Book Review: Irrelevant

Title: Irrelevant 

Author: Sara Addison-Fox

Date: 2019

ISBN: 978-0-9951188-2-9

Quote: "I'm not supposed to be nervous about the day I take my Relevance Test, but I am."

Does Relevance mean intelligence? Competence? Not...exactly. It turns out to mean something more like "ability to function as part of a totalitarian government." 

The narrator of that passage (this is one of those books where two narrators take turns, and they sound exactly alike) is Mallory. Addison-Fox obviously believes Mallory is autistic. Young people like Mallory accept the label "autistic" so they can get pensions but, even though Mallory does show a few reactions that suggest some brain trauma in her past, she's not disabled in any way. She's very sensitive to others' "feelings" as well as her own, and there's nothing abnormal about her "feelings." Anyone who remembers that "autistic" literally means disabled by having perceptions so skewed that one fails to learn to communicate even basic approval and disapproval with other people, by being a person who's likely to fall over sidewise if spoken to unexpectedly or howl with pain at the touch of water, will cry foul to Mallory's even claiming that label for herself, much less anyone else telling her that it describes her. 

Mallory is an intelligent eighteen-year-old with a conscience and a habit of rocking back and forth when crying, visualizing a friendly flying dragon when distraught. She fails the Relevance Test because, when asked what she'd do in various job situations, she gives answers indicating that she'd think for herself rather than obey or conform. She's not allowed to go home, but dumped outside the city walls into a little community of fellow Irrelevants. None of them shows any evidence of brain trauma, though the author evidently thinks they're autistic too. 

Real autism, the falling-over-if-spoken-to and howling-at-the-touch-of-water and similar genuinely disabling symptoms, does not exist in this story and it seems unfair to people who have real autism that the book mentions autism at all. A case could be made for using "autistic" to mean "self-directed," if it weren't in general use as meaning "disabled by inability to perceive consensus reality." But it is. Mallory's world doesn't seem to be so much healthier than ours that nobody has the disability we know as autism. The suspicion arises that people whom anyone not on the take would call autistic don't exist in Mallory's world because they're killed and made into the unpalatable nutrient bars people eat.

Anyway, while undergoing the torture of withdrawal from various drugs she's been fed for years--some to maximize docility, some as experiments--Mallory forms an instant bond with a boy, Cristan, who's been dumped out long enough that his skin has tanned. He has lots of temporary tattoo ink, which Mallory adores, not because ink does anything for women but because women tend to adore any and all characteristics of men who show actual concern about us before demanding that we make unwanted babies with them. They can hardly keep their hands off each other even as they're learning how the city government became increasingly totalitarian, even shutting out colors, apparently because it was allowed to do so. It all began with censorship, they're told.

This is volume one of a trilogy, so questions remain unanswered, the main plot unresolved, at the end. 

If you like dystopias, what's not to like about this one is that reading it may make you want to buy the other two books in the trilogy. If you don't like dystopias, well, you've been warned.

To a Young Leftist

Back around the turn of the century Rebecca Walker, daughter of Alice, edited an anthology of personal essays and memoirs called To Be Real. The contributors were too young to be very well known when the book was new and few, if any, have become famous since, but the one whose essay resonated with me was Anna Bondoc (1969-2023). Bondoc is remembered, when she is, as an artist first, a writer second. She wrote about being a conscientious, sensitive, talented individual trying to fit into a group of, to put it charitably, left-wingnuts. I wrote the first draft of this post after reading her essay for the second time, in 2010.

In her teens and twneties Bondoc said she wanted very much to join a left-wing political group, and the others just couldn't stop finding fault with her. When she taught a class, did she try to relate to and bond with the students? Who was she, a privileged Filipina, to try to "make" ghetto students "love" her? If her clothes looked "put together," did that prove that she was "so trapped in the middle class"? When she left her family to serve the movement, was she rejecting her ethnic roots? 

Not so many years earlier, when I was her age, I was having a similar experience with Seventh-Day Adventists, whose politics, such as they are, are so conservative that some Adventists don't even vote. In order to survive this kind of experience it's helpful to understand that religion, politics, or any other ideology that unifies a toxic group are only the flavoring. The toxicity comes from the group itself, independent from whatever they believe. It is a big part of what makes a cult "toxic" rather than just another bunch of people with peculiar views. It is found in secular as well as religious groups. Former associates describe similar things in the inner circles of political parties, like President Nixon and his Committee to Re-Elect the President, or writers' groups, like Ayn Rand's social circle. The beliefs that were originally so important to members of a toxic group get lost underneath the toxic group dynamics. 

