Rise and Blog and Grind

Rise, Fear, and Grind

Millennials are paranoid androids, driven mad by fear broadcast straight into our brains since birth. Social programming has made us terrified of everyone and everything. Perhaps this was inevitable for the generation raised by people told to hide under their school desks as nuclear hellfire rained down from on high.

What else could be behind the phenomenon of helicopter parenting, in which a mom or dad stands overtop their child while the kid plays -- or tries to play -- on the local playground? Why else would parents display such behavior? Because we're the Dateline Generation: we grew up with every show on TV telling us that you WILL be kidnapped by anyone at anytime. Everyone is a suspect. No one is to be trusted. Take that: a shot of terror straight to the heart. Sleep tight.

I talked with my mom recently about why she'd never allow her grandkids the same freedoms she allowed me and my brother. We rode our bikes a half mile to the neighborhood pool and stayed there all day in the summer. No cell phone. No beeper. Just two kids out there, playing wiffle ball and swimming for nine hours a day. No way, my mom said emphatically, would I let kids do that today. It's too dangerous. The world has gone mad. It's never been more dangerous to be alive.

This is hardly a unique view of society in the early years of the 21st century. Almost six in ten U.S. voters said in 2016 that crime had worsened over the previous eight years, when in fact the country had seen a double digit drop in violent and property crime since 2008. Not just a slight dip in criminal activity -- a marked drop (the profitable mass incarceration industry plays an outsized role here, but that's a topic for another meandering blog post).

The data is painfully clear: the violent crime rate for rape, sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault dropped from 80 victimizations per 1,000 people in the US in 1994, to 19 people per 1,000 in 2010. Yes, crime defines many forgotten communities in the United States -- most of them poor with large populations of people of color -- but overall, the nation is far safer today than it was a quarter century ago. That much is inarguable.

And it should come as little surprise that suburb dwellers have the most warped view of crime rates. Why do you think people fled to the suburbs in the first place?

The provably incorrect belief that crime rates had skyrocketed since 2008 was quite naturally more prevalent among Trump voters, 78 percent of whom said crime had worsened during the Obama era. Who could possibly believe criminal activity had plummeted when cable news -- particularly Fox News, which shapes reality for an entire generation of Americans -- broadcasts nonstop footage of the US besieged by crime, by unlawful immigrants and radical feminists and student protesters and Antifa super soldiers and black folks protesting police killings?

TV and the internet don't just create reality: they are reality. Lived experience doesn't matter. Media is what's real, and media shows us a never ending loop of American carnage. Americans' overestimation of crime rates in 2016 was nothing new. We always think the world is way more dangerous than it really is.

Hence, millennials hover forever over their children, terrified to their core that they too could end up on Dateline as the mom or dad of the child who was abducted. It's only when I consider this phenomenon that I realize how steeped in fear we are as a people. Maybe that shouldn't come as a surprise: fear drives us toward a quiet, comfortable suburban life. Fear drives us to take jobs we hate. Fear ensures we don't lend support to people who so desperately need it, terrified that we might lose the little that we've gained (read Rules for Radicals for more on the plight of the Have A Little Want Mores). We've received the message loud and clear: Get out of the road if you want to grow old.

I'm not immune to the bone-crushing fear pulsating at the center of our culture. I find myself hovering over my kids at the playground for fear of being the crying dad on the local news begging for the safe return of his kid, the dad whose life was ruined by a moment of inattention. I fear that the proverbial shoe will drop at any moment, shattering me and my family. I fear the unknowable. I'm aware of fear's effects on my everyday decisions though, and maybe that's good. Maybe that'll help me keep the fear from my mind, which malfunctions when terror takes hold. Maybe.

Rise, Surrounded by the Politics of Worms, and Grind

There's a part in Pink Floyd's "Hey You," when in the midst of our protagonist's devolution, we hear what can only be described as the sound of a drill -- or many drills, whirring together beneath the temporarily quieted drums and guitar.

This drilling comes right after the line, "and the worms ate into his brain," and right before the protagonist, Pink, cries out from his self-imposed existential isolation. His plea is shouted at everyone, at anyone, at you, the listener. "Can you help me?" Pink yells. "Hey you, don't tell me there's no hope at all. Together we stand, divided we fall."

Pink's desperate plea comes just before his final mutation into a monstrous reactionary, a nazi, becoming the thing that killed his father in the Second World War. The drilling, in fact, was the burrowing of the worms into Pink's brain, the representation of moral, psychological, and spiritual rot taking over his mind even as he calls out for help from behind the wall he has helped build over his tumultuous life.

Every one of us knows someone who has had the worms drill into their brain. All of us are familiar with the phenomenon on a deeply personal level: a friend or family member, perhaps an acquaintance, has let fear and hatred take over, allowing a corrosive mix of bigotry and ignorance override his better senses. The person controlled by the worms perceives nothing rationally, and makes no sober-minded decisions. The worm-infested brain is precisely the opposite: it's drunk on hatred borne from personal experience, learned prejudice, and the toxic sway of our Misinformation Age. The person whose brain has been invaded by decay makes us sick. Such a person would be worthy of our pity if we didn't loathe their very existence. They're disgusting, wretched, heinous additions to the human race.

The dark thoughts come quickly and without apology: the world would be better without them.

I buck at the idea of changing hearts and minds in this Misinformation Age, largely because the internet provides us with a justification for any behavior, political or otherwise. Tribalism and polarization have reached warp speed as everyone gains access to the internet, the uncensored collection of all human knowledge that has been warped into an unstoppable weapon for enemies of humanity, whose political ideologies thrive on chaos, confusion, and mistrust. How can one's mind be changed if the internet can always tell them that they're not wrong to hate and fear a certain group? When everyone is right, no one is right. Truth is unknowable when everything is true. The internet -- the final piece of the postmodern puzzle -- concludes our collective journey toward objective notions of reality, of truth, of human nature and morality. There are no changing hearts and minds in this environment. An internet connection guarantees this.

But, if you're like the reader of this little blog who recently told me that my writing has made him more interested in dying and dying quickly, there's more: I think we can and should tell our worm-infested loved ones that they are, in fact, ruled by internal decay. It's quite a remarkable spectacle to see your once-apolitical aunt or uncle or mom or dad blame their financial struggles on undocumented families scraping by on serf wages while being hunted by jackbooted ICE agents. It's surreal to see your buddy abandon all reason and decency and back a low life running for a powerful office. And they should know how you feel, what you see in the terrible light of day -- that you're deeply concerned by what they've become as the worms creep in through cable TV and radio and the internet (if you watch closely, you can see the worms slither out of the cable news anchor's mouth and into the viewer's brain, and if you mute it, you can hear the drilling). It's hard, I know, but we owe it to friends and family to tell them in so many words that they are firmly in the grips of the disease the corroded Pink from the inside out, because the worst part about the worm-controlled mind is that the owner of the mind doesn't know -- or doesn't want to know -- that fear and hate have crippled her critical thinking faculties. The worms are sneaky like that.

None of this is meant to abdicate responsibility for furthering the anti-human agenda that has plunged its razor-sharp fangs into the soft underbelly of our politics. We cannot simply blame it on the worms. The person who shrugs as fellow citizens in the richest nation in history die because they lack access to basic health care should be called out for his callousness, and for supporting the vile reactionaries who ensure such suffering persists. No one should be allowed to hide behind the worms, as The New York Times permitted in its recent Nazi Next Door puff piece. Decent people should instead confront these happy purveyors of hatred and tell them that they have been overtaken, and that their capacity for good has been eroded by the nightmarish belief system they have come to embrace. Tell them not to be a pawn. Tell them to refuse to give in to the sweet little lies whispered in their ear by the rich and powerful. Allowing the worms to make a home in one's mind is a choice. Rejecting the worms is a choice.

I find Pink's words, however tortured, comforting in the face of such political, social, and existential horror. As loathsome as Pink becomes in The Wall's final few songs, calling for ethnic cleansing and a very British version of MAGA, we shouldn't forget what he bellows after the worms -- the rot -- invade his mind: "Can you help me?"

