Though the movie’s been out for about a month now, I’m just getting around to writing this post about Up in the Air (I’ve been enjoying an extended period of funemployment that’s about to come to an abrupt end). If you haven’t seen it yet, this post has tons of spoilers, so you may want to avoid. To those who have seen it, let me know what you think in the comments.

This started out as a post about resolutions for 2010, but I suck at keeping resolutions. For that reason, I decided to make it more about some lessons I learned while watching the movie that I want to try to keep in mind as I move through an exciting/terrifying time in my life.

Today Might Be the Day to Do What Makes You Happy (Or: Just Do Stuff):
When Ryan’s first in the field in St. Louis with uppity, whiz-kid employee Natalie (Anna Kendrick), he tells her to let him do the talking as they carry out the terminations. All is proceeding to plan until they meet a man named Bob (played by J.K. Simmons). Here, via The Movie Spolier, is the basic exchange:

Bob reacts by showing Ryan and Natalie a wallet photo of his two young kids, about 8-10 yrs old. “What do you suggest I tell them?” he asks. For the first time, Natalie jumps in. She says this may actually have a “positive effect” on his kids. Ryan stares at her in disbelief as Bob does not react well. “Go f’ yourself,” he says. Ryan quickly tries to recover. “Look, I’m a wakeup call.” He explains to Bob that the reason kids love athletes is that, unlike Bob, they followed their dreams. Bob doesn’t understand. Ryan looks through Bob’s resume. He minored in culinary arts in college and worked busing tables at an Italian restaurant before working here. “When were you going to do what makes you happy?” Ryan asks. “This is a rebirth,” he says, “If not for you, do it for your children.” Bob takes the packet from Natalie, feeling consoled.

When I first saw the movie several weeks ago, I found the message that this scene asks the audience to take away wildly implausible. We always hear about opportunity and success being born out of chaos and failure, but I believe that it’s rare to actually have that experience in our own, individual lives. Maybe it’s because I was extremely cynical at that moment in time, seeing as I’d just graduated, had no job and took out thousands of dollars in loans to earn a degree that could – rightly or wrongly – be seen a superfluous in a field that’s slashing jobs quicker than Lane Kiffin can switch zip codes.

Be that as it may, I’ve come ’round to accepting that this is one of those proverbial moments that might only come once (or twice) in a lifetime. I have a couple of ideas that aren’t quite ready for public consumption that I’m working on that would probably have to be shelved indefinitely if I had a full-time job. I can now devote myself to them (at least until the creditors find me).

Don’t get me wrong. Having no income and no health insurance is fucking scary. Yet, I still feel like it’s going to be ok. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I’m allowing myself to do things just for the sake of doing them.

Look Before You Leap (Or: If It Seems Too Good to Be True, It Probably Is):
One of the great things about Up in the Air is its accurate depiction of the various ways we delude ourselves (or allow ourselves to be deluded). The prime examples of which are the reactions of the various office drones Ryan lays off over the course of the movie. Several of them express incredulous reactions to the news that they’d been fired; they’d somehow convinced themselves that putting in twenty years as a supervisor made them indispensable.

We’ve all felt this. None of us wants to believe that we’re instantly replaceable cogs in a nameless machine, though we all know this to be more or less true. We live in a culture that constantly tells us that each and every one of us possesses unique skills, talents and temperaments and that by best deploying those characteristics, we’ll achieve something akin to success (however defined) if you just believe or put your trust in the right things. This viewpoint, formerly rooted in the more materialistic and secular precincts of our of society and disseminated to the masses by tanned men in ill-fitting suits, is now espoused in a slightly modified (but more insidious form) from pulpits across the country as the so-called “prosperity gospel”.

But isn’t it time to grow up and admit the obvious? If we’ve learned anything since this recession started – and I’m not sure that we have – it ought to be that things aren’t always fair, that playing by the rules doesn’t always guarantee success and that life’s winners are often winners because they get to design (and enforce) the rules of the game.

That might sound defeatist,fatalist or possibly even misanthropic. That doesn’t make it any less true and avoiding that truth through willful blindness is a terribly self-destructive way to live.

This capacity to believe anything forms the basis of the relationship between Ryan and Alex. From Ryan’s perspective (and probably for of a lot of men who saw the movie), Alex is the perfect girlfriend; she’s sexy (witness her wearing a tie and nothing else around the room during the couple’s first romp), a little raunchy (she sends text messages about rubbing one out), funny, smart, and comfortable in her own skin. “I am the woman you don’t have to worry about,” she tells Ryan. “Think of me as yourself, only with a vagina.” But perhaps most importantly, Alex isn’t asking Ryan for anything more than he’s prepared to give.

