Jim Moore’s blog: Innovation, Strategy, Public Policy

 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/25/opinion/25martin.html?incamp=article_popular_2

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

The Man in Front of the Curtain

 By STEVE MARTIN

Published: January 25, 2005

Los Angeles

DEAR JOHNNY,

This letter comes a little late.

I
remember seeing the tape of my first appearance on your show, on a home
recording, a reel-to-reel Sony prototype video recorder, probably
around 1972. What my friends and I ended up watching was not me, but
you. It’s almost impossible to look away from oneself onscreen, but you
made it possible, because there were lessons in what you did. You and
Jack Benny taught me about generosity toward other comedians, about the
appreciation of the plight of the pro, as valuable as any lessons I
ever learned.

Your
gift - though I’m sure you wouldn’t have called it a gift - was, as I
see it, a blend of modesty and confidence. You wanted to do the job and
do it well. You allowed the spirit of your idols, Stan Laurel and
Jonathan Winters among them, to creep into you, and you found a way to
twist their inspiration and make it new. In you I saw simplicity, joy,
politeness, sympathy. Your death reminds me of the loss of America’s
innocence, the distance we have come from your sly, boyish leers to our
flagrant, overstated embarrassments for parents and children.

If
I could wake you up for a minute, I would ask you to tell me how good
you thought you were. “Between you and me,” I think you would whisper,
“I know I was great in a subtle, secret way.” I think you would also
say: “I enjoyed and understood the delights of split-second timing, of
watching a comedian squirm and then rescue himself, of the surprises
that arise from the fractional seconds of desperation when the comedian
senses that the end of his sentence might fall to silence.”

Your
Nebraskan pragmatism - and knowledge of the magician’s tricks - tilted
you toward the sciences, especially astronomy. (Maybe this is why the
occultists, future predictors, spoon-benders or mind readers on your
show never left without having been challenged.) You knew how to treat
everyone, from the pompous actor to the nervous actress, and which to
give the appropriate kindness. You enjoyed the unflappable grannies who
knitted log-cabin quilts, as well as the Vegas pros who machine-gunned
the audience into hysterical fits. You were host to writers, children,
intellectuals and nitwits and served them all well, and served the
audience by your curiosity and tolerance. You gave each guest the
benefit of the doubt, and in this way you exemplified an American
ideal: you’re nuts but you’re welcome here.

We loved watching
baby tigers paw you and koalas relieve themselves on you and seeing you
in your swami hat or Tarzan loincloth, and we loved hearing Ed’s
ripostes and watching you glare at him as though you were going to fire
him, but we knew you weren’t.

We, the millions whom you
affected, will weep inside when we see the reruns, the clips of you
walking out from behind the curtain, the moment in the monologue when a
joke bombed; we’ll recall your deep appreciation of both genuine and
struggling talent.

Because you retreated into retirement so
completely, let me thank you, in death, for the things I couldn’t quite
say to you in life. Thank you for the opportunity you gave me and
others, and thank you - despite divisive wars and undulating political
strife - for the one hour a night across 30 years of American life when
we were entertained purely, delightfully and wisely.

Steve Martin is the author of “The Pleasure of My Company.”

When I was a post-doc at Stanford (in organizations, in the early 80s) there was a wild and crazy sociology professor named John Meyer
whose focus was on “the world system” and a broad, structural inquiry
into how large but often hidden trends come to shape society and
history.  He is still at it:

What the world needs now is as broad as his work but more
cognitively/affectively oriented. 
We play our parts within the world’s Mind. The blog movement has
given new influence to particular nodes and collections of nodes in the
Mind.  RSS is a new kind of connective tissue, synaptic connective
tissue, threading through the global Mind.  We need a new
cognitive science of the global Mind, and many of us, implicitly or
explicitly, are workers in this vinyard.  Social software, “the
long tail” are crude,  early ideas that show the potential of this
new scale of cognitive science.  Keri Carpenter’s and Bonnie
Nardi’s work
to move the CSCW in this direction is part of a broad, coming
re-orientation of social science to considering effects of this type
and scale.

Do you ever think about why they have to run all of those “your vote
matters” ads?  Because everybody knows that their vote does not
matter–so millions of dollars must be spent to drown out the truth.

It would be better for our society if we ran ads that said “your
initiative matters” or “your care matters” and urged people to do for
themselves the things that need to be done, and not to rely on
outsourcing their virtue to elected representatives of dubious efficacy.

1.  In any case, politicians don’t represent you.  Politicians act on
behalf of big
campaign
contributors and major political parties.  The major political parties in
turn act on behalf of the same big contributors.  Unless you are a
billionaire, you can’t give enough money to have any influence. 
So don’t waste your time and money hoping for politicians to represent
you. They won’t.

2.  Your vote does not matter.  Rarely an election is so close that your vote might help elect one
person over another–not often, but sometimes.  But that does not
matter because neither person represents you (see item #1,
above).  Even that letter you
wrote to your congressperson did not matter.  Did you think it
did?  What evidence do
you have?

3.  But don’t despair.  Politicians don’t matter.  The really important problems facing our
society are not helped or hurt by what politicians say or do. 
Consider the problems that really matter:  improving education for our
kids, strengthening our families and communities,
encouraging kindness and care, promoting social and economic
innovation, saving the environment, reducing racism, sexism,
ethnocentrism and other stereotyping of individuals.  None of
these are helped by the actions of “political representatives.”  The
most vital contributions in American history are large social and
spiritual movements, not who won this or that
election.

