas that were, to me at the time, potentially delicious and also nutritious. I wanted to consume them all.

In contrast, the range of ideas available on social media back then (i.e., radio and TV) was very limited. It was a lonely neighborhood with a cluster of eateries, all of whose menus were comprised of the same half-dozen dishes, all based on the same half-dozen recipes, and all served with only the mildest of spices.

But it was safe and comfortable. Because when it was time to feed yourself, it didn’t matter which restaurant you chose.

When cable TV came along, the menu for new ideas promised a huge expansion as the number of channels went quickly from 13 to nearly 500. Unfortunately, the hoped-for diversity didn’t materialize. The eateries expanded by 4,000%, but the dishes available were all the same.

The internet did indeed expand the diversity of the idea menu exponentially. And for the first 10 to 15 years of this century, there was a flourishing of free ideas, opinions, and sources available to anyone that had access to the World Wide Web.

But then, sometime around 2010, all that rich, intellectual diversity seemed to thin itself out. Online searches for particular social, political, religious, and virtually any other category of collective thinking became more difficult. So difficult that it may as well have been scrubbed from the Web entirely.

Soon after Donald Trump was elected in 2016, another massive change began to take hold that eventually reduced the ideas and opinions available to knowledge seekers to just two: those of the percentage of the population that hated Donald Trump… and those of the Trump lovers.

This final reduction quickly transformed ideas and opinions (and even opinions of facts) into ideational weapons, where they have value only in relationship to whether or not they support one ideology or the other.

And that is where we stand today, with the world defined by ideological tribes that interpret every aspect of human knowledge – from history to psychiatry to medicine to art and literature – in terms of its usefulness in vanquishing (if not eradicating) the enemy.

It’s ugly. It’s also inescapable. For these competing tribal ideologies assert themselves antagonistically. Not just in everything we seek to understand about the world, but in everything we do. From the laws we pass about abortion and discrimination and criminal justice, to what we should do about the Russian occupation of Ukraine and the war between Israel and Hamas.

There is a huge intellectual and emotional advantage to this two-tribe cultural world we now inhabit. Each tribe gets to feel morally superior to the other because, having abandoned believing in the value of ideas, they have the benefit of believing that the ideology they subscribe to is not just absolutely correct, but also absolutely virtuous.

This is extremely dangerous and almost sure to end very badly for both tribes. The emotional mechanism that fuels and informs and preserves ideologies is always and inevitably not just uncharitable and anti-intellectual, it is mindlessly self-destructive.

So, yes, the two-tribe world we Americans now live in was sparked into life by the election of Donald Trump. But something else happened during the Trump presidency. A third group was formed of people that neither hated nor loved him but hated the way the Trump Haters set out to end his presidency by any means necessary. I consider myself one of that group, and I believe there may as many as ten million of us.

We cannot be identified by red hats or black masks or by the color of our skin or by our religion or lack of religion or by the level of our education. If there is something that unites us, it is the value we still hold in ideas, our deep distrust of ideology, and our unwillingness to submit our individuality to any sort of group-think.

And we could be the largest bloc of swing voters. Which would make the outcome of the next election interesting… except that we also are very reluctant to vote.

We Are So Much the Same. Then Why Are We So Damn Different?

When K and I had Number One Son, we parented him the way I imagine many first-time parents raise their children – to become, as Jordan Peterson advised, adults that we would like and admire.

Number One-Son did not disappoint. And when we had Number Two and Number Three Sons, we did the same. Again, the results were more than satisfactory.

But they are not at all the same kind of person. Their instincts, their interests, and their personal preferences are greatly different – as different as their physical features.

A common way of discussing these differences is to talk about nature vs. nurture – i.e., how much of a child’s temperament, intelligence, and personality traits are due to innate biological factors versus differences in parenting, teaching, and other social aspects of their developing lives.

Biology is definitely a factor. A much bigger factor than you might think considering that, from a DNA perspective, all humans are 99.6% the same. That tiny 0.4% difference accounts for all the physical differences – the bone structure, the height, the color of the eyes and hair and skin, etc. – not just between siblings, but among all human beings of every race.

But we also know that DNA accounts for other differences, such as temperament and even something as small as the way a child smiles or laughs. (You have your grandmother’s smile… your father’s laugh, etc.)

