I have been preparing a business plan all summer for my next book. This will mean sending out press releases, and I want to make sure that people know that I mean them no harm in my book, which I have titled Art in the Age of Talk Radio. The premise of the book is that there are two brothers, Richard and Frank Noyes. One is extremely liberal; the other is extremely conservative. The reader is asked to decide on the basis of my characterization of these two which side they are on in the current debate over art.
I began writing this book in the spring of 1989 at the beginning of my graduate education. As followers of my blog know, graduate school did not go well. I was called a Nazi (I wish I was exaggerating) on the first day of day for volunteering that I like to outline my papers before I wrote them, and it went downhill from there. I started writing it after I had a conservation with one of my favorite English professors, and I could not believe that he was so idealistic. I recreated it almost exactly in the introduction to the novel, and it has not changed in more than 20 years.
The rest of the book has gone through a myriad of changes, which paralleled changes in my political outlook. Originally, I was a liberal. After getting accepted to the University of Illinois, I changed my political orientation to conservative for a couple years. I gave that up before I got out of graduate school on account of Limbaugh’s anti-intellectual approach to the problem of political correctness.
In my latest incarnation of my book, I place myself outside the political fray as a disinterested party. But that’s not how I expect to have my book received. My experience in graduate school leads me to believe that the left will peg me as a partisan of the right, while the right will peg me as a partisan of the left. This state of affairs has endured for 30 years, and had left me thinking of myself as a man without a country.
I never intended to publish this (or any other) book until I had a stroke which forced me into the position of having to choose something I could do to keep myself busy during long days. Not being able to stand up for more than five minute and not being able to remember my own thoughts long enough to get to the end of a sentence, I decided to begin writing as therapy. I never expected to recover enough to finish anything, much less a whole book. But I did finish, not one but 5 books so far.
I have been wary of publishing my thoughts, because of my experience in grad school. I don’t like being characterized like this, and this is why for my first book, I wrote a ‘silly book’ on the American game, because I thought that no one would ever read it and if they did no one would take offence to such a silly book of stories. But this book is my baby, and so I spent a lot of time thinking about I could present myself as a disinterested party, and not a virulent adherent of the opposing party (the proverbial ‘other’). I had done it in grad school; why could I not do the same thing now.
So my first test came recently, when I answered my good friend’s post asking for people to gather together around President Obama’s new jobs plan and tax Wall Street. I had some questions for my friend, and suspecting that she would put me in the same box that I always get put in (she’s left, which means that I’m a partisan of the right), I ventured an opinion. In the end, I think it went well, although I got the usual ‘not-with-us-must-be-against-us’ response. I put only that which I wrote, not wanting to embarrass others (it is enough that I embarrass myself).
Letters to a Friend
I applaud your seriousness, but I have some serious reservations about our President (for whom I voted). But rather than getting worked up about them, I prefer to poke fun at serious people from the margins, and that is why I write amusing (and I hope funny) books like Poker Tales
.
I understand the passion for politics in this country, but I can’t participate in it (other than voting) since I got screwed in grad school. I’m extremely conservative on financial issues (which liberals just don’t understand) and extremely liberal on social issues (which conservatives just don’t understand). Maximal freedom is what makes this country great, and the more opinions the better, even wrong opinions like mine.
But since this country is made up of two parties (what we used to call in grad school a ‘binary divide’), and since it was required that I declare myself, each side of the grad school binary divide considered me a member of the ‘other’ party. This made me feel like a man without a country, but unlike the guy in that story, I long ago abandoned politics and country.
There are some serious implications that I have been dealing with since I decided to drop out of binarily-ordered society. This is why I write books. You can read a fictionalized (and I hope funny) version of my dilemma in Poker Tales
in the story called ‘Reykjavik.’
In case you’re worried about my lack of seriousness, I am just finishing up a serious scholarly book on Spenser’s Faerie Queene on the same subject. In that book, I divide the universe into three parts (which we used to call a ‘triad’ or a ‘trinity’ in grad school). I find that I occupy what I call ‘the middle space’ (a quote from The Faerie Queene) all alone. I like it that way.
.As you can see, I don’t take myself very seriously (after all, Who am I?). I am trying to make my non-violent personality clear to my friend. But my gentle friend has lingering questions, which she expressed in a sports metaphor:
I do have trouble, imagining, given many remarks and tales from or about others, that there is a middle ground available for occupation by just one! If so, then, I guess there is a sports complex where all of these grounds are situated, offering acreage for at least a few others who do not align with the far coasts of theoretical polarizations.
