The Third
I promise you, the solution to our problems will make you mad
This week Robin Whetstone offers another chapter from her Moscow memoir, Red Ticket, in which she moves in with her boyfriend’s family after he’s arrested and, well, it does not go well. I should probably let her tell the story. My friend Monte Williams offers tips for screenwriters in the pandemic. And I ask Keri Blakinger about her latest exposé about how federal prisons are bungling the response to COVID-19 in the latest segment of “You’re on Mute.”
And as always, we remember who we’ve lost and offer recommendations on what to do, read (including a new poem from Angela Marie Spring), watch, and listen to. If all you do with this newsletter is watch The Photograph and listen to Anderson .Paak’s new single, you’re winning the weekend. Happy Fourth, y’all.
But first, did I ever tell you about how I learned how to fix everything?
I’ve figured out how to heal the pain, bridge the divides, end racism, and restore bipartisanship, and you’re not going to like it. And because you’re not going to like it, I’m going to walk you through how I learned this horrible and not-at-all comforting way to turn the Giant Badness now into that Don Draper Coke commercial. Because if nothing else, this is a story about guidance I’ve received on this path as much as it is about where it ends up, though if I’m being honest I’m dragging my feet. I do not want to tell you the ending.
The other day I dipped back into TED Talk Daily, a podcast my friend E.H. hosts, and noticed an episode about Dolly Parton. Sold. Except it was more about Jad Abumrad, the host of Radiolab, and his search for purpose which has changed from using science to elicit wonder, to “lead people to moments of struggle,” to the time he did the podcast series about Dolly Parton in search of a way to bring people together.
“You go to a Dolly concert, you see men in trucker hats standing next to men in drag, Democrats standing next to Republicans, women holding hands, every different kind of person smashed together. All of these people that we are told should hate each other are there singing together,” explained Abumrad. “She somehow carved out this unique space in America, and I wanted to know, how did she do that?”
Dolly’s Dolly, but she’s not the only artist to have united disparate audiences. Part of Austin’s creation myth as the Live Music Capital of the World is that Willie Nelson left conservative Nashville and came to Austin to wear his hair long and play what he damn well pleased. This spawned the outlaw country movement that welcomed all influences — folk, country & western, rock ‘n roll, even jazz.
And the ecumenical evolution onstage filled the pews of Austin’s dive bars with kickers and hippies. It’s easy to valorize the past we see in black and white photographs. In living color, the guys with gun racks in their pickups probably beat up a few of the long-haired hippies. We look back on that reconstruction of social caste through nostalgic, Coke-bottle glasses and hear a song about teaching the world to sing in perfect harmony. The kickers and the hippies probably hated each other, but they shared a space in the Austin music scene.
It wasn’t until Parton described her songs as “migration music” that Abumrad figured out that country music was a product of trade routes, including one linking his native Lebanon to Tennessee where he grew up. He grew up thinking that country music was a reductive soundtrack to an insular world and learned that country music was about sharing stories and making connections.
“What do I make of this? Well, I think there's something in here that's a clue, a way forward. As journalists, we love difference. We love to fetishize difference. But increasingly, in this confusing world, we need to be the bridge between those differences. But how do you do that?” he asked. “Story cannot end in difference. It's got to end in revelation.”
And then someone gave Abumrad a book:
And coming back from that trip on the mountain, a friend of mine gave me a book that gave this whole idea a name. In psychotherapy, there's this idea called the third, which essentially goes like this. Typically, we think of ourselves as these autonomous units. I do something to you, you do something to me. But according to this theory, when two people come together and really commit to seeing each other, in that mutual act of recognition, they actually make something new. A new entity that is their relationship. You can think of Dolly's concerts as sort of a cultural third space. The way she sees all the different parts of her audience, the way they see her, creates the spiritual architecture of that space.
This reminded me of an essay I wrote last July about religion, hope, self-delusion, and Tartini tones.
I think about that in terms of combination tones, which are also called ghost tones or Tartini tones. If you have a piano, go hit an an A at the same time as the E above it, and you will get a pitch equal to a C# above the E. Why? Because the A vibrates at 440Hz and the E vibrates at 660Hz, creating a ghost note that vibrates at 1100Hz. No one played the C#, but it is only heard because someone played the A and the E. Humans harmonize and elevate themselves.
“The third” that Abumrad discovered is a psychological manifestation of those ghost tones, an experience on a higher plane created by two other things, people or notes, placing themselves in harmony.
We are not, as of this writing, living in harmony. Democrats and Republicans increasingly hold different beliefs about the coronavirus, which frankly doesn’t care what any of us think about it. We are all increasingly in thrall of disproven conspiracy theories about the pandemic and increasingly unable to discern fact from fiction in the news. Black and white Americans see the world of race and police so differently they might as well be two different planets. Meanwhile, our trust in the sources of information — newspapers, television, radio, social media — is falling. We are all the drunk person at the church picnic, trying to appear sober while everyone around us gets sloshed in the sun. The center has not held.
We got a lot of letters in response to J. B.’s “7 Hours in November,” his elegiac, dystopian prediction of Election Night’s disinformation extravaganza. My favorite letter was a confession, of sorts, from an older woman who for the majority of her life held fast to normality only to emerge into a cacophonous modernity.
I confess that I’ve not adopted any specific Religion or Faith, but I have read the King James version of the Bible from cover to cover. What I’m witnessing now is like the city of Babel. Throngs and throngs of people talking, yelling, begging and complaining. People lost, sick and afraid. Soooo many babbling among themselves and no one understands or comprehends one another.
What is to be done?
Do you want to know? Because you’re not going to like the answer. I sure as hell didn’t.
First I’ve got to tell you about pessimism bias. People generally think that the other group thinks worse of them than they actually do. Admittedly, sometimes we’re right about each other. Republicans, for example, accuse Democrats of wanting abortion on demand. To which I disagree; we’re willing to make appointments. Democrats think Republicans are unspeakably evil, which is unfair and not completely true. Some Republicans speak evil all the time.
This retribution-based thinking drives us further apart unnecessarily, according to E.B., a conflict resolution professor whom I spoke with.
“Democrats and Republicans, for example, don't like each other. But they dislike each other less. So their dislike for each other is less than half what both sides think it is. So Democrats and Republicans think that the other side hates them with a passion, and both sides just dislike the other side,” he said. “And the amazing thing is it's all an illusion. Both sides, think the other side hates them and dehumanizes them more than twice as much as they actually do. And the degree to which they think the other side dislikes and dehumanizes them drives their behavior.”
Accepting that someone who disagrees with us might not be quite as bad as we assume they are is all fine, if not quite dandy, and allows for a space for a ghost note, but it does not explain how to find harmony. In fact, there are some conflicts that require you do stand fast while risking your heart. For example, E.B. studied former white supremacists and how they shrugged off their racist ideology. How do you find harmony with someone who hates Black people?
“I met with a number of these guys over the years,” he said. “And one thing that we all agreed does not work is that people cannot be shamed out of their beliefs. One story that I heard again and again, from a number of these former white supremacists, and I know this is hard, but what they often cited was being treated with kindness by someone whose kindness they didn't deserve. This was often a catalyst for them in rethinking their ideologies.”
See?! I knew you’d hate it. As J. C. P. wrote so perfectly in Bad Girls Upset by the Truth, “Know the truth, and it shall upset you.” Here I was all ready to punch Nazis, and it turns they are the work that needs doing. You can’t use reason, evidence of their wrongness, or lectures and presentations thereof, to bring them into the light. What did we learn last week? The Enlightenment was a lie. You can’t use reason to get someone out of a ditch they didn’t use reason to get themselves into, and neither can you make them sit still while you lecture them into submission. You’ve got to show them “kindness they didn’t deserve.”
The good news is that when it comes to white supremacists, there is all kinds of kindness they don’t deserve. You’ve got a wide array from which to choose, a veritable H-E-B Superstore of kindness. There is so much undeserved kindness on offer in such abundance and in so many varieties, that you can get lost in the aisles and forget what you came there for. And then you remember. Oh right, Nazis. That’s the bad news. Nazis are always the bad news.
Can I tell you a secret? I came home last night not sure whether I wanted to publish this, because it’s a fair criticism that I’m advocating that the oppressed save the oppressors. There are countrymen who would deny the right of other citizens the right to exist as free people, and I’m saying that some professor told me we have to show them “kindness they didn't deserve.” To put it mildly, that seems unfair. Before I went to bed I indulged in a little doomscrolling and saw one of my Republican friends B.M. posted a meme about Daryl Davis, the Black musician who converted, directly and indirectly, more than 200 KKK members just through conversations in which he showed them kindness they didn't deserve.
The next morning, I received my next bit of guidance from R.H.’s podcast, The Daily Stoic. He focused on Marcus Aurelius’ observation that the things that are in our way are in fact what we must do.
Our actions may be impeded…but there can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.
Neither Marcus Aurelius nor Jesus Christ would say that loving your neighbor means laughing at his racist jokes to be polite — or that remedying injustices cannot exist simultaneously with conversations. We can write a city budget, rewrite the police’s rules of engagement, and talk with police at the same time. I’ve seen it done. And no one, at least no one here, is saying we have to compromise principles to make peace. I just find it so horribly depressing that Marvin Gaye might have been right all along.
Father, father
We don't need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today, oh oh oh
A brilliant poet I know, R. R., recently published a brillhonkulous essay in the Yale Review that touched on white writers appropriating the suffering of Black people.
Could this be precisely the problem—the inability to imagine the other in ecstasy? In the examples I’ve given above, all three artists sought to encounter black subjectivity or the racial, economically disenfranchised other solely through woundedness, annihilation, and the elegiac—quite simply, through eradication, as if pain is and was the only way to make the other legible. What if the pursuit of writing about the other means understanding the other as a body in the possession or position of ecstasy, rather than sorrow? I am not arguing that racialized others’ sorrows or struggles should be off-limits to a writer or artist from a different subject position; rather, what I am petitioning for is a rendering of the other that allows for ecstasy, pleasure, and joy to be within moments of struggle and sorrow.
I know, I know. This sounds wrong. If you’re reading this, you’re probably like me in that you’ve earned rewards for being right and knowing your facts. Maybe you even debated in high school or read one of those primers on how to win arguments against your Trump-supporting relatives at Thanksgiving. You probably still repeat President Bartlet’s smug dialogue from The West Wing.
Abbey Bartlet : Okay. So just ease up on the high ground.
President Josiah Bartlet : On that point I concede the high ground.
Abbey Bartlet : And I concede I was wrong about the thing.
President Josiah Bartlet : Good.
Abbey Bartlet : However...
President Josiah Bartlet : No. No "however". Just be wrong. Just stand there in your wrongness and be wrong and get used to it.
Oh, how wonderful it felt to watch ol’ President Bartlet be right about everything. Oh, how little good it did any of us. The show debuted when Democrats held the White House and Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress, and it went off the air when Democrats were in charge of exactly diddly squat. We basked in the self-righteous glow of President Bartlet’s weekly lecture series “Standing Here in My Rightness” for seven years and now can’t understand why medical advice is considered elitist. It’s possible that this driving need to be right appears to many as a need to prove them wrong.
To paraphrase Bad Girls, what if we did something that worked? Maybe, instead of wasting energy trying to get a gold star on our behavior chart, we could allow for the possibility that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was right about what can and cannot drive out the darkness. We need to tell a story about ourselves that allows space for the third, for the ghost tone, for a dance hall where we might all enjoy a little music. Hate and mistrust are not long-term growth strategies. “Story cannot end in difference. It's got to end in revelation.” We need to tell the story about ourselves that allows space for a happy ending.
Red Ticket: Rude Awakenings
by Robin Whetstone
Every weekend we serialize Red Ticket, Robin Whetstone’s memoir of her time in Moscow in the early ‘90s. This week, Robin moves in with Lyosha’s family while he’s in jail. It does not go swimmingly, but there is thing with a chicken.
“Get up,” she said in a flat voice that scared me. “Get up right now and cook this chicken.”
Content for Jason
by Monte Williams
My old friend Monte Williams has been a reporter, a television writer for ABC, NBC and DreamWorks, a campaign press secretary for former Texas Gov. Ann Richards, a sports radio talk show host, a steel mill chemist, a substitute teacher, a cook, a tennis instructor, and a failed PhD candidate. That’s Monte in the picture, looking flummoxed sitting between Mayor Ivy Taylor of San Antonio and Mayor Steve Adler of Austin during a tense moment in the armistice talks to end the Great Breakfast Taco War of 2016. Thanks to Monte’s steady hand and renewed vigor, the mayors signed the I-35 Accords without breaking a single egg. Today he offers tips to aspiring screenwriters in a pandemic.
It’s not every day that the respected writer Jason Stanford invites someone to contribute to his newsletter, and it certainly didn’t happen in my case. No, I had to beg.
“You’re on mute” with Keri Blackinger
This week on “You’re On Mute,” I ask Keri Blakinger of The Marshall Project to talk to me about her big article on how federal prisons are responding — and not responding — to the pandemic. The headline’s a doozy: “‘I Begged Them To Let Me Die’: How Federal Prisons Became Coronavirus Death Traps.” She also mentioned her big food piece, which I do not recommend reading before a meal.
