The Importance of Not Being Earnest

We are on an edge, one of those transitional moments when the tectonics of the world are beginning to shift, and people must decide which of the many subcontinents they are going to jump aboard. We all feel this. Which of the old ways should be discarded and to which should we hold tight? This is the argument of our time.

“Happiness is nothing.” Thus spoke Ragnar in his final soliloquy to his son Ivar the Boneless in this week’s episode of Vikings. To the Vikings (or at least the ones on television), action is what mattered. What counts is what you do, and how you will be remembered. And hurray for that.

We have been living in an age of earnestness for far too long. It seems so important for everyone to prove what good human beings they are, to their friends, to their relatives, even (God forbid) to their coworkers. But no one really cares how much you care. And you don’t owe them anything. We are helping no one, least of all ourselves, with this deluded need to validate and consecrate what goes on inside the twisted warrens of our own minds.

I blame this earnest malaise on our pop stars. Or maybe I blame the tepid and oh-so predictable nature of our pop stars on our earnest malaise. Either way, what a fucking boring show they put on. As if what the world needs now is one more singer-songwriter strumming their guitar or another cultural ambassador from greater Brooklyn letting us know how deeply they care. Even our corporations, their clarion calling from every coffee cup and car ad, are hell-bent on showing us their hearts are in the right place.  We are being serenaded by a parade of the safe and the sincere.  

Our parents have raised an earnest generation, but one without purpose. It is like our collective fate is a job interview, and when we reach those pearly gates on the other side and God asks us what was our biggest weakness, we are all preparing to be able to tell Him that we just cared too much.     

It is time to discard this cultural fetish for being earnest. Unleash your inner Viking. Go do something worth remembering. Turn your life into a saga, not a self-help seminar. If not for your own sake, then for the kind of world you will be leaving your children. 

The Cloud of Unknowing

There was a time when the Swans were the toast of the L.A. music scene. Sometime in the late Spring of 1984, I believe. Band after band made their triumphant appearances in our town on their tours across the hinterlands, conquering heroes of the day, some hailing from the exotic or the urban, others from the backward and seemingly mundane. We felt the need to bear witness to them all, living evidence that the world outside the L.A. Basin was not as barren as we had been led to believe.

 

It was a time of eminence for the music reviewer, a rare point where writers were the gatekeepers and purveyors for all things wild and good being brewed in the world. Without them, I would have been deprived, for college radio was still a scattered whisper and the music industry at large seemed openly hostile to anything interesting or cool.   

So when the Swans arrived with a processional blast of rejoice from the gate keepers of our world, we eagerly crammed into the Roxy on that hot, sweaty night. The Swans were loud. Ridiculously loud. Possibly the loudest band I’d ever heard. And they were slow. Almost absurdly slow, especially considering how loud they were. Slower than Flipper slow. Maybe even slower than St. Vitus slow. The Swans were an electronic dirge at 130 decibels.  

The concert exploded my musical horizons. My punk rock records seemed melodic and almost innocent by comparison. The Swans took industrial music out of the world of the art installation and moved it into the rock club, where the unwashed masses could grove to it.

Other bands would follow in this vein, bands that would even further expand the concept of sonic assault. Crash Worship, Whitehouse and Merzbow come to mind. Meanwhile, Swans spent the next couple of decades with a rotating line-up, a continual reinvention that just made them easier to ignore.

In 2016, the Swans are not something you need to know about to be culturally in tune. In fact, there is something so resolutely personal and defiant about them that they have become a kind of anti-trend. No one in the cognoscenti writes about angry white guys with guitars anymore, at least not as anything but an anachronism, the remnant of those backward days before our world became diverse. The Swans have done nothing to accommodate themselves to this new cultural imperative. So they have pretty much been ignored.   

It was an accident that I even knew they were playing in Chicago, and I knew nothing about their latest release, a full-length album titled “The Glowing Man.” But the Swans were my original sonic gangsters, so when I stumbled on the show via my wife’s facebook feed, I had to go.  

Michael Gira continues to refine the concept of industrial ritual, bringing the trance-inducing spiritualism of a medieval Eastern Orthodox chant into the sonic landscape of primal drumming and distorted guitars. There are still loud, distorted guitars, of course, along with a throbbing bass and percussive polyrhythms. But there were also a few surprising touches, like the steel slide guitar being used as an industrial instrument, along with an electric organ full of reverb and at least a little soul. It was not just bombast that the Swans brought on stage, but extended periods of the celestial and the rhythmic calls to trance.

