Semi random phone calls

Much of today has disappeared into unexpected calls with clients. One in New York, who is dealing with both cancer and with separating from her husband, another from Maryland, whom I may miss on he visits NC in June. Also my mom, who's a little disappointed about something. Also I went to the mall for free pizza, courtesy of a local realtor who sends me free things just because. Plus I dumped some tasks on a kid from NC State who is being a big help to us this spring, for proper remuneration of course.

So I haven't "gotten all that much done." But what a fine day. How awesome to speak to these good folx about this, that, and the other too, much of it financial, but just as much about family, what we expect of each other, and how to reconcile those expectations with what we get. All good.

Pushing back while sore

Yesterday afternoon Mary took my car to Southern States in Carrboro and loaded up on mulch. She got thirteen bags of it. Which is not very much and is probably more expensive, but is so greatly preferable to having a huge pile of the stuff at the foot of our driveway for months on end, which is what we get for trying to save money.

Naturally I enlisted Graham to help me get it out of the car and distribute it around the yard, per Mary's specifications. For one, because he was around, and secondly because his doctor has given us instructions to try to help him build up upper body strength, and we haven't been as consistent in that as would be ideal.

But he was a little grumpy when I told him we needed to do it. And then we went down to our neighbor Caroline's to borrow her mower, as we do, to mow our lawn. Luckily, their yappy dog Opie was not running free in the front yard, cuz at the very least he would have mouthed off at us. I don't think he's an actual nipper, he's just a little excitable.

When we got to mower out, I gave it to Graham to push up the hill, and he started pacing about, as he sometimes does. I could tell he was a little annoyed. "What's wrong?" I asked. Turned out, his arm was a little sore from getting his second vaccine shot yesterday. When he explained it to me, he even used the word "nonplussed," which shows he has been studying for his SATs. I had totally forgotten about the vaccination angle.

I apologized and pushed the mower up the hill for him, rather than turn it on early to get the motor assist, as had been his plan. Once more, it took a little digging, but Graham eventually came forward with how he was a little PO'd at me, which is a really good thing. 

Lengthening horizons

It often seems to me that my job is first and foremost to help people lengthen their horizons and then try to guide and coach them so their behavior aligns with that longer view. Which is complicated by the little bumps in the road that continually poke up. A wire that hasn't arrived on time. A marriage that's falling apart. Cancer. And so on.

Ideally all of these eventualities are anticipated and planned for, but in practice some of them just crop up. The worse people are at planning -- i.e. the more poorly I do this part of my job or the later I catch them in the arc of their lives -- the more of these things arise.

It's always instructive to look at people and organizations that have done better jobs at things. Amazon, for one. However much I resist the full Amazonization of our lives, one cannot but marvel at what Bezos and team have done over coming up on a quarter century. Like Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway, it turns out that Bezos has been publishing an annual letter since 1997, and somewhere on the interweb I came across one big pdf of them and printed it out. I've been trying to read one a morning on business days. In keeping with Bezos's philosophy of distillation (he is said to try to make one or two good decisions a day), they are very brief -- about two pages max per year.

In 2009 he focused on a lot of operational metrics -- number of products on platform, number of new reviews, new product lines launched on Amazon Web Services... Then he talks about Amazon's goal-setting practice, which takes months, and the goals are constantly revisited throughout the year, some of them measured, others jettisoned. He is at pains to point out that very few of their discussions or metrics are financial in nature, it's all about serving the customer better.

Like Buffett, even in - or perhaps particularly in -- years of financial crisis (2008, 2009, 2020) -- the crisis and its impact on the business isn't even mentioned. There is no excuse-making, no caveating of what went wrong and blaming it on external factors -- there is only the future. 

Lassitude

It was mild and breezy today, so I went for my second ride of the season, about 22 miles, out along Dairyland to Maple View then back, adding in a small loop. At this point in time, I'm not really feeling a whole ton of get up and go, but I don't have the delicious tiredness that I sought.

Truth be told, I'm mildly disquieted by Natalie's not having figured out her housing situation for the summer. She will be running a camp for housing-insecure children down near Silicon Valley. Little wonder that she's going to have to pay a non-trivial premium for housing of her own, given that it's in one of the most expensive places to live in the country. I've been trying to help out, pinging people, working the phones, but I've wrought no miracles, and wrangling with hosts on Airbnb has brought her mostly heartache thus far.

