George Saunders' "A Swim in the Pond in the Rain"-A Landmark Tutorial on Writing

 I found this a humbling and mind-opening book.  I left it realizing even more that I should have spent more time editing everything I have written.  Honing every sentence, deleting the extraneous and the too- expected.  It was humbling, too, in the intricacy of the Russian short stories which Saunders analyzes, acutely.  There is so much more to these stories by Chekhov and Tolstoy and Gogel than I appreciated on the first reading.  Saunders loved writing this book; that is clear.  He loves writing and reading, too.  Don’t we all?  We write and we read, because we love doing it.  That is how I feel even as I read more slowly, forget more of what I read and write more verbosely.  

Saunders practices good writing in this book with great care.  His ability to do that leaps off the page again and again.  “The focus of my artistic life has been trying to learn to write emotionally moving stories that a reader feels compelled to finish.  I consider myself more vaudevillian than scholar.”

I identify with the “vast underground network for goodness in the world.”  He identifies in the book clubs he has known, he has participated in:  “a web of people who put reading at the center of their lives because they’d often experience that reading makes them more expansive, generous people and makes their lives more interesting.”  That says it.  No more, no less.

A new perspective I emerge with: “a story is a linear, temporal phenomenon.  It proceeds, and charms us (or it doesn’t), a line at a time.  We have to keep being pulled into a story in order for it to do anything to us.”

Saunders follows in Einstein’s footsteps:  “No worthy problem is ever solved in a plane of its original conception.

 I believe Saunders is right. “All art begins in that instance of intuitive preference.”  The artist just comes to like it better that way, for reasons he couldn’t articulate, and before he had the time or inclination to articulate them.  It just feels right.  It is appropriate.”  

When Saunders is writing well, he says, “there is almost no intellectual/analytical thinking going on.”  He is trying different orders, looking for the perfect sentence, but mostly the artist “tweaks that which he has already done.  There are those moments when we sit before a blank page, but mostly we are adjusting what is already there.  A story is frank, intimate conversation between equals.  We keep reading it because we continue to feel respected by the writer.  The idea of a story is an on-going communication between one person telling his story to another.”  Beautiful.

When it comes to Saunders universal laws of fiction—“Be specific!  Honor efficiency!, always be escalating.  That is all a story is really:  a continuing system of escalation.”

What will keep a reader reading?  The only method, Saunders asserts, “is to read what we have written on the assumption that our reader reads pretty much the way we do.  What bores us will bore her.  What gives us a little burst of pleasure will light her up, too.”  He suggests reading the prose in front of us, the prose we have already read a million times, as if it is new to us.  How do we react?  In writing fiction, “we are in conversation with our reader, but with this great advantage:  we get to improve the conversation over and over with every pass.  We get to ‘be there’ more attentively.”

Saunders distinguishes those talented writers over the years that separates those who go on to publish from those who don’t.  “First, a holiness to revise.  Second, the extent to which the writer has learned to make causality.”  That may not seem sexy, Saunders writes, but it is the hardest thing to learn.  “It doesn’t come naturally, but all is  a series of things that happen in sequence, in which we can discern a pattern of causality.”  “Causality is to the writer what melody is to the songwriter:  a superpower that the audience feels as the crux of the matter; the thing that the audience actually shows up for.”

Of all the short stories, I found Gooseberries by Anton Chekhov and Saunders’ comments on it and on Chekhov to be the most mind-opening.  I won’t try to summarize them here.  It is a very short story,  only ten pages. It is a complex, insightful and ironic story as is Saunders commentary on it.  The story appears to be asking “is it right to seek happiness, knowing that it is ephemeral and he cannot have much of it at all.  His life can be lived for pleasure or duty.  How much belief is too much?  Is life a burden or a joy?”

The story cautions us against being too judgemental.  Too fixed in our views.  It encourages open-mindedness, for seeing two sides of questions.  “Every human position has a problem with it.  Believed in too much, it slides into error.  It is not that no position is correct; it is that no position is correct for long” (or I would say guaranteed to be correct forever).  “We are perpetually slipping out of absolute virtue and failing to notice, blinded by our desire to settle in—to finally stop fretting about things and relax forever and just be correct; to find an agenda and stick with it.” It is more comfortable that way. 