That is a good point, and it has made me rethink a position that I had taken in my forthcoming book on Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Her assumption is that there is no unoccupied ground in any argument. But I disagree. I tried to make my the case in the following post:
You are not the only person who’s had problems with my position. Nobody understands the world the way that I do. I was driven to my position by my inability to find a place for my ideas in the world as it’s been constructed since the Enlightenment. Reading works of the Dark and Middle Ages—works that by definition have been excluded from consideration since the Enlightenment—I discovered my position.
To be clear, I don’t expect anybody to believe me after 30 years. That is why I’ve set up my own company to publish my work (even my scholarly work). But I actually do believe that eventually people will see that I am correct. I liken my system of thought to the old book Flatworld (Lineworld? Planeworld?) in which people live on a two-dimensional plane and some enterprising person looks above and sees a hithertofor unknown third dimension to experience. Folks in the 2-D world either can’t see the third dimension or when they encounter the third dimension attempt to fit it into their 2-D model.
I maintain that the 3rd dimension is real and that it played an enormous role in the construction of the philosophical universe before it was wiped out by the Enlightenment that brought us Adam Smith’s capitalism and the American Revolution in the pivotal year of 1776, both of which were constructed on binary principle that eventuated in divides between rich and poor and the choice between Republicans and Democrats.
Of course, I could just be an idiot.
My 2¢.
Before my friend could respond, one of her friends decided to query me on my ‘fiscal conservativism.’ He gave me a binary choice between two alternatives: ‘One way to understand “fiscally conservative” it that that the books must be balanced over the business cycle. (Me.) Another way is that the federal government must be shrunk. Which are you?’
I responded as follows:
Thanks for the reference to Flatland. I believe that balancing the books is responsible business practice, but I don’t believe that this is in any way ‘natural.’ On the contrary, if it was ‘natural,’ people would have been doing it forever and not just in the modern age. As far as siding with the GOP, who follows ‘fair and balanced’ FOXNews or any of the other networks who claim that they are the ones who are really ‘fair and balanced,’ give me a break.
To understand why I don’t believe that balance is in any way ‘natural,’ see my blog post on the Pareto equation. http://william-heise.com/2010/03/23/tales-told-out-of-school/ I think this is a problem.
What I meant by fiscally conservative is that I don’t believe that I am obligated to participate in culture to understand its role in other people’s lives, so I play the stock market and I win more than I lose. That makes me part of the 20% of winners in the stock market (and that is a classic Pareto distribution, after all) and not one of the losers. Most of my academic friends in the humanities would be losers in this equation (although happily, because they conceive of money in idealistic terms as not just bad but metaphysically evil).
In my Poker Tales
, I explore the implications of a character who drops out of the Cold War world of 1972 to explore the (decadent) game of poker rather than staying in a binarily-ordered universe that offers an increasingly stark choice between individual (American) and collective (Soviet) models of social organization. His ultimate message to his opponent is that winners win, while losers lose, and you had better be on the right side of the equation or you will be a loser yourself.
That’s a disastrous outcome for a society built on freedom AND equality, because it offers an infinitely open society for freedom-seekers, while offering a steep hill for collectivists like [our mutual friend], who want us come together over our increasingly inequality. I’ve come to believe that you can’t have both, and America is traveling the road of individual decadence rather than collective action in spite of our election of the collectivist Obama without taking seriously other models (like mine or the GOPs).
As far as my model goes, models are only as good as their ability to predict the future and to make a model of the present. My model predicts the slipping of the status of collective action towards individual freedom. With that comes Paris Hilton as a collective role model, while deep thinkers who used to be models for our behavior (and still are to some) are relegated to back rooms to argue out minutiae in increasingly irrelevant detail (see the “Four Parisians” in my Poker Tales
). I still take the minority position that deep thinkers are more worthwhile than the democratically elected cultural collective, but I am in the minority.
I don’t like it, but this is what my model is telling me.
On the continuing questions to my model, I responded:
My friends call me Bill, and I consider both of you my friends. I hope what I am going to tell you will not be offensive, as I have no desire to fight with anyone, much less my friends.