We could probably swoop in and buy her out of this mess by just paying up, but it's kind of an important moment for her to come to grips with what things actually cost out there in the world. I was listening to a podcast not long ago in which this woman who works with very wealthy families saying that one thing she's seen in decades of experience is that the families who let kids figure things out for themselves and learn to stand on their own two feet end up having the healthiest kids. Having parents swoop in to fix everything isn't really good for the younger ones. I have to keep telling myself that.

The Project

Like many, and like Natalie in her own way, Graham is a very self-directed kid. He spends copious amounts of time lying on his bed reading on his iPad, getting involved in all manner of the most interesting discussions on various fora in places like Reddit, SpaceBattles, Discord and Quora. If there is some question of something related to a current event, often we just need to mention it to him and he will be much more informed about it from various angles than we could ever hope to be.

But it's hard to get him to focus on other things with a future orientation, like college, or physical fitness or... So we are often in the position of nudging him gently and continually and of hiring professionals like a math tutor and an executive function coach to support him.

One night at dinner in recent months when I was nudging him on something (driving without us in the car, a haircut, studying for the SATs, taking a shower, strengthening his upper body like his doctor recommended, looking more deeply into colleges, I haven't the foggiest what it was) he pushed back a little, alluding to "whatever this 'project' is you have in mind for me."

First off, as male teenage space-demarcating goes, this wasn't bad. I was much worse and my methods were much worse.

But "the project" he alluded to, what is it? I guess it's just basic parenting, what we all want. We want him (and them) to be able to fly from the nest, to go out into the world and flourish, to embrace it and enjoy it while standing on their own two feet. To prepare for our eventual absence.

It's a complex project, no doubt, complicated in particular by the endless plethora of choices with which we are all faced. The behavioral economists have done a great deal of good work, no doubt, but the place where they have had the most concrete and immediate impact has been on the design of 401k plans. A couple of them (Richard Thaler and Shlomo Benartzi) discovered that people in 401k plans freaked out and couldn't make good decisions about investing when they had to choose between too many options. They discovered that the right number of options was 8 or 10 max.

This principle holds true for a lot of things in life. When faced with too many options, we can easily get caught up in "analysis paralysis." I think college choice and the general prospect of the future freaks the fuck right out of most teenagers, of course. I was terrified, myself, and retreated into a variety of self-defense mechanisms.

So our job is to help our kids narrow things down and make the decision-making process manageable on an ongoing basis. And the key is to help them figure out who they are, which we begin by helping them figure out who they are not.

Who not how

The days grind on. So much to do, so much to think about in each one. Clients. Kids. Markets. Mary's project. Boards. The house. My body.

I recently listened to the book "Who Not How?" by Dan Sullivan, a guy well-known (it seems) in entrepreneurial circles who focuses on the issue of continually finding bigger networks and experts of people to partner with and hand things off to. Really a hyper-generalized practice of delegation, which really closely aligns with the broader economic theory of highly granular specialization and division of labor and the way it facilitates productivity at a macro level.

One thing in the book that slightly rubbed me the wrong way was the insistence that people should "dream big and aspire high", which strikes me as a little egocentric and denies the virtue of the small. But I also kind of get it. If you have large or high aspirations, it forces you to engage in more things, which makes you learn your limits, which makes you look for others who are better at things then you are. And then it becomes magical.

Regime change

My rhythms are about to change. First off, my hip injury. I felt a twing late in my match with Z on Thursday, then yesterday it came back when we were playing and I had to retire after one set. It was like flipping a switch: my mobility was reduced, and all of a sudden I had to go for winners so that I didn't have to play long points with lots of running. In my mind's eye I could see myself as one of these older guys on the court with limited mobility, and it made me think back to a conversation I had with my friend Matt earlier in the week. He had just turned 60 and was talking about how his body just began to fall apart.

On the one hand, it's not a pretty vision. I prize the exceptional mobility I've been able to maintain well into my fifties. On the other hand, it is what it is, and I have to accept reality, though I can also make some adjustments (lay off it for a little while, stretch more, get more professional guidance on what I need to do to keep going....)

Secondly, I booked some tickets to fly to NYC in May and go from there to New Haven to get her out of her apartment. This means getting back on shared conveyances: planes, subways and trains. Rationally I'm pretty sure the risks are well-managed on them by now, and I have two shots under my belt and can wear a mask or even two when in metal tubes with others. But still it's a pretty big change.

More importantly, it means getting back on the road to go to other places, something I'm a little bit less excited about than I used to be. I have come to like it at home.

The gathering storm of Sunday

I heard Graham bounding around downstairs just before 8:30 and realized he had a Quiz Bowl tournament starting at noon so I had better get downstairs to make pancakes. I had half a can of sweet potato that I had promised Mary I would use Sunday morning (so I shouldn't freeze it), and I'll be damned if I was gonna get up late and have her say "I told you you should have frozen it."

Next up: tennis with Z at 11:30. Beyond which stretches a bunch of tasks, much of it related to travel planning for the next couple of months both for me going to the Northeast to see folx and get Natalie out of her apartment, but also finding a place for Natalie to stay in the Bay area. There's other stuff on there too, LFA tasks, Graham college stuff...

Meanwhile, the biography of Frank Ramsey which I am reading (which I had long awaited) is gathering steam. Ramsey, having translated Wittgenstein's Tractatus at the tender age of 19, has just met Wittgenstein, and the book is about to accelerate as Ramsey meets Wittgenstein in Austria and their dialogue takes off, which will move Wittgenstein off the time towards his more interesting thinking.

Gotta go put water in bottles and make the bed.

Work day

Naturally, I felt a sense of deep dread as I looked down at the lake park around 10 this morning. Once again, it was Community Work Day here in the neighborhood, when everyone gets together to shovel sand and do other crap around the park. As I have moved into ever more responsible roles on the Board -- culminating in my current chairpersonhood -- I have gotten ever less excited about going out for things like this, though I feel like I'm supposed to do them. This is compounded by the fact that I've gotten very accustomed to the rhythm of days spent alone under COVID. No more are my Saturdays consumed by taking Graham to martial arts and also perhaps soccer. I have more time to sit and read, get some basic exercise and perhaps nap and talk on the phone. Good livin.

But of course I remembered that I generally like seeing people when I do go out and that I like most of the people that I see, and even that, however much I dig my routines, I also tend to enjoy it when I break out of them. So I went down there. There was sand shoveling, but I was also able to martial troups for some of the projects that I had been thinking about, like recovering gravel which had washed off the side of the road and filling in trenches which rain running off the roof of the pavilion has pounded into the soil, creating a pretty serious tripping and/or ankle-breakage hazard.

But then I had the not too bright idea of alerting Mary to the huge pile of mulch cum soil from the pile of wood chips made from the tree we took down several years ago. Did she want it? I think you know the answer to that, fair reader. Of course she did. So my exercise for the day ended up being bringing many wheelbarrows of rich brown soil up the hill into our yard and dumping them in places where nothing grows from the barren red clay of the Piedmont. With considerable labor we (Mary did some earlier) were able to more than scratch the surface of the pile, but not much more.

And now I am hungry for my birthday dinner with my mom at Jujube.

Who should drive the public good?

Mitch McConnell was recently quoted as whining about big business functioning as a "woke parallel government." Frankly, if the legislature was more effective in passing legislation pertaining to public goods, it wouldn't be a problem. But we are where we are. For decades now, the Federal legislative branch has ground to a halt as legislators try to ram through one or two big things by reconciliation or some other means of budget brinkmanship while jockeying for position for the next set of elections. The two-year cadence of elections for the House emphatically does not help.

The Democrats do their part, no doubt, but the "cooling saucer" function of the Senate, perhaps most elegantly laid out in volume 2 of Caro's LBJ bio, has been leveraged to a hilt by the Republicans under McConnell, who have ramped up their "tyranny of the majority" rural white people as victims strategy to a hilt. Pity the poor country boy.

So if the legislature won't move things forward, the corporate sector has decided it will. After Citizens' United, after all, corporations are people too. And of course corporations are disproportionately located in blue places and employ Democrats, and are owned by people with money, who vote Democrat. So money ends up winning.

In some ways this is an extension of the "voluntary associations" that de Tocqueville called out as such a distinctive feature of the American political landscape, but it differs by now by the scale of the voluntary associations -- which make reasoned back and forth difficult and also by the fact that social networks are the loci of too much discussion so that people don't look one another in the eye while talking, associate primarily with the like-minded and so generally have a difficult time beginning to see where their opponents are coming from in an argument.

It would really be better in so many ways if public goods were debated and addressed in public fora like legislatures and town counsels. At least then there would be a greater layer of the disintermediation of money. Right now we're not there.

Success

At the end of a podcast I've been listening to with other financial planners, the host always ends the interview by asking his guests how they define success. It's a good question.