The Swans played for a full two hours. Their set was seven songs long, the core of which were four cuts from The Glowing Man: “The Cloud of Forgetting,” “The Cloud of Unknowing,” “The World Looks Black,” and the title track. Interspersed with these were three staples from earlier albums, albeit all from the band’s post-millennial reincarnation: “Screen Shot,” “Some Things We Do,” and an augmented version of “No Words, No Thoughts” that they now call “The Knot.”

Even in their early days, the Swans were about more than the jackhammer blasts. But, at their most delicate and spiritual, early Swans were still a blunt instrument. Gira has now expanded his palette, and the Swans have once again redefined for me what a rock show can be.

A couple of weeks later, I went to see Hillsong United at the United Center. It was my first foray into this particular cul-de-sac of Christian rock, which attempts to bring the Pentecostal calling of the Holy Spirit into an arena holding thousands. There were odd moments for me here, almost embarrassing in their earnestness, like the lengthy appeal to give money to an aid agency for refugees or the plaintive call to accept Jesus Christ, right here, right now, on the cement floor where the Blackhawks play. But there were also moments when the trick worked, when I felt the Holy Spirit in the room, and it brought me, at least briefly, to tears. Hillsong’s music, in its contrasting volumes and syncopations, its use of repetition as an inducement to sing and chant, is in many ways trying to do the same thing as Sigur Ros or Swans. Whether a secular, a sacred, or a tormented spirit, all three bands are striving for their audiences to reach similar places.

 

Culturally, Swans and Hillsong United are ghosts in the machine. Much like with the early days of punk rock, they operate behind the normal confines of mass media. They thrive within eddies of musical and cultural irrelevance that refuse to die.

After all these years, they are places that still feel like home.   

When America Jumped the Shark

“She was a sweet, pretty California girl with Palestinian roots who left an arranged marriage only to find love with a man who committed the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.”

So began the lead story on the Chicago Tribune’s website this Wednesday.  I realize many in the media have gone out of their way to try and personalize everything Muslim over the past fifteen years. But has it really come to this?

What’s next? How about: Eva Braun, a sweet, pretty girl from the Bavarian hills who left the bucolic but restrictive confines of her home only to find love with a man who committed perhaps the worst genocide in modern history.

We’ve officially gone crazy. Do I have to note that this “sweet, pretty girl with Palestinian roots” is a likely accomplice in the killing of 49 people? What has gone wrong with America? It seems we have no standards or decency, that gossip and personal innuendo have not just replaced the news but that reporting has become a parody of itself, where all stories are real and valid as long as you tell them with verve. We have become a nation of bullshit artists, in love with the sound of our own words, and an accessory to murder becomes a “sweet, pretty California girl” when it suits the larger narrative.   

This country used to be able to count on its reporters to seek the truth. Wise and strong leaders would guide us in times of trouble, men like Lincoln, like Ike, like FDR, compelling us to preserve the union, warning us against the powers of fascism or the military industrial complex. But I’ve come to think that whatever blessings God has shed on this country since its founding have been taken away, that this nation is now cursed by purveyors of lies and ineptitude.

It is time to hunker down, to take stock, to realize that the people who purport to inform and to lead us are not by and large working in our best interest. It is time to turn off our Facebook pages, to leave our chatrooms, to step back and take the time to be individuals again. It is time to think for ourselves.  

The End of the Republic

It may seem like an eon away, but just a year ago it was widely assumed that Jeb Bush would be the Republican nominee and take on Hillary Clinton in the general election to decide who would be the next President of the United States. Normally, those who choose which candidates get promoted into positions of political power in this country at least have the decency to change the label on the can of crap they are selling the American public. In the current election cycle, they didn’t even feel they needed to change the names on the cans, that the American voters had become so comatose and uninvolved we’d just get in line for the latest can of Bush, the new and improved Clinton. At the time, I thought it would effectively be the end of our Republic if the American people validated the choices of the donor class and made these two candidates their respective parties’ nominees, that the people’s right to choose would have been so abridged by the money men that democracy as practiced in this country would cease to have any real meaning.

