It's THE Culture, Stupid!....Finally a finished piece....YOURs for the READING....before it goes up for sale...

THE BOOK LIVED

             The Genesis of It’s the Culture, Stupid!

By Tony Venuti

This book didn’t begin as a book. It began decades ago, although I didn’t know it at the time.

 

For years, I wrote blog posts, essays, arguments, observations, and reflections about the world around me. Some I published. Others I sent by email or left sitting in my inbox—some for more than a decade, some for decades. They weren’t chapters. They weren’t written to fill an outline. They were simply my thoughts, recorded as life happened.

I wrote about society, history, human nature, freedom, responsibility, and the often astonishing gap between what people believe and what they actually know. I had experiences worth examining, questions worth asking, and no shortage of opinions. But I wasn’t assembling a manuscript. I was living my life—and writing along the way.

Only later did I begin to see a connection among those scattered pieces. Again and again, I had returned to the same question: How does something become accepted as true, right, desirable, or even respectable simply because it has become POPULAR?

That question led me to POPULARIZED, to PopCULTure, and to the distinction between a perception of reality and reality itself. The essays, the posts, and the memories started to look less like separate writings and more like parts of one continuing conversation.

I didn’t invent a philosophy for the purpose of writing a book. I recognized the philosophy that had been taking shape through years of experience, observation, and effort. In that sense, the philosophy created the book—not the other way around.

And now there it is: It’s the Culture, Stupid! In print. A lifetime of thinking, doubting, learning, and assessing between two covers.

THE BOOK LIVED. I simply came to recognize it.

Now it's your turn to see just how popularized OR not....you and yours have been subjected to....

 

IT'S THE CULTURE, STUPID.

POPULARIZED - How COOL and the Media-Ocracy Changed What We

Think We KNOW

An Experiential Social Philosophy

Tony Venuti

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This is memoir, argument and philosophy built from a long life, a long archive and a memory that does not always keep a calendar as neatly as a publisher would like.

Where dates, durations or chronology come from memory, I say so or write them approximately. Where an outside record can establish something better than my memory can, the record gets the last word.

The same rule applies to ideas. Throughout this book I use five categories because I have spent too much of my life watching certainty impersonate evidence:

I KNOW - personal experience.

I OBSERVED - something I witnessed.

I THINK I KNOW - inference, intuition, logic or deduction.

I BELIEVE - a conclusion or conviction I cannot establish as fact.

THE RECORD SHOWS - something documented outside Tony's head.

Those categories are not decoration. They are the discipline of the book.

I have lived enough different lives to know that a man can be right about a larger problem and wrong about a detail. He can see a pattern and misidentify a dot. He can be certain and still be wrong. If THE RECORD SHOWS I am wrong, the Examiner has only one respectable thing to do: change his mind.

Correct me NOW if you can. Do not sabotage what can be delineated. If distinction can be made, make it. If error can be shown, show it. If my sequence breaks, tell me where. I would rather recalibrate my conclusion than rearrange reality to protect it.

Absolutely correct - UP TO NOW.

This is Tony checking Tony.

About time.

 

CONTENTS

PART I - THE LIFE

CHAPTER 1 Ma

CHAPTER 2 SELF-WORTH — or Be WORTH LESS

CHAPTER 3 I AM ME

ARCHIVE BLACK OR WHITE? NOT. ITALIAN I AM. - A RANT

CHAPTER 4 Going Down

CHAPTER 4A The Army, The TOC & The Courthouse

CHAPTER 5 WORK WISE - ACTUAL WORK, DEFINED

CHAPTER 5A How I Became a Publisher

PART II - THE MIND

CHAPTER 6 Why Are People the Way They Are?

CHAPTER 7 The Experiential Social Philosopher - In the Presumptive CHAPTER 8 A Philosophy of Mind

CHAPTER 9 How Do You Know When You KNOW?

CHAPTER 10 In Search of IS

CHAPTER 11 OF THE CENTER

ARCHIVE BATTLE OF THE SEXES - A MAN'S PERSPECTIVE (1973)

PART III - THE CULTURE

CHAPTER 12 BOYCOTT - OR PICKET THE MEDIA?

CHAPTER 13 Media-Ocracy

CHAPTER 14 When Pop Culture Took the Wheel

CHAPTER 14A The Playground

CHAPTER 14B Incrementalizing - Tick. Tock.

CHAPTER 15 The Trick Bag

CHAPTER 16 The Trump Phenomenon

CHAPTER 16A I AM MY AUDIENCE

CHAPTER 17 THE GOLDEN YEARS... TARNISHED

CHAPTER 18 Manifest Destiny II

 

PART I - THE LIFE

CHAPTER 1

MA

Cry and You Cry Alone

I grew up with a smile. Happy-go-lucky. That was Tony - or at least the Tony most people saw.

But was I always that happy? I THINK mostly yes. Still, I learned early how to put on a good face. I was rejected by a lot of the kids around me, much of it, as I remember it, because of economic differences. A collision of classes is not an abstraction when you are a kid. It becomes clothes, houses, who has what, who belongs where, who is IN and who is not. Peer pressure starts before anybody knows the words peer pressure.

Ma had a line that stuck: "Smile and people smile with you...cry and you cry alone." Tough love? Probably. But it was not permission to pretend nothing hurt.

It was Ma reminding me that sooner or later I still had to stand up inside my own skin.

I have always believed - almost like an inalienable understanding - that the world deals you a hand.

You accept the cards.

Win, lose or draw.

Because if you spend your life wishing you had been dealt somebody else's hand, you can wind up living in permanent disappointment - cynical, resentful, with a glass that never seems to get beyond half full.

My hand included living on the other side of the street.

Literally.

Torrey Street in Brockton separated worlds.

Across the street were lawyers, doctors and families with considerably more than we had. I would caddy for some of them at Thorny Lea Golf Club.

I was never invited to their birthday parties.

"Those Venuti boys."

Italian.

Low income.

Don't bring them here.

JUST AS WELL.

We could not have afforded the birthday presents anyway.

But it never got me down.

I would not LET it.

You DEAL with what IS dealt YOU.

And then there was Jimmy.

His name was Jimmy. I remember one morning walking to school with him.

Usually I would meet him outside and we would head off together. That morning was different. He was still inside, so I went in.

And there it was. The man with no feet.

His mother was passed out drunk on the couch. The place was a mess. She was so incapacitated she could not even make sure her son had breakfast before school.

Before we left, Jimmy said: "Let me make a piece of toast first."

WOW. I had heard the old saying about the man with no shoes until he met the man with no feet. That morning I understood it. I had my shoes on.

And all of a sudden, I could see the angel wings on my mother.

Later Jimmy needed more than toast. By my memory, Ma took him into our house for roughly a year. I would eventually leave for the Army. Jimmy would go into the Marines. Life scattered people the way life does, and I lost track of him.

But I never lost the lesson.

Sometimes you don't recognize the man with no shoes until life introduces you to the man with no feet.

And sometimes the real lesson comes afterward - when somebody quietly decides to give the kid a pair of shoes.

Ma

My father was chronically mentally ill. The language of the time was different; the consequences were not. There was a period when he kidnapped me and my brothers. There were adults, authorities, fear and confusion. My memory of the exact sequence is not complete enough for me to manufacture one now.

The Cycle

The cycle of my father's experience seemed, looking back, almost like a mirror image of my own later life - my being in and out, up and down, through one cycle after another.

Even as a kid, I could tell when something was beginning with my father.

The lights.

He would start leaving them on. All of them.

"Ma...Daddy's keeping the lights on again."

Talk about lessons learned young.

Somewhere in those years I learned that when he stopped taking his medication, it was like watching a wave build during high tide. Once it started coming, there wasn't much anybody could do to stop what seemed inevitable.

The last one I remember began with a drive.

The three of us piled into a 1958 Ford with our dog, Blacky.

Yeah. He was black.

And we drove.

And drove.

And drove.

Upstate New York. Albany. New Brunswick. Somewhere along the Hudson River - or at least that is how the geography survives in my memory.

And here is where memory becomes interesting.

My earliest recollection from that trip is tumbling down a trash-covered embankment, cutting my head badly enough to need stitches, and a back seat full of blood.

But is that really my memory?

Or is it my earliest recollection of a recollection?

I was three years old. People told me that story over and over again as I grew up.

Told often enough, a story can begin to feel like a photograph you personally took.

I can see it. I can almost feel it. But do I actually remember falling down that embankment - or do I remember being told that I fell?

Even this early in my life, there it is again:

How do you know when you KNOW?

What I know is who kept the center of gravity.

Ma.

She worked. She worried. She disciplined. She loved. She did not spend much time turning hardship into philosophy because hardship had a shift starting in the morning.

She worked three jobs when she had to. She was a garment worker, a head seamstress and sample maker. She knew piecework. She knew deadlines. She knew what it meant when the money did not stretch as far as the week.

BROCKTON - PART OF THE FABRIC

My mother worked for Picento Sportswear.

Piecework.

That word meant something in our house.

There were times when all three Venuti boys would be home from school while Ma was still at work — overtime, trying to make a few more dollars — and we would wind up fighting AMONGST OURSELVES. I was usually the THIRD MAN OUT, but none of us was immune to being the one who made THE call to Ma at work.

We were notorious for it.

Call Ma at work. Interrupt Ma. Get Ma involved.

I remember Mike getting on the phone with us once.

He said something I never forgot:

"You know your mother works piecework. Every time you call her away from that machine, that could be a loaf of bread she could have bought."

Now THAT gets a kid's attention.

Mike's office had a newspaper article displayed in it. As I remember it, there was Mike pictured with Rocky Marciano, and the article told the story of Mike helping teach Rocky how to box.

Rocky Marciano was not some distant mythical figure where I grew up. He was Brockton.

Boxing was Brockton.

THE BOXERS.

Even Brockton High carried the name.

And later there was Marvin Hagler, another friend of mine who became one of boxing's great champions.

All of that was part of the fabric from which Tony was cut.

Fighting was not theoretical where I came from. Neither was toughness.

Years later, tell somebody where I grew up and occasionally I still get some version of:

"Brockton, Massachusetts? You must have been tough."

Calloused, perhaps.

Tough?

Sure.

Whatever you say.

I was just growing up in Brockton.

And she taught right from wrong in sentences short enough for a kid to remember.

I remember walking to church with my brothers, Joey and Johnny.

Johnny would later die of a drug overdose at twenty-one.

But back then we were just kids walking to church.

And sometimes we skipped it.

Then came the real work:

getting our story straight.

We would coordinate what we were going to tell Ma.

She was clever.

She had a way of finding out what we had actually done.

Which, in a strange way, only taught us to become more clever.

But here is the part that stayed with me:

Even while I was doing wrong, I knew I was doing wrong.

Tony knew right from wrong.

And somewhere in that little boy's head another question started forming:

What happens if everybody starts doing what I am doing?

What happens if more and more people stop going to church?

What happens if, over time, the church loses its influence?

Not merely the religious ritual.

The teaching. The reinforcement. The repeated instruction about right and wrong.

What happens when one of the institutions helping teach those lessons begins to disappear from everyday life?

I was too young to put all of that into words.

But I think I already sensed the principle.

If enough individuals stop doing what an institution depends upon them to do, eventually the institution itself changes.

TICK.

TOCK.

Incrementalism.

One kid skips church. Then another. Then a family. Then a neighborhood. Then a generation.

And one day people look around and wonder where the influence went.

I did not know sociology. I did not know cultural theory.

I only knew I was doing something wrong - and I wondered what happened if enough other people did the same thing.

And as I look around today, I BELIEVE that little kid may have been onto something.

Because that is how so much of life changes.

Not all at once. Not with some giant announcement.

Something matters today. A little less tomorrow. A little less the day after that.

Until eventually:

Some things become less than something.

Then, one day, almost nothing.

That is the danger of incrementalism.

We usually notice what disappeared only after enough of it is already gone.

TICK.

TOCK.

The world doesn't owe you a living.

Count your blessings.

Do not take what you have for granted.

Whenever Ma saw somebody less fortunate, another one came automatically:

"There, but for the grace of God, go I."

As a child, I never quite understood that one.

There but for the grace of God... go I?

What the hell did that mean?

I heard it. I remembered it. But I did not get it.

Then one day, sometime later, it simply came to me.

Oh.

DUH.

That could have been me.

Different parents. Different health. Different luck. Different circumstances.

Different turn in the road.

And suddenly one of Ma's shortest sentences became one of her biggest lessons.

And when one of us tried the oldest excuse in childhood - "But everybody else is doing it..." - Ma had another one ready:

"If they jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?"

And, of course, the one you already heard:

"Smile and people smile with you...cry and you cry alone."

No PowerPoint presentation.

No philosophy lecture.

Ma had dishes to do.

But fifty, sixty, seventy years later?

Tony is still unpacking the sentences.

The remarkable thing is that her lessons remained inside me even during years when my behavior looked like I had thrown the instruction manual away. That is one reason I reject the easy causal story in either direction. A good mother does not manufacture a good adult by magic. A bad culture does not manufacture a criminal by magic. Influence is real. Choice is real too.

I knew right from wrong. I chose wrong anyway.

A lot of the time, wrong was simply more pleasurable. It was what I damned well felt like doing. I knew I would never teach a child that the things I was doing were RIGHT. I knew what I was doing.

Explanation is not excuse. Understanding how I got somewhere does not relieve me of responsibility for going there.

THE VENUTI THEOREM

Crime also taught me an ugly lesson about deception: one lie can buy time.

Another can buy more.

"By the time they know...it'll be too late."

A deception does not have to survive forever to succeed. Sometimes it only has to survive long enough to accomplish the objective. Truth may catch up later. Later can still be too late to prevent the consequence.

Years later I applied that same theorem to politics. Obama became one of Tony's strongest examples.

In my estimation, he became the ultimate example of the political deceiver. That is Tony's judgment - not a fact I can prove.

THE RECORD SHOWS: In 2009 and 2010, President Barack Obama repeatedly assured Americans that if they liked their health-care plan, they could keep it, and likewise their doctor. When cancellation notices later reached some people in the individual market, the limits of that sweeping promise became unmistakable; Obama later apologized to people who found themselves in that situation based on assurances they had received from him.

That does not prove every consequence was intended or hidden.

It gives Tony a clean example of the theorem.

I THINK I KNOW that political persuasion can work like the old con: make the reassuring claim, accomplish the objective, and let the qualifications arrive later.

My old con-man instinct hears it another way:

Watch the right hand while the left hand does the work.

By the time the limitation becomes common knowledge, the vote, policy, sale or decision may already have happened.

By the time they know...it may already be too late.

Ma gave me a measuring stick.

I still had to decide what to measure with it.

Remember When Grown-Ups Were Grown-Ups

When I was a kid, adults occupied a different category. Teachers were grown-ups.

Cops were grown-ups. Generals were grown-ups. Parents were grown-ups.

That did not mean they were actually wiser than every child or morally beyond failure. It meant the culture expected adulthood to come with standards.

My naivete went even further. I thought society itself had guardrails that would protect us from the obvious wrongs.

I remember reading classified ads and assuming the newspaper must have checked them. Verified the advertiser. Made sure the offer was legitimate.

Why else would they print it?

We all know better.

Tony had to LEARN better.

That is part of maturity too: nobody is checking everything for you. A newspaper can fail. A business can deceive. Government can fail. Authority can fail. Media can fail. You still have to ASSESS.

SERFDOM - BEFORE I KNEW THE WORDS

I think one of my first real impressions of oppression came in junior high school, reading about serfs and serfdom.

I did not yet know the word authoritarian. I certainly would not have used the word abhorrent.

But I understood the feeling.

Here were people using authority selfishly - not simply to maintain order, but to preserve power and control over other human beings.

Even as a kid, something in me recoiled from it.

I did not know how to explain it.

I only knew:

This is wrong.

Looking back, that may have been one of the first times I began separating legitimate authority from authority being USED.

I knew the feeling before I knew the word.

Years later I would give the question more precise language: dominance without injury - or dominance with injury?

So what influences kept us from seeing the world that way - the mature way?

I THINK I KNOW PopCulture increasingly became one of the strongest teachers in the room. Sometimes louder than family. Louder than authority. Louder than the institutions that once helped define adulthood.

And one of the cultural hammers I heard again and again was:

"SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER."

Fine. Tony has no argument with Truth.

My question is:

Who taught you that what you were speaking was TRUE?

Challenging authority can be courageous. It can also become fashionable.

Rebellion can be necessary. It can also become COOL.

Defiance without examination is not maturity.

Question authority if authority deserves questioning. Question culture too.

Question the rebel. Question yourself.

CHECK YOUR WORK.

Ma had one phrase that contains half this book:

Eventually, Tony, grow up.

Not become rich.

Not become famous.

Not win every argument.

Grow up.

The older I became, the more I wondered whether a culture could become so good at protecting people from discomfort that it accidentally protected them from adulthood. Consequence hurts. Responsibility is inconvenient. Need is real.

Help can be humane. But if every rough edge gets removed, when does the kid discover that his life is his?

That question would later become political in my writing. It was personal first.

I had decades of reasons to blame somebody else.

Dad.

Poverty.

Drugs.

The streets.

The culture.

The system.

Bad luck.

Good excuses are still excuses if they become a permanent forwarding address.

Ma's lesson survived all of them.

Eventually, Tony, grow up.

THE LESSON YOU CANNOT SIMPLY HAND DOWN

I fear there is a strange danger hidden inside success: the more one generation manages to GIVE the next, the easier it can become for the next generation to miss some of the wisdom that came from ACQUIRING it.

There are lessons in acquiring that cannot necessarily be transferred by receiving.

When I earn something, struggle for it, lose something getting it, recover from the mistake and finally acquire it, the THING may be the least important part of what I acquired.

I acquired the lesson.

Give me the same thing without the struggle and I may receive the possession without receiving the wisdom that produced it.

That creates one of the ironies of success. A parent can become so good at protecting a child from hardship that he also protects the child from some of the experiences that taught the parent how to survive hardship.

THE PLAYGROUND teaches through actuality. Take away every consequence and you may interrupt the curriculum.

You can inherit what wisdom BUILT without inheriting the wisdom that built it.

Affluence breeds ignorance to just how one BECAME affluent to begin with.

When you stop identifying the pluses that helped build the life you inherited - effort, sacrifice, opportunity, discipline, luck, people, institutions and circumstance - you can keep the benefit and lose the attitude of gratitude. What once felt earned or fortunate can begin to feel owed.

Making Room

The thing I remember most about Ma is not a political lesson or a theory of Natural Law.

It is room.

She made room for Jimmy.

Years later, Pamela would make room for me.

Sometimes family is what you're born into.

Sometimes family is who makes room for you.

That may be as close to a definition of love as this Presumptive Philosopher needs.

 

CHAPTER 2

SELF-WORTH — or Be WORTH LESS

NEED BECAME AMBITION

No money, no way, no how - unless we went out and got it.

That was not deprivation turned into poetry. It was math.

Need came first.

Then ambition learned to answer it.

Shoe Shine, Golf Bags and Piecework

I worked young. I shined shoes. I helped my brother Joey. I caddied. At Thorny Lea, Wednesday could mean the doctors' golf day and a chance for a kid to earn money carrying somebody else's bag while learning something about adults, status and the strange rituals people build around leisure.

The garment factories taught me more.

Ma was a head seamstress and sample maker. Talent mattered there. Speed mattered. Effort mattered. Piecework made the relationship between motion and money hard to miss.

I was an underpresser before I was old enough to have a theory of operations. I did not know the phrase bottleneck. I knew what it looked like when work piled up in the wrong place.

So I moved.

I watched where pieces were waiting. I watched who needed what. I started informally coordinating flow because idle work irritated me before I knew why.

Years later I would call that WORK WISE.

Back then it was Tony trying not to stand around.

DON'T BE SMALL

I remember doing small work early on — trimming zippers in the garment factory, among other workers. I was paid a quarter an hour, 25¢, and I learned early what those quarters represented. I listened to the talk around me as I worked.

People talk. Workplaces gossip. Somebody leaves the room and suddenly the absent person becomes the most interesting subject in it.

Ma gave me a line I carried forward:

Big minds talk about ideas. Average minds talk about events. Small minds talk about people.

Whatever the original source of that saying, the lesson Tony took from Ma was simpler:

DON'T BE SMALL.

I later used words like catty or effeminate for indirect, behind-the-back conflict.

I did NOT mean female. Men can do it every bit as well. That is a behavior I am describing, not a biological law.

If your conversation requires somebody else's absence in order to be interesting -

DON'T BE SMALL.

The Label

One of the earliest marketing lessons I remember came from clothing.

By my memory, essentially the same garment could leave the same production world under different labels and different prices.

The cloth had not suddenly developed self-esteem.

The name changed.

The presentation changed.

The perceived value changed.

That fascinated me.

People do not buy only the thing.

They buy what the thing means.

Name. Story. Status. Presentation. Confidence. Belonging. Perceived value.

Perception met reality.

Sometimes perception won.

That's marketing.

Hell, that's Popularized.

Competition Without Humiliation

I liked competition. I still do.

I liked races. I liked trying to be the best at something. But even as a kid I disliked a particular kind of competition among boys - the constant ranking, one- upmanship and humiliation that sometimes came with proving who was tougher, cooler or higher in the pecking order.

That distinction mattered later.

Competition can sharpen skill.

Humiliation can make the contest more important than the thing being learned.

In high school I loved typing. I took it for my last couple of years and got fast.

There was a girl in class who was fast too, and I remember the silent competition.

Skill against skill. Nobody had to be diminished for me to enjoy trying to beat her.

Funny where life hides its clues.

HARM AS A MEASURING STICK

Somewhere early on I developed another measuring stick:

HARM.

That became one of my determining factors in deciding whether something was

OK.

Did you cause harm?

Did you MEAN to cause harm?

How much?

Was the harm necessary, accidental, careless - or was hurting somebody actually the point?

Intent matters. Degree matters. Consequence matters.

But when a person knowingly causes unnecessary harm to another human being, Tony starts moving toward another word:

EVIL.

Manifest evil - to whatever degree it exists in the act.

FORK IN THE ROAD

I enlisted in the Army in 1968 at seventeen. By my memory, I was in Vietnam roughly a month after turning eighteen.

I did not approach enlistment like a career counselor designing a civilian future. I was a seventeen-year-old kid.

What did I want to do?

I want to jump out of airplanes.

There is Tony strategic planning for you.

Somewhere between the obstacle course, the typing ability and whatever the Army needed, communications entered the picture. Morse. Teletype.

Eventually the kid who loved typing found himself operating a teletype in Vietnam.

What else was I going to do?

I could not stand outside my own life waiting for a better set of cards. I had the hand in front of me. Whatever the hand was, it still had to be played.

Reality is...err, IS!

I could rewrite that story now and make it sound inevitable.

It wasn't.

Life rarely looks like a straight line while you're walking it.

Need became ambition.

Ambition became motion.

Motion became experience.

Experience became something I would spend the rest of my life trying to understand.

As my memory gets updated, so does my muse.

I was standing at a FORK IN THE ROAD. And I had to pick one.

 

CHAPTER 3

I AM ME

My brothers used to get irritated with me. They would look at the confidence — arrogance, depending on which brother you asked — and finally challenge me:

“Who do you think you are, Anthony?” My answer was always simple: “I’m me.” That probably irritated them even more.

Usually this came after I had been standing on my hands over and over and over again, bouncing around, doing something, moving somewhere. My brothers even had a name for me: Ants — as in ants in his pants.

I’m kind of glad “ADHD” wasn’t around as a ready label when I was growing up.

I was never diagnosed with it. Looking back, I sometimes wonder about it, but at the time I was simply the hyperactive kid: always moving, rarely sitting quietly for long, always thinking about something.

A lot of kids thought I was strange. But there was another side to that. Even then I was already looking at some of the things kids did — the stupidity, the meanness, the cruelty, the way one kid could psychologically hurt another just to get a laugh or be accepted by the group — and thinking: Why?

Why would you deliberately make another kid feel small? Why did being part of the clique sometimes seem to require somebody else being pushed outside of it?

So yes, they sometimes thought I was strange. And sometimes I was looking right back at them thinking some of what THEY were doing made absolutely no sense.

There was a struggle going on that I probably could not have explained then:

How do you accept yourself when other people are not accepting you? And maybe more important: Do you really want to be accepted if acceptance requires becoming something you do not respect?

Maybe that is where some of the self-worth started.

“Who do you think you are, Anthony?”

I’M ME.

That answer did not come from a life of easy victories. It came from somewhere earlier and deeper. My mother gave me something I did not have a name for when I was a kid: identity. She taught us right from wrong, worked, worried, pushed, punished, loved, and expected us to become self- sufficient. Years later I would write that my mother gave me my identity and that self-image sustained me. The phrase I use now is self-worth.

One of the old essays gives me a cleaner way to say it because I had already written it years before this book existed: "My Mother, bless her soul she gave me MY Identity. SELF Image sustained me, not Image." The capitalization was mine. So was the distinction. SELF Image came from inside. Image needed an audience.

That distinction became more important the more I watched people borrow identity from the world around them. I eventually used a word of my own for the condition: POPULARIZED. Popularity is a number. POPULARIZED is what happens when acceptance by the culture becomes more important than your independent assessment of what the culture is asking you to accept.

To BE cool is one thing. To BE cool by proxy is something else. Celebrity can do it. A political movement can do it. A party, a religion, a profession, a neighborhood, a cause, even a rebellion against the IN Crowd can become another IN Crowd. If they stop applauding, are you still YOU?

Self-worth is everything. If you don't value you, no one will. Lead by example. I like me; you should too.

There is a joke in that line, but only half of it is a joke. Once "I like me" is settled, "you should too" becomes an invitation. I do not require your vote.

That distinction matters because confidence and arrogance can look identical from across the room. Arrogance needs an audience beneath it. Self-worth does not. Arrogance says, I need to be more than you. Self-worth says, I know what I am. You being good at something does not diminish me. You being smarter than me about something does not diminish me. Hell, if you are that good, maybe I want you standing next to me.