Rise, Pay to Believe, and Grind

"Gaga: Five Foot Two," the documentary ostensibly about the making of Lady Gaga's latest album, opens with a home video of the global goddess pop star in workout clothes, milling about the kitchen while lunch is prepared. She wears no makeup. Her disheveled hair is up. She is utterly without glamour. Lady Gaga is a person, chatting and smiling. She is stripped of her otherworldliness.

It was a moment that made me equal parts uncomfortable and relieved. Yes, it was nice to see that the high-fashion electro-pop queen and fame monster was indeed a human being, but the shattering of her public image -- the way I perceived her until now -- was disconcerting. It made me squirm in a very literal sense.

Because I realized that I had paid to believe in a certain image of Lady Gaga, and that the willingness to pay to believe in someone or something is far from an isolate phenomenon. It infiltrates every aspect of modern life. Media and art could not exist without it.

I thought back, after finishing the altogether depressing "Five Foot Two," to other instances in which my illusions were dispelled, broken up all at once. I recalled the time I saw an old, yellowed photo of a young David Bowie ironing his pants in a modest apartment. There's the star with a million faces engaged in the daily drudgery of making one's clothes not look like shit. Ziggy Stardust waiting for the iron to heat up. The man who made performance art out of his death making sure to get that last wrinkle, right there by the back pocket. Just like you and me. Not you, Bowie. Not you.

I was sent reeling shortly after college when I accidentally found in an online search that James Maynard Keenan, the Tool frontman who had become a godlike figure for me in high school and college, ran a vineyard on the west coast. This can't be, I thought. James Maynard Keenan would never do something so normal or practical. He's surely far too busy experimenting with myriad drugs, creating transcendental art meant to enrich my life and help me understand the impersonal universe in which we exist. But no. He's a regular dude who happens to enjoy wine. Far from being beyond human, Maynard James Keenan -- like Bowie at his ironing board -- was indeed very human.

I had paid to believe. I had spent wheelbarrows of cash to believe that these artists were what I wanted them to be: explainers, examiners, knowers, synthesizers of human knowledge. I had paid to believe because I wanted to believe.

Who hasn't paid to believe in something? The short answer: no one. Sports fans pay to believe that their team's success means something. They fork over their cash and emotional investment to believe that the players and coaches and owners care about them, the fans. They don't, of course. There is no innate meaning in wins or losses. A game -- any game, anywhere, anytime -- is without meaning beyond the competition that ensues. The outcome doesn't matter. Nothing rides on a championship except for some undefinable sense of pride in a city or state. The fan's life won't change in any meaningful way. The city's prospects won't improve in any concrete manner. The players who won the title will soon be in another city, playing for other fans who pay to believe that the players care about them. The team's owner will pay proper lip service while he rakes in mountains of money from the middle and working class, all the time wearing a shit-eating grin at the realization that a fan will always pay to believe. Sports fans tether their self worth to the outcomes of the night's game. They're so willing to pay to believe that they'll make themselves miserable if things go wrong. What a steep price.

Many of us who have mistakenly believed that a single person can bring about good for our friends, family, and neighbors have paid to believe in a politician. They dispatch their slick ads with finely tailored imagery appealing to our demons and angels and they ask, with a smile and a nod, for our money. Want to believe in something bigger than you? Want to believe in me? Then chip in. Pay the toll and you're part of the movement. I paid to believe in Barack Obama in 2008. A young, naive version of myself saw the U.S. senator as a transformational figure, as The One, as Neo come to end the reign of the evil machines that suck us dry. I was happy -- thrilled -- to pay to believe in Obama. I wanted so desperately to believe in his potential to change everything -- to singlehandedly turn around the 10,000-ton tanker that is our rigged economic system -- that I willingly donned blinders and paid to believe. I was a broke local reporter trying to save enough money for an engagement ring, but I never questioned the decision: I had to believe, so I paid up.

The $10 billion self-help industry exists because people of every creed and color are holding out their fists of cash, begging to pay to believe. They're desperate for answers, for advice on how to stop thinking or feeling a certain way, for suggestions and strategies on how not be miserable. I've been there, stuck in a dark place, hoping that I could pay to believe that someone -- anyone -- had the answers for what ailed me. And for every good-hearted person selling advice for those who will pay to believe, there are a thousand hucksters and snake oil salesmen cashing in on this phenomenon. They know, like the owner of the professional sports franchise, that people want desperately to believe that someone out there holds the answers. Someone can get them out of this funk. Someone can unveil the secret to getting rich. Someone can cast out the anxiety and depression that ravages you from the inside out. Someone can infuse their lives with meaning. The answers can't possibly be within myself, we say, so let's pay to see if this smiling guy in a nice suit has what I need.

All organized religion thrives on folks paying to believe in something. If you really believe in the mission of the church, you're told, then you'll put some cash in the plate when it zips down your row on Sunday morning (though a personal check will do). If you believe, you'll pay. This is of course a barebones version of how the message is delivered, and much of the money in those offering trays goes to indisputably good causes in a nation where the rich have shredded the social safety net: food and clothes for those without, medicine for the sick, assistance for the elderly. But all this hinges on a people's willingness to pay to believe in the holiness of a house of worship. They must first believe that they're in a House of God, doing the creator's bidding, before any of these good works can come to pass. And then they have to pay up.

Why we pay to believe is hardly a mystery: from sports to self help to religion and politics, art and entertainment, we pay to believe in something beyond ourselves. We pay to believe that there is meaning in life, that we aren't cosmic accidents stranded on a lonely blue marble in the middle of a galactic nowhere, born only to die with all memory of our existence wiped from history an eye blink after we're gone. You can hear it if you listen closely: the collective cry of humanity begging to be shown the reason we're alive, right now, on this planet, with all its various horrors and beauty intertwined in our short, warm moment of consciousness. We don't have much, but we'll give it all if it means we can believe.

Maybe the meaning can be found in the pursuit of understanding any of these mysteries. Maybe we're wasting our time paying to believe when the experience of living is the meaning we seek. Lady Gaga, after all, is only human.

Rise, Get the News Dumped on You, and Grind

We like the weekend. The weekend is good. It's when we're happiest. Of this our rulers are well aware.

The weekend and its fleeting reprieve from the rigors of the workweek has been weaponized against us. The collective desire to simply live, not work, has been contemptuously deployed to ensure we'll not pay attention to the day's most pressing issues -- decisions that impact our lives.

The Friday news dump is a cynical arrow in the political class's quiver of horrors that takes full advantage of our couple days of not doing a job we hate to earn a little money to buy stuff we don't need. And the worst part: it's become so normalized -- so accepted as a matter of how government operates -- that we scoff at the very concept of the Friday news dump. It's a tragic way of coping with the idea that our rulers strive so much to ensure we're civically and politically disconnected that they carefully schedule when the week's most important developments are made public.

Whether it's announcing major policy changes affecting millions of families or pardoning a sheriff who willfully ignored child rape or firing a powerful government official, big news happens on Friday afternoons for a reason: people are clocking out after five days of sometimes hard, sometimes tedious, almost always underpaid work. They're tired. They're ready for a respite from what could've been a nightmarishly monotonous or grueling work week. They're done engaging after engaging all week.

Then the news drops, and what would've been an all-consuming story on a Monday morning is only noticed by those who are paid to notice -- activists, political operatives, journalists. These compensated attention payers can scream from their social media rooftops all they want. Workers are on their way home, ready as all hell to disconnect from the ever-churning ocean of political discontent in our age of banal dystopia. We live in the worst possible world, we say, let us have the weekend.

The carefully orchestrated Friday news dump, of course, is not an isolated phenomenon. It fits in with having elections on Tuesdays -- when working folks are, well, working -- and scheduling political debates during the parts of the day and week when people are least likely to watch TV. Devising ways in which information can be disseminated during the time of the week when people are likely not paying attention is an effective way of privatizing public debate -- to keep the unwashed hoards on the sideline while the rich and powerful decide what's best for working families. Probably this is how austerity economic policy -- a deeply unpopular proposal among every segment of the U.S. population -- came to be. Arrange the release of news to effectively remove the voices of those who will be destroyed by inhumane austerity measures and, like magic, we have a government run by people who want the public to hate the government.