I don’t think it’s a great idea to raise revenues to balance the budget, as it will take away from economic growth, leaving us in a state similar to Japan for the last 20 years of maintaining artificial wealth of an oligarchic few at the expense of the many. Cutting a government that is living beyond its means and shifting the burden of growth to the private sector is a much better solution in spite of what some would say is a lot of corruption in the private sector. Government is equally corrupt, so it doesn’t make much sense to take away from the private production of wealth to a corrupt government to redistribute wealth to those who have no incentive to work. This will take away from the production of private wealth. Being a wealthy country has its own privileges and not having wealth carries its own punishments, as we are seeing in the continuing decline of America to China in the post-Clinton age.
People who don’t work should not be able to vote for a share of the product of other people’s hard work, as it takes away the incentive of people to work hard for their gains if they can do no work and reap similar rewards. It took me ten years to learn how to invest in the stock market and to able to make money consistently. I spent a lot of non-tax-deductible money on a library of books, and I lost money consistently until I found out the secret. No one in the government expressed any concern over my losses. But the government was very interested in collecting taxes on my winnings. This makes them unequal providers of protection in my universe. I take all the risk; they take a piece when I win and leave me alone when I lose.
The government is a useful parasite who provides a useful service but who eats away at his host because he thinks he, and not the private individual, is at the center of existence (just as every organism thinks they are at the center of the universe). Individuals, though limited are capable of making better and more nimble decisions than bloated bureaucrats are because they taking risks that the government does. The government’s 1-way view of the world is extremely self-serving. Even Obama’s push for collective action to even out the wealth distribution in terms of social inequity can be put in terms of a (thinly disguised) grasp after the wealth that others have earned through hard work. Hard work, not economic equality, should be the goal of the American people. If you want a share of wealth, you should be forced to find out how the world of money works (and a lot of this is like learning how sausage is made; it’s an ugly thing that doesn’t correspond to how with how idealists would like the world to work).
Having said that, I would point out to conservatives that it is the private sector’s short term focus on making money that gives us the people’s love/hate relationship with the wealthy Paris Hilton at the expense of more collective cultural action. The GOP’s desire to give us more private wealth will only perpetuate the current trends towards what Limbaugh considers decadence. I think that the world needs a better solution than the ones being offered today.
This last point is import to me, because it is only here that I start to make my case for myself as a thinker. I find it surprising that no one ever asks me how I make money in the stock market, but they don’t. I like to think it’s because I am such a fascinating conversationalist, but I know better (and so do you). My friend, for instance is much more concerned that I am making the case that I look at the world through a different lens than she does. This offends her ‘can’t-we-all-get-along’ mentality. I respond thus:
In my perception of the 2-D universe, people operate on absolute structures of is/isn’t, yes/no, this/that without any incentive to compromise. When two parties arrive at differing positions, both believe that their position is ‘true.’ This leaves all other positions as ‘false.’ So people like Rush Limbaugh hold their opponents as liars who are only interested in using rhetoric to persuade people of things that are against their better interests. The same thing is true of the Left’s answer to Limbaugh, Al Franken, who accuses Limbaugh of being a ‘Big Fat Liar.’ How are we to determine the truth in such an atmosphere in which two people claim that they hold the truth EXCLUSIVELY?
In America today, people decide who to believe on the basis of their upbringing, not on any rational consideration. Democrats and Liberals decide on the basis of what their parents supported and the listen to Franken and believe that the ‘other’ party is the party of liars. Republicans and conservatives listen to Limbaugh and believe that the ‘other’ party is the party of liars. There is no room to compromise. And where could someone compromise with someone who embodies a position that is not just different but EVIL? Having been on the outside of both positions for 30 years (not by choice), I find myself looking for a solution in which I can at last belong on the inside.
My triadic solution to this problem is laid out in my forthcoming novel, Art in the Age of Talk Radio, where I propose two Noyes (no-yes) brothers who operate on binary principles without any a) any sense that something is missing in their own configuration of the world and b) with an absolute sense that there is something wrong with the position of ‘others.’ Neither position wins in the end.