I learned that later in business. Insecure people often surround themselves with people who make them feel smart. Secure people can put strong people around them without worrying that somebody is going to take the wind out of their sail.

That is not just a management lesson. It is a self- worth lesson.

SELF-WORTH leads somewhere.

If I value me, then I have to own me.

I AM ME becomes I am the BOSS of ME.

And once I claim ownership, responsibility comes with the title.

That is the part people sometimes skip. Freedom sounds wonderful if you stop before consequences. Self-ownership sounds heroic until the bill arrives. But if I am going to claim the victories as mine, then the mistakes are mine too. Nobody gets to be the boss only when the numbers look good.

I was a good kid who grew up to do bad things. That contradiction belongs in this book because it belongs in me. I am not interested in polishing it away. I have spent too much of my life watching people make themselves RIGHT in their own heads. I did it too. We all want the story in our head to come out with us as the hero, or at least the justified victim.

VICTIM — OR IDENTITY?

One of POPCULTS’ most consequential moves, in my assessment, is turning victimhood from something that happened to a person into something a person can become.

So you admit you lost? Fine. My next question is: did you even enter the race?

Losing after you ran is one thing. Being prevented from running is another.

Never entering and still demanding the identity of the defeated is something else again.

Failure, defeat, obstruction and refusal to compete are not synonyms. Assess them separately.

The blues gave me another way to think about it. Musicians have argued for generations about whether somebody who never lived the blues can really understand the blues deeply enough to sing it authentically. The larger question interests me: before you claim an identity, did you live the experience?

Were you victimized — or have you learned to identify as a victim? Those are not automatically the same thing.

Experience has a nasty habit of interrupting the story.

Ma's lessons did not prevent every wrong turn. They became the measuring stick I could return to after the wrong turns. That may be more important. A moral compass is not proof that you never got lost. Sometimes you discover the compass because you got lost badly enough to need it.

GENERALIZATION IN THE ABSTRACT

A label is useful right up until it replaces thinking.

Label -> assumption -> generalization -> judgment. That sequence can happen so quickly that the individual disappears before anybody actually assesses him.

A category may tell you something. It does not finish the examination.

Here is the rule as I mean it. If reliable empirical evidence shows Group A has a higher rate of some behavior than Group B, I can discuss that difference in the abstract. That is a statement about groups.

But the moment the conversation becomes about ONE PERSON from Group A, the generalization no longer decides the case. Now I need evidence about THAT person.

Generalizations may describe groups. They may not convict individuals.

The abstract can inform the question. It cannot answer the individual case.

The older I got, the more I became interested in the difference between identity that comes from inside and identity supplied from outside. I watched people explain themselves by party, race, crowd, profession, status, enemy, fashion, religion, movement, neighborhood, income - anything that would answer the question "Who are you?" without requiring the person to answer it alone.

I had my own labels. Plenty of them. Italian. Sicilian. American. Veteran. Addict.

Ex-con. Salesman. Publisher. Broadcaster. Conservative. ExCONservative.

Presumptive Philosopher. Some I chose. Some were handed to me. Some I earned the hard way. Some I outgrew.

A morally defined person is, at his or her core, a nurturer.

And sales, properly understood, is an opportunity to become a kind of caregiver.

If you call me, walk into my store, come into my office or ask for my help, I am already presuming something: you either need something, desire something, or are at least considering something you believe you can afford.

What are you hoping to accomplish today?

Then listen. I want to hear: I need... I want... I can afford...

My job becomes helping that person find what is in his or her best interest, not merely what produces the largest commission for me.

Taking care of the people who are taking care of you.

The Golden Rule, applied organically. Not as a sales technique. As a moral one.

Those who need to decide with perfect clearness before they decide... NEVER decide.

Even the nurturing salesman still has a job to do: SELL.

Being a caregiver does not mean becoming timid. There is a difference between being pushy and being strong enough, confident enough, and perceptive enough to help a customer understand what may be keeping him from making a decision he already wants to make.

Sometimes the obstacle is not the product. It is the person’s own hesitation.

And if I genuinely believed the purchase was in that customer’s best interest, helping him get past his own indecision was not contrary to caregiving. It was part of it.

FROM THE ARCHIVE: BLACK OR WHITE? NOT. ITALIAN I

AM. - A RANT

Tony Venuti - Black or White, A Rant

I've had it, I had it up to here. Now you have it.

A Rant & Roll. I know what I know, ...unlike most of you that think you know...you think....

Unlike most of you, you and you, and yes, maybe even you... indeed not only me...but gosh...two or three aren't great numbers...NOW are they??

I've had it up to here, to there, have come from down there...down there in hell...the hell, we fear not....fear not, indeed fear not...

Italian, never white, always American, but recognized not!

...No...why Italian ...the wine...with the waters parted diluted to ...a hyphen...

Assimilate, dialate, dilute....pollute w/ abundunza...pollute that which is water to the wine....

Waters parted...and now we're white... I'm telling you I've had it!

I had it up to here... Not all things are Black and White - Italian Am I. Wrong or right...rules to break...satisfy the need...rules to break...pay the price...fall on the sword, accept the heat.

Rules to break, the fun we make..."do as I say, not as I do" were the rules we HAD to follow....

"But you got Caught" was the burden for which the price paid...

You compete with life, do all you want, yes the risk, but oh what "fun."... Pay the price - shut your mouth. Oh woe is me...

"Dad,...bail me out, I don't belong,"

"take him out Officer, that's my son..."

The Jone's while being swept upward, must keep up, never mind air is thin, awareness thinner, feeling faint, so high, looking down...

... ON Others,...

lucky are we the anointed ones...yes anointed, for we know better, better than those and yes even those...as we "think we know."

Not all things are Black and White!

But none of them gets the whole sentence.

That is why I have become increasingly suspicious of category-first thinking. A category can tell you something about a person. It can never tell you the whole person. Do not tell me who I am because you know my category. Assess ME.

That word matters: assess. I do not want to sit on a bench passing moral sentence on everybody I meet. I want to look at input and output, action and reaction, claim and evidence, effort and result. A label is not the person. A label is not the proof. Look under the label.

I DON’T JUDGE — I ASSESS

Again, I don’t judge, but I do reserve the right to assess. I look for the effect:

positive-energy paradigm, negative-energy paradigm, or neutral. Neutral does exist.

Assessment is not permission to turn a group label into a verdict on an individual.

The individual still gets his own evidence.

I AM ME.

That is why a line we developed later belongs right here: If the best explanation of who you are is who you're against, you still haven't told me who you are.

That applies to politics, but politics is almost the least interesting place to use it. If your whole personality is your ex-wife, your boss, your father, your childhood, your enemy, your diagnosis, your tribe, your complaint - who are YOU after all those people leave the room?

That is not a rhetorical question. I have had years when the answer would not have been flattering.

Self-worth is not immunity from shame. It is not pretending you were right. It is not loving every version of yourself equally. It is the refusal to surrender ownership of the person who has to do something about it.

HYPOCRISY

One of my earliest beliefs was that hypocrisy is one of the lowest human characteristics. I can deal with somebody I disagree with. What I have trouble respecting is somebody who says one thing, pretends another and lives a third.

I have more respect for an axe murderer who admits he is an axe murderer than I do for a two-faced “friend.” At least the axe murderer gives me choices: get the hell out of Dodge — or get a bigger axe.

Visible danger gives me choices. Hidden deception steals the choices before I know I needed them.

DON’T LET THEM SEE YOU SWEAT

I never wanted people to see me from a weakened position. Love me. Respect me.

Disagree with me. But I learned early to keep vulnerability close to the vest. That was strength sometimes. It also carried a price.

I put myself out there. If you can’t get along with me, it’s not my fault. That does not mean I am never wrong. It means I am not going to manufacture a different Tony just to make everybody else comfortable.

That is why I do not need the last word merely to feel whole. If I know what I know, explain why I know it, tell you what I observed, admit what I only THINK I know, and you still disagree - okay. Agreement is not identity.

And if you prove me wrong? Good. Make me smarter than I was a minute ago.

There is no humiliation in learning unless your self-worth depends on always being right.

So when I say I AM ME, I am not claiming perfection. Quite the opposite. I am claiming ownership. The mistakes are mine. The survival is mine. The reinventions are mine. The lessons are mine. The things I still don't understand are mine to examine.

But do not ask me to become somebody else so you can be more comfortable with who I am.

My brothers asked, "Who are you?"

I gave them the shortest answer I have ever given anybody.

I AM ME.

And Then I Met My Angel

I noticed girls early.

Third grade early.

Not because I was some tiny philosopher already studying the sexes. I was a boy.

An all-boy boy. Competitive. Restless. Interested.

I liked races. I liked trying to win. What I did not like was the way boys could turn every room into a ranking system.

Girls interested me before sex had any useful meaning to me.