The news dump, an objectively un-democratic tool of the powerful, doesn't stand alone as a way to make sure the broad public remains uninformed and disengaged with how things are run in what cable pundits often call a democracy. The news dump is a small part of a larger campaign to ensure we are not citizens, but consumers. A citizen cares what happens. A citizen believes she has a stake in government policy. A citizen demands that government bends to her will, and the will of other ordinary, workaday folks. A consumer, meanwhile, shops and consumes and minds his business as he tries to fill the void with meaningless shit. The consumer has no time for politics or public policy. There are things to buy before we die.

Our rulers fear an informed citizenry more than anything else, because an informed electorate will call the rulers on their mountains of bullshit. Consent must not be gained, the rulers say, but manufactured. And if molding that widespread consent requires the most important news to be released in the waning hours of the work week, so be it. Information repression and manipulation are key dance steps in doing the propaganda.

The Friday afternoon news dump is a wicked development in the elimination of public discourse in deciding local, state, and federal policy. It's not funny or cute or wily; it should be seen as a naked attack on the attempts of working people to have a say -- any say -- in what goes on here at home, and what's done abroad in our name.

The Friday news dump should be seen a political assault on all of us: left, right, and all shades of middle. There would be no such thing as a news dump in a functioning democracy run by those committed to basic democratic principles. We have this hideous tradition because our rulers have nothing but contempt for us. Internalize that message and recall it next time they dump news on us at 5 p.m. on a Friday. Get angry about it. The ruling class deserves nothing but our fury.

Rise in a Technological Dystopia and Grind

"Society is binding," the crude Hollywood stereotype of a pothead muses in the 2012 horror film, Cabin In The Woods. "It’s filling in the cracks with concrete."

Marty, one of the movie's smart and poignant archetypal characters, says this in response to a friend's teasing question: "Is society crumbling?" Marty rejects this notion of societal destruction: technology's proliferation and evolution, he charges, makes him long for "one god damn weekend where you can’t globally position my ass."

Who could -- with a straight face -- argue with Marty? Everything we say, everything we do on the internet, every channel we watch and link we click and person with whom we associate is recorded and stored. It's used to sell us shit we don't need, exploiting our fears and insecurities in ads tailored just for you. Every crack has been filled. From the moment you wake every morning, you generate information -- data -- used by corporations and governments to monitor and manipulate you in every possible way.

No one is immune. To our technological overlords, we are but the green lines of code humming across computer screens in The Matrix.

I told my mom on a recent Sunday afternoon that I'd like to clean the white couch we have in our living room. It's dingy after a few years of use, complete with a stain or three from the children who weren't around when my wife and I thought a white couch was a good idea. My mom said yes, it's time. This thing looks ragged. I'm sure there's an upholstery service that can come by and clean it for a decent price, she said. It won't be too much. Yeah, I said, I need to do that soon.

Sixty seconds hadn't passed when my iPhone rang -- it was a number I didn't recognize. I answered. A robotic woman's voice spoke to me: "Has your furniture seen better days?"

I felt my pores open. I looked at my mom as if I had received a ransom call.

The voice then advertised a local upholstery cleaning service. I quickly hung up and stared at my phone in silent disbelief. I thought back to when my wife was pregnant for the second time, when she told me every few weeks that she received automated calls about baby strollers and cribs and discount infant clothes, along with a truck full of mail about sales on various baby stuff. I brushed it off as a coincidence. I had read horror stories about what companies could do with the microphone in a smartphone, but I had made sure that the microphones in our iPhones were switched off.

That's why the upholstery call chilled me so thoroughly. My own phone spied on me. It told someone, somewhere, what I wanted. It recorded a conversation in the privacy of my home. Perhaps I'm a dolt for being stunned. The authorities can and do spy on anyone and everyone with an internet-connected device. This happens every second of every day. Turns out that Steve Jobs' stupid toys for adults were the missing piece of the happy, complacent authoritarian state.

There's no rolling back this filling of the cracks. Congressional Republicans, while Americans fretted about having their health care ripped from them, killed a regulation in March that barred internet service providers from selling our browsing histories without our permission. The logic of capital -- that it must expand or die -- says that this filling of the cracks must continue, and rapidly (it's that nature of capital that necessarily means good government policy will be opposed at every turn in our waking nightmare of late-stage capitalism, as money finds new and harmful ways to grow). This personal data, telling corporations and governments what we like and dislike, is far too valuable to keep safe. Technology's never-blinking eye won't pass up an opportunity to violate your privacy, to make you a ravenous consumer -- a dead-eyed thing born only to consume.

"Rise and see that Facebook ads know you better than you know yourself, move to the wilderness, cower in your cabin and grind," I wrote in 96 Ways of Rise and Grind. And even then, in my cabin, some faceless corporation out there knows I need a flannel shirt, or a blanket, or another tin of coffee. The cracks, after all, have been filled.

Rise, Falsely Equate and Grind

A surefire way to be taken very seriously by very serious and thoughtful humans is to analyze current events -- from pop culture to politics to war and economics -- through the prism of equivalency.

Here's how to use such analysis to your benefit so that everyone standing in your circle, smartly sipping from their smart drinks, dressed in smart outfits, will nod with approval.

1. Even if you disagree with a lukewarm take, acknowledge that the take haver has the right to have her take. This is what people mistakenly believe to be free speech.

2. Start a sentence with, "While I see where you're coming from," then throw it in reverse, feel the transmission buckle, and find a way to say that someone who would vehemently disagree with this take is also very wrong.

3. Ramble a bit and smile. Be self deprecating. Keep talking about how everyone is wrong about everything, and maybe no one knows anything about anything.

4. Try to wrap up your take with something like, "So I get what you're saying and you're right on this point." But here's the kicker, the critical ingredient in the very serious soup: falsely equate this person's stance with the equal and opposite, because -- as the news has taught us -- there are two sides to every story, both being equally right and wrong. This is what smart folks like to call discourse.

False equivalency will help you make friends. You won't alienate anyone, anywhere, especially among groups of people whose self perception hinges on the ability to cast off all opinions outside a very narrow mainstream of cultural and political thought. These good folks say a Pepe the frog emoji is just like a rose emoji because they are opposite. And therefore, equal.

Like I said: smart. Almost too smart.

Father John Misty, the apocalypse-obsessed Jim Morrison of the Internet Age whose latest release, "Pure Comedy," is quite good, has a musical dedication to false equivalency on the track, "Two Wildly Different Perspectives." I get the gist of the song: our political culture is rife with hatred and fear due to extreme polarization that has divided states, counties, cities, and families, while creating two realities in which liberals and conservatives exist. In one reality, climate change will kill us all. In the other, it's a grand international hoax perpetrated by the Chinese.

I liked this song until, well, I didn't. My backlash against "Two Wildly Different Perspectives" is complete, as I've come to see it as a crowning artistic achievement in analyzing the world through that old, reliable false equivalency prism: the laziest possible analysis.

Let's start with the middle stanza.

One side says "Kill 'em all."

The other says "Line those killers up against the wall."

But either way some blood is shed

Thanks to our cooperation

On both sides

I'm going to take the brave stance that killing is bad, even if you disagree with someone. This is a revelation to you, I know. Your world: it's rocked. Is there perfect equivalence between someone who shouts the first line -- kill 'em all -- and someone, with passions aroused, calls for the killing of the killers? The phrase, "Kill 'em all," connotes an otherness of the group in the crosshairs. Them, after all, is not us. This is a targeting of a group of people because of who they are -- perhaps it's their collective religious identification or their skin color or their country of origin. Maybe it's their socioeconomic status. Maybe it's their political affiliation. The long and bloody history of Kill 'Em All is, well, long and bloody. Is this not the rallying cry for every atrocity ever committed? Has there ever been a massacre of innocents without the call to kill 'em all? It's as ugly and devilish as human beings can get.