4. Thus, voting is a false virtue. 
Voting is a relatively meaningless activity dressed up as a
virtue.  Voting encourages you to feel you
have taken action, when you have not.  Voting undermines personal
creativity by providing an easy, socially-sanctioned, and ineffective
action that salves our conscience and provides an illusion of
participation but does not have any other effect.

5.  An emphasis on voting degrades communication in society.  Political arguments that are aimed at influencing voting are almost always propoganda–and
thus degrade citizen discussion and reflection.  Swing-state
targeting,
polling, calculated language and image, spinning:  Over a
billion dollars was spent on political advertising during the latest US
political season.  Did it enhance true national dialogue on
matters that
make a difference to our future?  Do we as a nation now better
agree on the key facts of
our situation? Do those with diverse views better understand and
respect each other?  The emphasis on propoganda is inherent in a
representational democracy, because all the politician needs to do is
to get you to vote for him or her–the politician does not need to
prepare you for deeper participation, or maintain communication with
you.  He or she only needs your vote on a certain day, and the
incentives to manipulate you to get your vote are very great.

6.  There is no way to fix vote-targeted political communication by regulation.  
Public discourse in many other fields is regulated by prohibitions against fraud, slander, etc.  It is
well-known that advertising campaigns run by politicians are among the
most misleading of all advertising.  There is no meaningful way to
regulate campaigns without impairing free political speech–and this is
rightly judged a more critical value than honesty.  But this
ensures
trouble.  Product and service
advertisers incur liability if they lie.  Politicians do
not.  Fraud–in the form of false promises–is illegal in product
and service promotion.  False promises are the stuff of life for
politicians, who incur no direct consequences for making promises not
kept, and face no criminal penalties.  The way to change this
situation is to make votes and the process of influencing voting less
important, and chose other forms of leadership and participation as
ways to improve our society.

7.  The Internet does not improve traditional politics. 
Internet voting does not change the limitations of
representative government. It can make voting faster and easier, but it
does not change the problem: Working through representatives is an
obsolete way to address our common challenges and opportunities.

Internet political messaging and Internet
fundraising can get messages out and raise lots of money–but they have
not proven effective at deepening dialogue.  Centralized Internet
campaigning can be corrosive to the spirit of the online
community, because politics trades in evasiveness and dishonesty.
Candor and honesty are central to dialogue on the web.

Internet blogging and grassroots organizing has proven much better at
stimulating dialogue, mostly by hooking up far flung members of a
community and making communication fun and easy.  But I would
argue that this is not an example of online tools improving traditional
representative democracy, but rather of online tools helping people
come together to help themselves.

If you are interested in using technology for social
change, I increasingly believe it makes sense to put your efforts directly into your passions, rather than into
trying to influence voting.  Technological passions that
have already had an impact include RSS, global blogging and enhanced
free
speech, micro-e-commerce, peer-to-peer music and video sharing. These
are just a few.

8.  Representative democracy is necessary but far from sufficient. 
Representative democracy is better than dictatorship–and is necessary
but not sufficient for a progressive society.  But representative
democracy is obsolete as a way to organize society and come together to
address our most vital challenges.  Direct action is here now.

The opposite of representative democracy is not “direct democracy.”
Direct democracy is an oxymoron.  There is nothing direct about
electing a representative and hoping that he or she will take action on
your behalf.  The opposite of representative democracy is direct
citizen action.  Let’s focus on improving our abilities individually and as groups to take effective citizen action.

9.  You matter.  You matter most.  And you are enabled to matter more each day. 
You are already an “army of one” without joining any government’s
army.  Your creative action is enabled by widespread public
education,  free speech
and other civil rights, the Internet, travel, globalization, creative
capitalism and iPods.  Entrepreneurship, blogging, home study and
home schooling are all examples of this trend.  You do have the
power.  But your power is not the power to
elect or influence political representatives.  No, you don’t have
that power, as explained in item #2.  But you have a better
power.  You have the power to create.

10. You can use your energy for higher and more effective pursuits than voting.  Voting and the process of campaigning takes personal time and
money from you, and reduce your ability to invest in more effective
ways.  Do something direct instead.  Hire kids to clean up a
park.  Plant some trees (the latest Nobel Peace Prize was won by a
woman who plants trees to help improve the environment in Africa).
Write that book, record that song.

The era of citizen power is
upon us.  You have the power
to come together with other people to shape the world directly.  Have fun.  Don’t get distracted
from your mission:  your mission is creative, satisfying, and more likely to be effective the more you work at it directly.

11. The nonvoter party is global.  Given that we don’t vote, we do
not need to be sanctioned by current political jurisdictions.  We
can be active all over the world, without concern for national
boundaries and rules.  Imagine..

Playing around with the argument for nonvoting.

Nonvoting, like nonviolence, seems more compelling by the day.

Imagine the bumper sticker:

I’m pro-choice and I don’t vote.  I
do provide free, comprehensive family planning, birth control, and
pregnancy services to strengthen families and improve our community. 
Ask me anytime.

Going down.

This, this morning from the Wall Street Journal.  Thanks to Glenn Reynolds, who was up earlier than I was, as usual.

You can search Google for Tsunami Videos. This is what I found this morning:

Waxy.org: Daily Log: Amateur Tsunami Video Footage