At the time it seems like a throwaway line (and in retrospect, it’s rather ominous) but after one of their early trysts, Alex remarks to Ryan that “we both know what this is.” For him, it appears to be the human connection he’s always lacked, given the life he’d chosen to live. It’s apparent early on in the movie that this is a man with no real attachment to virtually anything. He gives motivational speeches about unpacking the metaphorical backpack of our lives and making it as light to carry as possible. His apartment in Omaha is barren; the only connection he seems to have outside of work is a casual (and probably sexual) relationship of convenience with his next-door neighbor. Likewise, he is connected to his sisters by name only. He doesn’t seem to have burned those familial bridges as much as let them atrophy due to years of neglect. Of course, as he gets closer to Alex and is drawn into his youngest sister’s wedding, Ryan begins to realize the importance of having tangible relationships. He never questions the bond with his family – why should he? – but he’s almost blissfully ignorant of any sort of salient facts about the woman he’s fallen for (except that she’ll rearrange her travel schedule to sleep with him in a Travelodge in Jacksonville).

Because this is not a thriller or a mystery, the conclusion of the relationship is telegraphed; Ryan dramatically flies to Chicago, Alex’s hometown, to profess his love to her, only to discover upon arriving at her door that she’s married with children. The next morning, in one of the more brutal phone calls in recent movie history, she tells Ryan that he’s, “an escape,”, “a break from our normal lives. A parenthesis.”

Calling somebody a parenthesis is some harsh shit. The reason this cuts so deep is because it’s only a break from her normal life, not his. He thought that he’d gotten what he wanted with the added benefit of not having to change or compromise to get it. Instead, he ends up alone.

Ryan allowed himself to believe everything he wanted to about Alex without questioning a single aspect of who she was. Part of the danger of starting anything new is that it can easily become intoxicating; we become so taken with the experience and excitement of it all that we don’t stop to figure out whether or not the feelings we have are justified or even real. We don’t ask questions. We shut down our critical facilities. We do what feels good, even if it’s not what feels right and we often suffer greatly for our lack of awareness. Some would say this is part of being alive. And so it is. But so is being smart about what it is you’re getting yourself into. This isn’t meant to be an attack on spontaneity (you do have to let yourself live in the moment sometimes), but rather a gentle warning that no moment last forever and that you have to slow down and take stock when it ends.

Sometimes A Song Can Change Your Outlook (Or: No Shit, Sherlock):

At the risk of contradicting some of my comments above, I found some solace in this song from the movie’s soundtrack and perhaps you will, too:

In ten days I will accept my degree from the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. A half month later, we’ll collectively close the door on one of the most turbulent periods of American history, a ten year span that Time magazine recently dubbed “the decade from Hell.

In the case of both, it’s about time.

Graduations, in theory, at least, are supposed to be happy occasions. Our families and friends will travel from all over to hear our names called as we walk across a stage and are handed a piece of paper that, in some way, is supposed to be a validation of the literal blood, sweat, and tears expended (not to mention the financial liability incurred) to receive it. Words of wisdom – and warning – will be conveyed by our elders. Grandmothers and parents will cry tears of joy. The auditorium will twinkle like a Christmas tree from the flashes of dozens of digital cameras. Celebrations will ensue. There will be booze.

But graduations are also supposed to represent lines of demarcation; a beginning and ending. Before grad school, we were perhaps less aware, more credulous. Reporting for a year and a half quickly disabuses you of any notion that you truly have a handle on this world, though. Post-graduation? Well, that’s a different story. It’s all supposed to make a little more sense. Or perhaps we’re just supposed to understand how little we actually know and accept it.

In any case, I feel like the ending of this year and decade might represent something of a graduation day for the county as well. Because just as the halcyon haze of my commencement will eventually fade and I’ll be faced with a series of gut-wrenching decisions about the nature of what it is that I want to do in an uncertain field, America will find itself grappling with a host of perplexing issues about the type of country it wants to be.

During his run for the White House and in the wake of his election, many pundits speculated that President Obama’s deliberative intellectual style and accommodating mien might indicate that the country was ready to turn away from the gut level decision making and openly partisan politics that characterized the two terms of George W. Bush. And, for a short time, it did feel that way.

But then the summer came and the health care debate revealed how little actually changed. Facebook posts from out of work politicians making baseless claims about the nature of the legislation dominated the national debate. Guns were brandished at town halls. Republicans accused Democrats of wanting to kill granny.