A longing for justice is innate. It cuts across cultures and eras. Desiring punishment for those who wrong the innocent other seems like something baked into our DNA. And in this song, it's simply the other side of the proverbial coin: the equal and opposite of the monsters who murder and destroy with the hope to kill 'em all. I reject the premise that those who want to kill the killers are the same as those who want to kill for power, or because a group looks different, or speaks differently, or because God told them to. It's true -- as the good Father says -- that "either way some blood is shed," but is all bloodshed created equal? Revenge fantasies, both in movie and book form, are based on the idea that these two acts are not the same. We know this in our marrow. One can avoid expressions of unfiltered glee when the killers are killed while recognizing the somber reality that bad people who did bad things were put "up against the wall" and now cease to exist. Though the lines between right and wrong is often so blurry it's barely visible, equating these two groups and their violent acts is not just morally squishy. I think it's wrong.

One side says "Man, take what's yours!"

The other says "Live on no more than you can afford."

But either way we just possess

And everyone ends up with less

On both sides

The song's final verse makes me break out in hives. It makes me fall to the floor and convulse and speak in tongues. This economic summation isn't so much falsely equivalent as it is fundamentally inaccurate. Father John Misty, with whom I attended high school in the late-90s (I'm very important), doesn't seem to have a firm grasp of the key differences in economic visions on the left and right.

The summary of conservative economic thought is on point: Greed is good. Self interest is the only virtue. The earth was made to be destroyed for monetary gain. The world would be a better place if everyone pursued land and money without abandon. Got mine, fuck you. The free market, in all its glory, will reward those who work hard and long and punish those who don't. Father John Misty, you've channeled all the great libertarian thinkers. Good job, good effort.

That leaves us with the good Father's second line about those who preach to never spend more than you have. This doesn't reflect leftist economic theory as much as it does the thinking of my conservative uncle who tells me the government should be run like a household (and other elementary school bromides screamed at him through Fox News). Perhaps Mr. Misty is trying his damnedest to channel the Karl Marx quote, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." That lyrical translation fell short. No, wait. It utterly failed, fell on its face, and knocked out its front teeth. Instead of presenting the opposition view to the "take what's yours" crowd, this line offers a slightly less brutal version of conservative economic theory. It's advice on how not to go into debt. It's not a counter to the laissez faire mania reflected in the first line. I suppose there's no false equivalency here. It somehow falls short of that.

The stupefying meaning of the second line invalidates the fourth line, which moans about no matter what is done economically, every single person on earth will wind up with less than they had. This is untrue in a couple ways: if everyone follows the directions of the second line -- to live on no more than one can afford -- those with very little won't see their lives change in any dramatic way. People with little or no access to credit, who have no savings -- this is most of us -- and who scrape by on a paycheck that never seems to budge are doing precisely what the song instructs. They aren't living beyond their means because if they did, they'd be homeless or dead. If everyone obeyed the selfish dictates of the first line, almost everyone would be left with less -- except those at the very top of the economic food chain. Wealth compounds and accumulates, creating yawning disparities that have reached unprecedented levels in this still-new century. Almost all new wealth today goes to the One Percent, rich folks marry each other, the wealthiest among us are buying political power in ways we've never seen, and the ruling class has money that makes money -- way more than you and I could ever earn in our 9-to-5.

They are, in other words, taking what's theirs. And they're bucking Mr. Misty's economic forecast. The rewrite of this song would end with, "On one side."

Rise, Virtue Signal and Grind

I attended a protest this week at the U.S. Capitol. I was among several thousand people gathered on a steamy D.C. summer evening to speak out against a health-care bill designed to strip our friends and family of their health coverage.

It was near the end of said protest -- as the headline speakers filed out with their well-dressed posses -- that I snapped a selfie of me and my wife. The whole exercise took about seven seconds: we turned away from the crowd, took the picture, then turned back to the labor union official urging people to confront their senators at upcoming July 4 parades.

I posted that selfie on Twitter, as one does, and was almost immediately accused of "virtue signaling," an increasingly common term used on social media to chastise people who engage with society and subsequently tell the world that they are in fact engaging with society.

Here's the definition of virtue signaling, in case you're interested: "The action or practice of publicly expressing opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one's good character or the moral correctness of one's position on a particular issue."

Seems straightforward. And fair. That's precisely what I was doing when I posted the photos of the health-care rally on the steps of American political power. I made the trek down to D.C. in the oppressive heat precisely because I believe I'm morally correct in opposing an abominable health-care bill that nakedly strips vulnerable populations of their care so the country's most fabulously wealthy families can have a fat tax cut. Everyone has to take their position in the class war. I've taken mine.

Why else would I have attended the protest? Because I wanted to be fair and balanced? Because I think the GOP's attack on my parents' health care is maybe a good thing that I should support? No. I went because I believe I'm right. I take political positions not for something to argue about at Thanksgiving, but because I think they are the right policies to support. The same could be said for -- oh, I don't know -- every single person who has ever supported a policy, politician, or party.

But here's the funny thing about virtue signaling: the folks on social media who decry virtue signaling are, in fact, signaling their virtue. They don't do this in the same way I do because many of these people don't believe in anything and fancy themselves above politics -- removed from the muck and mire of using government to enforce a political agenda. The anti-virtue signaling crowd believes it's virtuous to look down on politics, that dirty word. My response would be that no one is too good for politics, and if you think you are, you're likely a privileged asshole or a fucking moron who doesn't know he's a fucking moron.

The point of decrying virtue signaling is to tear down those idiots at that protest with their stupid t-shirts and ridiculous signs. Those people think they're making a difference, they think they're effecting change. Worse -- the most unforgivable part of the whole charade -- is that they think they're better than me, the anti-signaler says.

I'm committed to continue virtue signaling at every opportunity, in part because I hope someone disconnected from the political scene might see someone taking a stance and wonder why that person is so committed to that stance. And maybe that person will read up on a topic, and maybe she'll talk to her friends and family about it, and maybe she'll engage with politics that affect real people in real ways. Maybe that person will sever ties with the anti-virtue signaling masses who have no belief system, care about nothing and no one, and get aroused by calling out those who do. Part of my social media shtick is to be some sort of nihilist. I'm not, in fact, a nihilist, but people who think of themselves as far too good for politics are nihilists without equal.

You might ask if I believe I'm better than those who hate virtue signaling. My answer is a short one: yes, of course I do. I'm virtuous.

Rise, Get Manipulated and Grind

Frail children, gasping for breath, convulsing in the dirt during a gas attack in Syria. A cop in Minnesota firing his gun into a family's car. Police ripping people from their wheelchairs as they protest a health-care bill that would leave them without care so a multimillionaire can throw a few more coins on his mountain of money.

Twenty-first century life, in which we stare at screens of various sizes from the time our sleepy eyes open to the time they close, has a distinct feature that is unavoidable even for those aware of it: we are bombarded with images meant to manipulate the way we feel, act, and think.

While we're not the first generation to be pelted with images tailored to create irrational people making irrational decisions -- rationality is the Big Lie at the center of the so-called free market, in case you missed it -- the volume of imagery has become all consuming, filling every crevice of society. Americans average nearly 11 hours of screen time every day. Square away work and sleep, and we spend 86 percent of our free time using mobile devices or staring like the undead into the TV, according to research released last year. Screen time has invaded every part of daily life. No one would deny that.

It's not farfetched to say that our primary function as human beings today is to consume media through screens large and small. It's in this sleek, friendly technological nightmare that we're so easily manipulated -- shaped -- by the pictures our brain processes. Video and still shots of Syrian civilians spread across the media landscape this spring turned hawkish types into salivating animals ready for more war as those usually opposed to bloody conflict could be heard murmuring that something, anything had to be done.