Chekhov was open to criticism on this point.  Tolstoy accused him of having a “very good heart, but thus far it does not seem to have any very definite attitude toward life.”  But this quality, Saunders avers, is what we love him for now.  In a world full of people who seem to know everything, passionately, based on little (often slanted) information, where certainty is often mistaken for power, what a relief it is to be in the company of someone confident enough to stay unsure (that is, perpetually curious).

Through Chekhov’s short life; he lived to be only 44, he seemed glad to be alive, he tried to be kind.  “His feeling of fondness for the world takes the form, in his stories, of a constant state of reexamination.  Reconsideration is hard; it takes courage.  We have to deny ourselves the comfort of always being a certain person, one who arrived at an answer some time ago that has never had any reason to doubt it.  In other words, we have to stay open in the face of actual grinding, terrifying life.”  And I would add new emerging facts.

Back to the joy and satisfaction from reading and writing.  “These days, it is easy to feel that we have fallen out of connection with one another and with the earth and with reason and with love.  I mean:  we have.  But to read, to write, is that we still believe in, at least the possibility of connection.”

At the end, Saunders calls on himself to address the question:  How are we altered by reading?  He gave it a try: 

 “I’m reminded that my mind is not the only mind.  

I feel an increased confidence in my ability to imagine the experiences of other people and accept these as valid.

I feel I exist on a continuum with other people:  what is in them is in me and vice versa.

My capacity for language is reenergized.  My internal language, the language in which I think, gets richer, more specific and adroit.  I find myself liking the world more, taking more loving notice of it.

I feel lucky to be here and more aware that someday I won’t be.  

I feel more aware of the things of the world and more interested in them.

That is all pretty good,” Saunders concludes.

*******************************

That is a mighty fine summary, I believe. .

I wouldn’t want these several of notes to discourage anyone from picking up and reading this book, carefully, for it demands careful reading.  I assure you it will be a rewarding experience.

Congressman John Lewis: An Icon of Courage, Persistence and Faith

 Jon Meacham’s biography of John Lewis is a wonderful book.  It’s not, as Meacham himself said, a “full-blown biography”; it stops in its detail with the Civil Rights movement. 

 

It was mind-opening to me.  First, in conveying in a cinematic fashion the brutal violence Lewis and others incurred during that period, 1960-65.  I’d read about it.  I didn’t feel it.  I do now, more than ever.  

 

But above all, what I discovered in the book was Lewis’ faith-based commitment to non-violence and his ability to continue to make progress despite all the setbacks.  He never gave up hope, nor the determination and courage to turn hope into reality, even knowing it would often be one step forward and one step back; indeed, sometimes seeming to be two steps back.”

 

There were other “learnings” 

 

It’s important to remember that the public very much disapproved of the Freedom Fighters’ efforts, the sit-ins and other public protests during the first half of the ‘60s.  Reform does not come without controversy.  I loved Lewis’ citation from Horace Mann:  “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”

 

Lewis’ pursuit of “the beloved community” was unwavering. 

 

John Kennedy in the summer of 1963, reflecting on the Civil Rights Bill, remarked:  “Sometimes you look at what you have done and the only thing you ask yourself is—what took you so long to do it?”  That’s exactly how I felt when we at P&G finally gave the same rights to people of the same sex who were partners as we did to married partners in 1995.

 

Lewis kept his faith.  It wasn’t easy—it was, in fact, the hardest thing in the world.  How could you hold to a creed (non-violence) that appeared to produce more pain than progress?  The only way to explain Lewis’ persistent non-violence, his unending commitment to answering hate with love and death with life, is to take him at his word:  “We truly believe that we are on God’s side and, in spite of everything—the beatings, the bombings, the burnings—God’s truth would prevail.”  Lewis recalled, “The anguish and the duration of the struggle was, in a way, a vindication of the premise of the struggle itself.”

 

President Johnson was at his best as he spoke before signing the Voting Rights Act in 1965:  “The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such as issue (one that speaks to the values and the purposes and the meaning of our beloved Nation).  Should we defy every enemy, should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a Nation.  For, with a country as with a person, ‘what has a man profited if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’”

 

And, continuing:  “There is no Negro problem.  There is no Southern problem.  There is no Northern problem.  There is only an American problem.”