It starts when one or more fear-driven, control-seeking extroverts realize that other people care enough about the group's goals and ideals to let themselves be shamed and bullied by criticism of their service to the said goals and ideals. It doesn't matter whether the goal is idealistic and never fully attinable (to be like Christ, to "live the Girl Scout Promise in everything you do and are") or mundane and easily achievable (to get a candidate elected, to get books published or sold or recognized with special awards). Someone who makes a good target for this type of ploy is told, preferably in front of others, that person isn't doing enough or isn't doing well enough. Person feels humiliated. Person apologizes and promises to do "better." Person may cry. The control seekers' self-esteem and sense of happiness surges up, and the person starts living for another chance to repeat this delicious experience.  From this time forward you, the conscientious person who honestly believes the group are trying to make you a (more effective salesman, better representative of the school, sincere fraternity brother, more enlightened Christian, closer friend to the candidate, whatever), can do no right.

If you listen to it for very long, you'll soon be paying a psychologist ninety dollars an hour to try to figure out how you might someday be able to please these unpleasable tyrants. You never will, but for ninety dollars an hour a lot of therapists will wait very patiently for you to reach that conclusion. 

It's not mot ministers' favorite text, but the Bible actually spells out the most loving Christian way to deal with faultfinders. Jesus said, "When you leave, shake the dust off your feet ." (Mark 6:11, Luke 9:5). Don't waste your energy on people who reject you. Save your good will for people who want it.

There may have been, or still be, something you do that tends to isolate you in groups, especially in toxic groups. Thisis probably a good thing, a thing you want to continue doing. For example, you might be comfortable maintaining a healthy interpersonal distance and doing other things that show respect for others. This may be part of your ethnic cultural tradition, your introvert personality, or both. It's not a thing you want to change; the ethnic groups that maintain a good healthy distance tend to have longer average lifespans than the groups where people think they need to be able to smell what their friends last ate to show "friendliness." There are more important things than fitting into groups. 

Instead of following the group, try following joy. Spend time around people who like you the way you are, who have reasonable expectations and who meet your reasonable expectations of them when you meet theirs. At first it may seem that this limits you to people who pay for work you do. Persevere. Real friends will find you. 

You may have to give up some groups altogether. There are social groups where the social rule is that women aren't supposed to be competent or that people of certain ethnic types aren't supposed to be there at all...

Some groups aren't as hostile as you might initially think. You might think that, if people put great emphasis on an interpretation of religious texts according to which their ancestors, and now they, were set apart from others and given special rules to live by, and they had no "missionary" interest in other ethnic groups, those people would not want to see anyone with the wrong kind of face or family name in their meetings. You might be wrong. The Old Testament prophets who denounced intermarriage between Israelites and other Semitic tribes accepted a few foreigners as adoptive Israelites. People who identify as Anglo-Israelites are likely to agree that it's a waste of time to send missionaries to non-Anglo countries, because God has a different plan for those people. What about people whose ancestors came from those countries, who have assimilated into Anglo culture and want to live by the same rules? Some Anglo-Israelites will never trust them. Others may be slow to trust them, but over time they'll agree that non-Anglo people who want to join their church have been, like Ruth in the Bible, destined by God to be part of Israel by adoption. For someone in that peculiar position, the question would be whether the initial caution is merely a question of why anyone not born into "the tribe" would want to join it, or whether it's a form of toxic group behavior. There are "adoptive" Anglo-Israelites and Messianic Jews who are Black. I've never heard of a non-German really joining an Amish community, but in theory, if one sincerely wanted to join, it would be allowable.

Toxic groups don't usually flaunt their toxicity. In fact, because the sociopathic extroverts who make these groups toxic need victims to kick around, toxic groups may be positively evangelical about bringing new people in. Only after making some sort of commitment to join the group do people find out that the role for which they've been recruited is "victim." In some toxic groups everyone but the big boss bully at the top of the bullying order is predesignated as a victim.

Left-wing political groups have a special potential for toxic relationships with introverts because, as Bondoc found out, one of the original Communist Party's tenets was that it's not fair to Real Proletarians that intelligent, sensitive, creative introverts exist. Being an introvert on the Left is like being a German Jew working for the Nazi Party. It may be good for a lucrative contract for a while but, eventually, the rest of the group will remember that they hate you. The first thing to do about this specific stituation is to realize that, although introverts can be classical liberals, belong to liberal religious groups, pursue liberal education, or be liberal donors, we really have no place on the left wing. Moderate and independent are as far leftward as we can go. "Liberal" accurately describes people who opposed persecution of anyone who had any association with the Communist Party, but it describes the Communist Party themselves about as well as "black" describes falling snow. Because we were born with enough working brain cells to see through the Big Lies of Marxism, if the Marxists ever get the revolution they want, we will be liquidated. 