In fact, I think DNA goes even further than that. I’ve seen what I would call personal tics in my boys. The way, for example, that Number One Son rubs his nose that is identical to the way his grandfather, whom he never met, rubbed his nose.

As a parent, I find this eternally interesting and amusing to think about.

Recently, I was contemplating the way my children dress.

Number One Son has my sense of style – in that he always thinks he is stylishly dressed but almost never is.

Number Two Son’s sense of style is apparently (What do I know?) cool but low key.

Number Three Son’s is (again, apparently) particular and au currant. So much so that, once a year, when I visit the Chanel store on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach to buy K a few things for Christmas, the salespeople talk directly to him, not me, about what they think she might like.

Three boys with 99% similar DNA, 90% similar parenting (K did most of it and she is extremely consistent), and 90% similar childhoods in terms of the town they grew up in, the schools they went to, and so on.

Why such a difference?

I suppose it could be that small natural difference in their DNA, which does, after all, account for the very distinct differences in their physical appearances. But my guess is that it has to do with the happenstance of the particularities of the nurturing they received. Not from us, but from their teachers, their friends, and the hundreds of small but significant (to them) experiences they had growing up.

What do you think?

For more information about the gardens or to schedule a private tour or event, email giovanna@palimi.net.

A Crisis You Probably Never Knew Existed!

I came across this in my reading yesterday: Hormel Foods is once again sponsoring what it calls the “10 Under 20 Food Heroes Awards” to honor young people working in the fight against “food insecurity.”

What is food insecurity?

The US Dept. of Agriculture’s definition is “a household-level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food.”

I wasn’t sure what that meant, so I went on a little Google search. I found nothing that helped me understand it any better, but I did discover that, apparently, it’s a huge crisis.

According to Feeding America, one of more than a dozen non-profit, fund-raising businesses that are enjoying the growth of this crisis, “nearly 40 million Americans, including 12 million children, faced food insecurity in 2020.”

Did you know that?

I didn’t. Nor did I know that “food insecurity can have a seriously bad impact on people that experience it.” For example, they say that…

* Food insecurity can cause serious health issues when people must choose between spending money on food and medicine or healthcare.

* Food insecurity can make it more difficult for a child to learn and grow.

* Food insecurity can lead to difficult decisions, like choosing between food and rent, bills, and transportation.

I know what you may be thinking: “Really? In America? I thought the food problem here is that so many Americans are too fat!”

Well, yes. That is true. The data (from the FDA as well as other government sources) indicate that 20% of America’s children and 30% of its adult population are obese. Another 30% of adults are just fat – too fat, in fact, to be eligible for basic training. And the lower the family income, the more likely it is that family members will be fat or obese.

So then, if you were heartless, you might wonder whether the Food Insecurity Industry’s efforts to get more food to our low-income people is the right thing to do. Because if lack of food was the problem, wouldn’t all those tens of millions of “food-insecure” people in America be skinny? Like the photos we see now and then of adults and children in third-world countries?

No. In America – and the rest of the developed world – we have the opposite problem. So, clearly, it’s not because they need more food.

Starvation and undernourishment (when people are not able to consume enough calories to sustain health) are problems that do exist. They are much less common than many people think, but they exist, usually on a temporary basis, in third-world countries suffering from famine or war.

But in America, we have neither starvation nor undernourishment. We have malnutrition caused by eating too much of foods that make you fat and sick.

Countless studies have shown that when your diet is heavy in carbohydrates and processed foods, all sorts of unhealthy things happen. One, for example, is that your insulin spikes. And when insulin spikes, you experience (an hour or two later) a craving for more junk.

In other words, low-income Americans do not suffer from not eating enough. They suffer from eating too much of the wrong foods.

And the Food Insecurity Industry is telling us it’s a crisis. If they were to say, “In America we have a crisis of Americans eating too much junk food and being fat,” I would agree. But they won’t say that because then how could they justify the billions of dollars they raise each year to “solve” that problem?

It would be a hard sell, because we all know how to solve the problem of being fat. We don’t need a thriving industry, funded by taxpayers, to figure it out.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Here are four that may help.

This is what starvation looks like:

This is what undernourishment looks like:

This is what malnutrition looks like:

This is what food insecurity looks like: