Michael Konik » Thoughts

To Our Investors

Michael Konik — Sun, 13 May 2012 15:15:26 +0000

Dear Inverstors in MichaelKonik.com,

We’re really sorry about our most recent trading loss. People will say we require more oversight, and, in this case, maybe they’re right. It shouldn’t have happened, and we’ll take steps to make sure it doesn’t happen for a third time.

The $4,000 or so ($4,882) of your money that we failed to bring back from our annual company trip to Hollywood Park Racetrack and Casino will in no way whatsoever impact our ability to pay our promised dividend of .1% on all investments. We remain financially stable, with significant capital reserves — thanks to you, our valued shareholders — and enough gains from our other departments that the latest debacle in our Trading Department will not affect our ability to make more trades in the very near future.

No, it’s not the $2 billion that JPMorgan Chase blew on derivitative bets, but still $4,000 or so probably sounds like a lot to you when your entire investment in our company is $100. So, again, we’re really sorry.

Although we’re not legally required to provide a detailed explanation of how we lost your money, we feel that given MichaelKonik.com’s past calls for transparency and honesty from the rich and powerful we ought to ‘fess up. It’s not a pretty picture. But it is what it is, as people say (with alarming regularity).

Basically, our proven system for selecting the winners of thoroughbred horse races by deciphering suggestive anagrams from the horse’s name (Main Wire! = “I’m A Win!er”) did not produce the expected return on investment, in that we realized a significantly lower percentage of successful bets (0%) than anticipated by our computer models. We also learned slightly too late that when wagering on horses gamblers do not win a “show” bet whenever the horse comes out of the stable and runs.

Now, we can understand how investors in a Website filled with boring essays might not want their money to be comingled with funds from the MichaelKonik.com Trading Department. And we can also understand that you might wish for us to not trade in horse racing futures whatsoever. Totally understandable. We’d like to stress, however, that betting on horses is totally legal and, not to be a dick about it or anything, none of you would be complaining much if our can’t-miss $1,000 bet on “Mickep! Mickep!” hadn’t missed.

With all due respect, it would be entirely inaccurate to say that we were gambling with “other people’s money.” Once you invested it in MichaelKonik.com, it became our money to do with what we felt was best for our shareholders — and what would get us most quickly into that sweet Gulfstream we’ve had our eyes on.

So, now that it’s been all entirely and completely explained to our satisfaction, we offer you once more our apologies for this unforeseen setback. We pledge to make better bets with your precious investments. And if that doesn’t satisfy you, our pal Jamie Dimon will bemore than happy to help you.

Aphorisms, Epigrams, and Such

Michael Konik — Sun, 06 May 2012 16:09:51 +0000

The truly wise man aspires to be ignorant.

Women who say they prefer chocolate to sex either have bad sex lives or exceptionally great chocolate.

Male nipples simultaneously disprove evolution and intelligent design.

Marriage is the most reliable curative for hopelessly incurable romantics.

People who frequently “need to vent” to friends usually have previously failed to say what they really mean to those who inspired their need to vent.

Behind every vast fortune is a master criminal calling himself something else.

Those who employ the locution “eats like a bird” do not have backyard bird feeders in need of daily re-filling.

The most dangerous people are those who dedicate their lives to protecting people from themselves.

Sportscasters who frequently use the phrase “sacrifice his body” don’t understand what the word sacrifice means.

Professional athletes are paid handsomely not for their ability to throw or kick a ball, but for their ability to distract us from all the vexing stuff that matters.

Billionaires and social justice make strange bedfellows.

People who like jazz don’t like smooth jazz, and people who like smooth jazz don’t like jazz, but everyone likes smooth.

No Worries, Bro

Michael Konik — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 15:46:28 +0000

You’ve talked to someone thirty-or-younger recently, so you’re aware that we’re presently living in the blissful state of no worries.

No worries, bro.

The problem for those of us who read newspapers and have some time to think is that there seems to be plenty to worry about — if you’re into that whole caring about stuff mode. The world quite often feels like it’s on the precipice of disaster, a calamity (or apocalypse) about to be perpetrated against humanity by humanity. No worries? Well, not really, bro.

But after 4:20PM, when we brooding types might discover a more charitable and optimistic state of mind, the sentient observer begins to understand that, wow, yeah, everything we fret about already has been fully explained to everyone’s satisfaction and there really is nothing to worry about.

Lehman Bros. Bonuses. No worries, bro. Yes, shortly before the firm’s 2008 collapse, which precipitated the global financial meltdown, Lehman Bros. awarded nearly $700 million to 50 of its highest paid executives. But DO NOT WORRY. The worthy folks who collected this bonus – which, let’s call it what it is: more like a glorious recognition of their inherent value to society — are capitalists. Surely they will spend the millions on houses and planes and whatever else they want, and many, many people will be employed to paint those houses and refuel those jets, so the proceeds of Lehman Bros. generosity to Lehman Bros. will trickle down quite nicely.

L.A. County Supervisor Campaign Chests. No worries, bro. Yes, even though they almost always run unopposed or against anonymous opponents and haven’t lost an election in more than 30 years, the incumbent members of the LA County Board of Supervisors up for re-election this year have accepted campaign contributions in excess of $350,000 (Don Knabe, unopposed) and $450,000 (Mark Ridley-Thomas, unopposed) for the grueling election season ahead. But DO NOT WORRY. The money came mostly from contractors, builders, developers, unions, healthcare workers, physicians, attorneys, and casinos. This is just another way that these winners can give back to the system that allowed them to achieve so grandly. Also, in the case of Knabe, $68,000 of the contributions were directed to a consulting firm where his son is partner, so you know it’s all in the family in a feel-good kind of way.

Taco Shells Made Out of Doritos. No worries, bro. Yes, the shells are made out of Nacho Cheese Doritos, the spicy kind, with extra flavor powder sprayed on them, and some folks might worry about the social costs of feeding low-income people low-quality food. But DO NOT WORRY. Taco Bell’s advertisements assure consumers that by purchasing the new Nacho Cheese Dorito Shell taco they’re fulfilling their destiny to “Live Mas!” It’s all about living more, not less, bitch!

Ah, yes. Life is good, except when it’s not. But even then it’s good in a way. So, yeah, no worries, bro. None.

Free to Be Disconnected

Michael Konik — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 16:47:49 +0000

If you’re reading this essay on MichaelKonik.com, you know that this is a reliable place to find “me,” the me who shares his ideas with the world, whether or not any part of the world is interested. This is where I unilaterally invade my privacy, allowing strangers to read my mind, exposing my beliefs and my doubts, keeping very little secret. You want to know what I think about something? It’s pretty easy to know. My Thoughts are even searchable. Hiding is almost impossible when you’re trying to be unflinchingly honest.

Yet if you’re looking for me on Facebook, I’m not there.

There’s an official Michael Konik Author page, which serves as a publishing conduit for my Thoughts. Dozens – dozens! – of people “like” it. Facebook also offers several Michael Konik Community pages, the equivalent of digital flypaper, where people who are looking for me on Facebook get stuck when they’re lost and confused. In order for the official Author page to be activated, I’m supposed to have a Michael Konik personal page. So I do. I have the mandated minimum number of friends: one. My wife.

I have a Twitter account. My daily and weekly Thoughts get posted there in the form of short hyperlinks. But I don’t tweet, and I don’t “follow” anyone else’s tweets. OMG!

I don’t text. My antiquated mobile phone isn’t smart. It’s old. It has a rigid antenna nub. And no camera. LOL!

Also, I don’t “blog.” Very few readers care what I think; even fewer care about my diet, exercise, travels, extra-curricular amusements, or photogenic relatives. WTF!

Am I a misanthrope? A Luddite? A fool? A loser?

Maybe all four. But primarily I’m someone who cherishes fully examined ideas, not simple glosses; someone who thinks a 140-character limit is acceptable only in medieval epics; someone who wants to prevent his passions and preferences from being treated like commodities.

I reveal these embarrassing details not to confess how behind the times I am but to emphasize how out of step I am with the times. Sure, I know how these newfangled gadgets work, and I’m acutely aware of how integral a “device” is to many modern people. But I’m unconvinced and not seduced. Just as I don’t enjoy most of the movies and TV shows and music that my fellow citizens proclaim Number One, I’m perplexed by everyone else’s compulsion to expose themselves – figuratively and quite literally – on the Internet, along with their children, their family and their friends.

Another old-fashioned concept: friends. My wife (as well as millions of others) has 5,000 of them on Facebook. I don’t think I know 5,000 people, let alone consider them friends. Strangers are welcome to the entire archive of my candidly composed essays, not what my hot nephew looks like with his shirt off.

No smartphone. No texting. No Facebook. No Twitter. I’m free.

I’m still here and present. But I’m free.

ROTFLMAO!

Suspension of Disbelievers

Michael Konik — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 14:47:23 +0000

North Korea is launching rockets, Syria is slaughtering its citizens, and the Filipino community is organizing a massive get-out-the-vote campaign for a crucial election (not for something boring and unimportant like a public office but a cause that’s got folks passionately engaged: the American Idol finals). So the astonishingly weird five-game suspension of Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen — for comments emanating from his mouth — came and went with little comment.

Principles like free speech, you see, are “important” according to moldy textbooks, but, really, let’s be honest: it’s hard to care about silly old constitutional precepts like the First Amendment when we’re permitted to express our opinions in the form of Facebook “likes.” Plus, Ozzie offended a whole bunch of people, and there’s got to be some punishment for that, right?

For those who missed the imbroglio, what the baseball skipper said was that he loved Fidel Castro, mainly for his longevity and ability to stay in power while so many wanted him dead and gone. Very admirable, Guillen opined. When he was reminded that many people in the Miami community have suffered unspeakable horrors at the hands of the Cuban dictator – as have millions more who couldn’t escape to Florida – Guillen realized he had said something stupid and apologized profusely for his callousness and ignorance, blaming an internal translation problem between his brain (which thinks in Spanish) and his tongue (which communicates in Spanglish or ESL-level English.) “I’ve learned my lesson,” he confessed.

Whatever, Ozzie. You hurt a lot of people with your words, so you’ve got to face the consequences. This being America, land of the free and so forth, the proper thing to do, of course, is to keep your dumb-ass opinions to yourself – and if you’re going to be foolish enough to tell a journalist what you’re thinking, then you ought to be prepared to be suspended from your job. The logic is, um…clear?

Major League Baseball approved the suspension, handed down by the team. People’s feelings had been hurt after all, hurt even more profoundly than when they discovered their beloved home run hitters were drug addicts and liars (and that Major League Baseball permitted the naughtiness). So it was decided: say something inappropriate, get fined. Equilibrium restored.

But what of precedent? How about all those other sports figures who once said something idiotic, disrespectful, or painful? Is it too late to retroactively suspend them?

Johnny Miller, NBC golf analyst: “Let’s face it, the LPGA Tour would be a lot more popular if they had fewer Koreans and more Americans with nice boobs who know how to put on a little makeup.” [Suspension: three broadcasts.]

Sidney Crosby, NHL player: “The reason there aren’t more black people in our league is because most of them live near the Equator, where they don’t have much ice. That’s why they call them African-Americans.” [Suspension: the entire regular season; reinstatement for the playoffs, when NBC might broadcast a few games.]

Sean Payton, NFL coach: “Everyone’s crying about our so-called bounty program. But financial incentives worked for the Stasi in East Germany, so how bad can it be?” [Suspension: one full season.]

Rick Adelman, NBA coach: “Am I the only one who thinks having lesbians officiating pro games is a mistake?” [Suspension: four games.]

Kobe Bryant, NBA player: “I wouldn’t say Wilt Chamberlain is my idol, per se. But maybe you could call him a role model. I mean, he sure did bang a whole bunch of white girls, and never once had a rape charge brought against him. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.” [Suspension: all games conducted south of the Mason-Dixon line.]

John Calipari, NCAA basketball coach: “I’m against paying our collegiate players. They get a scholarship and a chance at a fine education. It’s not our fault that they’d rather listen to jungle music instead of learning to read.” [Suspension: banned from recruiting for one academic quarter.]

Alex Rodriguez, MLB player: “Three words for Madonna: vaginal rejuvenation surgery.” [Suspension: one game and a donation to the Susan J. Komen foundation.]

Wayne Rooney, soccer player: “Maggie Thatcher was the best thing that ever happened to England. At least she got the Pakis to take a bath every now and again.” [Suspension: first-half of game versus Arsenal.]

Manny Pacquiao, boxer: “I love Ferdinand Marcos for bringing law and order to the Philippines. Plus, his wife has great fashion style, and that should count for something.” [Suspension: none; ordered to distribute free boxing gloves in the provinces.]

