500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
I am an elitist to the extent that I am likely to call myself a snob, unless I am in the company of other snobs. Then that would mean that I have joined their group, and that wouldn’t be good. I am more likely to quote Groucho Marx than the other Marx: “I refuse to join a club that would have me as a member.” I am not a man of the people. I do not care for pop music. I pretend not to know who Justin Bieber is. This, given my proclivity for populist movements, is a great contradiction.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
-Walt Whitman
The poem to which those lines belong is Song of Myself. Perfect reading for a snob, but then I didn’t read it all the way through because it was about him, not about me, and that was intolerable.
I love mankind, it’s people I can’t stand.
- Linus, of the Peanuts comic strip
The New York maitre’d who won’t seat me in his restaurant without a jacket and tie or the San Francisco barrista who berates me for putting sugar in my espresso are irritating only because they are bigger snobs than I am. They have outdone me, beaten me at my own snobbish game. I enjoy being a snob in yoga class, watching newbies struggle with a pose, until somebody bests me by executing a posture far better than I ever could, or worse, I am corrected by a teacher who sees room for improvement. (“Can you get your foot completely into your mouth? Yes! That’s the pose.”)
I admit that being a snob is a rough and lonely game sometimes, but there is a purity to it that is greatly appealing. Reading Metamorphosis in German is a great way to get all of Kafka’s jokes, and even better, from a snob’s perspective, is telling somebody you’re reading Metamorphosis in German. I’m reading Paul Theroux’s travel book The Old Patagonian Express and one of its finer pleasures is his unflinching assessment of national character. He describes entire nations as crabby or backward; his highly-polished crankiness could also be called snobbery. This is good, because he’s not afraid to be who he is, which is sometimes tired, cranky and impatient. He’s not running away from himself, like the people at the American Association of Retired Persons who renamed their organization AARP, which is the sound a dog makes when you step on its tail, or those liberals who are afraid of being called liberals and instead want us to call them “progressives.”
Once upon a time being a populist was good, but the Sarahpalinization of culture has dumbed things down fast, and I’m going to let the Tea Party claim the populist territory for a while. If you want to hit the strike zone of meaning, I say, you have to be a snob sometimes. Do you agree? I hope not, because then we will have formed a club of which I would refuse to be a member.
Photo Credits: Snob dog by ~ggvic~ and snob drawing by Oldmaison, both via Creative Commons.
500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
Just my opinion, but Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman are both dilettantes driven by ego and fueled by too much money. They think they can get elected by saying just what our Governator said in order to get elected. They are dilettantes because, like Sarah Palin, they want to do the job because it will make them look cool to their friends. When the going gets tough they will run away, like Sarah Palin, and become dilettante journalists on Fox. But, wait – there’s hope! There are also some visionaries around here.
A visionary is someone who looks at the same things we all see and sees something different. For example, Elon Musk made money when he co-created PayPal, but he’s a visionary for creating an electric-car company called Tesla, and he’s proven himself a visionary again by partnering with Toyota to bring a $30,000 electric car to market. Seth Godin is a visionary for re-imagining marketing as a form of education, and Jacqueline Novogratz is also a visionary for using capitalism to bring dignity to the poor. All of these visionaries have something in common. What is it?
“I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I mean to say that stupid people are generally Conservative.” — John Stuart Mill
This is not a time to be thinking conservatively. It’s a time for visionary thinking that cuts across boundaries. Some may contend, “Yeah, like Palin and Fiornia!” and I say to them I only get 500 words here so stop interrupting and go write your own article. Fact is, I haven’t seen much bold thinking in politics that wasn’t also stupid. (See quote above.)
I’m going to veer away from Carly and Meg and concentrate on some visionaries I’ve met recently and examine how the engine of their success is all about cutting across boundaries. At Public Architecture in San Francisco Richard Neill and I ran a workshop this week called “How to Tell a Story Online.” 