The SEX part would catch up later.

Believe me.

Even then I had a ridiculous amount of confidence about the future. Somewhere in little Tony's head was the belief that whatever woman eventually got me was going to be lucky.

There is I AM ME before I knew the phrase.

There was another side to it too. I had seen enough men I did not want to become. My father was ill. Other men failed in other ways. A boy can form an identity partly from admiration and partly from refusal.

I won't be THAT man.

Of course life has a sense of humor. Drugs, prison, sex, selfishness and bad decisions would complicate the hell out of my childhood confidence.

But the desire survived.

I was going to love the hell out of her.

And then I met my Angel.

Pamela.

The Family Pamela Gave Me

Pamela gave me something I had not understood I was still looking for.

Family.

The twin boys, Ian and Byron, were a godsend to me.

That is not me polishing every family memory into a Hallmark card. Families are human. So am I. But Pamela made room for Tony the way Ma had once made room for Jimmy.

That symmetry did not occur to me until much later.

Ma made room for the kid who needed a home.

Pamela made room for the man still learning how to have one.

Later we lost Byron.

I remember him earning a Fulbright and becoming a professor at Washington State. There is much more I could say.

I won't. Some things belong to the story. And some things belong to the heart.

CHAPTER 4

GOING DOWN

Twenty years before I began trying to make a book out of this life, I had already imagined the title. It might have been Free and on the Run. It might have been Sentenced to Life on the Installment Plan. Both sounded right because for a long time my life did not move in a straight line. It went down, out, around, back in, back out, and somehow forward.

Even now I have to be careful with chronology. I remember less than people might expect. Dates blur. Durations blur. Sometimes even the order of things has to be reconstructed from whatever evidence survived. I am not going to give a memory a false date merely because a book looks more respectable when every year lines up neatly.

There are things I KNOW because I lived them. There are things I remember approximately. There are things the record can establish better than my memory can. Part of telling the truth is admitting the difference.

What I do remember is the direction.

Down.

I came to understand survival from the inside. That is different from discussing survival as an idea. There were periods when money, food, freedom, identity and tomorrow were not abstractions. They were problems to solve before the day was over. I learned what a man can rationalize when he believes the immediate need is greater than the rule standing in his way.

I spent roughly fifteen years addicted to heroin and other opioids. Cocaine came later. I went from petty crime to more sophisticated crime, from local jails to state and federal prisons, from being free to being on the run, from one identity to another, from thinking I had everything figured out to learning that the people who have everything figured out are often the ones in the most trouble.

I also learned that the explanation inside your own head can be beautifully coherent while your life is becoming a catastrophe.

We always wish to make it RIGHT in our heads.

There is a difference between rationalization and ownership. Rationalization changes the label. Ownership accepts the label. I can know I am wrong and still choose wrong. I did. More than once. "So damn what" does not mean "no consequences." It means I am not going to rewrite the decision afterward just to make Tony comfortable with Tony.

I do not promise you purity. I promise you ownership. I chose it. I own it. Assess me accordingly. That is about as priestly as I intend to get.

That does not make it right.

It only makes the next bad decision easier to live with until consequences finally become louder than the explanation.

That is one of the reasons I resist the clean redemption story. I am not going to tell you that one morning I woke up, saw the light and became the man you are reading today. Life was installment payments. So were the sentences. So was

learning. One lesson paid down a little ignorance; another mistake added interest.

Maybe that is why putting this book together has felt a little cathartic. The different Tonys are finally sitting at the same table: the kid Ma raised, the addict, the criminal, the prisoner, the salesman, the businessman, the broadcaster, the provocateur, the philosopher, the old guy looking backward. None of them has to pretend the others were not there. The point is not to acquit the younger Tony.

The point is to understand how one became the next.

There were dark years. There were also funny years, absurd years, lucky years, stupid years, years when I was one bad decision away from something worse and didn't know it, and years when some turn that looked terrible at the time later pushed me toward something better.

That is part of why I eventually came to believe I had been ordained for something. I use that word carefully. It is an I BELIEVE, not a THE RECORD SHOWS. I look back at timing, survival, strange turns, doors that opened after I had done everything possible to close them, and I see purpose. Somebody else can look at the same history and see coincidence plus a human brain that likes patterns.

Fair enough.

How do you know when you KNOW?

That question has to apply to God too.

Darkness belongs here because it happened, but darkness is not the point. I am not interested in dragging the reader through every cell, every score, every scheme and every ugly detail simply to prove I have been ugly. There are enough crime stories in the world. The useful question is what the darkness taught me about people.

Yes, there were many times I dishonored the chances I was given.

So many times.

I suppose I could try to go through them one by one.

Good luck with that.

I cannot remember half of them.

And some of the other half I remember too well.

Some of it embarrasses me. Some of it shames me. And some of it I simply will not drag into the light in graphic detail because there are people I love - and people who love me - who do not need every ugly piece of Tony laid at their feet in order for this confession to be honest.

Let it suffice to say:

I participated in plenty of crap.

Criminal and otherwise.

And I would never - EVER - model that behavior to a child.

That matters to me.

Because innocence has value.

A child sees before he fully understands.

He imitates before he has developed the maturity to examine what he is imitating.

Lose innocence too early, before judgment and character have had enough time to develop, and you may be putting adult temptations into a mind that does not yet have adult defenses.

Tony knows that because Tony lived enough of the wrong side of the equation.

I would never teach a child to become the man I once allowed myself to become.

Need. Greed. Fear. Pride. Shame. Love. Loyalty. Deception. Self- preservation.

You see those differently when they are not vocabulary words.

I learned how quickly morality can become negotiable when survival enters the room. I learned how easily an intelligent person can become stupid while remaining intelligent. I learned that fear does not always make people freeze.

Sometimes fear is the thing that finally moves them.

I learned how badly people want to explain themselves to themselves.

Including me.

My mother remained one of the fixed points. There were periods when Ma had to deal with three sons and three different kinds of trouble - including the insanity of visiting sons in prisons. Think about that. A woman who worked, sacrificed and tried to teach her boys right from wrong got to see what we did with the instruction.

Imagine driving upwards of 200 miles, once or twice a month, visiting your three sons - in three different prisons at the same time.

She did it.

Until, after a while, she stopped making the visits.

She got tired... of it.

Literally.

Dig!

That belongs in the story, not because I want sympathy for us, but because Ma's values and our choices existed at the same time. People like simple causal explanations: bad parents make bad kids; good parents make good kids. Life had already taught me that people are more complicated than that.

And that is where PopCulture enters my autobiography in a way that lets me keep both agency and influence in the same sentence. Ma taught me right from wrong. PopCulture did not erase the lesson. It just made wrong look like a hell of a lot more fun.

Sex, drugs and rock and roll. Rebellion. The bad boy. The rogue. The road with the neon on it. I knew damn well Ma would not approve. That is important. I do not get to say the culture made me do it. The road did not fool me. I chose the road.

If I had to draw the fork now, Ma gave me the map, PopCulture sold me the trip, and I chose the damn road. That is the difference between explanation and excuse. Culture can make a choice attractive. It cannot own the choice for me.

I learned early that I was more fortunate than somebody else, even when I did not feel fortunate. The old idea of the man with no shoes meeting the man with no feet stayed with me. That attitude of gratitude did not make me virtuous. It kept "poor me" from becoming a permanent address.

That distinction matters.

I have patience for need.

I have less patience for turning need into identity.

Sometimes that impatience has been fair. Sometimes I have judged too quickly.

The book has to admit both.

Eventually the same instincts that could be used to survive badly could be used to build something. Sales, publishing, entrepreneurship - these were not a separate human being replacing the old one. They were many of the same tools redirected.

Reading people.

Taking risks.

Improvising.

Seeing opportunity.

Selling an idea.

Acting before every answer was guaranteed.

Refusing to sit still.

Same engine. Different direction.

That does not romanticize the criminal years. A talent that can be used constructively does not excuse using it destructively. It simply explains why reinvention was possible. I did not have to become another species. I had to point some of the machinery somewhere else.

There is a Tonyism underneath that: I'd rather be wrong moving forward than right standing still.

Even that requires qualification. Movement is not automatically progress. I spent enough years moving hard in the wrong direction to know better. Sometimes I played to win when the damned game itself was not worth winning.

That is experience talking.

The life story matters because later I would make claims about culture, media, responsibility, work and human nature. A reader has every right to ask: What the hell does this guy know?

Fair question.

My answer is not that I have credentials.

My answer is: look at the road.

Then decide whether the road taught me anything.

In fact, it's my resume... my credentials... I am...

AN OPEN BOOK.

Lived.

The Book Lived

Years later I wrote a line that sounded like bragging because, naturally, Tony wrote it:

Some read books, some write books....FEW live the lives people

write about.

I called my life "the Show."

I called the method empirical.

And I wrote that the book Lived.

