A Guarantee On The Box Makes A Man Feel Good
You put that box under your pillow at night, the Guarantee Fairy might come and leave a quarter, am I right
This Friday will mark two years since the last time I reached the summit of a mountain.
Wrapped in a rain cloud, my friends Will and Mike and I stood atop South Brother in Olympic National Park after almost six hours of near-vertical stumbling and scrambling. As is the case with a lot of physical endeavors I undertake with my friends, I was at the back of the pack in both athleticism and competence. But we all got there—which felt especially sweet as Will and I had tried for the same peak in 2018 and spent all day toiling only to expend our precious time and energy reaching a false summit.
Hiking up to the true summit of South Brother from the climber’s camp in the Valley of the Silent Men, you churn upward through thick forest and then dense brush and then a spooky burn. The trail is pitched between a 35 and 45 degree angle basically the whole way. But you don’t really feel like you’re on a mountain-mountain until you round a corner at the top of the new growth area starting to cover the burn, where a blast of glacial air rolls down to hit you. Where a moment before you were doubled over and sweating, here all is frigid and frosty.
In June, the snow begins to melt out from the peak, which makes the going occasionally tricky: from one step to the next it is hard to know if you’re landing on deep snowpack or a thin crust that you can punch through to expose a crevasse below. There was one such incident on our journey, when my leg went through a snowbridge and into a narrow gap, almost taking the rest of me with it. In the same moment Mike’s phone fell beneath the same bridge. Mike and Will hauled me out of trouble and before the adrenaline could fully hit I was on the ground helping them dig for the phone. (We found it in short order.)
After that moment we went the rest of the way mostly without incident. To this day I look across the Puget Sound on clear days and grin at the massive M-shaped peak that lured me in. My body took me all the way up there, I think. It could have all gone very badly but instead I have one of the most precious memories of my entire life.
Of course, you don’t just have to be good in the backcountry. You also have to be lucky, which has nothing much to do with you.
A few weeks ago, a woman my age died descending from the summit of South Brother. All she did was slip—a very easy thing to do up there in the melting snow.
Her story is not mine and so is not mine to tell. But it has made me think quite a lot: about how lucky I have been, about why anyone does the hard things they do. About how something that is so beautiful to me could be so hateful and tragic to others. We too often assume our reference points are the same as everyone else’s, when really we have no idea.
Unsurprisingly I often think about that idea in a political context. I certainly don’t believe in some Gladwellian idea that the reason all bad things happen is that people are just strangers who have different pieces of information, but it is useful to ground oneself in remembering that people do read the signposts differently. (Or they don’t read them at all!)
There are obviously plenty of examples of this but how we view Barack Obama’s presidency feels like a good one, personally. It is incomprehensible to me that after eight more years of forever war and massive bank bailouts and blowing a historic three-branch Democratic majority with nothing to show for it, people would still feel rosy enough toward the guy to listen to his podcasts or Netflix interviews or advice about elections.
Seriously, look at this shit, that a 13-year-old kid had to say in front of Congress.
I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer grey skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are grey.
But millions of people do listen to Obama’s interviews and political advice, and my incomprehension is not particularly useful to the project of changing the conditions that make so many people miserable. American politics, like so many other things, is often carried by the way people feel rather than what they actually get out of it. Remember that scene in Tommy Boy where Tommy has to convince the auto parts guy that the quality of the parts matters more than the guarantee on the box?
That’s not to excuse people who put their hands over their eyes or ears because it’s easier that way, of course. I think you’re only entitled to your illusions provided other people don’t have to suffer for them. But acknowledging those illusions as a real political force that you can’t shame or fact-monger people out of is an important consideration for those who wonder how any of this heinous shit can ever get any better.
On top of that it is probably worth noting that to view politics solely through the lens of moral outrage is another type of failure. The idea that things are bad because people just aren’t mad enough about the right things ignores the larger forces at play here; people’s differing interpretations of facts hardly make for the most decisive factor in our political lives. To return to Obama’s presidency for a moment:
In the November 2010 midterm elections, business made its anger known…When Democrats took huge losses in the midterms, White House officials interpreted it as a sign of the need to bolster business confidence in the administration. More consequential than corporate campaign donations was the fact that business was still withholding so much money from the economy, impeding the recovery and contributing to voter disaffection with the Democrats.
Obama was proposing a deal with corporate leaders in which they would “stop hoarding cash and start hiring in return for tax breaks and other government support,” including free-trade deals and deregulation.
None of these reforms would directly address the economic roots of the crisis. They would do little to boost the low level of domestic demand, which was the main economic cause of continued recession…Rather, the reforms sought to address the political nature of the economic recession. By granting concessions to business in unrelated realms of policy, the administration hoped to cajole banks into making new loans and employers into hiring new workers. The reforms did not make economic sense, but they had a compelling political logic. They were concessions designed to get business to cease its capital strike.
While it’s daunting to consider that the hoarded trillions of American corporations have the power to steer the ship of state without the president being able to do anything about it, the good news is that there is a blueprint for taking some of that power back. You may not believe that just because you saw it in a newsletter, but perhaps this will compel you:
Movement organizers understood this dynamic. The most successful local campaigns throughout the South did not focus on public officials. When they did, they were much weaker. In the Albany, Georgia, campaign of 1961– 62, the local branch of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other Albany-based organizers targeted downtown businesses and local bus services. However, Martin Luther King Jr.’ s Southern Christian Leadership Conference did not throw its weight behind those efforts. As a result, the economic disruption campaign remained somewhat haphazard, which was one of several reasons for the movement’s defeat. The Albany campaign is widely said to have failed because of the restraint of the local police chief, who quietly arrested protesters rather than creating violent spectacles. But King’s own conclusion was somewhat different:
All our marches in Albany were marches to the city hall trying to make them negotiate, where if we had centered our protests at the stores, the businesses in the city, [we could have] made the merchants negotiate ... If you can pull them around, you pull the political power structure because really the political power structure listens to the economic power structure.
Like all things—climbing a mountain, changing the world, etc.—it’s certainly easier said than done. But it can be done, and more importantly, it must. We can’t settle anymore for guarantees on the box that make us feel good.
That’s all for now. Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next week.
-Chuck
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