Thankfully, the American people, or at least those in one of our two major political parties, rebelled. Of course, part of the reason was that one of the brands was particularly sour. Have you ever met anyone who thought the last President Bush did such a great job that we had to bring the Bushes back for one more round? Forget all the other contradictions of his Presidency, of campaigning against nation building and for a smaller government then executing the biggest expansion of the federal government and the American empire since the Johnson Administration. Just the decision to cajole us into waging the Iraq War alone should have been enough to forever stain the Bush name. Yet there we were, not even a decade later, being asked to vote for another Bush as President. The hubris of those bankrolling Jeb’s campaign was astounding. Fortunately, other than Mitt Romney and a couple of other wealthy sycophants, no one was frightened away by all the Jeb campaign cash. Even more fortunate, Jeb! was a half-hearted, petulant candidate whose only early sign of passion was a soliloquy about how being an illegal immigrant was an act of love. Now whether any of the elves and dwarves in the Republican field would have been capable of exposing Jeb’s vulnerabilities is an open question. Which is why I credit Donald Trump with the saving of our democracy.

I should state right here that I’ve always disliked the Trump brand, and I remain unconvinced that he is some kind of a political wunderkind, or for that matter that he would make a decent President. But there is one thing that should be clear by now: Donald Trump knows how to destroy a person’s reputation.

However, I don’t think Donald Trump will survive the conflagration he has ignited. To me, Trump is Robespierre. At some point, the same forces he has unleashed will turn on him, and he will be consumed. Now whether this happens before or after the general election in November, I can’t say. But I would be very surprised if a Trump Administration made it past a first term. For that matter, I think the same thing about Hillary Clinton.

For a long time, most Americans have not trusted the institutions of political, cultural, and economic power. But we pretty much kept quiet as the machineries of power kept rolling along, seemingly oblivious to how much we had grown to despise them. Now, like Prospero, Donald Trump has come along and spoken the words that dare not be said. The important words being not so much “build the wall,” although that is what got things started, as “the system is totally corrupt” and “our leaders must go.” 

As much as they try to isolate and castigate their opponents, I doubt the established purveyors of public policy and opinion will be able to get this genie back in its bottle. The storm has begun. And I, for one, hope it will not end until the authorities have all been routed. In fact, I don’t just want them gone. I want them to suffer, like they’ve made the American people suffer for the past 20 years.   

I, Loudmouth

I stopped writing this blog a couple of years ago. There has been this growing dislike within the zeitgeist for the internet troll, against the flameout that disrupts civil discussion. It gave me pause. I became increasingly uncomfortable at the prospect of being labeled as one of “those guys.” This blog also didn’t seem to go with all the other things I was doing. Would being the Asshole of the Century stop me from getting my poetry published? Would it cause a potential employer to balk at offering me a job? I felt the pressure to tone it down, to become civil.

So I shut up. But no more.

My return to this blog was probably first predicated by my decision to leave Facebook, with its little tribes of like-minded folks shunning those they find disagreeable. It no longer feels right to have the parameters of my outbursts dictated by the consensus of a community of my supposed friends. We’ve reached the point where the fate of the world is too important to step aside and let it be decided by the folks already drinking the Kool-Aid.

Disruption has become not just an act of personal defiance. It is a civic duty. We are in the process of becoming Rome, where a ruling class placates the masses with a program of bread and circuses that serve to distract us from the fact we have almost no say in the future of our country, our planet, our families, or our posterity. In this context, it is imperative to speak my peace without concern for whom I might offend.    

Democracy is on the precipice, with a handful of billionaires having an outsized influence on the body politic, and a self-appointed meritocracy works against the interests of most of the American people. The school system emasculates our children, spending most of its energy training them to be a cross between a trained monkey and a computer, programmed to conform while efficiently completing a mundane series of tasks. Culture has increasingly turned into entertainment, tinged with a dose of brainwashing, as our world revolves around our smartphones and a well-crafted fiction that is accepted as given. There is very little impetus to rock the boat, the goal of the enlightened class being the process of learning from other enlightened people what enlightened people should think. Conformity is enforced even as the culture tears itself apart, as opposing sides seek their own consensus. In such a world, thinking for yourself is not just a revolutionary act but a public gift, albeit one not likely to be appreciated by others.   

Even most of today’s music, the creative art I believed held the secret to the human heart, increasingly means nothing. Listening to the radio feels like it is 1974 all over again. The production studio is once again the locus of creativity, and the songs, to the degree they are about anything at all, run the long but narrow gamut from loud declarations by the latest cock-of-the-walk to bathetic moans of personal lament. The difference being that the nadir of the 1970’s was a fairly narrow moment in time, whereas the current sonic purgatory shows no signs of abating.  