Experience does not make me automatically right. That would violate the entire philosophy I eventually developed. But experience gives me something to examine that cannot be downloaded from somebody else's biography.

I did not just want to write a book.

I had lived one.

The job now is not to prove that the life was impressive.

The job is to find out what the hell it meant.

THE LAST HEROIN STORY

I remember driving into Boston to cop heroin and ending up on the third floor of a Roxbury tenement. Three generations of females were there, all strung out on heroin except the youngest grandchild, who — for now — was only a witness.

It was around this time that I began to feel just how many times I had been a living hypocrite.

"From the eyes of a child" was a principle I would tout - often with fervor - as if, Never would that BE me.

But there ME was.

In a big way.

Living hypocrite.

Ahh... "What am I, a priest?"

Watch me make it right in my own head.

That is what the mind can do when it wants permission badly enough.

Another buyer came up behind me, got his drugs, injected and went unconscious.

He did not wake up while I was there.

This time I did not escape behind “I don’t want to get involved.” Maybe I had finally swallowed one of Ma’s lessons. I put him over my shoulder, carried him down a couple flights of stairs, emptied his pockets so nothing on him would create another problem, and got him to a nearby emergency room.

I literally dropped him there. Staff came after me — Who are you? Who is this?

— while I got back into the car and drove away. My brother Joey was with me.

I do not know what happened to that man afterward. I will not manufacture the ending.

Tony was still in the life. But maybe, by then, not entirely OF the life.

CHAPTER 4A

THE ARMY, THE TOC & THE

COURTHOUSE

FROM SCARED SHITLESS TO "WHICH ARM?"

I was seventeen years old when the Army began turning me into a soldier.

I remember Intake. Medical. Dental. Clothing. Hair. Paperwork. Shots.

Equipment. Everything needed to convert a civilian kid into an Army recruit.

Formal institutionalization.

It was off-putting to say the least. I did not know how to behave. I knew enough to be SCARED.

Somebody with one stripe on his sleeve could scare the shit out of me. Somewhere in the back of my mind was always the same movie-fed possibility: THE BRIG.

Where did I get all that? Certainly not experience. I had just arrived.

Looking backward, I can see what I could not have seen then: MOVIE OSMOSIS.

Before the Army taught me what the Army was, movies had already taught me what I THOUGHT the Army was.

The military ethos portrayed in those movies was not entirely imaginary. The Army I entered really was authoritarian. Rank mattered. Orders mattered.

Discipline mattered. But movies do what movies do. They dramatize. They turn the volume up. MAKE-BELIEVE had already helped MAKE-ME-BELIEVE.

Then somebody says: "DROP! GIVE ME TWENTY-FIVE!"

Seventeen-year-old Tony went down. ONE. TWO. THREE. Scared shitless.

Fast-forward a few years. Vietnam had happened. The Army had happened. Life had happened. The authority that once looked supernatural had become considerably more human - and considerably less impressive.

If some lifer had gotten in my face by then and said, "DROP! GIVE ME TWENTY-FIVE!" twenty-year-old Tony probably would have looked at him and said:

"WHICH ARM?"

Seventeen: YES, SERGEANT. Twenty: Aah...NO. Actually - FUCK NO.

Same Army. Different Tony.

I was not even twenty-one yet. At seventeen I was frightened by a stripe. By twenty I had been to Vietnam, had developed a deep cynicism about authority, and had also developed a particular affection for heroin - a habit I picked up in Nam.

That does not mean the twenty-year-old had become wiser. Experience had made me less afraid. Heroin was busy proving that fearlessness and wisdom are not the same thing.

Sometimes you do not understand what the hell happened to you until AFTER it happened. The Examiner came much later.

WHAT'S YOUR SITREP? - FUCK IT

I was a radio operator in the TOC - the Tactical Operations Center - and I worked the graveyard shift.

Patrols were scattered out in the bush. Periodically we would get on the radio and call them.

"WHAT'S YOUR SITREP? OVER."

Situation report. Where are you? Anything happening? See anything? Hear anything? Everything okay?

What I remember most is not the procedure. I remember the ATTITUDE.

A lot of times the answer was not some crisp "All secure." It was more like:

"FUCK IT."

Just plain FUCK IT. Fuck your situation report. Fuck this place. Fuck the Army.

Fuck the war. Fuck everything.

Not everybody. Nothing is absolute. But enough of it that I remember the attitude more than fifty years later.

This is where I make a distinction that mattered to ME. People use HIPPIE for almost everybody from that period. That is not how I saw it.

The hippies, to me, were political. Anti-war. Anti-establishment. Peace. Culture.

A philosophy, however coherent or incoherent it might have been. A HEAD wanted to get HIGH.

Marijuana. Heroin. Whatever was available. It did not necessarily come with a political manifesto. Sometimes it came with: How do I get through tonight? How do I make this place disappear for a few hours?

Same behavior can have a different reason underneath it. One guy may be protesting a war. Another guy may simply be trying not to feel it.

That is another reason I became suspicious of GENERALIZATION. Call everybody hippies and you miss the heads. Call everybody drug addicts and you miss the politics. Call everybody soldiers and you miss the kid alone in the jungle saying: "Fuck your SITREP."

I was listening to those voices through a radio in the TOC. I did not know I was studying human behavior. I thought I was working the graveyard shift. Observe first. Label later. And be damn careful that the label does not erase the person.

LZ PROFESSIONAL -> MARY ANN

I was with the 1st Battalion, 46th Infantry, Americal Division - 1/46 - at LZ Professional. Later, the battalion story moved to Firebase Mary Ann.

I received an early out. At the time, that meant one thing: I was going home.

Only later did I understand what else it meant. I was not there when Mary Ann was overrun. I left. They moved. Then this happened.

The exact personal chronology is something I still have to reconstruct carefully.

Memory says one thing; surviving records can sometimes tighten the dates. That is why this book has I KNOW and THE RECORD SHOWS.

What matters to my memory is that the same 1/46 environment I knew at Professional did not suddenly become another species of Army when the map changed. The drug culture I remember - heads, marijuana, heroin, the FUCK IT attitude - later appears in other soldiers' accounts of Mary Ann.

That does not make my memory proof of every detail at Mary Ann. It makes the intersection between memory and record worth paying attention to.

HAYMARKET SQUARE — THE HANDSHAKE

Post-Vietnam, at Fort Bragg, I spent time around Fayetteville and Haymarket Square — anti-war people, hippies, heads, unemployed characters, and plenty of people looking for a fix. I was one of them.

Before the fix you needed money. I sometimes made mine by “middling” drug deals: find somebody who wanted to buy, find somebody who wanted to sell, connect the two and try to get paid for standing in the middle.

One day three men told me they had roughly a kilo of grass. I found buyers with cash. Only there was no grass. There WAS a gun. The whole thing had been a setup to rob the people I brought in — and me.

The buyer immediately thought I had been part of it. When he said, “Call the cops,” my first response was basically: Are you stupid? We were breaking the law.

We’re going to tell on ourselves? Which, of course, only made me look guiltier.

Fine. Call the cops. I knew I had not set him up.

Two officers came, put us in the car and actually drove around looking for the robbers. At a gas station one officer pointed to a car behind us and asked whether it matched the description. I turned around. Holy shit. It was them.

The police let the car leave, coordinated over the radio and followed. Then the robbers turned down a dead-end street. A literal dead end was about to become THEIR dead end. “OK, GO.” Cars seemed to come from everywhere.

They got them.

I turned to shake the officer’s hand.

He would not take it.

I NEVER forgot that lesson. I had helped catch criminals, but I was still a criminal standing in the middle of a criminal transaction. One good act did not wash the situation clean.

WALPOLE STATE PRISON

One of my first prison lessons was how quickly a man learns to need less.

"Need anything?"

"NOPE. Nothing at all."

Soon I learned my neighboring cellmate was Albert DeSalvo - of Boston Strangler fame.

That sentence sounds almost cinematic now. It did not feel cinematic then. It was prison. Names that meant something enormous outside could become merely the man in the next cell.

By my memory there was also a 1973 riot, tear gas and the kind of prison politics that teach you very quickly to watch people, alliances, fear and power. Where the exact chronology can be tightened by the record, the record gets the last word.

Prison was another PLAYGROUND - with much harder consequences.

MOVIE NIGHT IN MAXIMUM SECURITY

One of my first weeks in maximum-security prison, they showed us The Longest Yard.

Convicts versus guards. Football. Rebellion. Entertainment. The whole room could enjoy it for the obvious reasons.

I remember sliding down in my seat as something entirely different clicked in my head. NOW I understand. Finally.

I had been trying to understand politicians and bureaucrats as though the words they used were the machinery. Rehabilitation. Service. Public good.

Administration. Fine.

Then another question arrived: WHAT IS THE INCENTIVE?