 

Here we are, just about 56 years after Johnson’s talk, facing the same existential challenge.  Human rights are still under attack. Yet, we dare not give up. 

 

Meacham aptly describes what drove John Lewis and Martin Luther King.  The journey begins with faith—faith in the dignity of the worth of every human being.  It calls for faith in God and that God gave us the courage to believe that the power of love is greater than the power of hate.  

 

 

President Biden's Infrastructure Bill—"A Bridge Too Far"

 

There is scarcely anything in President Biden’s proposed infrastructure plan I don’t agree with, even though, as many Republicans and some Democrats and economists are properly pointing out, some elements go well beyond any traditional definition of infrastructure.

 

But almost without exception, they are needed:  refurbished bridges, roads, tunnels.  Improved airline terminals.  All needed to bring us up to where China, for example, already is. 

 

And I agree there should be some incentives for the purchase of electric vehicles and funding to provide an electrical charging grid across the nation, just as the federal government contributed to the building of the nation's railroads and highways in decades past. 

 

And no one could believe more than I do in the importance of preschool education being available to all families who seek it as well as improved child care. 

 

My problem with this proposal is not what it’s proposing to fund—it is all strategically important--but how it is proposing to fund it.  I have long felt, for example, that preschool education should be funded in part at the federal level but even more at the state and local levels. There needs to be joint ownership at every level including the community because only there can one bring the tailored leadership needed for the programs to be effective and learn over time.   The same line of reasoning applies to improved child care. 

 

I worked closely with President Obama’s first Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, trying to persuade him and the Obama administration to change their proposal for universal preschool education—not to have it rest entirely on the federal government but rather have it be a shared funding and implementation responsibility at federal, state and local community levels. 

 

The Biden administration should pull back on this infrastructure bill to get bipartisan agreement to the essential elements of it and ensure careful thought is given to the apportionment of costs among the federal, state and local governments as well as private industry.

 

There is an undue rush about advancing this legislation based on the feeling that there is an opening to make it happen. The proposed legislation is sweeping together a disparate group of initiatives under one umbrella (infrastructure) without careful and prudent thought on how they should be funded and how much money should be spent.  This nation’s capacity to assume more debt is not infinite.  My advice to the administration is “Slow down.  Get committees together to study this. Achieve a bi-partisan outcome.”  I hope the Biden administration follows this course of action. 

 

 

  

How Many Lives Have to Be Lost Before We—Finally—Pass Common Sense Gun Legislation

 

I first posted this blog almost three years ago. I do so today after the murder of ten more people in a single incident in Boulder, Colorado. Surely, we can act now!

As many as 50 people—50 men, women and children—might still be alive today if the common-sense gun policies supported by 80% of the American public were in place.  

That’s right.  Fifty people today, 50 more tomorrow, 50 every day after that, might still be alive if  we were acting  on what we know to be true.  

For someone of my age, this fight for life through the adoption of responsible gun policies recalls other fights for life through common-sense regulations. Fights including automobiles and tobacco.

Take automobiles. Today, about 35,000 people die annually as a result of automobile-related accidents.  That’s tragic, but consider that if automobile fatalities per mile were occurring at the same rate today as they were in the year I was born, those 35,000 deaths would not be 50,000, not 100,000, not 200,000, and not even 300,000.  They would be closer to 400,000 people each year. 

Back then, seeing this carnage, nobody talked about banning cars.  But they did come to demand common-sense 

regulations. Seat belts became required; so did airbags.  You were required to pass a driver’s test.  (How, I ask, do you justify requiring a test to drive a car and not a test to shoot a gun?)  You have to get your license renewed every five years.  There are fines for traffic violations and sometimes suspension of your license. 

Make no mistake.  These common sensed regulations didn’t come easily.  Car manufacturers complained about the cost of some of the safety devices. Drivers complained about being "forced" to use seat belts.  But the evidence prevailed.  So did common sense. So did public will.  

  

Or  take tobacco.

