First World Problems

Self-possession in the home of the brave.

“The most important thing in life is to be free to do things. There are only two ways to insure that freedom — you can be rich or you can you reduce your needs to zero.” — John Boyd

The other day I got into a pissing match on Facebook. A couple of dudes I’ve ‘known’ for years were into a thread about SuperBowl entertainer Usher’s black history moment. The OP went a little something like this:

LOVE the fact that the pregame show did an interview with Usher focussed on the history of Las Vegas and black performers and the fact that for years they were only allowed to perform at the hotels, but not actually patronize them, entering and leaving through the back door.

And disgusted at thinking there were a bunch of people rolling their eyes and not getting why it’s still reasonable to talk about today.

To which my response was ‘First world problems’.

Now I’ve been called an asshole before, and as I’ve said many times, I don’t mind being one as long as there are people around who will say, “Yeah but he’s my kind of asshole.” But I really don’t even appreciate that so much as I did 10 years ago when I started realizing a lifetime of hard lessons learned often require snappy answers to stupid questions. But I had just that same day published the following on Human Race Man:

Impossible, Mississippi

And I have people in my family who actually did pick cotton. While they were school aged kids. In the summer. And got cheated at the gin. And left fucking Louisiana behind. So I wasn’t really inclined to feel sorry for Las Vegas entertainers, or take history pointers from the likes of a bare-chested dancer whose most popular song has a one word chorus. Yeah.

So I asked the question of these Jim Crow era entertainers who were probably not actually born in Las Vegas if they were ever asked to pick cotton by their white supremacist overlords in Sin City - who most certainly were Italian mobsters, by the way. Why? Because my fuck budget is slim.

They say familiarity breeds contempt. Here’s the kind I got. Meh. They scrubbed it.

Anyway, I’ve been contemplating representing GenX despite the fact that I don’t particularly like identitarian buckets. But it is a fact that our generations have faced very different economies, and very different mediaspheres that support some memes while good ideas and virtues die of malnutrition. So when I look at our culture of complaint and the growing fraction of America who say “I just can’t” I wonder if I’m just being an asshole. But I also wonder, especially when it comes to race and colorblindness, if indeed GenX simply did a better job than everyone before or since as products of our environment. And while we still live in the shadow of Boomers, sorta, we’ve surfed a big wave of technology and peacetime. Plus we had 80s music and 80s optimism and 80s punk. Most importantly, we are survivors.

In the context of First World Problems, I tend to believe that GenX are those who have survived all of them. While we are not currently dipped into the litter basket of lingering hostility that were the 1970s when Central Park was a gangster’s paradise we certainly missed the immediate post-war years when fifth graders were perfectly safe taking the subway on their own. Without being much of an old crank, I think the following histogram confirms my bias. We’ve seen a lot worse than where we are, but the recent trend hasn’t been good.

I’ve never expected crime or wealth to be evenly distributed across America, and I used to talk a lot about our internal third world. It would be useful for me to get a grip on that. Where exactly is Favela America? It’s everywhere. Unevenly distributed.

I wrote about Philadelphia’s Kensington. Since I did that I’ve discovered something called Tranq, which is more deadly than fentanyl. It’s called Tranq. Now you know.

When I first started blogging, over 20 years ago, I was part of a relatively small group representing the Chatting Class. Now a new generation of folks want to be influential and part of that class. But what we have failed to do across generations is establish a set of opinions based in reality that let us know if our influence is important or not. What seems to be important in a cultural production may go far with a peacetime generation, but for folks who have seen war, it makes no impression. It is for these reasons of dissonance that we aren’t clear on what our First World Problems are. What’s sadder still is that the floors and ceilings of anti-social and criminal behavior have shifted.

The Barbell Strategy
My Stoic approach is to pursue a barbell strategy. Examples of these are most often popularized in aphorisms like “If you want peace, prepare for war.” I first learned of the concept in a quote from the legendary air ace instructor John Boyd whose quote is at the top of the page.

The term ‘barbell strategy’ was popularized by Nassim Taleb, author of Black Swan. It is an investment risk management strategy that dictates that you place small bets on low probability events with very large payoffs and large bets on high probability events with low payoffs. No bets in the middle. So both ends of the risk spectrum are weighted, thus barbell.

In GenX we often say “We didn’t know how poor we were”. But we were always up for adventure and pushing boundaries with as much confidence and elan as rich kids. For me in particular on the cutting edge of public school racial integration and public accommodations, that was always top of mind. Can I compete? I was determined to win, and play fair. I could be a star in the ghetto or in the middle of the pack of front runners. Either way, I was prepared for either challenge. But no bets on mediocrity. That’s my barbell. In my pocket are pennies and twenties. Nothing in between.

The Air Conditioned Peasant
My sentiment and my sympathy is for the peasant. My entire vocabulary of growth and change for the better is informed by my own ascent from humble beginnings to affluence. I hot rodded my own life. I always believed in my own chassis, I just needed the right kit and the right road. I’ve trawled the junkyards and browsed the ateliers and wrenched myself in my own garage. I’ve adjusted, reworked, tore down, rebuilt and forged new components for myself. I’m always a jury-rigged work in progress, but I have a certain elegance, like Art Arfons’ Green Monster.

What I know is that this nation has the infrastructure to give its strivers the opportunity for greatness. But those who chillax in the American Palace are not interested in that infrastructure. They’d much rather troll Elon on X/Twitter than take a roadtrip to Bolsa Chica to watch the most powerful rocket ever built take off. My heart is behind the folks who pack up the kids and crank up the car. What we must do is insure that the infrastructure of America belongs to all of us and that we are confidently welcome to use its leverage.

Our first world problems & entertainments have distracted us. We need to be putting our relative affluence aside and guaranteeing that future for the most of us. We need to step outside of the palace, stop the car and give out some hugs and some maps. I don’t want people asking me how do I get to your America. It’s not my America. It’s our America. Somehow we forgot that. Somehow we have become dainty and fearful of making the smallest misstep. And reasonably so because we’ve pushed ourselves into narrow specialized and fragile webs of dependency. Once upon a time, you could buy an acoustic guitar from the pawn shop and lead songs around the campfire. Now you buy a $700 camera on credit, register an account on YouTube and record 1000 takes of you flipping a bottle of water. Hope it goes viral, dude!

A nation of bottle flippers is not our destiny. I know you know this. We need to recover some sense of seriousness, some priority on principle, some disciplined dedication to what keeps our civilization from crumbling into mediocrity. It is our infrastructure, not our optics.

I’m confident that GenX knows this. We have failed to leave the palace early enough. We could have made the iPhone X bulletproof, but we wanted more of the luxury stuff instead of the right stuff. It’s time to get ruggedized.