Anna Bondoc described herself telling her leftist friends how she'd alienated her family, given up her home and allowance, to promote their causes, and getting criticized because she was "cut off from her roots." Oh, people. That kind of story wasn't even about politics. It was an adolescent thing. Part of growing up is separation from parents, demonstrating independence. Once that's done, most young people whose parents are still alive are able to reconnect with their roots. A really liberal older woman would have acknowledged Bondoc's commitment to the group, first, and then acknowledged that the next step toward emotional maturity, after establishing independence from parents, is reconciliation with parents. 

One of the dictionary definitions for "liberal" is "generous." That's a good test for whether people who appeal to our liberal ideals are liberal, or merely leftist. (Or, in a religious context where the "liberalizers" are those who want to flout the traditional rules, weak characters who weren't up to the challenge of breaking unhealthy or extravagant habits.) 

This does not mean that they always condemn only with faint praise. There are things that fully justify liberal outrage...

* slavery, human trafficking, child abuse, anyone but an individual who chooses to do "sex work" making any profit from such "work"

* government mandates that people buy things

* marketing toxic products

* sweatshops

* restaurants that ignore health regulations and sell food that makes people sick

--to name a few. Real liberals save the outrage for those who deliberately, repeatedly, do harm to others, and have very little of it left to waste on the way their colleagues tell their personal stories. They criticize liberally--early and often, but with charity toward all.

One of the goals of a liberal education is to help people understand the difference between, say, "an allegedly scientific book that encourages people to do things that can have very harmful effects" and "a popular book that's not all that great, but the worst thing it really does is leave people who bought it feeling cheated." So, real liberals don't waste time bashing bestsellers. We observe that it was cool that a poor single mother in an adverse economy was able to write a series that sold like Harry Potter, even if we also observe that, for all their drama and movie effects, the Harry Potter books are not as satisfying to the intellect as the Narnia books. Real liberals' criticism of anything is likely to describe what the thing is and who is likely to find a use for it--and only rarely will that be "nobody," or even "people who are not aware of how much better something else is." Real liberals never want to ban or burn books; always and only to write better ones.

Short pieces, likewise. A member of a group writes something. Naturally others want to read it, or hear it read. Someone in the group didn't read it carefully, or let per mind wander during the reading, but feels obliged to give tongue anyway. Therefore there will always be occasional idiotic reactions to things people write. But if it's all pick, pick, pick all the time, the group is or is becoming toxic.

One common toxic group dynamic, in long-term groups, is that young talent can feel more threatening to older group leaders than a rational person would believe possible./Robin Morgan was actually banned from publishing in one magazine, in the 1970s, because she was a professional writer who'd found a clear and distinctive voice. The left wing's targeting a "proletariat" whom Marx stereotyped as unthinking, unfeeling, deliberately made stupid but unlikely ever to recover the use of their minds, makes left-leaning political groups especially prone to this type of resentment of talent, and, consequently, the choice of talented people as victims.

Isn't it suicidal for groups to attack their most promising young members, to punish the artists and writers who want to serve the cause with vicious "You only got that published because of your privileged background" hatespews? Of course it is. Marxism never did appeal to the rational minds of people with liberal educations. It's all about the emotions of selfish, greedy, materialistic people, so if you have a sensitive creative soul that actually cares about, e.g., your students who are NOT a big dumb lump of "proletariat," who have individual talents and feelings and thoughts some of which are similar to yours, do not look to the Left for moral support. Marxism was designed to appeal, and will always appeal, primarily to people who care less about whether the cause ever succeeds than about whether they've appeased their cravings for control today.While denying that either emotionality or spirituality matter, Marxism runs on emotionality, and is a favorable field for very sick emotionality.

Random Blog Challenge Post for 1.5.24: How Introverted Are You?

There's still confusion about the terminology here...

Introversion is a gift people inherit. We can be more conscious of it under some circumstances than others, but it's always there. It's a physical trait--a set, not the same for every individual, of different neuron circuits that develop completely in the brain, which extroverts unfortunately lack. Introversion is defined by the presence of the "conscience" set. Most introverts also have one or several "ability" sets: long deep thoughts that "synthesize" ideas, music/math, math/music, visual memory and/or imagination, overall sensory perceptivity, intuition, formal/verbal logic, empathy or "psychic" sensitivity, memory, probably others. 

Nobody really develops all of the possible human brain circuits. Nobody has all the talents. Which is like saying that nobody is really a complete introvert.

Introversion is a separate thing from shyness and tiredness, which happen to everybody, although extroverts probably suffer more from shyness and feel less conscious of tiredness. 

