Author: Benjamin

Today the Twitterverse is blowing up with news that Neil Gorsuch founded something called the “Fascism Forever Club” when he was in high school. (I assume Facebook is as well.) I’m working on a longer essay regarding the Supreme Court vacancy, but in the meantime I want to share a few thoughts.

1. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but a Donald Trump nominee is going to be the next Supreme Court justice. The Republicans played a game of hardball utterly without precedent in our nation’s history, and they won. It sucks, but they won. I hate it as much as everyone else, but unless you can think of a quick way to get three Republican senators replaced by Democrats, the Dems simply don’t have the votes to keep someone from being confirmed.

   (I’m here assuming that the Republicans will use the so-called “nuclear option” if the Democrats choose to filibuster.)

2. Neil Gorsuch is a colleague of my wife; she knows him personally. She reports to me that he well liked and highly respected around CU Law School as a thoughtful jurist and a good person.

   One political writer whom I trust, Tim Dickinson at Rolling Stone, has been reading some of Gorsuch’s opinions, and he tweeted the following:

   https://twitter.com/7im/status/826844995869040641

   https://twitter.com/7im/status/826873113010806787

   https://twitter.com/7im/status/826942076663128065

   Yes, Gorsuch is intellectually and politically in the mold of Scalia. But he’s clearly a far cry from being a monster.

3. It is possible to be pro-life and be a good person. I differentiate between someone with whom I disagree on the issue and really nasty people like the Operation Rescue folks. If you are unable to at least fathom why abortion remains controversial 44ish years after Roe v. Wade, you yourself have succumbed to fanaticism. Sorry.

4. We don’t actually know what the “Fascism Forever Club” is. It’s totally possible that it was something like a club devoted to playing the wargame Diplomacy, and it got its name because Gorsuch always wanted to play as Germany or Italy and threw a hissyfit when he wasn’t so permitted. Who knows? Here’s a little hint: most modern fascists (Gorsuch is only seven years old than I am) don’t use “fascist” to describe themselves. They recognize that the term is kind of, uh, tainted.

   In all likelihood, the “Fascism Forever Club” was the kind of blithely intemperate thing that people do when they’re in high school, because teenagers are idiots.

   And if there really is something nefarious about the “Fascism Forever Club,” trust that it will come out in his confirmation hearings. Even the Republican party is likely to look askance, at least publicly, at someone who chooses to self-describe thus.

Update 3 Feb 2017: It wasn’t until I woke up this morning that it occurred to me that perhaps the picture from Gorsuch’s yearbook that drove this story was someone’s semi-clever Photoshopped fake. The story first appeared on the NYPost, got picked up by liberal outlets like Daily Kos, and was genuinely blowing up Twitter, which is where I heard about it. But I looked into it no more deeply than that.

After I got over my initial shame of “Oh my God, have I become a ‘I read it on the Internet so it must be true’ person?” I realized that pretty much everything I wrote here still holds. A Trump nominee will be the next Supreme Court justice, and there is nothing the Dems can really do to stop it. Notwithstanding that I strongly disagree with his judicial philosophy, Gorsuch is qualified; more importantly, all Republican senators will think so. And it’s totally possible Gorsuch played wargames back in high school.

Is it true that you are in no small part putting up these short pieces about the craft and goals of Free Refills in order to give yourself a little space and take the pressure of daily publishing off for a while?

Damn right I am.

As these things go, the Free Refills mission–“change the world”–might be a bit broad to be effectively actionable.

In examining my work here (again), I asked myself some questions about why I’m doing what I do, and I was startled by the answer.

Why do I maintain a word-count quota? Easy enough to answer: to keep myself writing. Do I ever over-focus on quantity over quality? Sometimes. But I’ve found the surest path to quality work is work. Keeping a quota forces me to keep working.

Why do I maintain a daily publishing schedule? A trickier question to answer. Initially, there were two reasons: in order to keep myself in front of readers every day, and as an antidote to perfectionism.

And now? Regarding the latter: While I won’t claim to have vanquished perfectionism, after two years of practice it’s much less of a problem. But the former reason actually looks poorly defined. What does it mean to be in front of people every day? And to what end?

I watched both the men’s and women’s Australian Open finals this weekend. The women’s final, between Venus and Serena, will be remembered for its place in history (Venus’s first final since Wimbledon 2009, Serena winning her 23rd Major to break her tie with Steffi Graf for most Slams in the Open era), but not for the tennis on display, which was error-filled and drab.

The men’s final, between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, was everything we hoped it would be–a dramatic, back-and-forth match at the limits of their ability, every bit worthy of the occasion.

I was pretty blown away by the Federer-Nadal match, and I’m inspired to write about it in a way that’s unlike any sportswriting I’ve done before. I want to see if I can tell the story of the entire match. Why try to do such a thing? Why not just tell everyone to go watch it? In part it’s because my training in energy systems in the body gives me a perspective that other sportswriters don’t have. But also, it’s because I don’t know if I can do it. It may not work. And the only way to find out is to try.