What, exactly, they didn't know. But something. The images were too horrific to ignore. We have our limits. Missiles had to be launched, bullets needed to be fired, people had to be killed for these killings. This call to action -- some action, bloody action -- could not have happened without the well-placed images of immense human suffering. The president, for he is human who sits around in his bathrobe being mad online about the news, isn't immune to this. (A surefire way to predict military action is if major media outlets air footage of women and children dying. It's then that you know the warmongers have what they need: pictures to stoke your fear, contempt, and vague desire for justice, and a pretext for purposeless bloodshed.)

Scroll down your news feed and watch police shoot civilians and bombs blow people to bits in far-off markets and a woman refusing to see a doctor of color and bloodied congressmen being rushed off a baseball field on stretchers and a football player punching a woman in the face and a grieving Palestinian father carrying around the shredded remains of his child in a plastic bag. The images are relentless, they send our heart rates skyward, they twist our stomach until we want to wretch, they destroy any semblance of rational thought. And that's just a regular Wednesday.

"Rise, refuse to be manipulated by moving images, give up and let the tidal wave of manipulation wash over you and grind," I wrote in 96 Ways To Rise And Grind.

How can one even begin to fight the power of this bombardment of images? How can one not be manipulated? It can't be better to be numb -- to shut the emotional spigot as self preservation (note: I'm aware that this is terribly whiny and not at all constructive, but it's something that wears me down). Maybe the answer is to detach oneself from the culture rooted in this manipulation. Maybe it's best to say no, this isn't how I want to live. I don't know.

Rise, Don't be a Pawn and Grind

I don't listen to much music that evokes a visceral reaction. Songs don't usually leave me mouth agape, mumbling incoherently, shellshocked by lyrics' gravity and devastating accuracy.

But Bob Dylan's "Only a Pawn in Their Game" is no ordinary song. It's universal and specific all at once, identifying the central cause of American societal strife. Dylan, of whom I am no superfan, speaks the unspeakable truth about race and class in the United States: white privilege is a deal made between the ruling class and white people with nothing. And it's a deal, as Dylan says, that makes everyone -- every working family -- worse off.

I understand that "white privilege" is a phrase loathed by folks who see it as a whiny outgrowth of what they might call PC culture, a culture centered on not being a total asshole. They hear the phrase as convoluted college speak, as academic and detached from life outside the Ivory Tower. White privilege isn't only misunderstood by those who hate the mere mention of it, but by those who might wield the phrase as a weapon in political discourse.

Dylan in "Only a Pawn," which he performed at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, explains in gorgeous prose what white privilege really means, not just for the person of color who faces the evils of systemic oppression, but for the white man who made the deal with his monied masters. More than a song about the assassination of Civil Rights activist and NAACP leader Medgar Evers, "Only a Pawn" is an explanation of the rot festering at the dead center of American society almost twenty years into the 21st century. It is a lyrical dissection of a cultural, political, and economic arrangement that has lasted for centuries, infecting every part of American life.

A South politician preaches to the poor white man

"You got more than the blacks, don't complain

You're better than them, you been born with white skin," they explain

And the Negro's name

Is used, it is plain

For the politician's gain

As he rises to fame

And the poor white remains

On the caboose of the train

But it ain't him to blame

He's only a pawn in their game

The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid

And the marshals and cops get the same

But the poor white man's used in the hands of them all like a tool

He's taught in his school

From the start by the rule

That the laws are with him

To protect his white skin

To keep up his hate

So he never thinks straight

'Bout the shape that he's in

But it ain't him to blame

He's only a pawn in their game

From the poverty shacks, he looks from the cracks to the tracks

And the hoofbeats pound in his brain

And he's taught how to walk in a pack

Shoot in the back

With his fist in a clinch

To hang and to lynch

To hide 'neath the hood

To kill with no pain

Like a dog on a chain

He ain't got no name

But it ain't him to blame

He's only a pawn in their game

Much of this might resonate if you're surrounded by white people and understand the prism through which they view race and class. They separate the two, of course, because that's part of the Grand Bargain With White Workers: you won't face the abject horrors of black and brown folks, you will not find solidarity with them, and you will not ask for more than you're given. We've granted you privilege, the politician says, so take it and shut your mouth. Your skin color protects you, as Dylan sang. What else could you possibly want?

Something you may notice about how many white Americans see race and class: they can't see clearly. They view it through blurred fear goggles. Too many are consumed by anxiety and hate and fear that doesn't just change politics, but brain chemistry. The way we function as humans is affected by the consumption of messages designed to make one afraid of the Other, of the religious minority, of the person of color, of the non-gender conforming person, of the woman. Dylan sings that these carefully tailored messages "keep up" the hate of the white man, which ensures that he'll never think straight about his condition. There's no time to wonder why one is scraping by, paycheck to measly paycheck, in the Land of Milk and Honey when one is overcome with terror and hatred. It's a toxic combination and it's available 24 hours a day in our burning dumpster of a media culture.

Flip on the TV and get your hit of hate. Slurp up the fear. Don't be shy -- there's enough for everyone. Please just never consider who is to blame for the fundamental unfairness that has slashed the life expectancy of white people in the poorest parts of the country, as these beleaguered folks die "deaths of despair." Please never consider what once made the American middle class so vibrant and secure. Please never consider that one's country of origin is an abysmal predictor of one's likelihood to commit a terrorist act, or that U.S. law enforcement agencies “consider anti-government violent extremists, not radicalized Muslims, to be the most severe threat of political violence that they face.”

Please never think straight. That's central to the arrangement.

I wasn't in a particularly political and confrontational mood last week when a decidedly politically confrontational discussion broke out at an informal get-together. One guy -- we'll call him Joe -- had just watched a Fox News segment in which undocumented people were blamed for every imaginable American woe, economic and otherwise. Joe's position was predictably hardline: kick 'em out, every last one, even if they were brought to the United States as children, serve in the military, or have fled horrific violence abroad. Joe parroted the message he had been spoon fed by a cable network designed to keep up the hate of its viewers: purge America of undocumented families using any means available and things will improve. The message was to be afraid for your finances, afraid for the safety of your children in the face of the invading unwashed hoards from the southern border, and not to think straight under any circumstance. This conversation predictably devolved into name calling and invective as me, my wife, and Joe were unable to bridge the gap between what we perceive as reality. This isn't a quip about the computer simulation in which we may or may not exist, but an acknowledgement that modern media culture has created at least two distinct political realities that annihilate truth. Joe's evidence-free truth was that a war against undocumented people would benefit him -- just as he's been brainwashed to believe.

"To be a pawn, then, is to serve as a front-line defender of the powerful, putting yourself at risk because you incorrectly believe, due to indoctrination and illusory benefits, that you are defending your own interests," Avery Kolers wrote in the compilation, "Bob Dylan And Philosophy." "A pawn is most straightforwardly a piece in a board game -- a mechanical plaything moved around by the whims of a transcendent agent."

Expendability defines a pawn. In chess, a pawn is only useful for protecting the more important, versatile pieces. It's not hard to complete the metaphor. The pawn, that downtrodden white man working longer hours for less pay like his black neighbor, is but a useful tool ensuring unfixable fissures in the middle and working classes. This pawn is important in only one way: he is the centerpiece of what makes the ruler's kingdom tick. His refusal to side with those who share economic interest is the grease that keep the wheels of crushing inequality spinning. This pawn doesn't know what he means to the elites who use his hate and fear to keep us divided among bright lines of race and class.

But what if he did? What if.

Rise and Get Numb to Violence and Grind

I tortured, I killed, I maimed, I shot and stabbed and hit and kicked. And I considered this fun.

I was 10, and the game was simply dubbed Army. My little brother and I would rally some neighborhood kids who we knew to be a touch on the nerdy side -- they were not, in any sense, too cool for school -- and we'd kill the bad guys for a few hours in the summer sun, or under a bright summer moon if the mission was covert. You understand.

The level of violence ratcheted up with every passing summer until, at its logical conclusion, we were using our plastic guns to put bullets into bad guys' kneecaps when they wouldn't talk, or mowing down entire rows of the faceless baddies, or murdering each other when things went bad. We set mines and blew guys' heads off and severed their limbs until the jingle of the ice cream truck called us from the killing field.