For me, the first thing that came to mind was something that happened a few years ago when Natalie and I were out looking at colleges. We were headed from Larchmont up to Cornell and then, since we were up there, Colgate. On the way we stopped in to see a friend and client who was at a Balkan music camp which is the highlight of her summer, which takes place in one of those towns along Route 17 as it winds its way upstate, as well as another friend, the son of my dad's best friend from law school (a well-known environmental lawyer). On that stop Natalie and I swam in cold rivers not once but twice in a short span of hours, with some barefoot soccer with my friend and his daughters in the middle. Good livin.

Anyway, Natalie and I spent the night in Binghamton at a Hampton Inn (on points, of course), then found a diner for breakfast. The diner had seen better days, and it was blazing hot out and the AC was straining a little, but we were there and it was breakfast time so we found a booth and ordered. After we got our food, the waitress checked back in and asked us how the food was. We said it was fine and she went on.

A few minutes later a woman from a booth near ours came over and said how nice it was to hear us interact with the waitress, how gracious we had been, "everyone around here can be so nasty, but you guys were so kind." That made me feel really good about how we had done raising Natalie, because in my mind we had done absolutely nothing out of the ordinary, it was like breathing, but we had made this woman's day.

One more sign of success: a weekend or so back, I was making breakfast on Sunday for Graham (pancakes, of course, since it was Sunday) and I said something to him about how he probably didn't need both a steak knife and a butter knife for pancakes. I was thinking about how the steak knife handles dry out and fall apart over time in the dishwasher, a point Mary likes to make. I said something else which bugged him because he then said to me: "Have you had an OK morning thus far? Because you've criticized me about two things already."

The fact that Graham is comfortable enough in his own skin to let me know I was bugging him like that, to have not stormed off and sulked, that is a sure sign of success. So I thanked him for letting me know how he felt and apologized and explained that I didn't mean to be critical of him.... Anyway, those are two instances that we have done well raising our kids, which is really the most important thing.

Bad mental day on the courts

Z took me 6-1, 6-4 yesterday. And it gets worse. I was up 4-1 in the second set, and then I just collapsed. Frankly it's not that I played that badly. The two sets took us almost two whole hours, because there were a lot of games that went to deuce and just kept going. It's just that Adam won most of them.

One thing I will say is that my mental state didn't help. Even in games where I was up, I'd let negative thoughts creep in and trip me up. Entirely unrelated negative stuff. For example, at lunch last week I heard that Sonya Manning, a Black woman in our high school class, had recently died of COVID. I'm pretty sure I have blogged about how poorly I knew that Black women in our class, since gifted tracking and then Honors and AP classes meant that I went effectively to a parallel segregated school within an integrated school. I knew lots of the Black guys because I was a striver on the basketball court. For years I played at lunch and went to gyms on weekend nights to work on my game, which made me a not bad but not great basketball player. So I knew the Black guys -- and Pam Clarke (but who didn't) -- but not Black women.

But Sonya Manning looked very familiar when I consulted the old Proconian. Why I let that thought creep into my mind on tennis games when I was up -- along with other similar negative things -- that's the question. It's a pattern of self-defeating behavior.

Generally, I was unable to consistently stick to a strategy of letting Adam make mistakes and beat himself. It just gets boring. He is better at that than I am. I give up and go for winners too quickly. The boring stuff works and makes for long rallies and lots of exercise benefit, but poor blogs.

Putting myself at risk

When at home, I spend a lot of time upstairs in one of two armchairs: one in my study, one in the bedroom. Really it depends on time of day and where the sun is, and whether I am reading a book or working on a laptop, which determines what kind of light I need.

But it does work out to me being up in a lair, away from Graham and Mary. This morning I decided to break the cycle of isolation and sit downstairs on the couch for longer to be less antisocial.

The problem was that I thereby put myself in harm's way. Mary is working under a tight deadline. I had done some editing work on her upcoming book yesterday, but I missed a couple of things and she wants me to do more. I was sitting on the couch and she started asking me questions: should I do this or that? And so on. So if I am in the same room, I am basically easily draftable at a moment's notice, whereas if I am upstairs and somebody needs something from me they have to make more of an effort to ask for help.

Still, I think it's good on balance to try to isolate less.

Back on two wheels

Got back out on my bike today for the second or perhaps third ride of the season. It was a perfect day for it. Being out on the bike got me back in a new mindset and lots of ideas came flooding back to me. I won't bore you with all of them, primarily because the main point is that the different way of being out in the world, biking, which offers its own rhythm.