RIP
How we’re getting through this
Brainstorming moon toilets
Dining in the cone of silence
Searching for “elastic waists”
Celebrating actual good gd news
Wearing corporate-banded face masks
Becoming not unbreakable but unruinable
Making Rao's meatballs with marinara sauce
Casting “Hairy, Burned, and ‘Funny Looking’ Actors”
Listening to a barbershop quartet quoting the President
What I’m reading
The Atlantic: “The Dudes Who Won’t Wear Masks: Face coverings are a powerful tool, but health authorities can’t simply ignore the reasons some people refuse to use them.”
Decibel: “Suzi Quatro: Hell Bent for Leather”
Omar Gallaga: “Stormy Leather”
HBR: “How to Play ‘Friendly Hardball’ in a Negotiation”
Monica Hesse: “Making men feel manly in masks is, unfortunately, a public-health challenge of our time”
It’s slightly worrisome that, in order for us to survive as a species, spouses and daughters or sons must scour Etsy for Venom-themed masks so that their 52-year-old packaging-engineer husbands and fathers can feel gender-secure when they pop out to Safeway for some milk.
Ryan Holiday: “What Everyone Gets Wrong About Stoicism Is Exactly Why You Need It”
The Hub: “Celebrate George Orwell’s birthday by reading his (scathing) 1940 review of Mein Kampf.”
After a few years of slaughter and starvation ‘Greatest happiness of the greatest number’ is a good slogan, but at this moment ‘Better an end with horror than a horror without end’ is a winner. Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.
Paul Kane: “‘Always Trumpers’ complain as president’s missteps threaten Senate GOP majority”
Monkey Cage: “Colin Kaepernick is back in the news. Here’s how black athletes can inspire activism.”
Alexandra Petri: “Now introducing personal protective equipment — For Him!”
The Plum Line: “Trump’s unhinged crusade to destroy Obamacare boomerangs back on GOP”
Roger Reeves: “The Uses of Memory: What if we deployed ecstasy in the middle of struggle—even in the middle of the grief of protesting police brutality?” <—THIS
For those interested in writing about people and lives other than theirs, this moment is instructive. … The writing of the other then, is the learning of what is beyond desire: “not less of love but expanding / Of love,” learning to braid, walk, talk, love, cry, run, and hurt like the other without usurping the moment. So liberation. So ecstasy. Ecstasy, then, becomes not a possession of the other but a mutuality, a recognition of a simultaneity such that “The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree are of equal duration,” as Eliot writes. “If you can, get to it,” writes Gilbert. Another pattern, another love. Ecstasy.
Angela Maria Spring: “The Immigrant’s Pandemic”
Mimi Swartz: “How Texas Swaggered Into a Coronavirus Disaster”
Wall Street Journal: “How Exactly Do You Catch Covid-19? There Is a Growing Consensus”
WaPo: “As ‘Hamilton’ becomes a movie, suddenly we’re all in the room where it happens”
What I’m watching
Been rolling a lot of double sixes lately. Loved What Happened, Miss Simone? and The Black Godfather, both streaming on Netflix, the former a cautionary tale, the latter an instructive and inspiring one.
But if you ever want to spend two hours rolling around light and softness with beauty and love, watch The Photograph. This Times review gets it right; this is a love story. I’ll go further, it’s a story about how we record love in pictures of light. Photography is the metaphorical river that carries the narrative, but to watch light play on the faces of the actors is something to behold. There’s a trick the writer-director Stella Meghie plays with the soundtrack, picking a distorted speaker from an old car in one timeline and remixing it into the ambient soundtrack in another timeline where the character played winningly by Issa Rae tries to make sense of things.
What I’m listening to
Another week, another bunch of musicians providing a soundtrack to the jagged wound exposing the nerve in the space-time continuum of late. Austin’s Miss Lavelle White, 91, wants you to “Keep Your Mask On.” A subscriber offered The Chick’s “March March,” which represents welcome musical growth from the bluegrass Texas trio but, for my money, makes an initial mash of intersectionality but lands the ship solidly. Los Coast & Gary Clark Jr. cover Sam Cooke’s A Change is Gonna Come” to raise money for charity. And those are just the Texas musicians.
Then there’s Anderson .Paak’s “Lockdown.” I mean. Damn. Ann Powers of NPR wrote a better review of the video for Anderson .Paak’s “Lockdown” than I could imagine.
Here is the downtime of the uprising, where people doubt themselves and comfort each other, hold their children and silently mourn the losses that have drawn them into the streets.
Watch this video or we can’t be friends anymore.
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