We were nothing but products of the culture in which we existed: one that glorifies bloodshed like nothing else, one that normalizes hideous violence -- naked brutality of the first order -- in every possible medium. We didn't think much of killing in our backyard war games because that's what soldiers do. We had seen untold hundreds of bodies mutilated on our TVs. We were numb to it. It was playtime for us. What a fortuitous phenomenon for those who need young folks to be immune to the horrors of war.

Today I have a four and a half year old, one whose every game revolves around fighting and killing and destroying. Everyone -- from his Mario and Luigi toys to his cars to his Star Wars Legos -- dies horrendous deaths. Everything turns into a gun. Everyone gets shot. My son plays death-centered games with his friends, his cousins, anyone and everyone who will engage in these bloody fantasies. My son, like me in the early 1990s, is a product of his culture. Violence is crammed into every crevice of American pop culture -- it's pervasive, inescapable, and it defines everything. Violence is our greatest export. It is who we are, both to ourselves and to the world, which has seen the aftermath of our main export in the form of an endless body count.

I stopped fighting the good fight against this aspect of gun culture a while ago, as I wrote in "96 Ways to Rise And Grind." "Rise and condemn lawmakers' ambivalence toward mass shootings while your kid plays with a toy gun, just call it a laser shooter and grind."

I don't mean that I've stopped caring about our insane gun culture and the immense and needless suffering it causes. I care very much that many hundreds of innocents are slaughtered by people with easy access to weapons of war just so gun manufacturers can cushion their bottom line. I'm baffled that the Second Amendment stands as is even though the folks who wrote it would die of a fucking heart attack if they encountered a microwave, much less an automatic weapon designed by madmen to kill other madmen. But my days of insisting that my kid says "laser" instead of "gun" are over. The culture has beaten me down; fighting it was as exhausting as it was frustrating. Useless too. So useless.

I pretended to murder as a child. I indulged in video games that made killing a blast -- the most fun you can have with two thumbs. Hopefully the culture won't erode my son's sense of right and wrong. I'd like to say it didn't erode mine, but I'm not so sure.

Rise and Fight the Toxic Discourse and Grind

I know a guy -- a family friend -- who won't take his Social Security checks. Flat out refuses. That would make him a taker, he says. It would make him just like them, he says.

Now a few words about language.

Language is all powerful: it can make one believe what can be disproven in an instant, it can make a person call for the annihilation of another, it can turn people against their self interest, and it can be limited so how one thinks of something is confined to the narrowest of parameters.

And it's the language of politics that determines how we talk and think about vital public policies. Whoever controls an issue's messaging controls the politics of that issue. They dictate the terms of political thought. How we think and talk about an issue determines how that issue is treated in public discourse. This, of course, requires a zooming out from the politics of the day, and all the intense emotions that cloud how we perceive a political issue.

"Rise and argue that George Orwell's darkest musings have come to pass, realize that pernicious things aren't easily labeled and grind," I wrote in 96 Ways to Rise and Grind.

The most brutally effective form of political speech is the kind that "renders dialogue impossible," which is "the desired goal for those who want to exercise absolute power," wrote David Rowan, archbishop of Canterbury. It's not actively evil manipulation. It's banal. It's boring. And it works.

We see this in every sphere of modern politics, from war to health care to tax policy to reproductive and LGBTQ rights. But it's the language of those against the existence of public assistance that strikes me as particularly successful. Perhaps nowhere in political culture has language triumphed like it has in demonizing and attacking the welfare state.

The right wing's victory in welfare discourse is total: everyone in the political mainstream discusses public assistance in the same words -- words designed to stigmatize those who receive those benefits, and to shame anyone who requires government funds to pay the bills. The right's insidious anti-welfare propaganda systematically turns neighbor against neighbor, sister against brother, worker against worker. Genius turns of phrase like "welfare dependency" and "welfare queens" -- which cropped up in Reagan's American and leaked across the pond to Thatcher's UK -- started the frontal assault on the once-celebrated welfare state.

"Welfare" is practically a curse word today. It's a slur deployed to besmirch someone's work ethic. But it's another word that has served as a nuclear bomb dropped on the very concept of economic security for everyone: entitlement. To be entitled is to be lazy, spoiled, a sinner against the religion of work. No one wants to be called entitled.

It wasn't always this way. Politicians in the decades before Reagan brought far-right economics to the White House used the term "earned entitlements." Even Reagan, before his right-wing wonks transformed the way Americans think about the welfare state, "referred to government programs for the old, the sick, and the poor as the 'Social Security net,'" The New Yorker reports. That changed once anti-welfare forces discovered how effective their focus group-tested language could be. We can make poor folks hate welfare? Let's do it.

The federal government's turn against public assistance programs -- which enjoy widespread support in public polling -- prompted a stark change in the way media outlets discussed welfare. The Washington Post, for example, mentioned "entitlement" and "Social Security" a meager five times in 1979. That number skyrocketed to 118 by 1982. By the 90s, those words appeared in the same article more than 800 times. Those terms now appear in the Post 1,700 times every year.

Language is everything.

Back to that family friend who is semi-retired, in his mid-60s, and tells my dad that he won't accept Social Security payments -- the ultimate earned entitlement. The federal government is broke because undocumented immigrants and lazy free riders have sucked its coffers dry, he argues. He doesn't want to be part of that "culture." He insists that he doesn't need help from anyone, not like them. He's always worked, always provided for himself, and he'll be damned if he's going to take that dirty government cash now.

Propaganda is a hell of a drug: it's inserted the political aims of the wealthy into a middle-class guy who has worked every day since he was 16. Language -- the way we talk about public assistance programs -- has done such a number on this old man that he now denies himself the money he's earned over almost five decades of toiling for others.

Is there an antidote to this dominant anti-welfare discourse? Certainly there's not a single magic solution that will force the news media to discuss welfare as a massive public benefit, but we can start small.

I'm careful about the ways in which I talk about public assistance. I try not to use "welfare" in discussions with family and friends because it's such a thoroughly stigmatized word. I make sure to talk up the unquestioned economic stimulative power of food stamps. I try to stamp out the false notion that widespread abuse plagues the public assistance system. I point out that people who receive these benefits don't often stay out of work for years and years; in fact, nine in ten recipients are employed within a year of getting food stamps. Public assistance has tremendous health benefits for children living in poverty. All of this is verifiable. But maybe that doesn't matter in today's discourse.

If you feel like I do -- that people who need and deserve these temporary benefits shouldn't be shamed by the the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps truthers -- then don't get mad when someone talks about welfare recipients in demeaning ways. Try your best to explain that everything they know about public assistance is wrong. They've been indoctrinated by rich, ruthless folks who want nothing more than to unwind the social safety net. This rhetorical strategy won't work on many everyday working people -- some are too far gone -- but I believe it's worth a shot.

Many have never heard public assistance discussed in positive terms because the political language has been so strangled -- so limited -- over the past 40 years. Do your part. Rise and chip away at the toxic discourse and grind.

Rise, Get Happy, and Grind

We've all known the person who grinds away at the millstone before and after regular working hours, sure that rising earlier than the rest and grinding harder than anyone will, in the end, pay off with money and fancy things and happiness.

Maybe we are that person.

That's in the unsigned, unwritten social contract, right? Work hardest and reap the benefits. Ye who grinds shall see rewards aplenty, yes? Well, the thing about that social contract is that it is, in fact, unwritten and unsigned. It also happens to be unobserved by many who control the resources. Does hard work pay off? In self-help books and profiles of professional athletes, sure. Does it guarantee anything? My sources say it does not. My other sources can confirm.

"Rise with the understanding that honest, hard work pays off," I wrote in 96 Ways To Rise and Grind, "know with soul-crushing certainty that this is not true, and grind."

This isn't a call to stop trying, to stop pursuing goals and passions that serve as the reason you pry yourself out of bed every morning, drag a comb across your head, gulp coffee until you feel alive, and shuffle off to work. I may be a shill for Big Cynicism, but I'd never deny that determination leads to results. I decided over dinner one night in September 2012 that I would write a piece for The New York Times about my unhealthy relationship with fantasy football. This article appeared in the paper of record two and a half months later. I had a goal. I chased it. Good stuff followed. I get it. It happens.