Eli Manning, NFL football player: “If I weren’t playing in the games I’d probably be betting on them. I mean, everyone does, right? At least it makes some of those boring late-season games a little interesting for the fans.” [Suspension: lifetime ban.]

Perverse Priorities

Michael Konik — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 21:00:04 +0000

Sometimes our chaotic, unknowable, seemingly random Universe arranges itself with perfect symmetry. In these moments of bracing clarity, authored by a Creator (in whatever guise or nomenclature you prefer) whose sense of irony is matched only by her/his/its sense of wicked humor, our innate foolishness and learned stubbornness are robbed of their pretensions. We see what we have wrought – and then pretend we didn’t, because, despite our professed wish for “change you can believe in,” change is the process we’re most unwilling to endure.

Last week provided several of those The Way It Is moments, with several illuminating events happening almost simultaneously, twinned like opposite sides of a coin, as though the worm-hole theories of modern physicists were getting an earthbound demonstration. Our chief prophet of change you can believe in, President Obama, who seems intent on being as big of a disappointment to as many of his former supporters as possible, played an alarmingly large role.

In Oakland, California, a man armed with a legally procured gun took his weapon to a small Christian college campus and started shooting people. He killed seven unlucky victims before being apprehended.

On the same day in Oakland, less than two hours later, just a few miles away, the federal government, in the form of agents from the IRS and DEA, trampling on the voter-approved laws of California, raided the apartment, dispensary and trade-school of one of America’s highest profile medical marijuana activists, Richard Lee. He was the paraplegic former Republican behind Proposition 19, a living refutation to all the invidious stoner stereotypes propagandists use to scare uninformed citizens. Candidate Obama, you may recall, promised not to prosecute medical marijuana users who comply with state law, and his Deputy Attorney General David Ogden reiterated that unambiguous position in a 2009 memo credited with sparking California’s “green rush” of pot-related businesses. Lee is the latest and most blatantly obvious victim of the Justice Department’s intimidation tactics, in which individuals are targeted for their political speech. Since the Ogden Memo, nearly 200 marijuana-related operations, many of them dispensaries that serve medical patients, have been raided, and more than 300 landlords of dispensaries have been sent letters threatening them with seizure and prosecution.

On the very same day as the Oakland events, President Obama was hosting a summit with leaders from Canada and Mexico. President Calderon expressed his concern over the unthinkable violence – the equivalent of a gunman shooting up a Christian college on a daily basis — that occurs when his rich neighbor to the north offers a combination of loose money, an insatiable appetite for mood altering substances, and fatally porous gun laws. Might legalization be the answer? President Obama has already declared that idea not open to discussion. The War on Drugs marches on.

That was one day in Oakland. A few days later, the administration announced that several terrorism suspects would soon be tried – at Guantanamo Bay. The place that candidate Obama promised to close. The War on Terror marches on.

Our same President Obama, he of the dangerously progressive bent that real Americans hate, spent some of last month on a cross-country “energy tour,” in which he adopted the formerly Republican stance of “all of the above” when it comes to feeding our appetite for energy. “All,” of course means fossil fuels, and that’s convenient since Obama pledged to expedite the southern leg of the controversial (to lefties) Keystone XL tar sand pipeline. The President is intelligent enough to know that our gasoline prices are actually too low and should be taxed more aggressively to discourage consumption, not encourage it. He understand that you can’t be pro-environment and pro-pipeline — not if you want to look your grandchildren in the eye. But his priority isn’t to make America an altogether healthier and better place; it’s to get re-elected.

Meanwhile, our Supreme Court justices taught us in Florence vs. Board of Chosen Freeholders of Burlington County, that strip-searching jail inmates is always permissible, even if those inmates are being held in jail for traffic violations. The War on Crime marches on.

Meanwhile, the General Services Administration chief, Martha Johnson, the person whose responsibility it is to be a steward of the public’s money, resigned her post after it was revealed that her GSA gang partied in Vegas at taxpayer expense. The boondoggles recalled the recent revelation that Eric Holder’s Justice Department, the same one that is on a mission to prosecute state law-abiding cannabis users, spent $32 per-person on Cracker Jacks and $600,000 on event planners, none of whom, one assumes were instrumental in planning the raid on Richard Lee’s Oaksterdam complex.

And amid the shooting and arresting and pilfering and prevaricating, we’re still fighting over how much (or little) of our national treasure we should spend on education.

If Mr. Darwin was right about the whole evolution thingie, let’s hope it doesn’t take our species as long as the insects and the birds and the fish. Because we’ve got to get our priorities straight. And fast. Before it’s too late.

Lotteries, Poker, and Other People’s Money

Michael Konik — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 15:26:05 +0000

Braving odds of 176 million-to-1, scores of otherwise sensible Americans, including several of our intelligent friends, were infected with Lottery Fever this past week, standing in lines of up to three hours to buy a ticket at “lucky” liquor stores and gas stations.

The prospect of a $640 million jackpot and the assurance that some of the money would go to our schools made throwing away hard-earned wages seem like an altogether fun thing to do. At $1 a pop, the lottery is a cheap fantasy while it lasts.

Like any fixed-odds proposition, a category that includes almost every casino game, including slot and poker machines, roulette, craps, and baccarat, lotteries are unbeatable. There’s no such thing as a professional lottery player; it’s not a viable way to end up with more than you started with. Sure, someone has to “win” the Mega Millions or Powerball, or the progressive slot jackpot in Atlantic City. But the house – in this case, our State Governments – always pays out less than it takes in, gifting the minority with some of the majority’s money and keeping the rest for themselves. In a state lottery, the percentage returned to gamblers is usually 50% or less; casinos, which no one has ever mistaken for bastions of kindness and charity, usually return more than 90% of the collected wagers to their customers. And serve free drinks. And miraculously pay the electric bill.

Having written a few books on the twinned subjects of risk and reward, we’re in the unusual position of knowing a little bit about how all this gambling stuff works. We’ve found that people who genuinely want to win, who put money at risk not for fleeting thrills nor to reinforce perpetual self-loathing but to profit, don’t gamble. They find games and situations where the player occasionally has the advantage, such as blackjack, which is sometimes beatable because the odds are dynamic, changing slightly as the composition of the deck changes. After learning all that can be learned about gambling – a quest that really doesn’t take very long, given the dearth of long-term winning opportunities – most sharp people turn to games in which their superior skill (in calculating, in deciding, in acting) produces an edge, an exploitable advantage that gives them an improved chance of winning.

The most popular and easily understood of these games is poker. It’s the one game in a casino in which players compete against each other, not the house. (The casino makes its money by renting out the table and dealer). Over time, when short-term fluctuations get ironed out by long-term mathematical constants, the better players end up with the money and the weaker ones go broke. Along the way, the losers cash a figurative lottery ticket or two, improbably triumphing when the odds are stacked against them. But with proper bankroll and emotional management, the superior poker player gets rich. He builds his endowment on the mistakes of those less clever, less disciplined, less prepared, less capitalized, and less educated.

If this sounds to you like a pretty good description of how capitalism works (or is supposed to work in its most gloriously unregulated form), then you can understand how being a wildly successful poker player is in many ways like being a wildly successful arbitrageur, bond trader or stock picker. You’re a winner. You’re rich. You’re a predator, not prey. You buy automobiles whose advertising tag line is, “Aggression in its most elegant form.” You[re an achiever.

Huzzah and hooray. Even in 2012, knowing what we know about the winners of our economic game, knowing how the banking, housing and political sectors were conquered by those who gamed the game, many of us still celebrate the champions. (Or give them multi-billion-dollar “bailouts.”) They accomplished the main thing: they won.

Never mind that most of these winners create nothing. Forget that even a lowly toilet-cleaner or lettuce picker or house painter (or school teacher) does something useful with his labor, something that benefits others. Like poker players, masters of money play a zero-sum game better than most people. They earn their prizes legitimately. They deserve to prosper while others suffer. Thems the rules.

In a previous chapter of my life, I admired great poker players. I wanted to be one. I thought it was cool to earn a living by playing a card game, getting rewarded for being better. Telling lies and getting paid. But the more time I spent around serious poker players, culminating in several years serving as a commentator on TV broadcasts of poker tournaments, I realized that what I had been aspiring to was a peculiar kind of sociopath.

The best poker players aren’t just Asbergerian savants; they have the temperament of cold-blooded killers, and they’re proud of it.