I wrote more after both responded. My friend was concerned that I was dictating her belief to her, a distinctly un-American thing to do. I assured her that I had no such intention. In fact, I thought that this conversation was going better than I imagined it would, even though my friend’s friend had said he found nothing in my thought that he hadn’t seen on the MotleyFool website. I wrote to my sincere friend first:
First, I want to reassure you that I’m on your side in this debate. Secondly, I don’t believe that I have any right to dictate anyone’s else’s beliefs to them, the more so because I studied English literature in grad school. What I want from someone more than anything else is someone to take my arguments seriously and not put me into a ready-made box that they feel I belong in but that I do not. That’s what I found in my academic career, where people put a position in front of me and expecting me to adhere to it on its face because THEY cannot find anything wrong with their arguments. That is the definition of ignorance.
I can find contrary arguments and evidence, and scholars who seriously hold those beliefs. I don’t profess to know anything (I’m like Socrates in that) and I desperately want to believe in someone who can hold a mirror up to my beliefs and show me where I am wrong. Your argument that my beliefs make for a ‘hostile environment’ for the poor is just, but my response is to educate the poor so they can fish for themselves and not to give up a piece of my fish that I earned through my own education and hard work.
My only obligation is to teach others my small and definitely not important bit of information to help them get along better in their lives, which I have done for twenty years in my spare time. But in my experience not everyone is willing to study and learn, and as a result some people get better results from their education, and as a result get more pieces of the pie. We need education to teach the valuable lesson that everything people want they can get from themselves if they work at it as well as the corollary lesson that this is not guaranteed. Making a lot of money involves taking risks, and taking risk involves a heavy percentage of people will fail. Not trying is akin to taking a shortcut through somebody else’s garden while at the same time eating the fruit of their labor. That only leads to creating a society of thieves and beggars, as the gardeners give up working and start receiving the benefits of other fool’s abhor.
Liberal arguments, which I say again that I support, don’t hold up as well as liberals think they do (neither do conservative arguments). Rather than looking to a past, as Limbaugh (to 1950s conservatism) and Obama (even further to turn of the 20th century progressivism) are doing, the next generation of liberals should think about fixing the weaknesses in their arguments that they seem to know not of. If they do not, then the current path of the country towards the have-nots admiring the haves (like Paris Hilton) will continue to the detriment of American culture.
But what is far worse for this country is that the rich, who have more liquidity than the poor and who make up only 20% of the population in the Pareto equation but have 80% of the wealth, will simply leave this country and go to someplace that will tax them less. We have already seen how rapidly job situation is deteriorating in the face of rapidly changing conditions. The same thing will happen to our rich people if we can’t get them a better reason to stay that won’t impede their earning power. To be clear, I do not like the situation, but I am not in control of the government, and no one is or can be in charge of the economy.
In the end, I just don’t think any humanly-devised argument can hold up under pressure that can be brought to bear on it. This is why Galileo and Copernicus show up to change the game with new ideas that take into account ALL of the pieces of the puzzle and not just those pieces that appeal to the old and fat office holders of the Church. They rapidly overtook the backward-looking Church in spite of all their power and wealth and the fact that they regularly burned heretics on the square. Ditto Bill Gates and powerful and wealthy IBM, although to be fair that happened without anyone getting burned. Power and wealth don’t matter in the face of a new imaginative construction that better explains the world. Old ideas fall as soon as a new idea emerges. I am trying (by no means succeeding) at looking forward through the prism of history which teaches that all ideas eventually fail and not at the world from a tarnished prism that has been looked through for a hundred years or longer.
That is why science puts forward hypotheses that only stand until someone comes along with a better explanation of phenomena. That’s what happened to Aristotelian physics after Newton came along, and it’s what happened to Newtonian physics after Einstein came along. And it is what will happen after a new thinker comes along with a better solution to problems that explain more evidence than can be explained now. Though new ideas start out as avant-garde ideas, they end up a last century’s ideas, as Limbaugh and Obama’s ideas currently are.
I say again, Ruth, that I’m on your side. But in the 2-D universe, I’m afraid—I live in fear, but I am by means sure—that both you and Peter will have pegged to the ‘other’ side of an ‘with-us-of-against-us’ 2-D argument. This is what happened to me over and over (and over) in grad school, and scars that open up don’t always heal properly. It is why I appeal to people on the middle ground between the two poles where I can get a fair hearing and be heard, not in your house or on mine but on a neutral middle ground that I identify as the third pole in my triadically-constructed universe. It is also why didn’t write a book for 30 years. It’s also why after I started writing that I wrote a humorous book, because I want to have friends more than I need to hear myself speak. (You can laugh; I know that’s a funny sentiment from someone who is verbose as I am).