You don't become an introvert, or more of one, when you leave a party and get some sleep. You don't become less an introvert when you stay out late partying. Though a case might be made that learning to notice when you need some sleep is one of the markers of becoming an adult.

Like most adult introverts, I've been able to pass as an extrovert for days or weeks on end, though now I realize that that was both unhealthy and demeaning. I'm usually quiet in a group because, if I weren't interested in hearing what the others have to say, or else being paid to entertain them, why would I want to be in a group at all? I'm not particularly shy and am likely to be the first to complain or say what others are hesitating to say. I can do the entertaining job, and I can be loud. But I am Highly Sensory-Perceptive and also likely to be the first to feel that things are getting too loud to be enjoyed. I also test positive for the Long Brain Stem that ruminates and synthesizes and generates new ideas from a mix of older ones. I'm very mildly dyslexic, most noticeably when numbers are involved, but I have been paid to perform music and I have a sort of vague general appreciation for the concept of math. (Liked algebra and geometry, made lots of dumb dyslexic mistakes on the practice problems.)

The assumption is still out there, among the sillier young people, that my generation were all brought up "racist." Wrong. Most of us were brought up as what was then called "liberal" about race. We were more or less on one side of the 1960s color wars, although if we happened to be even slightly other than Black or White we had a perspective on those times that has never been recognized by the commercial media. Most of us, however, were for that reason drawn to the ideals of peace and good will and being able to judge people not for the color of their skin but for the content of their character. 

It is, of course, true that this did not give us the experience or perspective of people on the other side. All it did was put us in a position to listen to them, set aside the prejudices we'd been taught, and try to be friends with people of different ethnic types. 

I grew up thinking of myself as White. I was told that noticing that my father's face looked Red was not very nice, and anyway he had grey eyes, which was then considered proof of Whiteness. My brother came along three years later and identified as Cherokee. I never tried to reclaim that piece of my ancestry, although if I'd had the chance to marry the man whose legal identity was Cherokee I might have done. A majority of my actual ancestors came from Ireland and passed on the specifically Irish celiac gene to prove it. Then on Mother's side we have the ones from England, and on both sides a couple of strays from France, Scotland, and Germany. And if we trace Mother's English ancestors back to England, they had some Italian connections, too, though I've not confirmed whether I personally had any known Italian ancestors. But I have been told, with reference to my own lifestyle, "You're an Indian," meaning a Cherokee. I take that as high praise.

Why is this relevant? I went to college in Washington, DC, and my DC neighborhood of choice was Takoma Park. Second choice, Bethesda. The madly multicultural ones. At my school it had been traditional to complain, "You walk into the cafeteria and see Black tables and White tables." (There were also Spanish-speaking and French-speaking tables.) Third year, when I was living off campus but if I ate in the cafeteria people would gather at "my" table, we were the multiethnic and bilingual table. And things didn't change in the grown-up work world, either. I was interested in domestic policy, even then, but I kept getting steered to and called back by the "diplomatic" and "international" offices, hardly ever a "national" or "federal" one. White racists, to the extent that they exist, avoid me. 

My adoptive brother came from India--the northern part, in the Himalayas. My adoptive sister's mother came from Mexico, her mother's husband was Irish-American, and she could pass for Black, which was why she was in foster care. I went home, dated a White man with partial albinism, and made a serious attempt to adopt a blue-eyed blonde child. I went back to the city, married a British West Indian man with melanism, and became the stepmother of a Black...young man. My adoptive sister's husband was Black; their children look Black. My natural sister's husband is White; my natural sister has that "classic black Irish" complexion thing going, too, and their children look White. The young cousin who shares my name is half Mexican, but not pura sangre native Mexican, and can be seen as Black. My brother died young; the girl he should have married had children who are also less than pura sangre native Mexican, and can be seen as White. The man I've mentioned online as a Significant Other, 2006-2022, was Cherokee, as was the adoptive son who lived with him; his first wife and her children were White. Then just to mix things up the very dear friend whom I met too late in life for sentimentalities about being adoptive sisters, but she taught her child to call me "aunt," was a German Jewish blonde who married a German Christian blond, so there's a real blond German-American Jewish youth in among The Nephews, too. You could say that my home is a place where people are judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. 

In Takoma Park most people lived in houses rented out by rooms, and advertisements for available rooms used to specify the house language. My house language is English. Well, mostly. It's a choice. Most of us have a free choice. Some days you might hear Spanish. When my husband was alive, some days we even spoke French for as long as we could. (He went to McGill and immigrated legally via Canada.)

But, yes...character. I noticed, all the way back in college, that all the people I liked did have certain things in common. Specifically, they were all introverts. And still are. 

So, "introvert" is the part of my physical genetic identity that matters most to me. Introverts are My People. Extroverts may be all right in their way, but they're a different kind of people. That limited amount of energy we have for putting up with other people's company? It lasts about five times as long when I'm among fellow introverts as it does when extroverts are around.

Book Review: Provocations

Title: Provocations 

Author: Soren Kierkegaard

Translator:  Charles F. Moore

Publisher: Plough

Date: 2014

ISBN: 978-0-87486-626-1 

Length: 448 pages

Quote: "Why is it that people prefer to be addressed in groups rather than individually?"

Soren Kierkegaard, the existentialist philosopher, wrote as a radical Christian. His beliefs about Christ and the Church were in some ways heretical, but Christians can't overlook the intensity of his belief in the individual's need for a spiritual life of "radical obedience." He didn't like the official church of Denmark, in which he thought it was too easy for men with no spiritual lives to use the Church as just another place to make good money. "Purity of heart is to will one thing," that is, to glorify and enjoy God, but clergymen were more likely to will other thigs like financial security and popularity. He used the analogy of a preacher accepting an allowance of alcoholic drinks as part of his wages for presiding over a Temperance Society. He said that a spiritual experience ought to drive a person back into service to other humans, which are the image of God Christians are meant to see. The person who "willed one thing" ought to practice "joyous obedience." Of God, not of a group of humans.

It would be this radical fath that interests the Bruderhof group in Kierkegaard. His understanding of Christianity as basically something that takes place in "existential solitude," between the one who prays and worships and the One Who is prayed to and worshipped, also appeals to me; but many Christians find it provoking. That's probably why this collection of his religious writing is called Provocations.

He was a provoking young man in any case. (Kierkegaard was always a young man; he died before age fifty.) Toward the end of his short life he said that everything he'd written had been written in the service of Christianity, but some of his early writings, quoted in Provocations, opposed Christianity to Christ and denounced Christianity (meaning, in those contexts, the state-sponsored church). People wondered whether he was a Christian at all. As a student he was known for quarrelling with classmates and teachers. He fell in love with women but didn't believe he could live with them. He was able to keep a "job"--as a writer--mostly because he had inherited money. Nineteenth century authors were expected to criticize in cutting terms, and Kierkegaard's first scornful mention in a satirical magazine was merely evidence of his acclaim as a writer; he not only took it personally but replied with an invitation to the satirists to "attack" him--which of course they did--and then became enraged by the "attacks." Very obviously his idea of love and service to others had no more concern for their emotional feelings than those of Jesus and St. Paul; but his biographers don't mention the sort of private generosity, for Kierkegaard, that they do for other crusty Christians such as C.S. Lewis. It is possible that his furious, prolific writing represents his only positive way of expressing Christian love.

He is best known in the United States for two Christian books, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, which apparently give some indication of the quality of his spiritual life. (He looked back on his life as one of suffering, around age forty. It must have been spiritual suffering since he had money, seemed healthy, sold all his writing, and even, in spite of everything, had friends.) His books weren't translated and published in English for seventy years after his death, and it's easy not to realize how many there were. He did little but write for twenty years. He wrote so fluently that lucid, controversial work flowed out of his writing almost as fast as if typewriters had been invented, which they hadn't. 

Kierkegaard was the writer who didn't want either his beliefs or his writings to be "understood too quickly." He refused, among other things, to fit an essay into an outline and sum up his remarks in a concluding paragraph. Previous translations of his work have turned them into readable, but not remarkable, English. 

This situation Moore seems to have set out to correct. If one wants to be as prolific as Lewis, or Mark Twain or G.K. Chesterton, this reviewer has been heard to grumble, one had better ave as unerring an ear for English prose as they had. Kierkegaard never wrote in English at all, but Moore has put considerable effort into making his English as readable and quotable as--if not Lewis's, at least Fulton Sheen's or Max Lucado's. Those who make the time to read these short passages aloud, savoring them, will not be disappointed. I can't say whether fidelity has been sacrificed to style, but I can say that Moore has given Kierkegaard an excellent prose style.

If we begin with an understanding of the kind of thing Kierkegaard said, and the kind of people it provokes in a merely painful way, I think the reader most likely not to appreciate Provocations is the one who (like a reviewer) wants to read a book as quickly as possible, without doing it too much injustice, and get on to the next. Kierkegaard did not want to write books that can be read that way; nor did he. Reading my e-coy in reviewerly haste, I admired Moore's wording but wished he'd presented the book in multiple volumes. Properly paginated, it prints out to 448 pages or even fewer, but on a Kindle it actually feels like the number of "locations" Kindle ives a book.

If you can take the time to savor these short pieces--short essays, and paragraphs cut from long and short writings--they can provide food for thought for years. 