All of this played out against the backdrop of the worst recession most of us have ever seen not to mention the two wars we’re prosecuting in the Middle East. Throw in concerns over climate change and a host of other issues and its hard not to be crestfallen over what appears to be a lack of seriousness in the public debate.

So we are at a critical moment: will we, both as students and as citizens of the nation, take the lessons we’ve learned and apply them to our lives in a productive way, or will we choose to ignore them at our peril?

As to journalism, although I’m unsure of what the field will look like in the immediate future, I know that there are enterprising reporters doing the sometimes thankless but incredibly important work of providing the people of this city with snapshots of the triumphs and struggles of what’s going on around them. I see classmates digging to find important stories that need to be told. I see experimentation and innovation.

In short, it may be a rocky road, I think the future of journalism is in good hands.

And after reading stories like this, I see some reasons, albeit minor ones, to be optimistic about what the coming year might bring. Things won’t be easy, but being able to get a glimpse of our leaders working, really working, to make the best choices they can is reassuring.

So as my time as a student and this year and decade end, I look forward to 2010 with sober eyes but high hopes. I wish us all the luck in the world. We’re gonna need it.

I can’t remember the exact moment when I first “got” Bruce Springsteen. It was probably the summer on 1999, right after I graduated from UVa. I recall picking up Live 1975-1985 at the now closed Circuit City out on Rt. 29 in Charlottesville. I brought the cd’s home and proceeded to sit on the roof outside my room at 3 University Circle with a bottle of Jim Beam and a two liter of Coke, lost for hours in the tales of “shut down strangers and hot rod angels”. It was as if I’d found the person who had make sense of things I never could.

So it was with great interest that I read David Brooks’s latest op-ed in the New York Times as he talked about the two types of education we have – academic and emotional – and how his experience first hearing the Boss back in February 1975 shaped the latter for him.

Brooks writes:

I followed Springsteen into his world. Once again, it wasn’t the explicit characters that mattered most. Springsteen sings about teenage couples out on a desperate lark, workers struggling as the mills close down, and drifters on the wrong side of the law. These stories don’t directly touch my life, and as far as I know he’s never written a song about a middle-age pundit who interviews politicians by day and makes mind-numbingly repetitive school lunches at night.

What mattered most, as with any artist, were the assumptions behind the stories. His tales take place in a distinct universe, a distinct map of reality. In Springsteen’s universe, life’s “losers” always retain their dignity. Their choices have immense moral consequences, and are seen on an epic and anthemic scale.

(emphasis mine)

So much of how music makes you feel and helps you make sense of your life can be traced, I think, to how heavily you associate with it. As a middle class black kid with a family that more or less looked like this, I have to admit that I never got NWA in the same way a black kid from Watts might have. At some point, that bothered me. A lot. When I was coming of age in the late 80s/early 90s, there was a distinctly militant bent to a lot of hip hop and other aspects of “black culture” in general. Public Enemy unapologetically fought the power. Naughty By Nature told people who’d never been to the ghetto to stay the fuck out of the ghetto. Spike Lee’s Malcolm X burned up movie screens, giving an entire new generation of black people a sense of empowerment they’d never experienced.

Me? I wasn’t a hood rat. My family belonged to a country club. My sister was in law school at the University of Virginia. I played soccer and took tennis lessons. I listened to Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington with my grandfather in his room in our house. Needless to say, I didn’t feel authentically black in the way that blackness was being presented to America at large. Being black was dangerous, seductive, powerful. I was none of those things.

Nor was I very much into Pearl Jam or Nirvana, the two groups that spoke to the “white experience” of teen self-loathing and rejection of authority. I liked myself! My dad was the principal of my high school. Authority was all around me and, at the time, I didn’t feel the need to question it because I didn’t feel oppressed by it. It was what it was; something to be observed that generally left you alone if you didn’t provoke it.

So musically, I was adrift for a long time before finding Springsteen. And what I discovered in his work were things I did know and did see and did experience. Many of my relatives worked for DuPont, which shuttered a major factory in my hometown of Martinsville, VA, when I was growing up. I’ve seen first hand the devastation those closings can have on an entire community. As I got older, my relationship with my father deteriorated for a variety of reasons, and so, as many young men have done, I pulled away to gain a certain sense of independence to live my own life, not one that had been imagined for me by someone else. I saw friends, talented friends, set their horizons so low because of where we’d come from; a fading blue collar town in the south side of Virginia that offered little in the way of opportunities outside of a factory job or joining the military. I knew I had to get out while I was still young.