So The Asshole of the Century writes again. I will be holding court on a range of subjects in the coming weeks, from politics to culture, education to race relations.

I’m a loudmouth, baby. Try and shut me up. 

The Revolt of the Middle Class

The Ukraine. Venezuela. Thailand. Egypt. Turkey. The list seems to grow by the day. The world is afire with revolt, but a new kind of revolt, befitting our young century: The revolt of the middle class.

While their complaints are all different, the specifics only magnify what they have in common: All of these protests and rebellions are being led by comparatively well educated, affluent citizens upset about their government’s violation of liberal principles and the rule of law. In all these countries, the nascent revolutionaries either lost or probably would lose a free election, as they don’t represent a clear majority of their societies.

Their protests underscore the first requirement of a successful, stable democracy: A modern nation must find accommodation for the concerns of the minorities in their midst, be they ethnic, cultural, or socioeconomic. And, as we are seeing in places like the Ukraine, Thailand, and Venezuela, there is no more dangerous minority to offend than the aspiring middle class.

I understand at least a little of what it must be like to live in a nation state with little regard for the rule of law. After all, I live in Chicagoland, which is about as close as you can get to living in a banana republic or under the heel of a Eurasian potentate without using your passport.

The corruption of Chicago pols is legendary, of course. But the hijinks of Rod Blagojevich and Jesse Jackson Jr. only scratch at the surface. I live in a small town of around 20,000 citizens in eastern DuPage County, about 10 miles from the Chicago border. There is a guy who lives in an unremarkable house on the north side of town. His name is Joseph C., but he goes by the name of Joey Chicago. He takes several trips a year down to unnamed Caribbean islands, purportedly as part of the local mafia’s money laundering operation. That may or may not be true, but what is a fact is that Joey Chicago has bankrolled a number of corrupt local politicians and crooked cops. Bribes, shakedowns, racially and politically motivated beatdowns: It all goes on within our little town.

Or take my stint in the Chicago Public School system, where I witnessed our principal skim money from the vendors, stack the local school council with personal cronies, and cajole sexual favors from the school’s career staffers. The assistant principal was also a real piece of work, a neurotic neat freak who brushed his teeth obsessively in the faculty washroom and had direct connections with the Gangster Disciples. Our football coach was a young man from the community, well liked by his players but who dealt crack on the side and was found dead one night in a back alley.

Multiply this by the hundreds of other government organizations and taxing bodies scattered across northeast Illinois, and you get an idea of the scale of corruption. This is a city where it is considered a civic virtue to protect your parking spot on a public street after a snowstorm with a chair and then slash the tires of your neighbor if he dares try parking in your spot. Dibs is what they call it. In any other place, it could be called criminal destruction of property.

So I know the face of the enemy. It is the public official who hands out favors to friends and favored constituencies. It is the fat dude down the block driving the Escalade with special state license plates. It is the politician who has his own security detail and puts his kids through private school. It is the demagogue who uses class and race to disguise his own power grab. It is the police captain or union boss who uses muscle to shut folks up.  

Let’s not get starry eyed. The Ukrainian rebels do not want economic democracy; they want free trade with the West and an end to their government’s cronyism. The Venezuelan students protesting on the streets have been on the losing side of several elections. The secular protesters in Turkey do not represent that nation’s Muslim majority.  But that doesn’t make their demands for free speech and a free press any less valid, nor can it dim their dreams for personal freedom.

The world has learned that the desires of the middle class are universal, transcending cultural and religious norms. Bring people up from ignorance and poverty, and they demand the same three things from their government: freedom of expression, access to a quality education, and the rule of law. And I stand with them in all three regards.

It is interesting to note which revolutions survive, and which are crushed. In the darkest moments of the protests in Kiev, when special forces were targeting their front line with high-powered rifles, the protesters responded by running toward the guys with the guns who were shooting them down. The protesters refused to be cowed. Contrast their response with the demonstrations against the Iranian ayatollahs or the student protesters at Tiananmen Square, as both movements withered when confronted with the violence of the state and its henchmen.

The fate of the 20^th Century was largely dictated by blood and iron, as Bismarck famously predicted. We imagine that we live in a new, more enlightened era, but our fate will be decided by similar means, except this time it will be blood and silicon chips that hold the day. Peace is overrated. It may be true that the meek will inherit the earth, but in the meantime, the world is being made by those willing to get their hands a little dirty in the struggle. If there is one thing that living with the petty tyrants of Chicagoland over the past 25 years has taught me, it’s that you won’t get a seat at the table if you can’t bloody a nose.

