Iowa Caucuses and Why I'm With Warren

U. S. government is weird. On the most basic level, a democratic republic with checks and balances between three branches of the government designed to write, enforce, and interpret laws, with parallel structures on the state and national level, seems like an excellent and intuitive system. But when you get into the fine details, everything suddenly seems arbitrary and kind of stupid. For example, who the hell decided to have goddamn Iowa be the first caucus state? How on earth does it make any sense for candidates to pander to some mostly-white, mostly-empty state from November to February of election years, then forgot about us as soon as the votes come in?

All the same, as little sense as it makes, Iowa is the first caucus state, which means that I’ll have a wildly disproportionate power in choosing the Democratic candidate this Monday. The last few months I’ve seen student advocates handing out flyers every time I walk into the dining hall and sat through fifteen-second campaign ads every time I watch a video on YouTube. I even had the chance to see Elizabeth Warren and Beto O’Rourke live the past couple months. And, since I have this electoral power I didn’t earn and don’t really need, I figure I might as well use it to advocate for my chosen candidate, Elizabeth Warren.

My girlfriend sometimes teases me that I only like her because I’m studying to be a public school teacher, and she made a pretty explicit effort to pander to my field at her campaign rally. And really, that is a large part of it, not just that she’s a defender of teachers, but she seems to speak and act for actual citizens. Of course, being on the side of the people is something almost every candidate claims, but Warren makes the claim more coherently and effectively than any other politician I have ever seen. Her “two cent tax” on those with over fifty million dollars strips away the lie that taxing the wealthy hurts all of us, and reveals how much the push against taxation is motivated by greed. Bernie aims for something similar with his railing against millionaires and billionaires, but Warren combines rhetoric and policy in a much more elegant way that I think can reach voters more effectively.

That focus on policy is another reason I like Warren. All the candidates have a nuanced policy, but Warren has a long record of dealing thoroughly and specifically with the details of what needs to be done. I especially like how she admits the possibility of working with an uncooperative house and senate, and has a specific list of plans for how a president can enact progressive policy on her own. A common comeback is that her policy, though detailed, is too extreme to work. But I’d argue healthcare for all, for example, is neither unattainable (it works for most other industrialized countries, and with much lower costs) nor frivolous (people dying from preventable conditions in the richest country on earth is simply unacceptable).

Of course, extremely progressive ideas aren’t exclusive to Warren, and many people on the Grinnell campus prefer Bernie Sander simply because, if you chart their political leanings, Bernie comes out the furthest left. But I find Warren’s ideas much more clearly articulated in her speeches and debates, and she has a better history of working with people to achieve progressive aims, given that Bernie refused to identify with the democratic party in the senate. 

And I won’t deny that Warren’s gender is important, and one of the reasons why I’m voting for her. Donald Trump’s campaign and election sent the message that sexism, misogyny, and outright rape are acceptable, and the reaction from alt-right communities and the rise in hate crime after his election show that our politicians have real effects on our communities. This isn’t just an abstract population statistic, it’s an immediate effect: the day after Donald Trump’s election, men in pick-up trucks drove through campus harassing students of color and women. Electing Elizabeth Warren wouldn’t extinguish sexism immediately, but it would be a strong symbolic victory with positive effects on how people in our country view women. And it’s not impossible either: with a much weaker platform and less enthusiastic support, a woman still won the popular election in 2016. Donald Trump is the president, but America chose Hillary Clinton.

As passionately as I support Elizabeth Warren, all of the candidates have their strengths. I would love to see Pete Buttigieg provide the world with a progressive Christian icon, and America’s first gay president would be a huge step forward. Andrew Yang’s insistence that disabled people should not be valued for their labor but their status as human beings is a powerful truth that needs to be spread. Bernie Sanders would implement many of the same badly needed reforms as Elizabeth Warren. Even Joe Biden, probably my last choice, would still move the country in the right direction, and the progressive energy of this campaign season will mean he’ll do it with more vigor than if he won the nomination easily. I’ll happily vote for any of them come election season. But even if any of them would be a good choice, the question is who is the best, and I’ll gladly answer Elizabeth Warren come Monday.

Leaving Inklette

Two years ago I wrote a post where I recommended that every new writer, as a rule, should work at a literary magazine. I still believe that, and I still consider myself a new writer (since I plan to keep this up for my whole life, being at it for five to six years still puts me well in the beginner category), but despite all that I’m breaking my own rule and leaving the magazine where I’ve worked the past five years. The reason is simple: I’m getting busier, taking on more writing projects, and I don’t want to keep my name on the masthead unless I’m an actively contributing member, which I can’t be anymore. But it still hurts to let go of the literary community that I devoted so many hours to and made so many friends on. So I’m going to spend this week’s post looking back on my time as part of it.

Before I joined Inklette, I didn’t think that there were really all that many real writers. There were hordes bright-eyed high schoolers and bored adults working at night and weekends on novels that would never make it beyond a few beta readers, of course, but the only a few people, as lucky and rare as lottery winners, actually ever got published. Joining Inklette was my introduction to the enormous ecosystem of how publishing actually operates, with millions of stories searching for publication in thousands of little magazines like us, which might gain traction and win contests and send the authors flying up to big name awards and publishers.

My job as an editor was a lot like a miner, or maybe it’s more accurate to say scavenger. We’d get a lot of submissions each issue, sometimes as many as five hundred, and read through each one, looking for promise. Even if you aren’t super picky with your reading and overlook grammar and spelling errors, it isn’t hard to sort through them. Most are simply poorly written, the sentences too simple or overloaded with adjectives, the stories and characters predictable or random, it’s easy enough to list why the story doesn’t work in two sentences. But every so often, there was a story that just simply worked. It’s hard to explain what exactly worked about them. They weren’t all typo-free, they didn’t all have well-rounded characters or some particular kind of elegance in the writing. Read through our issues, and you’ll see that there isn’t any unifying theme between all the stories. Not all of them are even stories, strictly speaking. The best way I can describe it is to say that the author promised something in the first few sentences, and after a page or so you learned to trust that promise, that you weren’t going to be let down, and you let yourself get swept along in the ride. It’s an odd feeling, reading a story that might be a winner: you want to be wise and discerning and objective, and so you try your best to mentally note weak phrases and spots for improvement, but another part of you really wants to like it, to trust it, and those two critical urges play off one another until some kind of breaking point when it works or it doesn’t, and if it does then you let the momentum rush you to the end.

But oddly, when I think back to those nights in the library, reading through submission after submission after submission, I don’t remember much about which ones we ended up rejecting or accepting. What sticks in my mind is that moment when I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not yet, when I weighed this weak characterization against that wonderful sentence and read on, waiting to see how it developed. That was the real joy of the appraisal, I think. Maybe it doesn’t make much sense, but it felt worth writing about.

Defense of Slacking

In the winter of my junior year of high school, all student-athletes got out of class to see some sort of “Excellence Assembly.” It turned out to be something like a TED-Talk, except the presenter appeared to have a passionate and personal hatred for each and every one of us. His speech jumped wildly between topics, veering from drug use to social media to nutrition to sleep to exercise, but on each point he had a consistent message: there was a right and a wrong way to do these things, and we were all doing it the wrong way. He personified the right way as some U.S. Marines that he’d known, who he described as perfect human machines who rarely talked and never laughed and always marched in perfect formation.

In case it isn’t clear, I despised this presentation, and as soon as it let out I wrote an editorial response that I planned to send to the student newspaper. I don’t have it saved anywhere (though, given my writing at the time, I bet it was hardly more intelligent than the presentation itself), but I still remember the last line: “After all, someone has to defend having a good time.”

In the end, I decided not to try to publish it for two reasons. First, if anyone who didn’t know me read it, they’d dismiss it as another lazy kid trying to find an excuse to be lazy (“Teenager DislikesBeing Told What to Do” is hardly headline news). And, second, anyone who did know me would know that I was the last person to defend having a good time. I hardly ever missed a day of cross country practice, never turned an assignment in late, and my idea of a splurge was to push my bedtime back to 10:00 and watch two episodes of The Simpsons in the evening instead of just one. Not to mention that due to my OCD (undiagnosed at the time, but still very much present), I was probably even more obsessed with doing things the right way than the presenter, though my right way mostly focused on the number thirteen in some way.

But an important factor of my OCD is that it only affects what I do. Sure, I’ll be certain something terrible will happen if I stop reading a book on page thirteen, but I don’t care if other people do what they will with that number. But there are a lot of people like that TED-Talker who can’t stand other people doing things the wrong way, however trivial the difference between right and wrong is. You run into these kinds of people often in schools: class picture photographers who spend an hour making sure everyone has the same expression and proper posture, choir directors who demand a hyper-specific dress code, coaches who publicly shame anyone doing the drills wrong. What’s worst is when these people in charge try to be enthusiastic about their strict and arbitrary rules, those teachers who explain the proper way to write a cursive G with a huge smile on their face, not because of any use this letter has, but because the pointless act of writing a cursive G is somehow supposed to be fun. There’s actually a fairly popular and respected teaching technique called behaviorism that is essentially this: embracing obedience as a virtue, rewarding the right behaviors and punishing the wrong ones, while leaving the student with no uncontrolled choices.