My generation were attracted to the existentialist philosophers because those philosophers said things that seemed to encourage the sort of nihilistic slacker life many of us thought we wanted.. People can't "connect" or even fully communicate with one another. Spirituality is private; why should God want us to "gossip" about our relationship with God? Church meetings are merely organizational functions. So on our day of rest we can stay home, sleep late, and watch television. The Bible never says that part of a day of rest must not be used to make up for lost sleep but it does tell us that a day of rest is not merely a day for personal pleasure. Kierkegaard was an idealist; He did not personally give all of his wealth to the poor--which he might eaisly ahve done, living, as he did, before welfare states--but he did recognize that that was one of the things to which "absolute obedience" might lead. Existential solitude is not properly understood as an excuse for either laziness or selfishness. It has been abused as an excuse for those things, but  that was not what the existentialist philosophers reall intended.Actually reading Kierkegaard's writings, even the selection in this book, will correct that error. 

Provocations has certain shortcomings. It des not tell Christian introverts whose spirituality is solitary, for example, how to be less provoking when we want to help rather than provoke; that was not something Kierkegaard ever learned. It does, however, serve as a wake-up call to those who are either tempted to be "Churchians'  or uncertain how to be Christians without bieng "Churchians." 

New Book Review: Charlie Utopia

Title: Charlie Utopia 

Author: Nowick Gray

Date: 2022

Publisher: Cougar

Length: 363 pages

ISBN: 9781990129230

Quote: "He had even plotted the end of his autobiography, envisioning life after fifty as icing on the cake."

Why read this novel? It's funny in a dry way, but not too funny to read in public. It's sad in a dry way, too, but not so sad as to be depressing. Mainly it's nostalgic. Charlie Utopia is a baby-boomer who lives in his utopian dreams, brings them into life in most ways--he succeeds at all the different things he wants to do as fun jobs, doesn't have to give much time to jobs taken just to pay bills, builds his own house, travels with a band, gets into all the beds he seems really to want to get into. Yet he's always just slightly depressed, because for all the self-help books he reads and all the trendy roads to happiness he follows, something eludes him.

And what that something is, is Love. Charlie's always loved himself and arranged for his own comfort. He's a decent man, and his own comfort includes doing honest work well, being a satisfactory bedmate, and providing for his one positively known child. But his good will fails to extend beyond the end of his own nose. He seems to keep track of the names of the women he's married or lived with, but beyond their different demographic profiles he's aware of very little about them, so it's hard for the reader to remember which fits into which part of his story (and that plus the philosophical fads are often the only indication of what year it's supposed to be, from scene to scene). He doesn't abuse his daughter, but he seems to know nothing about her except as baggage that comes with one of the women he's given pleasure yet failed to know. People always drift away from him and he never knows why. He has no religion. He hopes being a left-winger will appease the envious masses of people who have less than he and his friends have, but never gets to know any of them personally either. Determined to use his talents to preserve the space for the rich interior life his introvert brain needs, he fails to find the working partnership his introvert brain craves next. Many people seem to agree that he's a good neighbor, but he has no close friend, male or female.

It doesn't take 363 pages to paint a credible portrait of a man who has everything but love, so reading this book is mainly a nostalgia trip for those currently over fifty. If you have or have had a Partner For Life, you can enjoy feeling sorry for Charlie. If not, you may enjoy sharing his richly detailed life travelogue of work, thought, passion, and the sense of mild depression that sets in just when Charlie is in his workshop enjoying the other things. 

Morgan Griffith on Getting Bureaucrats Back to Work

From U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith, R-VA-9, editorial comment below.

"

Congressman Griffith's Weekly E-Newsletter 2.3.23 

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we saw a sharp rise in remote work, or telework. We were living through unprecedented times. Telework became an option for many, allowing workers to do their jobs, to the best of their ability, from home.

That was then. It’s been three years since the start of the pandemic, and it is largely behind us.

Most Americans have returned to work in person as they had done before COVID-19. Unfortunately, the federal workforce in large measure hasn’t followed suit.

During President Biden’s State of the Union address last March, he said, “People working from home can feel safe and begin to return to their offices. We’re doing that here in the federal government. The vast majority of federal workers will once again work in person.”

But this hasn’t been the case. According to a Federal Times report from October, just 1 in 3 federal workers had returned to work in-person full time in 2022.

Before the pandemic, only about 3% of federal employees teleworked daily. In their most recent report on telework, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) said that nearly half, or 47%, of federal workers currently teleworked routinely or situationally in Fiscal Year 2021, which ended Sept. 30, 2022.

Too many people around the country, those in the 9^th District included, have seen the real-world effects of federal workers not being in their offices.