I began thinking about the politician who needs reelection. The bureaucrat who has a budget. Spend the allocation or risk getting less next year. Grow the department and the department becomes more important. Grow the authority and the job grows with it.

That does not mean every politician is corrupt or every bureaucrat is sitting around plotting to waste money. Nothing is absolute.

It means systems reward behavior, and good people living inside a system can begin responding to what the system rewards. Do not just listen to what an institution says it wants. Ask what behavior the system rewards.

For me, THAT was political science - learned at movie night in maximum security.

THE PRINCE IN SOLITARY

Another classroom arrived in solitary confinement.

I had gotten into a fight or some such thing. No books. No normal distractions.

Then a social worker brought me Machiavelli's The Prince.

I read it in a cell.

People often use Machiavelli as shorthand for evil manipulation. What interested me was something else. I saw, in a very small way, the ADVISER.

Look here. If you do X, here is what is likely to happen next. This is how power behaves. This is what fear produces. This is what incentives produce. This is how people react.

SEE IT FIRST. UNDERSTAND THE MECHANISM. THEN DECIDE WHAT

YOU THINK.

THE EXPERIENTIAL SOCIAL PHILOSOPHER

IN THE PRESUMPTIVE

I do not have to endorse a mechanism to observe it. A doctor does not have to like a disease to understand what it does. Do not tell me only what you intended.

Show me what happens when you do it.

Years later that would become another Tony line: Somewhere between INTENTION and RESULT...there is PAVEMENT.

Prison was teaching me action and reaction before I had the vocabulary for Natural Law.

HEAR YE, HEAR YE, HEAR YE

For somebody who had not exactly been born surrounded by opportunity, I eventually had an extraordinary amount of GOOD FORTUNE.

Funny thing was, a lot of it seemed to arrive AFTER I had once again danced with the law - and the law won.

One of those chances came through a prison social worker. There was a program that helped place people coming out of prison into subsidized employment. No guarantee. You had to apply.

I applied. Eventually I got an interview with a woman whose name I DO remember: Grace.

What did I do in the interview? Probably the same thing I did with opportunities for the next fifteen years. I was ME.

I could be charming without trying terribly hard to be charming. I liked people. I cared about people. And I think people usually figured out something about me without my announcing it: I was a good guy who had done some bad things.

A lot of bad things. Things I would not want children to learn from.

Apparently Grace saw enough because the next thing I knew, former inmate Tony was going to work for the COURT.

So I got the job — designated for six months — as a bailiff in the Superior Court in Dedham, Norfolk County, Massachusetts.

Could Tony, still in the grip of addiction, make it through the entire six months?

We shall see.

Maybe redemption was incrementalizing too.

Because I never did finish the full six months.

The same general institution that had spent a good portion of my adult life putting Tony on the OTHER side of the room.

Now I was standing up front saying:

"HEAR YE! HEAR YE! HEAR YE!"

Life has a sense of humor.

THE THREE ROOMS

I remember the courthouse as having three centers: THE JUDGE, THE CLERK and PROBATION.

The formal organizational chart is more complicated than that, and the Judge was not literally the boss of every independent office. Fine. Tony Corrects Tony.

But I was not studying an organizational chart. I was watching PEOPLE.

Power was everywhere. Status. Reputation. Who had whose ear. Who liked whom.

Who did not. Different responsibilities. Different personalities. Different little kingdoms. Catty-chatty. Tribal. POPULARIZED.

Into that environment somebody proposed bringing in TONY - an EX-CON.

Not as a defendant. Not in cuffs. As an employee. A bailiff. A visible part of the court.

Institutions are built to avoid risk, and an ex-con carries a label that practically screams RISK. Yet somebody looked beyond the label.

Grace. The program. The court. Judge Sullivan. Somebody had to put a little of THEIR reputation behind MY possibility. Redemption requires somebody to take the FIRST risk.

Then the person receiving the chance has to decide what to do when the door opens.

MY BROTHER IN MY COURTROOM

There was another strange turn during my time as bailiff.

My brothers Johnny and Joey had also gotten involved with heroin. We were not particularly close. We were not living identical lives. Yet somehow all three brothers collided with the same drug.

That stayed with me. Years later I would ask how much shared family environment and PopCULTure can influence people even without direct coordination. Influence is not destiny and it is not absolution. But it is worth examining.

One morning Johnny had been arrested after a breaking and entering. The police held him and then transported him to the courthouse.

Eventually - into MY custody. Tony the ex-con was now the man holding the keys. Behind the door was my brother.

The judge came in. I went into his office as usual. "Good morning, Judge."

"Good morning, Tony."

I told him there was something unusual that morning. My brother Johnny was being held on a breaking-and-entering charge.

I remember Judge Sullivan being professional and very cool about it. I THINK he may have asked something like, "How do you feel about that?" But I do not KNOW that. I will not manufacture dialogue because it improves the scene.

What I DO remember is opening court and doing my job. Johnny was one of several defendants waiting his turn.

By the end of the morning he was released on his own recognizance. Not because Tony was the bailiff and not because I asked the judge for a favor. That was simply how many defendants without significant records were handled. One brother waiting to be called. The other brother calling the courtroom to order.

Same family. Same heroin. Different side of the door. For that morning, anyway.

THE MITTIMUS - AND NO HANDCUFFS

One of my major responsibilities was transporting defendants who could not make bail from the courthouse to the COUNTY JAIL.

Jail. Not prison. There is a distinction.

A lot of these were comparatively lightweight county matters. I would look at some guy and think: Where the hell is he going to go? Run? Turn a six-month problem into years worth of problems? That is stupid.

And I wanted to communicate something else: TRUST.

I had been the guy on the other side. I knew how quickly an institution could stop seeing Anthony Venuti and start seeing INMATE, PRISONER, OFFENDER.

So sometimes Tony did not cuff them.

Now picture me arriving at the county jail. Long hair. Beard. This is your COURT OFFICER. Beside me is another guy - no handcuffs.

The receiving officer would look at me. Look at him. Look back at me. I knew the look. Which one of you is bringing in which one?

Then I would hand over the MITTIMUS - the legal document transferring custody.

Until this moment: he is mine. Here is the paper. Now: he is yours.

Maybe that was foolish. Maybe it was risky. I am not writing a training manual. I am telling you what I did and WHY I did it.

I wanted to say to the man walking beside me: Walk beside me like a man and I will treat you like one.

Most did. Authority gives you the POWER to diminish somebody. It does not always give you a REASON to.

Then comes the contradiction. This same Tony eventually got a little physical with somebody because I decided that person needed some tough love.

A little physical is still PHYSICAL.

Sometimes my instinct produced compassion. Sometimes it produced arrogance. I did not yet always know the difference. Believing you are right does not automatically give you jurisdiction.

"TONY...I'LL PASS."

One day Judge Sullivan's car was unavailable. I asked if he needed a ride.

Sure. No problem.

Except I had forgotten one small detail.

My friend was bringing MY car around, and there were a few other guys in it. This was still PRE-PAMELA Tony. Long hair. Beard. Bailiff by day. And at that particular moment I was getting ready to go score.

The car pulled up.

Judge Sullivan took one brief look at the crew.

"TONY...I'LL PASS."

That was it. No interrogation. No lecture. No humiliation.

He had seen enough to reach a preliminary finding.

The courthouse Tony was not FAKE. Neither was the heroin-addicted Tony.

They were both ME.

That is the uncomfortable part of reinvention. The new man does not arrive one morning and evict the old one. For a while - sometimes a long while - they live in the same house.

SO, WHAT'S NEWS?

And then came the day the six-month opportunity ended.

Tony did what Tony had been doing remarkably well for years. I got arrested again.

This time for doing my very best to enter a drugstore during closing hours - without their permission.

Breaking and entering.

I was released, and the next day I SHOWED UP FOR WORK.

Judge Sullivan came in. We had our little routine. Good morning, Tony. Good morning, Judge. What's news?

Well...there WAS news.

I told him: "Judge, I was arrested." I gave him the torrid details.

I remember what happened next vividly. Sullivan remained Sullivan. Professional.

Calm. As I remember it, he said essentially: "Well, you know, I cannot compel you to quit until you are found guilty."

Older Tony can joke: typical liberal judge. But the Examiner has to give the man his due. He was extending to ME the same principle the courthouse was supposed to extend to everybody else: arrested is not convicted.

And I said: "Judge...no way would I do that to you. Enough of an embarrassment as it is. Better for me just to go."

I meant it.

I was not going to make the judge carry my embarrassment while the court decided what Tony already knew Tony had done. The opportunity did not fail Tony. Tony failed the opportunity.

But maybe something had moved a fraction. This time, when I failed, I at least knew enough not to make somebody else pay for it. TICK.

Maybe redemption was incrementalizing too.

LOS ANGELES — DEVIL’S DISCIPLES

Somewhere in between one prison and the next - what prison, what state, what the hell for? - I was in Los Angeles. I was on the run.