It was for changemakers and activists, and we showed them how to transform a social issue, or the story of a neighborhood, or a cause, and make it into a short video piece intended to play online and inspire people. I think this is a new frontier, a re-inventing of video media that blurs the boundary between advocate, journalist, urban planner and storyteller. It requires visionaries – and there are more than a few of them at Public Architecture.
On the same day as that workshop, I spoke on a panel at the American Society of Media Photographers. Photographers like to control what’s in focus, but many of the photographers I met that night were experiencing a disorienting blurriness. Their editors are asking them to blend video and stills, and this makes for an identity crisis. To be a journalist, an illustrator, a shutterbug and a cinematographer are all becoming the same thing. I’m told that beer and Dramamine consumed together can help with this unstable feeling, but luckily photographers are by nature iconoclasts, and they need to reinvent themselves anyway all the time, so they don’t need Dramamine, they need to let the boundaries fall where they may.
Let’s welcome more visionaries who are ready to remix, recombine and renew. I’d rather focus on them than on dilettantes who pretend to be prepared, but really are right where they are not supposed to be.
Don’t get me started on people who wear sandals to fly on an airplane.
Binocular photo: M0Rt3s via Flickr and Creative Commons License. All other photos by Lee Schneider.
500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
This week, I discovered Sarah Palin in a strange place. She showed up as the star of a planned new reality show on The Learning Channel, a unit of Discovery Communications. The show is called “Sarah Palin’s Alaska.”
“It’s surprising that Discovery Communications, parent company of such cable television channels as Animal Planet, The Discovery Channel and TLC — and known for their stunning wildlife-focused shows — would chose to embrace such a controversial and anti-wildlife persona as Sarah Palin.”
-Rodger Schlickeisen, President, Defenders of Wildlife
That sound you hear? That would be the huge vacuum forming between Discovery and its viewers. Discovery seems to care about nature and Sarah Palin wants to drill oil everywhere and kill all animals. Exaggeration?
As Jimmy Kimmel put it, “Her baby seal risotto is really fantastic.”
She’ll be able to buy lots of baby seal steaks with the reported $1 million per episode paycheck she’ll receive. Discovery wants to put a lot of money in Palin’s pocket.
Ok, I’m going to put a little Valium in my herbal tea, try to keep the politics out of this and just look at the message Discovery is sending.
Your brand is what you stand for. What does Discovery stand for? Ratings? Even though Sarah Palin is popular with nutcases, are there really enough nutcases to merit putting her on Discovery for the ratings? I thought CNN was the only really desperate network. (Still working to keep the politics out of this, sorry.)
According to Defenders of Wildlife, Sarah Palin fought against protections for whales and polar bears. She continues to support hunters who fly in small planes to gun down wolves from the air. I wish I was present at the network meeting when somebody said, “Sarah Palin is the perfect person to tell me about animals.” As in we want unstable, trigger-happy Glenn Beck to talk to us about terrorism.
Putting a controversial person on TV is an old game. It comes about when smart programming executives sit in a conference room, drink vodka straight from the bottle and say “let’s make some noise and hope somebody pays attention.”
We expect brands to be true to themselves. From Fox we expect overheated pseudo-patriotic gumbo. From the broadcast networks we expect some Bachelors and Survivors and other diversions. Television is a numbers game steered by advertisers. Ratings – good. Breaking your brand – bad.
Breaking the brand would never happen to good old psychotic uncle Fox. Fox is never going to break its brand because we don’t expect Fox to stand for anything, except maybe scaring people. They don’t worry about facts or truth over at Fox. They just need to find the next big mouth. They just need to make some noise.
Different deal with Discovery. Discovery stands for something: Curiosity, knowledge, exploration and compassion. Go ahead, Discovery, make noise but also examine your motives. You have to, because you stand for something. We want to depend on you for that.
You can sign the Defenders of Wildlife petition against Sarah Palin’s show by clicking here.
Photo credit: auburnxc via Flickr and creative commons.