Seniors have waited on the phone for hours to talk to someone from the Social Security Administration about receiving their benefits as they have been unable to talk to someone in person. In part because the agency has kept their offices largely closed to the public.

Many veterans have waited for months to get their medical records from the National Personnel Records Center (NPRC), part of the National Archives. At one point, the center had a backlog of approximately 500,000 requests for records. 

One constituent requested medals and records from the Navy in August of 2020 through our office. Despite numerous follow-ups, the response from the NPRC was that they were backlogged. In May of 2021, he died. We received the medals and records a year later in May of 2022. 

Because of closures to passport offices around the country, in-person appointments have mostly disappeared, leaving people with the inability to get a new passport in a timely manner.

In one case we had a constituent reach out for help after realizing his passport was expired. Because of staffing issues and backlogs, the regional passport agency could not provide an appointment due to limited appointments. After reaching out to all the passport agency acceptance centers in the country, the only available appointment was in Aurora, Colorado.

Obviously, federal workers aren’t supposed to take home your tax return, passport application, or Social Security records.

It’s time for federal workers to actually return to work so that they can more adequately serve the needs of the American people.

When Republicans took control of Congress, we ended proxy voting, which allowed Members of Congress to phone in their votes. More discussions to improve legislation occur in hallways, stairwells, and elevators than ever occurred on a zoom meeting with 30 people. The same is true for federal workers. More collaboration on solving problems will occur when they actually work together in the office.

Unfortunately, while Republicans have tried for months to get information from the Biden Administration on how telework has decreased federal agencies’ ability to perform their duties, the Administration has not responded.

We can no longer wait on the Administration. We have to push them. Accordingly, just a few days ago I voted in favor of the Stopping Home Office Work's Unproductive Problems Act, or the SHOW UP Act.

The SHOW Up Act, which passed the House largely along party lines, requires federal agencies to return to pre-pandemic levels by reinstating telework policies that were in place on Dec. 31, 2019.

The bill would also require federal agencies to submit a study to Congress looking at the effects of telework, whether it improved or harmed agency effectiveness.

If an agency can demonstrate to Congress that they are able to perform better with telework, while also lowering agency costs and ensuring agency network security, increased telework can be considered as an option.

Bottomline, we must do what we can to best serve the needs of our fellow Americans by promoting productivity and effectiveness in our federal workforce.

I believe that is returning to work in person.

If you have questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to contact my office. You can call my Abingdon office at 276-525-1405, my Christiansburg office at 540-381-5671, or my Washington office at 202-225-3861. To reach my office via email, please visit my website at www.morgangriffith.house.gov.

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Editorial comment:

Right. Some federal offices have a problem. But restoring the Dreaded D.C. Traffic to previous levels of gridlock can't be the only aolurion. 

Frankly, Congressman, some of these offices were full of time-wasting time-servers in the Reagan Administration when I was a young word/data processor. And in the Nixon Administration when a friend was a young typist.

We were hired on the basis of skills and test scores, so there was an incentive to be skilled, efficient workers who got the job done. Then we'd go to these offices and encounter the reverse incentives. Emphasis on looking busy to reduce hassle allowed us to type or even write books at the office, while being continually scolded about the lack of cordiality our mere presence seemed to evoke from the career office workers, which no one ever described in a way that we could understand as what it really meant, "Making us look bad." 

And if anybody imagines that these career office workers were taking a week to type, e.g., an elaborately formatted document that was still unsatisfactory and that I redid from scratch in three hours, at Fish & Wildlife, because they were the ones actually finding the records and answering taxpayers' questions? Possibly person would be interested in some beachfront property in Roanoke? It was more as if points were being awarded for the number of phone calls to different offices a taxpayer could be told to make. Actually answering a question was like something only a temporary worker would ever do!

Just bringing these people back into the office won't get their work done more efficiently but it will substantially increase the danger of D.C. traffic. When federal office workers are not motivated to help taxpayers, chances are that they're not motivated to drive courteously either.

Based on my limited (thank Heaven) experience as a federal office worker, I propose that these offices are due for a completely revised system of management.

As a general rule, introverts are motivated to do their jobs for their own sake, without needing someone else to sit around supervising them. Extroverts, who aren't task-focussed and efficient when they are supervised, come completely unglued when left to supervise themselves working from home. But we don't want those people back in government offices. We want them employed as cafeteria servers or garden weeders, where they can chatter all day and still get something useful done. We want introverts, especially people who left federal offices with notes on their records that they "did excellent work but didn't seem to relate well to the others," doing the office work. That means that the individuals who are more productive, and more helpful to taxpayers, while working from home, keep their jobs...and the extroverts are either transferred or dismissed. We want them kept out of federal offices.

