Sanuk D

I don't know what I'm doing here, I should be someplace else.

Thanks to @xtyc for the free idea that inspired this post.

Bill came into the house dripping with sweat after his run.  Out of habit, he kicked his running shoes into the coat closet by the door and walked back to the bedroom where he flipped the switch on the clock radio.  He heard Bob Edwards’ voice but did not listen to the words as he went to take a shower.  Charlottesville was supposed to be cooler than Nashville, or at least that was what Bill hoped for.  He had chosen the University of Virginia over Ole Miss or Alabama because it’s law school had a better reputation.  Being in the Blue Ridge mountains didn’t hurt either.

He almost went to Ole Miss anyway, even though he had not intention of making class action law suits with Dickie Scruggs.  The magnolias in Oxford fit right in with his close cropped hair and tortoise rim glasses.  It’s not that Bill was all that conservative, but his whole image of what he wanted to be when he grew up was built around Gregory Peck’s depiction of Atticus Finch in “To Kill A Mockingbird.”  He rented the movie when he was a sophomore in high school on the night before there was to be a test on the book.  Bill had not, of course, actually read the book.  That image of an honorable man standing up for justice against all odds made a deep impression on him, and the next time he needed new lenses, he traded in his John Lennon glasses for Atticus Finch ones.

That summer, after he finished the books assigned to rising juniors, Bill happened across In Cold Blood. He was engaged, enraptured even, by Capote’s vivid account of the Clutter family’s brutal murder.  He finished it at Boy Scout camp.  When he got home, right before school was about to start, he saw in the paper that Truman Capote was dead.  Out on the road this morning, while Bill was running he thought about Capote’s other great work, Breakfast at Tiffany’s.  Like To Kill A Mockingbird, he had only seen the movie.  But he turned over in his mind the ways that he was like Holly Golightly, making up a persona for the people around him so that they could not get at the more horrid truth of his real life.

And the truth was that Truman Capote was not the only author he had killed, although he was the first.  It would be another five years before Bill did it again, but just as he was trying to decide between law school and journalism school, he came across All The King’s Men. One might imagine that, being an English major at Vanderbilt, Bill should have come across Robert Penn Warren significantly sooner.  There remains, however, a great deal of ambiguity regarding the leader of the Southern Agrarians in Kirkland Hall.  It was perhaps serendipitous that Bill picked up the book in the days just before his last year of classes would begin.  Not wanting to resemble the cow of the first chapter who is powerless to do anything but observe, Bill chose Atticus Finch over Jack Burden and the LSAT over the GMAT.  When he finished the book two weeks into the semester, Bill heard that Robert Penn Warren was dead.

That spring, in an effort to coast to graduation, he took the survey of southern literature course that had been put off since freshman year.  Bill was not much on being exclusive to a genre, but he loved the class.  He especially loved Walker Percy, picking up The Last Gentleman on Spring Break after having read The Moviegoer for the course.  As Bill was about to cast off his line from the only city in which he had ever lived, he could identify with Will Barrett’s disorientation and fainting spells.  By graduation, Walker Percy was dead.

Bill did not bring any novels to Charlottesville.  He was tempted to read through a John Grisham novel just for spite, but it turned out that not even spite was up to the task.  Not that there was a lack of reading material in his classes.  Contracts and torts kept him busy enough, but they lacked the sort of moral compass setting that Bill had come to rely on from literature.  At a time when most of his classmates were headed towards lucrative careers in big DC law firms, Bill’s vision of life as a simple country lawyer — doing pro bono work for the poor and downtrodden — seemed at best foolish and at worst irresponsible for the President of the Law Review of a leading school of law.  In desperation, he had picked up a copy of To Kill A Mockingbird in the Daedalus Bookshop.

The book had been beside his bed for a few weeks.  He knew it was a stupid notion, that he killed writers just by reading their work, but it was also hard to shake.  Like many people, Bill was hoping that Harper Lee (and JD Salinger and Ralph Ellison) would have a change of heart and publish some new work.  He could not fathom how he would feel if he killed Harper Lee, especially if she was working on something.  So the book sat by the bed with his glasses on top.  This morning as he reached for them with a hand wet from the shower, he thought he heard Bob Edwards say something about Harper Lee.  Bill froze, sure that just the intention of reading the book had brought doom.  James Carville, the Presidential Campaign Manager for the Governor of Arkansas, responded to Edwards’ question that yes, he in fact had been profoundly influenced by To Kill A Mockingbird. Bill put on his tortoise shell frames and threw the book in the garbage.

I cannot tell you how many times in the last 12 hours I have gotten the question, “So, what IS your deal with Malcolm Gladwell?”  Well, I could tell you but the answer is not at all flattering to me, so I won’t tell you.  The deal is this: Mr. Gladwell is good with the words.  He is artful at taking a piece of research which I could not care less about and describing it in a way that makes it interesting.  He is also able to take the conclusion of that research and connect it to a societal issue.  Not bad, huh?

Well, that depends.  Take the article he wrote on brain damage and football for the most recent New Yorker. In it he deftly and compellingly outlines the emerging research on the long term effect of brain injuries sustained during football games.  Good stuff which I had not seen so clearly described before.  He also seeks to connect football and dog fighting.  With the continuing story of Michael Vick in the zeitgeist, one can understand Malcolm Gladwell going there.  But the connection, once made, is never fully explicated.  Half baked, it seems to be presented as a novel statement which, being obvious, needs no further exploration.

But the fact that athletes in general are asked to sacrifice their health and maybe their lives for our entertainment is not a new idea.  In addition to introducing us to Renee Zellweger, “Jerry Maguire” did a nice job of exploring this moral territory.  When it comes to football specifically, and especially to the ambiguous relationships between player and fan; poverty and wealth; and black and white, Michael Lewis did that already to great effect in The Blind Side.

In the one book of Malcolm Gladwell’s which I have read, Blink, this same fault arises.  Early in the writing, we learn that people make decisions and judgements about other people much more quickly than we would like to admit.  Compelling stuff, but the narrative doesn’t go much farther than that.  In another recent New Yorker article, Gladwell decries the failure of Southern Liberals to bring about societal change because they did not work to change institutionalized racism, preferring instead to attempt to change individual’s attitudes.  One of his main examples of this is Atticus Finch.  Finch, of course, is a fictional character.  Harper Lee, who created Finch to be an example for an alternative to impersonal and institutional solutions to a problem rooted in individual attitudes, is a real person.  Despite her obvious discomfort with the spotlight, she produced a compelling alternative to re-enacting Reconstruction using modern uniforms.

By focusing on the character rather than the act of popularizing that character, Mr. Gladwell misses the point.  But we are sure not to miss his, because he will make it again.  And again.  And once again.  Despite his research and literary abilities, Mr. Gladwell’s conclusions are often shallow and unsupported.  Rather than observing a phenomenon and finding multiple perspectives that confirm or deny the truth which the phenomenon seems to illustrate, Gladwell takes other phenomena and fits them into the same matrix.  While the connections he makes are sometimes inventive and often well described, they are ultimately incomplete.

That’s the deal with Malcolm Gladwell.