What Richard Linklater Hath Wrought

There's a point in Meg Jay, Ph.D's The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter–And How To Make The Most Of Them Now where the clinical psychologist author is counseling a patient (or a composite type of "patient") about the fact that she needs to consider her biological clock:

"Can you get married and have a baby now?"

"No! Dr. Jay! I'm not even in a relationship!"

And then it hits you: this author shares the same name as a certain Hall of Fame player from the 70s and 80s who combined the ability to glide through the air with an almost artistic dunking style. Dude, if I had the last name "Jay" and some sort of doctorate degree — even a lousy juris doctor or doctor of education — I'd be using that title all the goddamn day. I can't believe it wasn't until the epilogue that I realized the import of her last name and title.

As you might take away from the subtitle, Decade is self-help for twentysomethings — for their work life, relationship sphere and a third category, which mostly deals with hectoring women not to wait too long to have children.

I'm being glib about that last part, but it's something you return to over the course of the book. At least as it relates to work — and I think you can make a case that meaningful work lays the groundwork for the self-discovery that happens later — I don't think the liberal arts curriculum of high schools serves children well. Or, more accurately, children won't learn anything about their future career/employment choices in this kind of curriculum.

It's not that the liberal arts curriculum is a bad system but rather that it doesn't do much to focus a child. Which is obviously the point of a comprehensive education. I think there's something important about every child receiving the same educational background — it also fits into the democratic ideal of equality of opportunity — but the other component of preparing a kid to participate in the economy is missing. And not for nothing, but "we" don't track kids. "We" don't prescribe careers for kids at age 14 or 15. "We" don't want us doing that.

So given that normal high schools don't prepare kids well, it should fall on the parents or wider community, whatever that may be, to pick up the slack. You passed pre-calc? Great. What are you thinking about for after you graduate? I don't know if it's not cool or backward looking or counterproductive, but we're real good at not telling children what they can or can't do. There were a lot of double negatives in there, which is part of the problem: If the schools aren't equipped to advise children responsibly for a career or future then parents and whoever else around need to focus their attention.

Which is a long, multi-paragraphical way of saying that it's sad and weird that Dr. Jay's Decade is the closest thing younguns have to good advice.

Most of the advice is relatively intuitive: bust ass and challenge yourself wherever possible; prioritize not being a weirdo who can't meet people or take advantage of connections; key in on your passions and figure out ways to make that lucrative (or at least paying); don't shack up with idiots; etc., etc.

The crazy thing is that we've warped things to the point where it's not intuitive. And parents and people, for whatever reason, don't lay down the hammer like I assume people once did. In theory, it's a good thing that kids have to puzzle out the world for themselves, but in a world where adolescence bleeds into one's twenties and beyond, it's asking a lot to expect children to figure it out for themselves. That doesn't let people off the hook, but just contextualizes the difficulties somewhat.

Dr. Jay's book is filled with composite characters — as a health care professional she's obligated to protect identities — so it's hard to differentiate straw men (and women) from real-life people, but a lot of the kids in the book just make you want to throttle them — and I say this as someone who somehow made it through his twenties not completely moronically, mostly accidentally, and tremendously fortunately. That said, there's a point you get to when you realize that she's talking about upper middle class children. She can't exactly say that, and there's no reason not to just understand that and move on, but at some point, it's kind of glaring and uncomfortable. No question, it's important to take advantage of any connections, no matter how weak, to get a foot in the door, but when you take half a second to ponder the inequities at work and the deficiency of a supposedly meritocratic system, it's hard to feel bad for these people.

So many of the composites circle back to the same outward symptoms of underemployment and goofing. It reminds me of Richard Linklater's Slacker, except that I'm surprised that kids can fumble along for years as bartenders or whatnot, especially with student debt and this or that. Austin in the late 1980s or early 1990s was probably a really cheap place to live. In this era of unpaid internships and six-figure college debt, it seems stressful and unwise.

That's not to say this all isn't really good, important advice — not at all — but rather we've lost something if parents and the people closest to children aren't more explicit about what works and what doesn't. Modeling works, but it might take a while, and kids don't have that long when they go from dozing through high school civics to making meaningful choices about their futures.

The final parts of The Defining alight on the difficulties of family planning when you're still dating into your late 30s. At one point Dr. Jay writes, "There is something profoundly sad about seeing an eighty-year-old grandmother come to the hospital to meet a grandchild. It is crushing to realize there won't be many sunny days at the lake with Grandpa or holidays spent in Grandma's loving presence." Jeez, laying on a bit thick? Of course, she's right — but no one talks like this . . . or maybe they should? Which is worse, profound sadness or a twentysomething's hurt butt? Elsewhere, she recruits a composite with a near-near-death experience to note how he was wasting his goddamn life before he had children. But does George Clooney agree?