So I stand with my brothers and sisters protesting the brutality of the tyrant, whether it be in Venezuela, in Turkey, or the Ukraine. These protesters may not represent all the people, and the consequences of their victory may not be clear.  But, whatever its periodic regressions, history bends toward freedom and the rule of law. In the digital age, our willingness to defend these freedoms may be the highest calling of all.   

The Banality of Evil

We are in a mess. Sure, after almost falling off the cliff a few years ago, the U.S. economy has stabilized. But the lives of most Americans have not improved. Looking at our society as a whole, it seems just the opposite, that more and more Americans are dejected about the direction our country is heading. Wealth and power have become increasingly centralized into the hands of a few, our schools have been hijacked by a bunch of number-crunching bureaucrats, and most folks don’t see things improving, either for themselves, their children, or their communities. Meanwhile, the people who run this country view the average American as good for three things: As votes that can be bought, as consumers who can be sold to, and as soldiers to go fight and die in their wars. Welcome to the American Empire.

How did we go from a nation of neighborhoods, where rich and poor lived in relatively close proximity, where everyone watched out for one another, where there was a comparatively small difference between rich and poor, to one where the economically and culturally advantaged have segregated themselves into a handful of elite communities?

To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, true evil is more often than not a mundane affair, hiding its impact in well-intentioned orderliness and pedestrian execution. In looking for culprits to tar and feather, I find no Stalins or Pol Pots, those agents of evil who, like Brazilian soccer stars, need only a single name to evoke their posterity. My list of indicted are a comparatively dull lot. But that’s the sad thing about evil: It often doesn’t even have the good grace to be interesting. In this light, here are the three figures I find most to blame for the erosion of the American dream:

Bill Gates

There are many sins upon which I could accuse him, but there is one that cuts me close, and that is how Bill Gates has elected to use his astronomic wealth to have an out-sized influence on how we teach our children.

Gates is an advocate of national standards. Specifically, the kind of standards that his button-down brain can understand, the kind that can only be measured through an ongoing battery of standardized tests.  The bureaucrats in Washington D.C. have decided that national education policy only works if they can be in control of the outcome, and that they can only be in charge of the outcome if they have a way to measure what is being learned. And Gates has the perfect tool to assure this centralized control. He calls it the Common Core curriculum. Every teacher, in every community in every state, is expected to teach to this Common Core. And there are standardized tests that judge how well each student, each teacher, each school, each district meets these standards. As 45 states have signed on to this Common Core curriculum and its incumbent testing, it means pretty much every public school in the country is teaching towards having their children master these tests.     

Last week, I attended my first meeting of parents at my son’s school. Most of the other parents had absorbed the language of their oppressor. They were focused on how they wanted more computer skills taught in the classroom. I felt compelled to declare that I wanted less emphasis on computers, that I’d rather have them learning how to deal with their fellow human beings. They were worried about how to effectively implement all the new state and national requirements. I argued for the importance of art and music, of critical thinking, of spending less time learning how to take a test and more on how to live creative, productive, well-balanced lives. I felt pretty alone that night, and a little sad for the state of public education.

Just like in the business world and in our government, Bill Gates and his ilk are winning the battle over the nation’s educational policy, convincing the general public to accept the regimentation of the American mind, as the public schools churn out millions of mid-level white collar drudges to fill their cubicles and buy their products. Meanwhile, the kids of the ruling class get an entirely different kind of education, one that fosters creativity and independent thinking as well as personal discipline and an abiding respect for others, as the rich are wise enough to know these are the skills that will get you ahead in this world. But Bill Gates doesn’t want my child or yours to get ahead. He wants the nation to get ahead. And, to Gates, that can best be achieved if our masses become even more efficient drudges than the ones in China.

I hate Gates for how he transformed the software industry into his own image, making it a dull yet cut-throat endeavor where everyone watches out for the bottom line. I hate him for being such a soulless nerd. I hate him for a dozen petty things. But when Gates and company start fucking with the mind of my kid, that’s when it gets serious.