What if people were smoking today  at the same rate as when I was a teenager in the mid-1950s?  Almost half the population  smoked then, compared to 15% smoking today.  If that rate of smoking still prevailed, and if the linkage of smoking to mortality remained about the same, up to one million more people might have died last year from smoke-related diseases.  Instead of what is still a tragedy of almost 500,000 people dying from smoke-related illnesses, the death toll could be closer to 1,500,000.  

Believe me, getting common-sense regulations for cigarette smoking was a decades-long battle.  If you think the NRA is a strong lobby today, you should have seen the tobacco lobby.  It supported politicians committed to the industry.  It supported medical conventions and encouraged doctors to recommend cigarettes; I’m serious.  It lobbied against research to establish the linkage of smoking and cancer.  But we kept getting more data linking smoking to cancer, just as we are today on the linkage of guns to gun-related deaths.  

As a result, warning labels were mandated on cigarette packages.  Age limits were imposed on the purchase of tobacco; advertising was regulated to shield children from its influence; excise taxes were increased. 

What drove these changes in automobile and tobacco regulation?  There was increasingly compelling data and research. Above all, this research showed that automobile and tobacco related fatalities werematters of public health.  

We came to recognize that whether a person smokes is not just a private issue.  It's a public health issue.We learned the damaging impact of secondhand smoke.  

We recognized that how a person drives a car is not just a private issue.  It affects others.  It can kill others.  So we insisted that you had to have a license  and demonstrate you were able to drive.

Just as with tobacco and automobiles, owning a gun is not only a private matter. It is also a matter of public health. Tragically, we witness that every day.  So just as with tobacco and automobiles, use of guns must be regulated responsibly.

Importantly, changes in behavior resulting from the regulation of tobacco and automobiles also changed the “culture.”  It is no longer “cool” to smoke.   When I joined Procter & Gamble, there was an ashtray in front of every board seat.   You would walk into a store or restaurant and it could be “cool” to be smoking.  Movie stars were portrayed smoking; men and women. No longer.

It’s no longer “cool” to drive without a seatbelt.  It’s stupid.  That’s what strong social movements can do.  

Culture changes impact everything.  Including business.  Businesses stepped up to forbid smoking on their premises and encourage safe driving habits. 

We’re seeing businesses step up on the gun issue.  Walmart has banned the sale of assault weapons and now has increased the age to 21 at which one might buy a rifle.  Dick’s has done the same thing.  Rental car companies and airlines like Delta have stopped giving preferred discounts to members of the NRA.  Kroger has banned the sale of large magazines. 

 Businesses are getting the message. 

I urge you support businesses which are adopting responsible gun policies.  Let them know that’s why you’re shopping there.  And let those which aren’t adopting similar policies know you’re going to support their competitors.

Focus on electing candidates who support responsible gun policies and rejecting those who don’t.  Nothing counts as much as your vote. Demand to know exactly where a candidate stands on universal background checks, keeping guns out of the hands of people who have been involved in domestic violence and banning assault weapons and large magazines. 

The wind is at our back on this, but it’s going to be a continuing battle.I’m inspired how young people are taking the field.  Let us be worthy of their commitment.   

As I said at the outset, as many as 50 men, women and children might still be alive today if we had adopted responsible gun regulations.  This estimate is not a matter of sheer speculation.  Nineteen state already require background checks for ALL gun sales. In these states,  we are seeing up to a 40-50% lower incidence of gun deaths linked to domestic abuse, suicide and involving law enforcement officers.

These facts don’t call for banning guns. They don't call into question the practices of millions of responsible gun owners.  They don’t deny any reasonably interpreted right conferred by the Second Amendment.  They do call  for common-sense regulations of the kind we have applied to automobiles  and tobacco. Regulations that recognize that having a gun today is not only a private matter; it is a matter of public health.  Let’s act on what we know to be true.  Let’s demand that legislators, business leaders, everyone do the same.  Let’s start saving lives. We can do this.

*This an edited transcript of a talk I gave to a rally of "Moms Demand Action" in Cincinnati, Ohio on March 25  2018

"'Equity' Works as a Mandate to Discriminate"

 So reads the provocative and mistaken headline to an opinion piece posted in The Wall Street Journal on March 5, authored by Professor Emeritus Lipson of the University of Chicago.