Cheers!
A Lesson for the Curious
My profession that ‘I’m like Socrates’ is in no way supposed to make others feel that I am superior to others. I thought about making it clear that in likening myself to Socrates that I was making the same case I make in the classroom when I teach them Plato’s Ion. I first taught the shortest dialog in the Platonic corpus in 1991. When I was teaching at the University of Dayton in 1994, my advisor was stunned that I could teach my students such a complicated dialog as Ion and that my students could remember it and have an intelligent discussion of it without being prompted. This convinced me further that I was a good teacher and that it was just in Champaign that I couldn’t get a fair hearing due to the politically correct fervor there.
The lesson consists of my having my students to read Ion. Then I ask my students to decide who wins the argument between Socrates and the idiot Ion. They all choose Socrates (every time I have taught it, which must be more than 20 times). But when I ask them whether they actually believe in the metaphor by which Socrates describes the chain of being that descends from Zeus on high, through a mystical muse, through the empty vessel Ion, to a responding audience, my students always agree that Socrates is an idiot if he really believes such nonsense. Then we get involved in a discussion intended to pull apart the assumptions that govern our acceptance of Socrates over Ion, as well as our acceptance of our own minds over the authority of Socrates.
Anybody could have seen this, but it turns out that only I could see this (admittedly minor) point at the beginning of my class. I was able to lead my students through this discussion, because their alliegience is to aligning their minds with the truth (like Socrates intends to do) and not to an over-inflated sense of the power of their own rhetoric (like Ion does). It doesn’t matter that Socrates fails to align himself with truth. Then we get into a long discussion on the nature of truth.
My friend’s friend wasn’t interested in this (I’m not shocker, are you?). Instead, he had some questions about my belief in an alternate future.
I believe that this is likely in the long term, as redistributive tax policy will squeeze out the rich.
I have a fantasy (based on my reading of the history of Italian city states, where the modern world based in a new democratic society grew up between the two warring empires (Papal States and the Holy Roman) who were fighting over Superpower control just as the Soviet Union and the US had been fighting in the modern day) that this will be in a 0-infrastructure society that is not invested in the modern world and so not invested in accretions of modern error as both American parties are. I would put the most likely place for the next revolution on the margins of current society. Maybe somewhere in central Africa.
On my friend’s asking for clarification and simplification of my argument. In response, I wrote a two part answer:
PART I: Those who defend the poor AT THE EXPENSE OF THE RICH need to find an argument that is not so hostile to rich people if they want to retain them in this country. The liberal left is pursuing a perfectly justifiable program of asking people to pay their fair share, but there are two problems with it. 1) It is a completely politicized argument based in Limbaugh’s (and his ilk) overwhelming sense of patriotism. This will fade when Limbaugh fades (or dies). 2) There are other countries in the world than America in a way that there were not during the Cold War (The BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India, and China). None of them have followed the American model of freedom combined with low taxes; but when one of them does, it won’t be long before the rich apply for exit visas from high tax America. At that point, liberals will have killed the goose that lays the golden eggs. I’m not saying I like it; I’m pointing out how I feel human nature works in a philosophical sense.
PART II (last one): My 3-D argument is not meant to imply that I see more than you, or even that I see better than you. My 3-D way is a way of dividing what everybody sees in a new way. It’s like Freud who could see things that others could not in the world due to his new way of looking at things. At first he was the only person who thought that way (a position I take for myself), but when people began to see the value in Freud’s way of looking at the world, he got followers. Then he got too many followers. Then someone came with a better way, and no one studies Freud any more. I feel that I have a better system of looking at the world, but every insane person in the world thinks his system is better than any other system. I have no followers (nor do I particularly want any; for all I know, I’m an idiot). I just feel it’s a shame to have people locked in a 2-D world of haves versus have nots. There has to be a better way.