Which was brought home to me when I turned left off of Eubanks onto old 86. It's a particularly narrow piece of road, which was brought home to me when I began to be passed by a bunch of super cars: A Porsche, then a Ferrari, then a Lamborghini, whose driver gunned his engine as he passed me and startled me off of the narrow shoulder onto the side of the road, where I stopped to let the line of traffic pass. And they kept coming, fancy Audis, souped up Mustangs, a Ford 308 GTO or whatever, about 20 of them, all going vroom vroom with their manly engines as they went 20-25 on a narrow country road. Clearly there was some sort of a rally going on. A bunch of fucking jackasses.

Once they had all passed, I continued on.

Making progress

As my business improves, I am making progress on a number of key fronts around the house. First off, the new couch for my study, long lobbied-for, has been ordered and should be here in 7-8 weeks. We have had a blinds guy come into the house and we have samples for blinds for my study. Now I just have to have Mary look at them and make a decision. I have a new to me -- and my first ever -- electric guitar, thanks to my friend Nick up in Brooklyn. I also have the software, doohickey, and headphones that allow me to play and mix it through my laptop. However, it takes a lot more effort to hook it up and get the software right (it's confusing) than to just pick up my acoustic, so the electric has not yet taken over.

What I really want to do is have somebody come in and clean our metal roof from the decade-plus of gunk that has built up on it. It should last longer and it will be really shiny! But getting somebody to do that has been a big fricking ordeal, mostly because Mary is skeptical about the impact of a bleach solution on her plants. Also, the house and deck just crave a good powerwashing.

I also need to wash our cars, particularly hers, which looks like a homeless person's car from just sitting in the driveway and not being driven.

Once I get the roof cleaned, I will be like Navin R Johnson from The Jerk. I won't need one other thing. Except for my paddleball.

 

The roots of the disruptive urge

A client of mine sells for a very high-growth, dynamic software company: a new type of service/product aligned with the growth of "edge computing": the fact that so much happens on the web, in the cloud, where consumers expect very fast response time to any query submitted to anyone. He gets paid a lot of money, and also has a non-trivial chunk of shares in the company. I was talking to him the other day and he expressed frustration with an old economy company with whom he was working and expressed a strong desire to support "disruptive" companies.

It's interesting that there is a tendency in the tech world and its boosters (and lately many have become boosters, to the extent that many have been enriched by tech) to celebrate disruption uncritically. On Silicon Valley the team joked that their company's goal was to "change the world," which really resonated, because a lot of tech companies do talk like that: "We're not about making tons of money, really (that's just a byproduct), we want to change the world!"

But of course a generic desire to disrupt and change the world is predicated on the belief that the world as it is is in bad shape, and that the type of change the company offers changes it for the better. In fact the solutions offered more often than not do provide services more quickly and often at lower cost, but at a cost to current employment, and result in displaced lower skills workers who often must take lower paid rolls and become somewhat unmoored in society, with risks to the social fabric and political stability -- as we have seen recently. Generically, better and faster service delivery sounds like a good thing in most individual instances. Destruction of the existing fabric of society is less desirable.

A lot of research has been done, and anecdotal evidence and lived experience support this, that above something like $75k of income, increases to income do not correlate to increases in happiness and life satisfaction for individuals. In aggregate the same should be true. Once a society reaches a level of wealth in that ballpark, it shouldn't get much happier on average when the majority of people get much richer.

None of this is to say that change, dynamism and creative destruction are bad. We all like new products, better cars, smartphones, new foods, etc. But nor should all of that be considered an unalloyed good.

Rocky Mount

For Graham's first shot of the Pfizer vaccine, we were able to get an appointment in Rocky Mount at a CVS. First off, let me note how well the process was designed and administered at this site, particularly in comparison to the Walgreen's I went to in Greensboro. I suspect it had more to do with CVS vs Walgreen's than the specific locations. All the questions were asked up front, in the app, so that when we got there we just had to check in on my phone, go up to a table in the front of the store and have Graham's ID checked and name marked off, and walk to the back of the store. Graham was vaccinated 5 minutes after walking into the store.

By contrast I had to fill out a couple of long forms and then wait for an hour or so for my turn to come up. It could be that everyone is getting better at managing the process, or any number of things. It's all good.

It was about 6 and I was tired, so I decided I wanted a fountain soda from the Sheetz next door to the CVS. Before we went in, Graham and I speculated on what portion of the people inside the store would not have masks on, and their demographic. Based on recent samples, I guessed 25%, mostly white men.