What does all of this have to do with David Brooks? A lot, actually. I highlighted the section in his column because I think it says something about how skewed American political commentary really is. David Brooks is an elite (in every way) pundit who mixes his musings on politics with dollops of random cultural observations. I’m fully prepared to believe that he knows what he’s talking about when he’s writing about Bobo’s, but I raise my eyebrows a bit when Brooks and people of his ilk start talking about things like the “real America” or some other such nonsense. In fact, the perception of a place like my hometown would dovetail nicely with the imagery found in a Sarah Palin speech. But, of course, my hometown is much more complicated than any caricature and it bothers me that these people claim to know what they’re talking about when, in fact, they don’t.

Brooks writes:

Just as being from New York or rural Georgia gives you a perspective from which to see the world, so spending time in Springsteen’s universe inculcates its own preconscious viewpoint.

It does, but I wonder how much Brooks actually hears what’s being said. Springsteen’s best known work, 1984’s Born in the U.S.A., is perhaps the most depressing album ever to spawn seven top-10 singles. The title track is a screed about the plight of a Vietnam vet who comes home to find his life turned upside down (and was famously misunderstood by Ronald Reagan). “Glory Days” is about reliving the past because the present holds little promise. “My Hometown” catalogs the downfall of a small American town, the very towns that folks like Palin and Glenn Beck (and, to a lesser extent, Brooks) are happy to exploit when it comes time to get votes but seemingly don’t give a shit about any other time of the year.

If you’re where I’m from, it’s impossible to hear these songs and miss their intended meaning. I’m not saying that makes me better than David Brooks. Far from it. But how can people who get millions of dollars in speaking fees, who live in mansions in Connecticut and attend exclusive parties inside the Beltway claim that not having a universal health care system because of fears (stirred up by them) of socialism is what’s good for middle America? How can they let their own daughters make a considered decision about the merits of child birth while at the same time cutting funding for abortions, thereby restricting access for the people most likely to need it, the residents of small towns who have little means and money of their own? How can they advocate for cuts to the capital gains tax or estate tax, which affect only the most wealthy Americans, while having to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to vote to extend unemployment benefits in the stimulus plan?

I fear Mr. Brooks, while enjoying the quality of the craftsmanship of Springsteen’s work, misses the point of what he’s listening to. The assumption behind many of the Boss’ songs is that the little guy can’t win. From “Badlands”:

“Poor men wanna be rich, rich men wanna be kings, and a king ain’t satisfied till he rules everything.

At the end of the day, David Brooks is firmly in the corner of the kings of society. And that’s fine. I just wish there were other voices out there to tell him he doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about.

I mean, does David Brooks actually remember who Springsteen himself endorsed for president last year?

I must confess to the fact that I’ve never read Richard Hofstadter’s classic work, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, cover to cover. However, I feel like I’ve read enough to know that, were he alive, Hofstadter would probably be morbidly fascinated by how presciently he’d described our current political moment.

Of the paranoid style, Hofstadter wrote:

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.

If you simply swap out Goldwater’s name and replace it with, say, Glen Beck’s, the formulation still holds. “Heated exaggeration”? “Suspiciousness”? “Consipatorial fantasy”? Watch this clip of Jon Stewart channeling Beck and see if those claims don’t fit:

If it were just Beck, who is, at the end of the day, just a talking head, this kind of thing might be tolerable. But it’s quite something else when we see elected politicians indulging in this kind of talk. Take for example Texas’ Republican governor, Rick Perry. Just yesterday, Perry said that President Barack Obama was “hell-bent” on turning America into a socialist country and that he wanted to “punish” Texas (for what it’s unclear). A Colorado state senator, Dave Schultheis (R-Colorado Springs), posted this on Twitter yesterday:

“Don’t for a second, think Obama wants what is best for U.S. He is flying the U.S. Plane right into the ground at full speed. Let’s Roll.”

“Let’s roll,” if you’ll recall, was the rallying cry for the passengers aboard United Airlines Flight 93 who revolted against their terrorist captors on 9/11.

So now we have elected officials comparing the president of the United States to unappeased militant Muslim fundamentalists. Once again, it’s useful to revisit Hofstadter’s words:

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization… he does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated — if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention.

Perry’s wild talk of a socialist America. The creation out of thin air the notion of things like “death panels”; an effort to make something as benign as end of life counseling sinister and subversive. We’ve even come to a point where religious leaders are praying for the president to die:

“You would like for the president of the United States to die?” Colmes asked once more.

“If he does not turn to God and does not turn his life around, I am asking God to enforce imprecatory prayers that are throughout the Scripture that would cause him death, that’s correct.”