I followed my own advice last week, and so I quite forcefully stayed away from media of any sort. If anything came up around the inauguration, even as little as an image, I did my best to shut it down, to let it intrude in my consciousness as little as possible. One result of that was that I wasn’t aware of how much energy had developed around the protest marches that occurred the following day. Estimates of the attendance in Denver alone were in the range of 100,000 people. That’s impressive.

Wow, I thought. The guy has only been president for a day. He hasn’t even done anything yet. Well, except for saying all those shitty things, which is definitely more than nothing. But still, I wondered: what exactly are people saying with their protests, and what do they hope to achieve?

There’s a tightrope the protests have to walk. If the protest energy is nothing more than a mirror of the right wing’s approach of the last eight years–an assertion of the lack of legitimacy of everything the administration does, along with a concomitant sweeping up of the president’s voters into a them that’s in opposition to us–then the protests are only fueling dysfunction. The level of dysfunction in our system long ago became toxic, but fueling it will only make things radically worse.

On the other hand, the protests could serve as a line in the sand toward Trump himself–that people aren’t going to stand for his racism, his sexism, and above all the chilling Orwellian pounded-fist
demand to control all discourse–while at the same time trying to create conversation with Trump supporters, to bring in rather than push away. If that’s the case, then the protests are doing good, important, constructive work.

It’s not clear which way it’s going to fall. In fact, right now, it’s probably both. But the goal has to be the creation of greater and greater unity, not greater and greater division. Division is a form of destruction. For the past eight years (at least), we’ve watched destruction win. It’s time for that to change.

Roger Federer’s tense five-set victory over Stan Wawrinka brings us now three-quarters of the way to one of the most wonderfully improbable sports stories of the last several years. Were you to script the dream scenario for the finals of the Australian Open, you’d end up with Serena vs. Venus in the women’s final and Roger vs. Rafa in the men’s. Should Rafa beat Dimitrov tonight, that scenario will come true.

(Given the current quality of Rafa’s play and his far greater experience in the biggest matches, expect Rafa to do his part to bring the scenario to fruition.)

How improbable was it? Well, no one is surprised to see Serena in the final. But the others? Venus, now 36 years old, hasn’t been in a Grand Slam final since 2009. Roger is seeded 17th and is coming off a six-month injury layoff. Rafa is seeded 9th and has been out with injury as well. All three of them needed to beat top players in multiple matches to make it this far.

Dare I preview the finals?

Serena seems to play because of some deep sense of obligation to her talent, that being anything less than unequivocally the best ever is a betrayal of some sort. Her talent seems almost as much burden as gift. But she’s playing terrific tennis, having totally overwhelmed everyone she’s thus far faced.

Venus, on the other hand, seems to be playing for the sheer joy of it. Prior to the Venus-Vandeweghe match, I said I couldn’t imagine Venus bring her utmost to deny her baby sister her record-breaking twenty-third major. But after the unself-consciously overwhelmed exuberance of her celebration after beating Coco, I think otherwise. Serena has to be seen as the heavy favorite, but I’d love to see Venus get the win.

I’m assuming Rafa will indeed beat Dimitrov. And, as much as it pains me to say it, I think Rafa will end up beating Roger in the final. Ever since Rafa first burst onto the scene, he has been Roger’s kryptonite. The match against Stan showed that Roger is either not fully 100% yet or simply doesn’t have the strength to overcome someone hitting heavy balls to his backhand, which Rafa will surely do again and again and again and again. I’m a huge Federer fan and would love to see him get his 18th, but I have to see Rafa as the heavy favorite.

Another realization from recent contemplation about my work with Free Refills.

If the goal is more substantive work, then it’s not effective to have to draft, edit, revise and publish all in the same day. The need to keep shifting gears keeps me on the surface of things.

I note, though, that sometimes something happens that demands a piece in response right away. When that happens, I’ll get the piece written. It’s not my favorite way of writing, but I have the skills to do so.

Again pondering the question of how to make Free Refills more supportive of my broader goals, I had this realization: I have established tactics (weekly word-count quotas, daily publishing), but it’s not entirely clear what strategy these tactics are supporting.

This month I’ve been teaching a once-a-week class for nine- and ten-year-olds. At lunch on Saturday, three of them, two girls and boy, were sitting at the next table over. I walked over to check on them.

“How come you have those lines on your head?” the first girl asked me. “It’s creepy.”

“Well,” I said, “either my helmet liner has seams, and the seams leave indentations where they press into my scalp, or a mad scientist snuck into my house last night and cut my skull open.”

The second girl, clearly nobody’s fool, said in an incredulous, the-question-is-its-own-answer tone, “Which is more likely?”

“I think it’s the first one,” said the first girl.

“I think it’s the second one,” said the boy.