OCD aside, it’s strange that I get so mad at people who value obedience. After all, I want to be a teacher, and even if I’m not a full-on behaviorist, no one can run an effective classroom without some emphasis on obedience. I guess it’s the arbitrariness that frustrates me, how the rules are supposed to sit invincibly once they’re laid down. But that arbitrariness is necessary sometimes. I ran into that problem teaching basic literacy skills to elementary schoolers this summer. Capital letters and silent e’s seem perfectly natural to me, but I’ve seen firsthand how much students despise constant correction, even if it is the only way to learn. There’s no way to make it not arbitrary either: I love it, but I have to admit that English writing makes no sense at all.

As useful as obedience is, I think that it’s overused, especially in schools. Having a little room for natural deviation or a little time for slacking off is a necessary resource for sanity. When possible, teachers should enforce the least strict version of the rules, or at least explain why it exists in the first place. I get that it’s probably premature to lay down my laws for teaching before actually doing it on my own yet, but maybe it’s best for me to lay it down now, before life as a teacher grinds away at me too much. After a few years of not being a student, I might be in danger of forgetting what it’s like to be bossed around all day, and I never want to end up like the irate TED-Talker.

Play

I found a youtube video earlier this week that made me pretty nostalgic for Bionicle and, since I was at home, I took out a few that I’d built myself. I’d meant just to look at them, to admire all the time I’d put into making them, but pretty soon I was playing with them. And by playing I mean actually playing, in the kind of uninhibited way a five-year-old plays, bashing them together, speaking for them and making sound effects, the kind of playing that looks totally deranged to anyone else. But, to me, a setting emerged, and so did personalities for the characters, and pretty soon it was a story. Not a story that would work all that well if you wrote it out (the whole thing was premised on nine robots fighting each other for no reason, after all), but a story that I liked, at least in the moment. Afterwards it was shameful, partly because I’d made nine character I halfway liked without any effort, while a week at a writing desk trying to come up with a single decent character got me nowhere, but mostly because I’m supposed to be an adult. And adults don’t do that.

You could say that things aren’t so black and white, but if there’s a totally accepted way for adults to play, I haven’t found it. There are online communities of adults who like Legos, sure, but as someone who has been part of that community, I can say that it’s all about creation and display: the fun part is making the model, not doing anything with it. There are adults who do role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, adults who create stories in writing or inhabit characters in acting, adults who get physically active in sports. But none of those are the same, exactly. They follow rules and create something from the experience and feel like a job sometimes. None of it feels as spontaneous, or fun in the same way.

It makes sense, I guess, that people grow out of play. I’ve often heard that play is an evolutionary adaptation, a way of simulating adult experiences so children will be better prepared when they come of age. Once you’re an adult, play doesn’t make sense anymore, you’re supposed to have learned what to do and started doing it. Movies like the Toy Story series assume that this process works normally: the tragedy isn’t that Andy won’t play with the toys anymore, but that he simply can’t. Even the man-child archetype, pathetic as it is, doesn’t offer a model of adult play: he tends to be a snobbish collector who won’t take the toys out of their original packaging.

I’ve been worried about this for a long time, actually. I remember going through a period of acute anxiety at the beginning of middle school around growing up. Most of that was a natural fear of independence that I’ve mostly come to terms with by now, but part of it was that I wouldn’t be able to play anymore, that all my toys would just be more lumps of plastic in my mind. Now I know that didn’t come to pass, but it brings problems of its own.

I don’t mean to oversell this. The fact that adults don’t feel allowed to play like kids is hardly the most pressing issue in our society at the moment, and anyway, I can still get part of the thrill from writing or D&D. But it’s still a shame that there’s no straight-forward to play as an adult, that you have to be part of a society for Live Action Role Play or a parent humoring your kid. The issue is that people take themselves too seriously, I think, that there’s a sense that your boss is always looking over your shoulder to see if you’re doing a good job at being a grown-up, so you’d better make even your hobbies look like work. 

But it’s kids who really need play, after all, and as someone who spent the past summer socializing almost exclusively with second-graders, I can assure you that they’re doing it. There’s a cantankerous ending here begging to be written about how play is precious and disappearing from our tech-saturated children, but in my experience, so long as kids have unstructured recess time, there’s no danger of that. Sure, these days they pretend to play live-action Minecraft, which gets pretty confusing if you don’t know the lingo (“let’s punch down this tree so we can make a crafting table and make our gold into a railroad!”), but it’s play all the same, and you only need to look at the kids to know that they’re having the time of their lives.