 

He states the issue this way:  “There is a big difference between equal treatment and equal outcomes.  Equality means equal treatment, unbiased competition and impartially judged outcomes.  Equity means equal outcomes, achieved if necessary by unequal treatment, biased competition and preferential judging.”

 

Professor Lipson founds his opinion piece on a fundamental error.  “Equity” does not mean “equal outcomes” not, at least, for me.  What equity means and requires is equal opportunity.

 

And, yes, to test whether equal opportunities actually are being provided, we must measure how outcomes compare.

 

For example, if one finds, as we have, that African-Americans entering a corporation do so with every available test measure and interviews showing comparable likelihood to succeed, and if we find African-Americans are advancing at a significantly lower rate than their white peers, one has to ask, have they been provided equal opportunity?  Have they received the mentoring support, the advocacy, the placement in positions which offer the best opportunities to enhance growth and provide visibility of superior performance?

 

There is, to be sure, a challenging question as to what represents equal opportunity and how should it be applied.  There are tough choices here.  There is no dismissing that fact.

 

One emerges in college admissions.  On average, the SAT or ACT scores of African-Americans are lower than whites or Asian-Americans.  If admissions were based entirely or very heavily on SAT scores, the percentage of African-Americans being admitted to so-called premiere schools would be lower than they are today.  Does the assessment of what is “equal opportunity” allow for the admission of an African-American student qualified highly in every respect than perhaps his or her SAT score relative to a white or Asian-American applicant justify admitting the African-American?

 

My answer to this is yes.

 

Does my reaching this conclusion take into account the multitude of challenges faced by African-Americans over time which in fact amount to a lack of equal opportunity?

 

Again, yes.

 

To deny that this is a balancing act would be to deny reality.  But it is a balancing act we are called on to make in order to provide equal opportunity to the best of our ability.

 

 

The Criteria for Assessing the Rightness of An Organization Design

 Neil McElroy, a former CEO of P&G and who also served as Secretary of Defense for President Eisenhower, once  described the two basic tests of the rightness of any organization design this way:  to what extent does it 1) advance the growth of leadership brands and 2) provide an environment where women and men can grow in their abilities and satisfaction from the work they do. 

John Gardner in his magisterial book, "Self-Renewal" captures the timeless essence of the second test. 

"We shall discover that what counts is not the size of the organization but the patterns of organizations.  It is possible to continue achieving economies of scale and still give attention to human needs.  Too often in the past we have designed systems to meet all kinds of exacting requirements except the most important requirement of all—that they contribute to the fulfillment and growth of the participants.  We must discover how to design organizations and technological systems in such a way that individual talents are used to the maximum and human satisfaction and dignity are preserved.  We must learn to make technology serve man not only in the end product but in the doing".

 

Twenty Years Later—The Debate About "Political Correctness" Continues, As Well It Should

 If I needed any further evidence that few things are new, I gained it as I went through some of my wife, Francie’s old files.  One is on the subject of political correctness, with various clippings from 1991.  I could be reading them today.

 

The Wall Street Journal carries an editorial:  “Political Correct Newsrooms" which tells the story of how Juan Williams, a black journalist, still present today on Fox News, had “been taken hostage by the Washington Post”  because he was “saying nice things about Clarence Thomas” who, at the time, was being considered for the Supreme Court.  He was being accused of sexual harassment by Professor Anita Hill.

We see Thomas Gephardt, a conservative columnist on the Cincinnati Enquirer, lamenting “political correctness at UC.”  One professor at the university had recently written a guest column “about the effort of academic/afro-centrists to turn history upside-down to get across their point of view.”

 

Describing what is going on in university campuses, Gephardt wrote that, “taken together, they reflect a profound change in the tradition of free, open civil discourse.  How ironic that the once enslaved universities of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are rejoicing to see their intellectual shackles loosened.  Who would have imagined that new, politically correct shackles would one day be visited upon by their American counterparts?”

 

There was this poem entitled “The Politically Correct Christmas.” 

 

            No welcoming crash in the village squares; 

            It went the way of the school-day prayer.

            A multi-cultural spending spree

            Is what Christmas is turning out to be.

 

Followed by:

 

            Santa’s features are pictured in a bright rosy hue,

            But minorities require black or brown too.

            That stump of a pipe in his teeth has to go;

            It’s offensive to all non-smokers below.