Defining is intended for twentysomethings, but it's pretty entertaining for older folks. It's good to hear how you turned out, and why, but it's also good background to scare the fuck out of your kids, friends' kids, and various passersby. And then of course to see how you either fit the descriptions exactly or were lucky as all get out not to get bogged down.

When New Jersey Was The World

Back in 2007 we were lucky enough to get to travel to India. Much of India is astonishing: beautiful, chaotic, rich, historical, exotic and a bunch of other florid adjectives that don't immediately come to mind. And then there's the abject poverty that you come across all too often and in really unexpected places. For me, the strangest sight were the shanty towns under the freeway interchanges. Our driver pointed out that they were cooking with dung. When we returned and landed at Newark, we took the shuttle to Midtown and my first thought on the ride back was how clean and well managed the Meadowlands looked.

It's a small thing to think for a fleeting couple of seconds what it's like to live underneath a highway overpass and cook with dung. Then and now I couldn't square it except to say that as a citizen of the world, and a participant in a global economy, that it was important to see it firsthand.

Although I was sincere about this, and believed in what I was saying, the whole response is still pretty hollow; I don't know what I gleaned from zooming over a highway encampment, except that I've never forgotten that image. And there's not much you can "do" about any of it except to notice it: maybe it's not the worst thing to at least talk about stuff like that, so at least more people know about . . . people living under a freeway, I guess? Anyway, you travel through this world for a few weeks and it's eye opening. Then you go back home and reevaluate the New Jersey Turnpike. Traveling can be funny like that.

Goober traveled to India once, too, with work, and they stayed in one of the fancy hotels near the airport in Mumbai. Each morning he'd open his shades and see these shantytowns right by the airport. It was a sight, I gather, he didn't soon forget.

Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity profiles the intertwined lives of several people in one of the shantytown slums by the airport. It's an amazing document for many reasons. For one, it's an astonishing monograph of this place and time; she makes it clear that we shouldn't draw too many conclusions from this one slum, but at the same time it's hard not to see the systemic failures of a hyper-corrupt society.

Beautiful Forevers chronicles life in Annawadi, first settled in 1991 by migrant workers building Mumbai's international airport. Sanitation and housing standards in India are sketchy enough, so you can imagine what a squat by a marsh near the airport must be like. The citizens mostly subsist by picking trash and selling what's useful: cans, bottles, scrap metal, etc. It's a horrible existence, except for the fact that many of them still have faith in their goals and hope about the future; that's the power of the global economy. They often get fucked by the global economy, as when the 2008 downturn obliterated the market for scrap metal. This is a place where children are either breastfed or work. Harsh, brutish, and all that entails.

For me, however, the worst, most dispiriting moments in Behind are when the bureaucrats wield their power to their own corrupt ends. And not in a Russian traffic cop kind of way but rather moments when a cop or a social worker extorts a trash-picking, slum-dwelling, dirt-sleeping squatter for their freedom. It's one thing to be corrupt with people of means but quite another to fuck over those beneath you. I'm not sure what worldview makes this a reasonable, accepted proposition, but whatever is going on in this society is so mind-blowing and depressing that you can't even conceive of it.

Now, that said, there's something very convenient about me — person of privilege who gets to roam the New Jersey Turnpike, that sparkling beacon of efficiency and order, at will — taking out all of my upset on a couple of lowly corrupt civil servants. You kick the dog you have, not the dog you might want or wish to have at a later time. But now that said, there's something agonizing about routine, everyday corruption: it's the single worst societal ill, because it's such an abrogation of the social contract.

In Forevers, the level of corruption is so extreme and so craven, that it's almost a bad example to use, except that I'm sure this happens all the time, or at least there's no guarantee that this is extraordinary. Abdul, the hard-working minority Muslim trash middleman who somehow gets accused of driving a psychotic woman to kill herself, is pressured by a social worker court-something-or-other to pay her off to change the woman's police report. They refuse and he goes to jail, but is saved from the adult justice system by a corrupt doctor, who offers to confirm his "age" for a fee. It's ruthless and unrelenting and supremely depressing.

Part of what feels good about complaining and griping is that the moral right is on your side. When society breaks down such that you can't gripe about routine transgressions of the social contract — an overly zealous parking agent, a poor waiter, etc. — it makes you feel small. It should really go with out saying but there's a compelling irony in using unimportant things to protect yourself from feeling small. That's what it's all about, though, right?