Pouring inhuman hours into a job is often a fruitless (and harmful) game. Working all day, every day has become a perverse status symbol in our work-obsessed culture -- a badge to wear in the company of slackers who do the rise-and-grind for a mere 40 hours every week. Endlessly working has been pitched to us as a path to happiness, an amazingly convenient path for folks at the top of that big, nasty economic food chain. Work and be happy. Work and be free. Somewhere, George Orwell smirks. So do these people.

We're programmed to be so sure of this work-happiness tradeoff while research has shown for decades that we've put our unquestioned faith into an approach with no evidence supporting it. The work-happiness paradigm is a castle with no foundation. A gentle wind (in the form of evidence and research) knocks it over.

Research shows, as I mentioned in the foreword to the 96 Ways book, that happiness levels spike during the weekends. But of course they do, you say. Weekends are good and fun. I suppose they can be if you don't play fantasy football. But here's the thing: key happiness indicators peaked on the weekends even for people who don't work. Stress and anxiety levels for both those who work and those who don't jumped during the workweek, only to plummet on Saturday and Sunday.

Why, you might ask, bleary eyed and strapping a coffee IV to your forearm, would there be a universal happiness spike on non-work days? Because, as people in a Stanford University research project reported, spending time with friends and family made them happy. Socializing, laughing, engaging in various time-sucking hobbies, shooting the shit -- it all led to self-reported positive feelings.

There's reason to believe the workweek can and should be cut in half. A United Kingdom study published by the New Economics Foundation found that the 40-hour workweek -- a relic established in large part by the Ford Motor Company -- is "out of step" with what it means to be a 21st century worker. You don't have to read a 300-page research paper to know that worker productivity has skyrocketed in this dystopian technological age.

Slashing the typical workweek in half would solve myriad issues, including “overwork, unemployment, over-consumption, high carbon emissions, low well-being, entrenched inequalities, and the lack of time to live sustainably, to care for each other, and simply to enjoy life," according to the New Economics Foundation. A new workweek standard would lead to better health outcomes too, as workers would (presumably) deal with less stress, the destroyer of health. Reforming the workweek, cutting it to a cool 21 hours, would flip the script on what we think of as "the economy." People and the environment would no longer be subjugated to the whims of business interests; the economy would serve the public interest. Well-rounded lives would be possible without going broke. Gender relations would be vastly improved, as would everyday family life. Neighbors would get to know each other. People would be less miserable. Reforming the workweek wouldn't be a panacea, but it'd be a hell of an improvement over the abject horrors of today's work life.

And a workweek whittled down to a skeletal four hours might be possible for some.

Probably you can rattle off a dozen anecdotes about hard work paying off. I'd believe every one. But happiness -- if that's your goal -- won't be found at the end of an arduous workweek (or work life). This is for the work-long-hours truthers among us: your quasi-religious faith in hard work paying dividends is a lie fed to you from above. Work hard when you must, but remember that evidence matters, and the evidence is against you.

Rise, Get Crushed By Unity, And Grind

Worker unity died with ten thousand cuts, many cruelly inflicted by those with much who want more, and others the result of demographic changes, the internet, and the post-deregulation economy.

People don't stay at the same job for very long. Labor unions have been systematically mutilated by labor's monocled enemies. The tradition of worker unity is something for the history books. Millennials will never know it.

Unity among those taking in all but a morsel of every new dollar is all that remains. While there are voices in the monied wilderness warning their spectacularly wealthy neighbors that the economic status quo can only end in societal disaster, the call by one percenters for more economic austerity is in one voice. Some in the ruling class want more trickle-down policies with a side of religious imposition that crushes the rights of LGBTQ people, for instance. Other ruling class members stand mildly opposed to such fundamentalism. Still others advocate for civil rights, as long as they don't get in the way of profits.

But they all want the same thing: more money, at any cost.

On the airwaves of NPR and in the pages of The New York Times -- critical truth-telling tools as trumpeted by The Resistance -- millionaires and billionaires promote myriad myths about how the United States might unleash tidal waves of economic activity that will surely benefit everyone. They carefully create a reality in which massive tax cuts for the wealthiest are the only means of stimulating our stagnant economy, much like when governments craft a reality in which war is the only answer.

Working people are told that corporations are staggering beneath the hideous weight of sky-high corporate taxes. This, of course, is the opposite of what one might call true, as the Economic Policy Institute recently pointed out. Corporate taxes "paid as a share of the whole economy" are indeed historically low, according to EPI.

The country has never gotten by on fewer corporate tax dollars, as armies of lawyers hide away mountains of cash to the nation's detriment. Ninety billion in corporate taxes are dodged every year. But it's immigrants who drain the nation's coffers, we hear.

Working people tuning in to trusted news outlets are reminded in no uncertain terms that ours is among the world's highest corporate tax rates. And it is. On paper. The United States' effective corporate rate -- what the masters of the universe actually pay -- is less than half the official rate, per EPI research. Translation: our corporate tax rate is in line with other western nations.

And while you dutifully pay your taxes for programs you hate and people you loathe, some of the nation's richest corporations -- Verizon, Boeing, General Electric -- didn't pay one solitary dime in taxes in the years after the 2008 economic crash, while profits soared.

What's dare not uttered in mainstream media -- the insane right-wing variety or those favored by left-leaning people -- is that corporate profits today are at an all-time high. There is no golden age for which to strive for corporations because this is the golden age. Yet they demand more, with a gleaming smile, wearing finely tailored suits, caring not for the repercussions of their lobbying for crushing unfairness. They construct lies and spout them into a million-watt megaphone.

The result: I argue at a cookout with a guy barely scraping by, working 50 hours a week, who believes corporations have the raw end of the deal. A worker, advocating for those who siphon every penny while the country's safety net is shredded, while our roads and bridges crumble. A worker, repeating the slick lies he's been told by the collective vampire squid that will take and take until there's nothing left. A worker, swallowed whole by propaganda from the last unified group of earth.

Hence, from 96 Ways to Rise and Grind: "Rise and read the news today, oh boy, that the only tried-and-true unity is between psychopaths in the Fortune 500, and grind."

Working people might note that unity works. If you don't believe me, look up.

Rise With Friday on Your Mind and Grind

There's a song that transports me back to when I hated my job -- every minute of it, with every pulsing fiber of my being. "Friday On My Mind," a 1966 hit from the Easybeats, might do the same for you, oh miserable worker of the world.

Tell me if this sounds familiar: a guy drags himself to work and does what he's supposed to do, thinking of nothing but the weekend and his girlfriend and the booze he'll drink and the money he'll blow. The contrast is stark: workaday angst and anguish with a silver lining of giddy anticipation.

I'd suggest you listen to this poppy documentation of worker discontent (or the superior David Bowie version from 1973), but here's an over-analysis of the song that inspired at least a couple missives that made their way into 96 Ways To Rise And Grind.

It's the below stanza that hit home for this once discontented worker, who would rise and grind by scribbling what amounted to press releases for billion-dollar technology companies squirming their way into public education. These education-technology folks knew there was money to be made. They were so happy, they could hardly count.

Do the five day grind once more

I know of nothin' else that bugs me

More than workin' for the rich man

Hey! I'll change that scene one day

Today I might be mad, tomorrow I'll be glad

'Cause I'll have Friday on my mind

I'd toil away at this hateful full-time job, writing what powerful tech firms wanted me to write because my bosses had made deals with them: we'll give you positive press if you throw some advertising dollars our way. This was never on paper, never official, but everyone knew it to be true. I did that dreadful five-day grind, I screamed internally at the thought of my work benefitting people making ten or twenty or thirty times what I made, swindling school districts out of millions for their useless gadgets, and I swore I'd change that arrangement ... one day ... soon ... after next weekend.