Ayn Rand

Like Gates, Ayn Rand is guilty of a multitude of sins. But I only hold her responsible for one: Having lured a good percentage of the financial overachievers in our society into believing that they would be better off without all of us riff-raff around, and through this perpetuating and extending the move of those with wealth and power into boutique communities, where they don’t have to deal with their fellow citizens, other than of course when they need someone to plump their pillows and service their needs.  

I’ll start with what I don’t accuse Rand: She is no idiot. There is this tendency within academia to make Rand somehow intellectually inferior to their conceits, but there is nothing de facto illogical in her approach.

My problem with Rand comes not from her mind but from her soul. She is a cold heart, one that beats fast at innovation and the ideas of the chosen ones but that has little use for the foibles of human nature. When the millions of thoughtful, industrious young people who have been reading Atlas Shrugged over the past fifty years are attracted to her ideas, they are unlikely to be dissuaded by academic ridicule, because logically there is really nothing to ridicule. It’s no wonder she remains so popular. To paraphrase Swift, you figure that a genius must have entered the world when all the dunces have aligned themselves against her.   

Perhaps because of this, Rand’s peculiar brand of individualism, one without God or virtue, has weaved its way into the fabric of American conservatism. Ever since the early 1970’s, the titans of commerce have been captivated with the idea that they aren’t really responsible for anything but their own vision and the pocketbooks of their shareholders. Much like the “creators” in Atlas Shrugged, the creative minds of America have now gathered in their shiny burgs, peppered across the continent but generally someplace soft and comfortable, within shouting range of a major body of water, out of sight of the lives of most of America, free to redefine themselves as they see fit. Meanwhile, the country is drained.

There was a time not that long ago when an owner of a factory in Cleveland probably lived somewhere in town. No more. More likely, he lives on the Florida coast or maybe in the concrete canyons of Manhattan. He has no real connection to the factory, the town where it is located, or its people. It is all just numbers on a balance sheet. So when the numbers so dictate, it is an easy decision to do what is right for the balance sheet and not for the people and the town.

During the last age of the robber barons, at least the great industrialists and philanthropists gave back to their local communities, helping to build our libraries, fund our charities, found our schools. But when your community is an island in the Caribbean accessible only by private jet, it is easy to forget about the folks back home. And the view is not much different from your private dude ranch in the California hills.

In Rand’s master work, Atlas metaphorically shrugged, shaking off the burden of the planet and thus relieving himself of the responsibility to aid the worthless sacks of flesh otherwise known as his fellow man. It is a vision much of today’s meritocracy has taken to heart.

        

Woodrow Wilson

Like Gates and Rand, Woodrow Wilson is guilty of a series of crimes. Here is a short list: He got us into World War I, possibly the most inexcusable war in the history of the West, despite running as a candidate of peace and neutrality just months before; after the war, he helped slice up the planet in such a way as to virtually guarantee a century of war and conflagration; with his extended detentions of hundreds of anti-war advocates, some of whom were guilty of nothing greater than writing an opinion piece in the local newspaper, and whose detentions extended well past the end of the war, he is probably America’s most egregious violator of civil and individual rights.

But also much like Gates and Rand, there is one crime that I blame Wilson for most of all, as it still impacts the daily lives of many Americans: Wilson developed the doctrine of Moral Diplomacy, providing the ideological justification for a century of global interventionism.

The American Empire begins with Woodrow Wilson. He popularized the idea that we had a moral obligation to perpetuate and extend democracy around the globe.  Sure there were plenty of generals and politicians who had dreams of American glory before Wilson became President, but it was Woodrow Wilson who gave this ambition a global directive. Wilson gave imperialism its raison d’etre: Making the world safe for democracy.

All the while, President Wilson was sick. He suffered a debilitating stroke in 1919 while in the process of campaigning to have Congress ratify the Treaty of Versailles. But medical records indicate that Wilson also suffered smaller strokes in 1896, 1906, and possibly 1915, and it has been speculated that his sometimes erratic behavior at Versailles stemmed from another bout of hemorrhaging in his brain.

The Disease of the Righteous

Wilson’s physical and mental trials bring me to the moral of my story: Righteousness, even when it is couched in the dry terminology of the businessman or the theories of a philosopher, is often observationally indistinguishable from a disease, and should be treated as such. Of all the weaknesses and failings of the human psyche, the most insidious of all may be the hubris of the righteous, convinced in the justness of their cause.  It is at the root of the failings of all three protagonists in my tale of devolution. And when the cocksure idealists take over, confident they know how to make a better world, it is usually the common man who pays the price.