At some point reading the Beautiful you wonder how it is that this well-spoken American lady with such a soft, welcoming name is uncovering this gritty slice of Mumbai. The reveal comes in the Author's Note, when you find out that she actually went there and interviewed, observed and reported, day after day for more than three years. Three years. Let that sink in like your foot in a sewage-filled swamp by the airport: three years. It's a feat of reporting that I don't think many can touch. I'm Googling to see if Jacob Riis even went this far (it's unclear to me, after a minute or two of looking). On the one hand, it's like, thank you, Katherine Boo, you illuminated this faraway world that I wondered about. On the other hand, you're like, fuckin' a, seriously? You did what? And for how long? Pretty intense. And now I want Ben Mamafreaking Affleck to star in the optioned screen adaptation . . . oh, am I getting ahead of myselves? Apologies.

I Was Able To Get A Sense Of His Soul

Now that it's 2014, and we've seen Pussy Riot and "gay propaganda" and imprisoned oligarchs and whatever else bizarre about Russia, you might think that Vladimir Putin's unraveling of whatever democratic reforms accomplished after 1991 happened slowly, almost imperceptibly, and only after many turbulent years. Which is why Masha Gessen's The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin is such an important book — because not only is there so much you forgot — especially in the haze of front sections packed with terrorism and whatever else was going on in the US — but she also reminds everyone how Putin's dismantling of the nascent Russian democracy happened like almost immediately upon his taking power in 2000.

In some ways I think people just wanted to ignore it. It just didn't jive with the heady 1990s when there was only one superpower, no wars and democratic expressions of freedom or whatnot exploding all over the world, or at least Eastern Europe. In other words, when Jesus Jones ruled the world, "watching the world wake up from history" or however that embarrassingly simplistic thought went. And as far as the west was concerned, the end of the Cold War worked for everyone: the cowboys heralded the victory of democracy over communism and the apologists got to feel vindicated that the Soviet "threat" was overblown. No one wanted to think that it could be resurrected any time soon, and something sinister like what Gessen describes just didn't fit whatever narrative had taken hold in the Clinton-Yeltsin years: International Space Stations, arms control treaties, G8 and whatever else.

If you read the newspaper during the Putin years you probably remember some of the chipping away at civil society. I remember specifically when Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested in 2003 and thinking something along the lines of well, I'm sure something sketchy was probably happening, you know those Russian oligarchs or whatever. In reality it was just a bald power grab by Putin's government and, Jesus Fucking Christ, why didn't anyone say anything about it?

So I'm going back now and looking at some of the reports I'm sure I read in 2003, when Khodorkovsky was arrested. Here's one I'm pretty sure I remember, with a representative paragraph:

What brought him down is far from clear, whether political rivalries or criminal misdeeds, and his political aspirations remain unplayed. But his life as a businessman illustrates the changes and conflicts of a modern Russia that created a coterie of super rich.

Even a op-ed somewhat critical of Putin (that I don't remember reading) treats the whole arrest like it's a sort of growing pain in Russian democracy:

The Putin-Khodorkovsky showdown is a tough one to fathom. The contenders are both shining beacons of the New Russia — one a KGB operative transformed into a slick national leader with enormous popular support, the other a Young Communist who became a multibillionaire champion of corporate honesty. Both are darlings of the West — President Vladimir Putin is at home on President George W. Bush's ranch or in Queen Elizabeth's carriage; Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the erstwhile head of the giant Yukos oil company, is embraced by Wall Street and hailed as a "visionary" by the Librarian of Congress. Yet these two are locked in a seamy struggle.

The key, of course, is that for all the progress it has made, Russia is still a long way from really fitting into any Western mold. The fabulously wealthy men we have taken to calling oligarchs, or "businessmen," are really the lucky beneficiaries of a shameless division of spoils from the collapse of the centralized Soviet economy. Putin, whom we like to call Russia's democratically elected president, was arbitrarily plucked from obscurity by Boris Yeltsin's threatened political "family" and plunked into the Kremlin. Neither man is really the product of either democracy or market economy: Theirs is the struggle of power and plunder.

This is not to say that Putin is in any way justified in hounding Khodorkovsky and throwing him into the notorious Matrosskaya Tishina prison. The issue is not whether Khodorkovsky's wealth is ill-gotten — that's the only kind of wealth there is in Russia. But the arrest was so blatantly political — and so crudely theatrical, with masked gunmen and all — that Putin is not likely to have another barbecue anytime soon in Crawford, Texas.

The tone is condescending, and fits with what I remember Russia's standing was in the early 2000s (just before "Axis of Weasel" intransigence) — you know it whenever you hear a leader referred to as "a darling of [blank], for one. As for Khodorkovsky, the guy's an oligarch, and people don't feel sorry for oligarchs. Gessen's book reports something similar from the inside — there's a point where she writes that the dissidents shook their heads that they were eventually put into a position of having to defend oligarchs.