It wouldn’t be fair to call them boring – except away from the table. There’s some perverse entertainment value in watching professional mendicants practice their black art. Despite the cable TV industry’s partially successful attempt to turn these strange gamers into digestible characters, with back stories and tragic flaws, the truth is that great poker players are interesting only for exhibiting an abiding obsession with Getting the Best of It. For swindling a sucker. For exploiting the weak and foolish.

This imperative drives them and shapes their ethics, of which they generally have few. Several members of the Poker Hall of Fame were/are well-known cheaters. Several of the “household name” poker players celebrated by TV shows like the ones I worked on were cheaters in a “past life,” before the cameras were focused on their blank faces. I myself caught one of these fellows in the act, at a tournament in the 1990s. (He wasn’t disqualified, just scolded). Even the highly respected and respectable founders of Full Tilt Poker, including my former broadcast colleague Howard Lederer, are being investigated by prosecutors for running their online empire as a pyramid scheme. The founder of another site, Ultimatebet, was implicated in an online cheating scam.

I could go on. These are generally not nice people. And the example they set – that money is merely a method for keeping score – echoes the credo of many super-rich people: a life well spent is a life dedicated to accumulating as much as possible. It’s this maniacal quest to take more while those less capable survive with less that leads to debacles like worthless credit-default swaps gambled upon with other people’s money.

Poker (and gambling in general) was part of an interesting, enlightening, and financially rewarding period in my life. But that time is gone and ended. My goal is no longer to take other people’s wages. Now I’m trying to get genuinely rich with as little money as possible.

Violence Voyeurism

Michael Konik — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 16:18:27 +0000

Outrageous. Horrifying. Disgusting.

These were some of the adjectives hurled in the press when news broke that the former world champions of football, the New Orleans Saints, for years had instituted a bounty system that rewarded their players for knocking opponents out the game. Players contributed to an in-house pool and collected $1,000-$1,500 when they scored a knockout. Hitting someone so hard that they required a stretcher or motorized cart to be removed from the field earned a special commendation.

The National Football League, presenters of America’s favorite gladiatorial spectacle, handed down sentences to the malefactors. The General Manager and an assistant coach were suspended without pay for about half the upcoming season. The head coach, Sean Payton, was banned for the entire year. And in a maneuver eerily reminiscent of the Soviet Gulag, the former defensive coordinator and alleged mastermind of the bounty program, Greg Williams, now leading the St. Louis Rams, was suspended from the NFL “indefinitely,” which might or might not mean forever.

We’re betting on a sentence slightly shorter than forever.

We’re also betting that aside from dull-witted sportswriters and commentators who are paid to apotheosize the NFL and all the fine American values it represents most of the Saints’ fans are actually quite proud of their boys, just as the average hockey fan tacitly approves of (and cheers for) their team’s “enforcer,” the largely unskilled brute who comes off the bench for the express purpose of fighting the other team’s brute. Indeed, folks who understand how football is played can see the merit and virtue of adding incentives to beat the Other Guys unconscious. Knock the star quarterback out of the game and you’ve just increased your side’s chance of winning. We wouldn’t be surprised if other teams had (or have) similar bounty pools. We’ve assumed that was pro football’s standard operating practice, an unwritten code, just like the “high-and-inside” brush-back ethos of baseball and the retaliatory hard foul in basketball.

“It’s a violent game, it’s a tough game. Just playing it normally, you’re going to have injuries,” John Madden, co-chair of the NFL’s committee on player safety opined. “The game has plenty of natural violence, you don’t need to manufacture any more.” If this is true, what do we make of the inspirational pre-game speeches – “Let’s go out there and make those guys sorry they came into our house!” — and the tribal chants and warrior face paint, all of which are meant to get the boys “fired up,” to go out there and flatten someone in a different color uniform? More violence is precisely what the game and its fans require. That and winning.

The NFL, of course, can’t admit any of this. They’re in the business of providing a grand and glorious spectacle around which corporate America can market their automobiles, erection pills, and beer. Creating a televised “contact sport” is much less morally objectionable than “choreographed violence.” That kind of thing is for mixed martial arts. And the movies.

This weekend, many millions of us watched “The Hunger Games,” a film about pretty teenagers hunting and killing each other for the amusement of a depraved viewing audience in a fictional, futuristic society that – tsk-tsk – actually enjoys the mortal mayhem. The movie, based on a popular book, includes frequent glimpses of the deadly action being broadcast on gigantic TV screens to salacious fans. This is one of the oldest and most successful tricks in the pornographer’s playbook: give large audiences the violence they crave but pretend to be making a film that portrays as evil a society that would subject its pretty teenagers to a violent game.