I wrote revenge fiction in those days. It was bad and bloody stuff. It was borne of anger and resentment. Some of it was publishable. Most if it would doom me in a court of law. Writing it was cathartic. It was a natural reaction to bitterness that had built up one grinding day at a time, like bricks piling up on my hopes and aspirations.

But I had Friday on my mind. The weekend was always at the fore -- a sweet reminder that there was a temporary reprieve from this inane and frustrating daily grind. A date with my wife, wine, a weekend softball game, nine holes at the local course, beer, sitting around a fire pit with friends, liquor, horror movies, more beer, more wine -- it all danced around my head as I slogged through another workweek. The mere thought that something better was on its way kept me docile, a good worker bee. Having Friday on my mind kept me chained to that awful desk in that awful soulless office building for years and years.

The miraculous, blood-soaked labor victory that we call the five-day workweek has that terrible unintentional consequence. "Today I might be mad," we've all said, under our breath or in the furious cavern of our mind, "but tomorrow I'll be glad." Why? "'Cause I've got Friday on my mind."

I had a coworker back then, a middle-aged woman who had worked at the company for more than a decade, pushing papers and buying office equipment and sharing her vivid fantasies about having sex with Prince at the office lunch table. This coworker -- we'll call her Carol -- was the biggest Friday fan in human history. Find someone who loves you the way Carol loved Fridays (and doing unspeakable things to the late, great Prince) and you'll be set. She was the epitome of misery on every day not called Friday. That all changed on the workweek's final day, when she'd burst into the office and shout about how goddamn glad she was that today was -- you guessed it -- Friday.

I was sad for Carol. To actively hate one's existence for four days out of every week, only wanting to crawl through the Shawshank Redemption shit-filled pipe of the workweek to reach the end, then start the horrid process again on Monday morning, seemed like a special kind of hell. It only took me five years to recognize that I lived in the same hell. And it was of my choosing.

I have a more fulfilling work life today. I'll never forget the mundanity of my former work life though, and I'd say anyone who can relate to the Easybeats' hit from half a century ago should know there's a way out. Probably it won't be an easy route, since it likely took a long time to bury yourself beneath a job you hate -- one that makes you pine for the weekend. Not everyone can have their dream job -- whatever that is -- but if you have the means and determination, strive for a gig in which Friday isn't constantly on your mind. An infernal Monday being on your mind, at the right job, isn't such a bad deal.

"Rise and sell little pieces of yourself for money, hoping you can buy them back every weekend, and grind," as I wrote in 96 Ways. This is a deplorable arrangement: joyless, hopeless, with only sprinkles of relief for hard-working people. The trick to changing it, however, is to get Friday off your mind.

Rise and Wage Class War and Grind

No one, no matter how detached or apolitical, is immune from class warfare. No one can say they're removed from the never-ending conflict between the ultra wealthy and working families. All history, after all, is the history of class struggle.

Even libertarians, locked away in their cabins, haughtily chastising those on the left and the right, are part of the class war. They may stroke their enormous beards and disagree, but they are, no matter what they say to their Ayn Rand posters before they drift off at night.

We all have to pick a side, intentionally or by default.

I have an entry in "96 Ways to Rise And Grind" based on this economic and political fight between the haves and have nots -- with the have-some-wants-mores sandwiched between the warring factions: "Rise and pick a side in the class war, think of yourself as a person of the people, for the people, keep trying to get rich and grind."

Such is the cry of the petty bourgeoisie, those on the fringes of the comfortable monied class who strive like hell to keep what they have, even when it means allying with the wealthy for whom they hold a fine mix of jealousy and contempt. Many in this sub-class know there is a war raging between the classes, and think it best to remain neutral, or inactive. Even those who sympathize with the have-nots, like the 3.7 million people working for starvation wages at fast food joints, shield their eyes to the horrors wrought by the ruling class, whose only goal is to crush any person or entity that threatens their economic supremacy.

A member of the petty bourgeoisie might think of himself as a natural ally of working class people, but do little or nothing to join their battle against the economic elite that create misery for everyone. That's me.

I was horrified to read a few months back that the county executive in my ultra-liberal Maryland county struck down a county council measure that would have raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Even that wage hike would barely qualify as a living wage in one of the most expensive areas of the United States. The $15 measure, which would lift wages for more than 41 million Americans by 2024 if instituted nationally, went down with barely a whisper of protest. No rallies. No indignation. No one rioted. There was barely a peep from county and state lawmakers, all of whom are ostensibly Democrats.

Fifteen bucks an hour would've changed the lives of hard-working people in all manner of industries, helping women and men meet basic needs: the rent, food, clothing, transportation, perhaps a wild luxury like a night at the movies. And where was I while this near victory for workers was snuffed out? I was at home, comfortable, paying no mind to those who struggle to survive in an economy where all new income goes to the top 1 percent -- the elite of the elite. I was on the sideline.

This isn't an exercise in self flagellation -- I do enough of that on fantasy football Sundays -- but rather an observation that I too often take the side of the wealthy in the the class war. My inaction makes it so. The middle class has and always will be a veritable hotbed of political reactionaries scared stiff that they might lose the precious resources they've worked so hard to gain. I feel that pressure. Maybe you do too.

We choose sides of the class war every day, driven by a paralytic fear of losing what is ours. Recognizing that, I hope, is a step in siding against those who secure and hoard wealth to the detriment of working families who have less today than they've ever had.

The haves at the head of the federal government are wreaking terror on workers like never before, destroying worker protections, rewarding companies that systematically steal wages from working people, making workplaces less safe, and erecting barriers for workers trying to access basic unemployment benefits. They're waging war without apology. Their destruction of working communities is unencumbered by manners. Perhaps that's for the best: honesty is the best policy.

Rise and pick a side in the class war. Because it's there, and it's hotter than ever.

Rise and Put Skin in the Game and Grind

It's the call of the privileged and the wannabe privileged: everyone must have proverbial skin in the proverbial game.

It's a screaming dog whistle shouted by those who live comfortable or grotesquely luxurious lives. It's said with hands on hips and chin held high. It is a respectable verse read directly from the high holy book on the cable news pundit, the respectable and thoughtful political observer who stays firmly within the lines of accepted thought, governed by those who police the status quo. These people who work for scraps and dare complain about it, they say with barely-concealed contempt, must have skin in the game. Give me your skin, working people. We must have it for our little game.

What does it mean for one to have skin in the game? Politically it means that women and men getting by on just enough to feed their families should pay their fair share of taxes. This skin game emerges when taxes and public benefits come to the forefront of the collective political mind. Think tank elites take to the airwaves to remind Americans that the wealthy pay more than half of the federal income taxes collected by the government every year. Families that make less than $50,000, meanwhile, pay about 5 percent of all federal income tax. This, we hear, is fundamentally unfair. Studied, bespectacled women and men on TV tell us so. They sound so convincing, so clean and put together. Families with low incomes, they say, must put more skin in the game.

We hear it when state legislatures or governors consider expanding government benefits like Medicaid, giving health-care access to those who go to the emergency room when their kid has a fever. The opposition to this is dependably fierce and loud: how can we give someone something without them paying for it? How can we allow access to basic health services on the taxpayers' dime? It's unconscionable. Adam Smith will emerge from his grave and kill us all (he wouldn't). There must be skin in the game. The game cannot function without the proper amount of skin.

What this demand for skin ignores, of course, is that workers pulling long hours to stay afloat in this Great Gatsby economy already give chunks of their skin to our terribly unfair, corrupt, inhumane game. Working people have toiled more and more for less and less for four decades. Most Americans can't put their hands on $500 in savings. Homelessness and hunger lurks like the Reaper over the shoulder of people who work 40 or 50 or 60 hours every week as they struggle not to thrive, but to survive. Their skin, dear cable news pundit, is very much in the game. Otherwise they'd be on the street or dead.

They have no more skin to give. Ask them. It's a game to the pundit, and to the anchor to whom she's speaking and the lawmaker prepping for the next segment and for the billionaire who funds the whole heinous charade. To the worker it's life or death. It's no game.