#14 Nickel Boys and Losing
Hello again. Welcome back to Notes From Table 30. Table 30 for those who do not know is the last table, the one closest to the kitchen at most Shari’s restaurants. I spent quite a bit of time at Shari’s in my younger days. I met my first wife while she was waitressing the night shift at Shari’s. That particular Shari’s is gone now, destroyed. I forget what’s there now. But as I write this at the table of another restaurant, I’m reminded of the comfort I find in a place where food and drink is brought to the table and no one much cares how long one might stay.
What I’m Failing At
As many of you have no doubt noticed, my plan to avoid Facebook in 2020 isn’t going so well and I am all the worse for it. Sure, I’m not posting as much as I used to and my online arguments contain less vitriol and happen less often, but still, it’s a time suck and worse, I feel consistently disappointed by otherwise intelligent friends who say dumb things on Facebook. I’m sure I do the same. I know for a fact that my best writing is nowhere in a Facebook post. I still haven’t figured out what my rules of engagement should be, but I get the feeling it’s like an addict trying to figure out how much cocaine is okay to do while trying to stay clean. The solution is to stop altogether. I’m just not there yet.
What I’m Listening To
As you may have noticed, mere hours after I sent out a newsletter telling everyone to vote for Pete Buttigieg in the Democratic primaries, Pete dropped out of the race. Then Bloomberg dropped out. Then Elizabeth Warren dropped out. Then it was just two old white guys named Joe and Bernie and Tulsi Gabbard still campaigning from a tour bus that I assume has broken down somewhere in Nebraska.
In the wake of all this excitement, Rachel Maddow has managed to snag two of the best interviews from the entire campaign. One with Bernie Sanders and the other with Elizabeth Warren.
The Bernie Sanders interview showcases all the reasons I think Bernie is a terrible candidate: his inability to take criticism, his inability to admit when he’s wrong about something, his lack of support in the African American community, his obliviousness to the toxicity of the term ‘socialism’, and his lack of alliance with the Democratic Party. Maddow did a masterful job of showing all of this while not being openly adversarial.
By contrast, the interview with Elizabeth Warren is heartbreaking. There is no way to listen to these two interviews and come away with the view that Bernie is the better candidate of the two unless you’re already supporting Bernie. The interview with Warren shows off all of the traits that make her such a fantastic politician, candidate, and person. She listens, she’s personable, she genuinely cares, she’s practical and thoughtful. She’s optimistic about the future despite her campaign failing. If Pete had not been in the race, she would have been my choice. In a just world, Bernie would have swallowed his ego after having that heart attack in October, dropped out of the race, and endorsed Warren.
What I’m Reading
I just finished reading Colson Whitehead’s, The Nickel Boys, a novel about a brutal juvenile detention facility in Florida in the mid-1960s and the lasting effects of the violence that occurred there. This is Whitehead’s follow up to his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Underground Railroad.
The Nickel Boys is a quick read. It’s only 210 pages, but it packs so much into those pages that when one is done it feels like an epic adventure. Whitehead’s use of a narrative trick I can’t get into without spoiling it worked incredibly well. Those last couple of chapters genuinely surprised me.
The words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. are sprinkled throughout The Nickel Boys as inspiration for the protagonist and as juxtaposition with the events of the novel. By placing the story in the late 20th Century, Whitehead is able to use the horrors of the detention facility as a metaphor for the obstacles that lay in the path of people of color in a country of systemic racism and how even decades after some of those obstacles have been removed or minimized, their impact echoes through the lives and deaths of people of color.
The fact that The Nickel Boys is heavily influenced by a real facility hammers home the reality of the novel and the plight of the protagonist. The Nickel Boys is a powerful and well-crafted novel well worth your time.
What I’m Thinking About
As the field of Democratic candidates narrows, a lot of people are having to confront the fact that regardless of what happens in November, their first candidate will not be the Democratic nominee and they will not be able to vote for them for President of the United States. For some, this is something they cannot stomach. Their idealism will not allow for compromise. Anything less than their particular candidate is a betrayal to their beliefs and who they are as a person.
I end up wondering if these people are married to their first Elementary School crush because if they aren’t, then they should at least understand that sometimes the person you think is going to save you and solve all your problems and make your life truly happy ends up not being able or interested in doing so and you have to make adjustments because living a life where you just pine for the person who can’t or won’t save you and refuse any help from anyone or anywhere else is no life at all.
You’re likely not going to get a ‘yes’ from the first person you ask out. You’re probably not going to get the first job you apply for. And your first choice for President of the United States will probably not be President. Pinning all your hopes on one specific person is a bad idea in all circumstances. It’s a recipe for misery and ineffectiveness.
I learned this back in third grade when I fell in love with a girl in my class named Sheila. One day I got up the nerve to say to her “I love you.” She responded immediately by kicking me in the crotch. This was a painful lesson, but I’m thankful for it because unlike many people I’ve encountered, I don’t have a problem finding other people when the person I thought was going to work out fails to work out.
Sometimes you don’t get who you want in your life, at work, or in politics. Then you find the next candidate. That’s how it works.
That’s it for this week. What’s on your mind? What’s going on in your world? What old movie that took place in the future got the early 21st century right? Besides Robocop of course.
- Jack