I was wrong. It was closer to 40%, all Black youth. A couple of them were clinically obese, buying a bunch of cookies and other shit. When they got up to the register, one of them, maybe 16 years old, argued with the woman at the register nastily about the price of something and then demonstratively whipped out a roll of bills to show how he was going to pay. The source of his funds is up for speculation.

I had never been to Rocky Mount, and downtown was only 8 minutes away, so Graham agreed to investigate. A town of about 54,000, Rocky Mount has a pretty large historic downtown, but it is particularly forlorn and abandoned. Maybe a quarter of the buildings are occupied by some sort of enterprise. From the exterior, it at least doesn't yet appear to be entirely falling down, but the forward-looking economics of the place are far from clear. There are a couple of clearly state- or municipally-supported events facilities. The biggest building in town, on one edge of downtown, is the municipal services building. On the other end of town, maybe a quarter of a mile outside of town, is an improbably shiny mini-skyscraper that says "DMV" on it. A little interweb sleuthing shows that NC has moved DMV headquarters from Raleigh to Rocky Mount, as of December 2020. Which is brilliant on a few scores

1. We are now in a work from home era. What's with the shiny new building?

2. It's off to the side of a dying downtown. If you're going to build a new building with 500 FTEs (theoretically), why not stick it in the middle of the downtown

3. Are these people really moving to Rocky Mount? All of them?

Again, this is why Republicans rightly question putting too many capital allocation and management decisions in the hands of bureaucrats. This doesn't seem to have been a smart one. Who knows, maybe it will work. Maybe the DMV move to Rocky Mount will bring some good jobs and spread income around the state, and support a small ecosystem of suppliers. But it doesn't look smart right now for anyone except the contractor who built the building, or whoever owned it.

Ramping it back up

After a week away, back in the saddle this morning and back in the fray: a client newly divorced who wants to sit down and talk budgeting, a client in Brooklyn starting chemo today, money to disburse to pay for a client's kid's college, a wire to Germany for Mary's book to check up on, etc. And then there are the markets.

It was a fine week away, getting on the road a little, seeing some towns and corners of America I'd never seen before. Lancaster, Pennsylvania was particularly interesting. Same population as Chapel Hill in the town proper, but three times as dense, so really it was a small city. Block after block of row houses in varying states of repair. It was clear there were some interesting businesses and stories in some of them. Amish in the surrounding countryside, a couple of small colleges, beyond that it wasn't clear who the anchor employer was. Maybe some people commute to Philly. I wouldn't be sad if Graham ended up there for college.

Finished an Alan Furst novel, moved forward in Andrew Solomon's Far From the Tree. 

But eating dinner in hotel rooms sitting on the floor got old, so I am certainly hoping that the vaccines outrun the variants and also looking forward to the approach of warm weather everywhere, which will let us eat and meet outside. 

Things left undone

Back in September, I posted about how I haven't undertaken many of the tasks others have during the pandemic, for example thoroughly cleaning out the basement, shredding old tax documents, etc. When I last wrote on this topic I speculated that the months of cold and short days and colder and longer nights might be a great time to do some of that stuff.

Indeed it might have been, but it wasn't to be. Admittedly I have done a few things and have made some incremental progress towards paring and being better organized. But not much. Who knows, today may be the day I get lucky.

But really what I want to do is finish reading this Alan Furst book so I can start something else and maybe get Graham to walk uptown with me to get burgers at Al's, since I have not had my statutory one serving of red meat per week and Al's is a great place to do it.

On Chinese Nationalism since Tiannanmen Square

Back from our trip, catching up on reading. The Journal on Monday had a story about the economic implications of Chinese nationalism and in particular recent aggression towards Taiwan after the draconian Hong Kong security law.

Per Ezra Vogel -- in his monumental bio of Deng Xiaopeng -- following the events on Tiannanmen Square in 1989, the Chinese Communist Party wrestled with how best to preserve its legitimacy and popularity after its pretty brutal crackdown on a fairly popular, organic, bottom up movement. The Party settled on nationalism as the best chord to strum on. And so Chinese history has largely been recast as a story of retuning to past glory after the humiliation of its fall from grace, first and foremost from the period of the Opium Wars forward. 

Once great, then humbled, now risen again. It's a classic narrative that's hard to resist. Hitler ran this play before WWII, white nationalists are running it now. There's no end to what it can't justify.

I would be interested to learn how the current spate of anti-Asian crimes in the US are being played in the Chinese state media. It's probably safe to wager that the fact of the crimes themselves is being foregrounded rather than the upsurge of popular sentiment condemning them from Western liberals.