Now here’s Hofstadter again, on the way the “enemy” is defined in the paranoid style:

The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).

That almost perfectly describes the way in which Obama has been cast by some of his opponents.

It’s probably not news that the paranoid style is back in fashion. In times of tremendous social upheaval, people base instincts assert themselves and/or they’re preyed upon by those who know how to exploit those instincts. With banks failing, homes being lost, two wars going on and a fundamental change being proposed to the American social contract in the vehicle of health care reform, it’s perhaps not shocking that there’s a certain fear of the unknown in the air. However, that doesn’t mean we should give in to those feelings. Times are tough, but that’s when we need to pull together, not push each other away. Hofstadter was writing during the mid-1960s, another time of great societal change in the United States. We know looking back that the rest of that decade ended as one of the most violent political eras of our history. The circumstances now, in some ways, echo those of that time period, and so we’re left with a choice. We’ve seen what happens when we embrace the fear. Can we go a different way and embrace the idea of hope?

What if someone hosted a newspaper online, but potential readers couldn’t access the content unless they paid for it? Would that be the epitome of short-sightedness at a time when there’s a proliferation of free news, or could it be a shrewd move that reverses the fortunes of an entire industry?

It appears that Rupert Murdoch, the controversial and ubiquitous chairman of News Corp., is ready to find out.

In an interview last Sunday with Sky News in Australia (owned, of course, by Murdoch), the media mogul spelled out his intention to both erect pay walls around his content-generating sites online and to prevent internet search giant Google from indexing – being able to search for or link to – the material. Murdoch, along with many other newspaper publishers, contends that Google’s aggregation of their products devalues them since it costs the search engine close to nothing to troll the internet for content which can then be displayed without having to pay those who produced the material.

“The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories, we say they steal our stories – they just take them,” Murdoch said. “That’s Google, that’s Microsoft, that’s Ask.com, a whole lot of people … they shouldn’t have had it free all the time, and I think we’ve been asleep.”

One of Murdoch’s best known properties, the Wall Street Journal, already keeps its news behind a pay wall, and, perhaps not coincidentally, is one of the few profitable papers in the country. But even the Journal currently allows Google to link to summaries of its articles, so what Murdoch is proposing presents a radical departure from the status quo.

Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and cable network HDNet, applauded the move. In his view, news organizations can use emerging technologies to promote their articles without fear of diluting the value of their work.

“Twitter and Facebook are platforms that allow the news sources, like News Corp to post breaking news and gain value from their brand. Google does not,” Cuban wrote on his personal blog.”In other words, if I trust a newspaper, TV or any brand, I can follow it on Twitter and expect the news to come to me.”

To that end, Cuban finds the idea of a user performing a search for information archaic. “Having to search for and find news in search engines is so 2008,” he wrote.

But Murdoch and Cuban are missing the bigger picture. Closing off a site to Google, if visibility is part of your mission, is a self-defeating proposition. For one, the Wall Street Journal gets 25 percent of its traffic from Google, according to Hitwise Intelligence. Nielsen Online, a firm that tracks online metrics, estimates that Twitter has 12 million current users. By contrast, Google drives 100,000 hits to news sites per minute on a daily basis. During the course of a day, that equates to over 144 million searches, far dwarfing Twitter’s results. Twitter would have to grow at unprecedented rates to fill that gap. Additionally, according to the social networking site Mashable, Twitter’s use base seems to have plateaued over the last four months, so investing too much in its transformative powers may prove to be a fool’s errand.

But what about Facebook? According to its own statistics, it has over 300 million registered users worldwide, and it’s one of the most visited sites on the Internet. But, if you’re like me, you use the site for social networking – checking in on friends, finding out about parties – rather than a place to go for news. Yes, links to news stories do get posted, and I do occasionally click through, but there’s no way that I could even begin to rely on the site to give me a comprehensive view of what’s going on in the world given the myriad of ways that people use the site. Some post lots of news; other post some none at all.

Then there’s the fact that people who do have paid accounts will simply figure out a way to disseminate that information to their friends who don’t. It’s not very hard to copy and paste a story into an email that can be sent around. Passwords will get shared. The news will still get out, and it will get out without some people paying for it.

But that’s the crux of the matter. To stay alive, news organizations and publishers still need some of the people to pay for their products, so Murdoch could be taking a gamble. Perhaps he thinks that he can get another outlet – Bing? Ask? – to pay him for exclusive rights to search through News Corp’s material. Maybe. But maybe not. If it’s the latter, then Murdoch might have a lot of quality journalism sitting in a digital ghetto of his own creation.