 

Finally, here is the conservative national columnist, James J. Kilpatrick.

 

He writes, “There is something fundamentally ridiculous in the new orthodoxy of the politically correct.  In today’s academic world, words do summersaults.  ‘Diversity’ means ‘sameness.’  Free speech carries a heavy cost.

 

The general idea in these intellectual zoos is that all cultures are equal.  There is no longer such a value as ‘merit.’  The rule applies to language.  It also applies to music, with the result that Mozart is no better than rap.”

 

And still from Kilpatrick, "On many campuses, students risk suspension or expulsion if they are heard voicing any ‘discriminatory’ or ‘disparaging’ remarks about another student’s race, sex, religion, color, creed, disability, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry or age. Maybe the process of corruption will soon run its course, but don’t bet on it.  Those who love our Western inheritanceness had better get off their rumps and fight.”

All of this twenty years ago. 

 

*****

 

So what, as we are hearing almost the same issues today, twenty years later, do I view as a correct position on this issue?

In a word, the issue is complex. 

White privilege is a reality. Racial bias, at least for the majority of us including me, is a reality. And as we have seen more clearly than ever during the past year, racial injustice is a reality.  

Yet, we are making a major error—moral and intellectual—if we allow these realities to justify allowing an unexamined assertion by a minority that he or she has been the victim of racial bias to lead to conclusions and actions which impugn and deny the value and rights of another person, including the right to free speech. 

We have seen that recently at Smith College where an unfounded and on examination false accusation that a couple of people were racist has resulted in harm to them in their employability and state of mind. As has been true on many other campuses, discussion on the merits of the case is being inhibited by an inappropriately morally tinged sense of "political correctness" which is impeding getting at the truth. As a Smith Professor said (as reported by the "New York Times"-2/25/2021), "My impression is that if you're on the wrong side of issues of identity politics, you're not just mistaken, you're evil". 

I fear "political correctness" is running off the rails. We hear discussion of whether statues memorializing Thomas Jefferson should be taken down because he owned slaves. Reading Shakespeare is questioned just a reading Huckleberry Finn was generations ago. Consciousness extends to the laughable as we read that Hasbro toys will be rebranding Mr. Potato Head as a "gender-neutral" head. What comes next? Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse being conflated to a gender-neutral mouse? 

There is great danger in all this. It can leave us feeling that we are doing something substantive to address genuine racial and gender inequities when we are in fact dealing with superficial tokens of progress. 

Even worse, it delegitimizes the existence of  the very real, genuine racial and gender biases and thus inhibits broad and sustained action to confront them. 

*******************************************

 

I want to turn back briefly to an issue raised by James Kilpatrick in his previously cited column and the related issue being debated today on the importance of highlighting awareness of  the contribution of African-Americans  to our Nations history and culture. 

I deeply believe we have to be very intent in gaining a deep understanding of the history and the cultures of other people, importantly African-Americans whose history we have so long ignored.  Knowing this   history is vital if we are to understand what brought us to where we are today. Above all in recognizing the vestiges of slavery.  But there is more than that. Years ago, we didn’t recognize the role of music originating in Africa to current-day music. We did not recognize the role of the spirituals which lifted enslaved men and women.  We didn’t know of, let alone appreciate, the insights and inspiration to be gained from far too-long uncelebrated and unrecognized Black writers and novelists.

 

I say all of that,  believing there is such a thing as “merit.”  Some writing is richer and more meaningful than others. However, this quality of "merit" is not inexorably differentiated by race or nationality.  Some writing is better than other writing in describing human nature and the challenge and rewards of life.  One thing we have discovered over the past 20 years is that “merit” has many origins and smany sources and it carries greater or lesser meaning for different audiences. 

 

To conclude, I am increasing concerned that our urgently needed and deeper appreciation of the reality of racial and social inequities is too often leading to a premature, unexamined, and morally self-satisfying responses to  alleged incidents of  racial bias.  We must remain open to other points of view as we search for "truth" in how to confront the existential issues of racial and social justice. 

 

At the same time, we should never allow the pejorative labeling of exposing the reality of "white privilege"by some as "political correctness" to dissuade us from revealing the "truth”of this reality.