Gessen's reporting in The Man about this era is eye-opening. Gone is the bullshit ostensible reason for Khodorkovsky's imprisonment — tax evasion or whatnot; all the stuff that you gloss over when reading a Times piece about a faraway place. Instead she fixes it in the context of the rest of Putin's actions, and when you see it alongside the rest of the repression of the opposition, the contemporary silence becomes depressing. Most of the other oligarchs just left the country ("fled" seems like a misplaced word for rich guys), years later they started to go after gay people.

And then there's the terrorism, since that was one topic that I very clearly remember back in the early 2000s. After 9/11, the news from Russia about theater sieges, school hostages, apartment blasts and whatever else that seemed to happen with disturbing — frightening — regularity make you think that the world was about to end. Russia seemed, and was portrayed if I'm not misremembering, as one of the fault lines in the clash of civilizations, so all the worst-case scenario terrorism taking place — dead schoolchildren, theatergoers, people in the middle of nowhere — triggered something awful in a jittery post-9/11 culture.

And then it turns out that basically everything was bullshit — Gessen's recounting intimates that when it wasn't just tragically bungled the acts were actually perpetrated by the regime. In every case, the acts of terror were used to consolidate power in a way that seemed barely (or not at all) germane, which just makes you question it all even more. The machinations make the Patriot Act look like the Magna Carta. Again, it's not until you take it all in at one time that you start to see how efficient and ruthless the dialing back of democratic institutions was.

(I need to be clear: if you felt ill reading about Beslan or were on edge contemplating the fate of the Moscow theatergoers during that several day standoff or got depressed thinking about blown up apartments, you should read about the open questions about these events. It's not so much disturbing as it is disgusting.)

(Also, Face is useful in clearing the air about Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov, who I unfortunately assumed to be just another Russian oligarch but who comes off as actually a pretty good guy; in this context, headlines like "Is Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov taking orders from Russian President Vladimir Putin?" are unfortunate and unfair.)

I don't know when opinion really shifted, but it was definitely after Obama — maybe around Syria, when Putin's intransigence was exposed for everyone who had wanted to "reset" the relationship? (Speaking of which, what exactly was being "reset"? These guys seemed like fuckers way before 2009.)

I suppose Pussy Riot was next, but the thing that really did it was the anti-gay legislation, which seems so backward and impossible that it's hard to fathom. And yet it's there, and it's depressing to think that there's a constituency in Russia that somehow supports it.

Also, Putin likes to steal shit. Like Robert Kraft's Super Bowl ring, which is another completely insane story. Or his $40 billion in wealth.

Oh, and then there are the assassinations and murders of political opponents, whistleblowers and various other obstacles to power.

In the end you wonder how Gessen herself is able to stay in the country. The book's afterword is instructive: it's a coda about the time Gessen finally meets Putin. It happened when she, in her day job as the editor of a popular science magazine that was essentially taken over by the state apparatus — how this happens is as strange as just about everything else you read about in The Man. The upshot of the arrangement was that the magazine was compelled to run one party feature in every issue. Gessen refused to participate in one of Putin's many staged puff pieces about Putin rescuing exotic animals or archaeological treasures, in this case Siberian cranes. She was fired by the publisher, and when the buzz in the media about it filtered up to Putin's office, she was summoned to Putin's office by Putin himself to talk about it. At the meeting he waved off her concerns about photo-ops being environmentally unfriendly and he wasn't interested about her concerns about the lack of press freedom in general. He also ordered the publisher to hire her back. After only a few minutes she realized that Putin really had no idea who she was, or that she had written anything about him on the side, especially something so damning and aimed toward a foreign audience.

It meant two things: one, that she could live and work under the radar, but that two, what kind of radar is Putin using in the first place? I don't know if the caricature of the out-of-touch autocrat is a cautionary tale for budding autocrats or whether it's a feature of a diseased system. Honestly, I'm not sure how it exactly plays out badly, except for the fact that all great fucked up autocrats in the end seem to be tagged as out-of-touch: you think people like Saddam, Kim Jong Il, etc. That and bad things seem to happen when autocrats become out of touch — the apparatus underneath has cover to do what it takes to make sure the boss is somehow pleased.

In the end end, meaning after I finished the book and Googled her to see if she had thoughts about what was happening in the Ukraine — this was after the Crimean annexation I think — I found this article, in which I learned that she actually left Russia because its anti-gay laws; she wasn't about to wait around to see if the legislature was going to follow through on its idea to take away the children of same-sex couples. There are times you take a stand, she explains in so many words, and then you have children, and then things change a little bit; ironic, seeing that the so called "gay propaganda" laws are supposedly about "protecting children," but in the end just depressing really.