Outrageous. Horrifying. Disgusting.

It’s not that the average ticket buyer to “The Hunger Games” isn’t smart enough to understand the ruse, it’s that she prefers the pretentiousness because it conveniently excuses her compulsion to watch people kill each other – just as the fictional residents of Panem enjoy watching the Hunger Games in their society. Just as fans of the NFL enjoy their bone-shattering collisions to be all in good fun, not as a money-for-violence transaction. Just so long as it’s all make-believe.

One of the story’s key conceits is that the teen killers are unwilling participants. They’re reluctant murderers, forced to slay or be slayed. Unlike the New Orleans Saints, they didn’t choose to hurt their opponents for monetary rewards. They’re victims. It’s the sicko voyeurs of Panem who are bad. The judgment, strangely, doesn’t register with us, the ticket-buying, NFL-loving audience. Unlike Katniss and friends, we have no such reluctance when it comes to viewing violence. We like it.

This compulsion for brutal voyeurism could be filed away under “different strokes for different folks” and “everyone enjoys his own brand of pornography” if not for the stunning connection between our violent fantasies and our utter obliviousness to real-world violence. While millions of us are filling the multiplex to watch a movie about degenerates watching a TV screen broadcasting kids hunting each other with bows and arrows, millions of other young people are enduring the real thing. Outrageous? Horrifying? Disgusting? Nah. Boring.

For nearly a decade, the United States military, backed by the treasury of its violence-loving citizens, has been conducting an elaborate show in Afghanistan. Unlike “The Hunger Games,” this one isn’t very sexy, and its ratings would be an embarrassment to the NFL. Its participants won’t be memorialized on the cover of People magazine, nor will the countless victims, including the innocent Afghani civilians, some of them murder victims, many of them “unfortunate collateral damage.” How can we deny with a straight face that the overseas violence isn’t directly and inextricably tied to a bounty system of our own? Would any of our trained killers in uniform gladly fly to Kabul and destroy the Other Team if they weren’t paid? If their impulse for mayhem weren’t encouraged and celebrated in the popular culture?

When it comes to our appetite for violence, real and simulated, the future has already arrived. It’s not our Games that are hungry, it’s us.

What the Frack!?

Michael Konik — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 14:56:58 +0000

In 1969, the Cayahoga River, one of Lake Erie’s major tributaries, caught fire. This provided the kind of visual evidence boring old science never could. Folks got hip: Industry, they realized, was using American waterways as a massive free sewage system for their most noxious waste. Americans got serious about pollution in our water for a minute. Then we all got back to business and tried to forget about the future.

Now our present generation of leaders and decision-makers has its own Compelling Visual to consider as they try to sell the easily sold American public on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in which a proprietary cocktail of water, sand, and toxic chemicals are blasted into shale fissures deep beneath the Earth’s surface. The blasting breaks apart the rock formations and causes them to give up oil and natural gas deposits. The Academy Award-nominated (and therefore Good and Worthy) documentary “Gasland” showed residents of Colorado lighting their tap water on fire. You would think it was Lake Erie all over again.

You would also think there’d be some kind of revolution. Water equals life, right? OK. Sure. Fine. But life without cheap gasoline is not really a life worth living. You can have all the potable water you’d like, but what’s the point if it costs $94 to fill up your Chevy Tahoe?

You also might think we the people wouldn’t stand for another ruthless corporation with money on the brain to frack with our most essential resource. But these are different, more perilous times. It’s difficult to worry about poisoning the water supply — your precious children’s water supply — when you’ve got a car payment, an upside-down mortgage, and a giant Amex bill to fret over. For some years now, all sorts of credible people have been warning us about the dangers of fracking, but we’ve been a bit too busy with important stuff like the new season of “The Voice” and keeping up with “Hunger Games” news to be concerned about something incidental like our aquifers.

The mantra of Small Government reactionaries is “get the government off our back.” Abolish the Energy Department. Rip up the regulations. Let the market fix everything. Until those kind of patriots take over Washington (and the vaginas of women everywhere), we still have people called Regulators whose job it is to regulate. Quaint and charmingly naive as it sounds, these regulators are paid to protect the public from companies who care less about birth defects and causing cancer than reaping profits. The frackers make the same claim that the pesticide and cigarette makers used to make: it’s safe! It’s proven! It’s widely accepted! Heck, it might even be good for you, just like a glass of high-fructose corn syrup and a deep-fried potato is good for you.