Peter: That’s why it’s is still a fantasy. But fantasy can become reality awfully quick. Look at the rapid rise of Bill Gates in the face of all of IBM’s power and money. They virtually controlled the computer industry in the year that Gates and Allen founded Microsoft (1974). It took IBM’s complacency in the face of a changing vision of the world to shift the ground. The same thing is happening today with American complacency in the face of China’s aggressive challenge after they learned the lesson of the Cold War—as American’s apparently didn’t—that we live in a competitive world. That, like the rise of Bill Gates to prominence, has taken a breathlessly short time. China is still a Marxist state and is not a likely candidate to steal Americans, but it is only a matter of time before someone realizes that they, too, can reap enormous benefits by relaxing taxes and increasing freedom far beyond the increasingly Europeanified America. Other countries are flooded all the time with workers seeking better jobs and conditions (e.g. look at Ghandi’s experience in Africa at the beginning of his movie). It’s just a matter of time before we see white-collar flight from this country. Not advocating; just saying.
I then addressed my friend’s suspicions that I was a cranky m*****f***er.
I know I should shut up, but it seems I can’t help it. Although I wanted nothing more to be a ultimate insider, after 30 years of being told ‘No, you can’t write that’ (with harsh comments in the margins), I have become comfortable writing as a perpetual outsider. What other choice have they given me? But, as I am constantly saying on my blog, Who am I to argue against you or Freud or Socrates or Marx or Descartes? To each his own is my motto. But just because I have a different point of view that doesn’t mean that people need to be mean. That is my chief complaint about ‘with-us-or-against-us’ 2-D thought.
I continued, after she made an ‘with-us-or-against-us’ argument with the implication that I, not being of of us, must be one of them. I disagreed, pointing to one of my primary sources for my ideas:
The 2-D ‘us-or-them’ division isn’t real in the first place, so if you think that Obama is going to take the opposite tack and reverse course, it isn’t going to happen. Politicians are drawn to the middle of debates, as even Richard Hofstadter, one of my favorite authors (assigned to me in a college history class) understood.
http://www.amazon.com/American-Political-Tradition-Men-Made/dp/0679723153/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1315839985&sr=1-4
Read his Introduction on Amazon if you want to understand why things don’t change in the midst of politicians promising ‘hope and change’ and why I am so pessimistic about working for change within the system. Hofstadter’s belief is that politicians are drawn to the underlying ideals. In my opinion, even a revolution isn’t enough to change the direction of a society once it has set its course.
I continued by attacking my friend’s complacency that was based (in my opinion) on her Enlightenment foundational though that holds that there is nothing new in the universe that hasn’t been discovered yet. This is the cause of a large part of the problems that I had in graduate school, and it is what I have been working on remedying ever since I had my stoke. I corrected her as gently as I could:
Cooperation is valuable and necessary, but your sharing society won’t bring back jobs from China; and jobs matter because that’s how we get the money to pay benefits to others less fortunate than ourselves (like the 16% of people who are unemployed). This isn’t the Cold War anymore, where everybody had a different agenda than the American one. America won the Cold War because our way of sorting resources worked better than any other system in existence (see my Poker Tales
for my explanation of how resources are sorted in America). Our system accorded to basic human nature better than any other existing system. EVERYBODY has always wanted what we have, and after the fall of communism EVERYONE in the world (except a few rouge terrorists) is competing with America for jobs because ours is now seen as the only way. It won’t be forever, since the problem you’ve identified of unequal distribution of resources is a very real problem that could destabilize not just our society but any society.
That’s not to say that someone couldn’t find a better way (that was my original point, you know). Nor should we stop looking for a better way, because the inequities that you are concerned about make for an unstable society. So I’m not arguing, as I suspect you think I am (it’s happened to me before; in fact it happens to me every time I make this argument), for the status quo. I am arguing that we need to take our obligation to compete more seriously than we do. But we don’t want the society that invented the electric light bulb, the telephone, automatic refrigeration, the phonograph, the automobile, the automated assembly line, the toaster, the transistor, the rocket ship, the computer, and the Internet to fall by the wayside because we are too lazy to realize that our society isn’t perfect. But knowing that (and I believe that almost everyone knows that) and taking action to fix it without breaking it further (my complaint with President Obama) are two very different things. This isn’t the Cold War, and our way is not the only way forward anymore.
Conclusion
I was done, and I had exhausted my correspondents, but I got this nice letter from my friend about a week later. In it, she seems to have actually taken my advice seriously and has cut back on her partisan rhetoric. I am shocked and will immediately warn that no one takes me seriously and neither should she.
So maybe there’s hope for me after all. This has given me confidence to put out the press releases that I have been working on all summer in support of my novel, which I had expected to go as things with me always go (that is to say wrong). Wish me luck.