We want a system that monitors federal workers' actual productivity and rewards good efficient work, rather than kaffeeklatsching and working at the slowest possible pace. 

Taxpayers' phone calls could go through a system that asks them just one question about the performance of the employee who took the call: "If your question or concern has been completely resolved, press 1. If you need to make another call, press 2." Two callers pressing 2 in one day would indeed be a reason for bringing the employee back to the office...for retraining. Two retrainings would be grounds for transfer or termination.

While confidential records should be maintained as hard copies and not shipped hither and yon via the Internet, most federal employees don't actually handle confidential records often. What can be done via the Internet can be done better from home...if the right people are doing it.

Requiring agencies to show that they can work more efficiently without the gridlock is a self-defeating effort because the agencies have failed to hire, or have lost, the right sort of workers. Instead, the question should be whether individuals can work more efficiently from home--which the right individuals most certainly can. 

I can tell you, Congressman, that on several contracts and subcontracts with federal offices, I had one job responsibility that I couldn't have handled better from home, if today's technology had existed back then. That was teaching other people how to use their shiny new computers, all loaded with state-of-the-art software like Lotus and Word Perfect. And even then, it might have required more thought from me, but it might also have been less embarrassing for older employees, if that had been done via Zoom, instead of my going into their offices, breathing on them and being breathed on, touching their keyboards, and demonstrating how to do things like adding their own names to their "dictionary" files. 

For all other purposes, every hour I spent in every federal office where I worked could have been more profitably spent at home.

I never actually worked forty hours for the taxpayers on any federal office job. Never once. Of course the bureaucracy could have been restructured, as it has since been, so that I could have started out with more room to learn new skills and take on new responsibilities. But no office was generating enough paperwork to keep me typing and editing for eight hours a day in a federal office, the way my independent typing service did during the weeks before exams at a big university.  Everyone went to the office on time, lots of wasted gas commuting from all over Maryland and Virginia, and we spent some time sipping coffee and snacking, some time hauling paper to the copying room and waiting for a turn at the copying machines, some time going to meetings of two or three people that would have been better handled by phone, some time taking mandatory breaks and buying lunch. I'm willing to believe that some of the people in some of those offices really were focussing their minds on their jobs, some part of the time, and honestly needing an hour to type two letters accurately. I would ask the person responsible for those letters to dictate them to me at the computer, make corrections, and let the person take them out of the printer, in five minutes. And then I'd spend the rest of the hour typing students' papers I'd brought from my own office, or writing my own letters, or making samizdat copies of library books, just to look busy. The taxpayers paid me to transcribe about a dozen library books and make photocopies of knitting patterns from two or three dozen more, just because even I was not clueless enough to be seen knitting or exercising while everyone else was typing, even if my keyboard rattled continuously while theirs went click...click...click click...click...   

The federal government does need more of the kind of worker that I was and it does need to get rid of the kaffeeklatschers. It does not need to turn back the clock and have people commuting to work every single day, when their jobs do not consist of handling confidential records that need to be locked up in one place. 

Politicians, even the good ones, tend to be extroverts. That doesn't have to be all bad as long as they understand that most of the work of government is better done by introverts. Working from home may have led to an overall loss of efficiency in government offices, but that certainly is not because the way the offices had been working before was efficient. It is because unsuitable people were doing the office work before. It would be better to use working from home as a test that can efficiently eliminate the inefficient, unhelpful, unreliable people from the offices. 

In far too many cases it's too late for federal agencies to correct the problem they started by paying any attention to "interpersonal skills" when evaluating the fast and accurate work of the file clerks, mail clerks, typists, bookkeepers, proofreaders, and other office workers who just didn't seem to be "liked" by others at the office. It's not too late in every case. It would still be possible for the agencies to locate some of us, explain that it was wrong that our good work was unappreciated because of other people's envy and hostility, and beg us to come back and be senior consultants and managers in the offices where we used to be unappreciated clerks. At least it would be a laugh, for a demographic group who tend to lead long healthy lives, to be able to say that most of us were now enjoying being professors emeriti, business owners, or just grandparents, too much to want to go back. And I personally would be willing to take the 90% online courses I'd need to qualify as head of the EPA, or even Secretary of the Interior, just to find out how sorry it's possible to make the people who've failed to get glyphosate banned. 

But there is time for the federal government to adopt a policy that, if sorting mail or taking calls or digging up files for the taxpayers is not something you the young career employee want to do as well as it can possibly be done, for its own sake, then you are not the one who needs to be doing that job. If you need supervision to do the work that goes on in a federal office, then what you really need to do is retire and let someone who cares about the job take it over.