Regulators in Ohio concluded that fracking probably triggered more than a dozen earthquakes. In Ohio.

States from Montana to Maine are “debating” (read: “politely suggesting to their Energy Company benefactors”) moratoriums on fracking after toxic chemicals were found in nearby drinking water.

And in the great state of California, the people in charge of regulating the extraction of fossil fuels from California land are doing virtually nothing. The reason, they admit, is because they have no idea what’s going on. The regulators have no regulations on fracking.

California is the fourth-largest oil-producing state. Even in Los Angeles we have active wells bobbing along in a vaguely fellatio-like motion, including on the La Cienega-Baldwin Hills corridor, linking Hollywood and the airport. But almost no one aside from the shot-callers at Halliburton knows how much or what type of fracking has been conducted in our communities. Why? Because the energy companies and their lobbyists, dancing to the drumbeat of deregulation, have successfully scuttled legislation that would answer some simple questions. Like:

Where does fracking take place?

How often does fracking take place?

What are the potential risks?

These seem to simple country folks like us to be reasonable and not terribly provocative queries. But the energy industry finds this all to be a bit much. They’ve invested a great deal, you see, in chemical recipes (and lobbyists) and they’d really prefer if the Government would just stand back and let them deliver domestic oil to domestic Americans who may or may not drive domestic vehicles.

On March 22, it’s once again World Water Day. There will be speeches and heartbreaking videos and all sorts of startling facts and figures. While a small portion of the population will be engaged in earnest discussions and fretful hand-wringing, another portion — the part that believes jobs and cheap gasoline are more important than clean water — will be blasting away, fracking up the environment. The vast majority, almost everyone else, won’t know or care or understand. They can’t be bothered. One day these people will have children and grand-children and maybe even great-grandchildren. Fortunately, when these future generations inhabit what’s left of the Earth, few of us will be around to face the question: Why did you let this happen to our water?

Encouraging Words for Despairing Artists

Michael Konik — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 16:00:04 +0000

If you’re an artist, or have an artistic impulse, or care deeply about art, you probably experience the kind of quiet despair that I find in many of my jazz musician friends, my poet friends, my painter friends, and frequently from myself. Yes, it’s heartbreaking to be part of a culture that finds the work that we do increasingly irrelevant and of little worth (at least in the marketplace sense). It’s depressing to be so astonishingly good at something and yet so relatively uncelebrated and unappreciated.

But you must never stop. We — all of us who care in varying degrees about stuff other than acquiring and consuming — are out there. We’re reading, and listening, and looking, and cogitating, and arguing, and questioning, and loving. We can’t be co-opted. We’re too smart and too aware. We’re not going anywhere. And we need you, you specifically, with your lavish talents, and all the others like you who bring something good and maybe lasting to this world.

Let me remind you that what you do — what all of us who traffic in ideas, in the endless and unknowable quest to understand and explain what it means to be alive and conscious — has value. It is good. It is beautiful. It’s a counterweight to the crushing barrage of disposable crap that the popular culture flings at us.

One of my very best friends is a 10-time Grammy-nominated jazzer. Tierney Sutton was my high school classmate. Bobby McFerrin is my hero. These cats and kittens have taught me a lesson in humility, the real kind. They understand that they’re gifted, that they’ve been given specific gifts from the Creator or the Universe or whatever concept you prefer. They understand that the gift is not theirs; they are merely the vessel through which the divine energy flows, and they are meant to, they are obligated, to share it with the world. It’s a heavy responsibility. These folks complain and despair and fret, because it’s so damn hard to go on when you’re reaching for the transcendent and nobody seems to care. But they go on reaching, anyhow. That’s what a responsible curator of divine gifts does: he bears the burden and he shares.

Your gifts matter, Mr. and Ms. Artist. You’re a beautiful creator and a beautiful person. How many (or few) people are capable of appreciating your beauty hardly matters. That there are any at all means you are important, hugely important — to us and to God, or whomever bestowed upon you uncommon intelligence.

So keep doing your thing. It’s a kind of magic; you’re blessed to be cursed with the responsibility of sharing it.