I met a guy playing pool.

He was impressed with the way I played, and from there we became friends.

Somewhere along the way he learned I had nowhere to sleep.

Literally nowhere to lay my head.

So he invited me to stay on the floor of his one-room apartment.

I stayed there for months.

I wish I could give you his name.

I can't.

I don't remember it.

I don't remember where he went after that either.

No forwarding address.

Nothing.

Just another person who appeared in my life at exactly the right time, helped me when he did not have to, and then disappeared into the fog of memory.

Around 1978 I was about twenty-eight, a good-looking guy, but not Hollywood good-looking and not twenty-one. I wanted to be a male stripper. I got some work, but not enough.

So I found other male strippers around the Hollywood Tropicana and created my own show: TONY VENOOTI’S DEVIL’S DISCIPLES.

It was about this time that I made a proposition to the Hollywood Tropicana, a mainly Hispanic entertainment palace.

Your weakest link, I told them, is that you do not have much business during the week.

I have a male strip show. At the time, Chippendales had become nationally known and culturally significant. Women knew what a male strip show was, and there was a market waiting for it.

I can bring business to you. You do not even have to pay me. I will take the admission money - and I will take the risk.

I waited for the answer.

He said, "Certainly."

And voila.

There I was - on the run, and on the marquee.

TONY VENOOTI’S DEVIL’S DISCIPLES.

At one point I had the male strip show and the mud-wrestling operation running concurrently.

I had built the mud pit myself, figured out how to make the "mud" from Fuller’s earth mixed with foam, and was still taking buses everywhere because I had no transportation.

Without realizing it, I was getting one hell of an education in the free market.

Find a need. Create something people will pay to see. Take the risk. Make it work.

Then that operation morphed again.

One of the mud wrestlers was actually a classically trained dancer from Canada, and somehow I wound up choreographing a semi-professional dancer with skills far beyond mine.

Absurdity grande.

Then word came through the grapevine:

The law was onto me.

Time to move again.

I have pieces of exactly how that happened crawling around in my head, but I cannot quite reconstruct the sequence anymore.

I got the message. And I moved.

Understand the stupidity and the nerve at the same time: I was on the run, yet I was willing to put a barely disguised version of my own name up on the marquee.

I hated not looking Italian, so “Venooti” it was. Hide? Apparently not Tony.

After that, the clouds roll in. At the time of this writing I simply cannot tell you with confidence what prison, what state, came next. It is all so much of a blur.

It is going to kill me when some memory comes back after it is too late to add it to this confession.

PRE-PAMELA / POST-PAMELA

For somebody who never had the opportunities that good fortune, luck or family often provide, I certainly had a ton of good fortune AFTER I repeatedly danced with the law and the law won.

But the biggest dividing line in my adult life may be simpler than all the court records. PRE-PAMELA.

By my memory, over roughly fifteen years I was rarely out of jail for more than about six months at a stretch. Out. Back in. Out. Back in. Heroin. Crime.

Consequences. Another chance. Another screw-up. Another cell.

That was the pattern. POST-PAMELA.

I never went back.

Not because love sprinkled fairy dust over Tony. I was still me. Same instincts.

Same history. Same scars.

But the pattern changed.

That is evidence worth examining. What moved? What incentive changed? What responsibility changed? What did family provide that prison never could? What did belonging provide? What did having something to LOSE provide? Do not tell me only what you intended. Show me what happened.

That is where the life story starts becoming philosophy.

CHAPTER 5

WORK. And compensation. CASH. MOOLA. DOUGH. BUCKS. Getting paid for what you DO matters. YOU’RE being PAID. Duh. What you produce, how you value your effort, and how others value it all connect to SELF-WORTH.

WORK WISE - ACTUAL WORK, DEFINED

I was about twenty-three years old, sitting in a maximum-security cell, watching the Jerry Lewis telethon.

That is not where most people begin a chapter on work.

Welcome to my life.

Some high-level entertainer came on and started talking about how much he enjoyed bringing his WORK to the stage. I remember hearing the word and having an immediate reaction.

I enjoy my work?

WTF?

That's WORK?

The reaction stayed with me because the word did not fit my understanding.

Work was the thing you had to do when you would rather be doing something else. Work was watching the clock. Work was effort exchanged for something you needed. Work was not the thing some rich entertainer seemed thrilled to be doing under lights while people applauded.

Somewhere in that cell a definition began forming that I would repeat for years:

Work is when you prefer to be doing something else...Period!

Working WISE, to me, was really innovation.

When I hit a speed bump, I went around it, over it, or through it.

The point was never to avoid work. The point was to keep moving.

Where there is a will, there is a way.

An innovator keeps the balls in the air. When one starts to fall, he figures out how to keep it from hitting the ground.

Not less effort. Effort applied differently.

NOW became an important word for me when I finally decided I was going to make my business succeed.

I was a born procrastinator. If I did not feel like doing something now, I did not.

I used to joke when somebody said, "I want it right now." My answer was: "You can have it RIGHT, or you can have it NOW. You cannot have both."

Funny line. And sometimes even true. But it could also become a pretty convenient excuse for putting off something I simply did not feel like doing.

At some point, if I was going to build anything that lasted, I had to mature individually.

There were things that had to be done whether I felt like doing them or not.

That was part of learning what ACTUAL WORK was.

Without that willingness to grow up - to make NOW mean something different - I would never have gotten very far.

Now, before somebody sends me a dictionary, I know that is not the only definition of work. It is Tony's definition - and more important, it became a way of thinking about TIME.

You can lose money and make more money.

You can lose a business and build another business.

You can lose a house, a car, a job, a reputation, an audience.

Time is different.

You don't get the hour back.

Sitting in prison has a way of making time physical. A clock is not philosophical when somebody else controls the door.

Years later I wrote the thought more directly: you do HAVE your time...your time and how you value it. What do you do to make YOUR time worth more?

That may be the real beginning of WORK WISE.

Not "How do I avoid working?"

How do I make an hour of my life produce more value - for me, for somebody else, preferably both?

I did not learn that in business school.

I have called myself an ORGANIC learner. I learned by doing, screwing up, watching, selling, getting rejected, improvising, paying attention to what moved people and what didn't.

I had already learned some of the wrong lessons about systems. Crime teaches systems too. It teaches incentives, fear, risk, leverage, timing, reading people, improvisation, opportunity, deception. The moral problem is not that those abilities exist. The moral problem is what you point them at.

Same engine. Different direction.

What happens when you finally point the same engine somewhere useful?

For me, sales became one answer.

I could read people.

I could talk.

I could take rejection.

I could see an angle.

I could move before everything was certain.

Sales took some of the machinery that had helped me survive badly and gave it legitimate work to do.

That is where I began to understand another sequence:

Attention.

Interest.

Desire.

Action.

AIDA.

Every salesman knows some version of it. The importance to this book is what happened after I learned it. I began seeing the sequence everywhere.

I am a salesman.

NOTHING in life starts without someone SELLING and someone

buying...something.

Always be selling.

A good salesman is often selling a future value before the customer can physically hold it - the membership, the result, the possibility, what life may look like after the decision.

Imagine that.

Advertising.

Publishing.

Radio.

Politics.

Memes.

Picket signs.

Headlines.

Trump.

The traffic cop in the Media-Ocracy chapter had a salesman standing inside him.

First get them to look.

Then give them a reason to stay.

Then make them want something.

Then ask them to move.

That is not automatically manipulation. It can be. It can also be communication.

The ethical question is what you are moving them toward and whether you are telling them the truth while you do it.

I spent years in advertising and publishing. I created Access Marketing Systems. I learned guerrilla marketing before the phrase became fashionable. I could build something around a small idea - even something as simple as a $99 logo - and keep asking what else could be attached to it.

Newsletters became part of the model. One became several. Several became more.

At one point we were producing roughly thirty monthly newsletters. Databases became valuable before everybody carried the whole world in a phone.

Bizgenerator and other systems grew out of the same question:

How can I make the work I already did once keep working?

That is WORK WISE.

Not laziness.

Leverage.

HIRE SMART

You do not have to personally be the best copywriter, designer, salesperson, accountant, programmer, publisher and manager. You need enough self-worth to put strong people together without needing to be the strongest person in every room.

Henry Ford is often associated with the leadership principle that the boss does not have to personally know every answer if he knows how to find and organize people who do.

But hiring smart also meant knowing what I was looking at.

One day I had placed an ad looking for sales help. I was in my office when I saw what I assumed was my interview pull into the parking lot.

College student.

He got out of the car.

Shorts.

T-shirt.

Shoes without socks.

He was still a good seventy-five feet from my office door when I called out:

"JOE!"

He turned around.

"Turn your ass around."

Interview over.

Why?

Because I was hiring somebody to SELL.

Who was the first person he had to sell?

ME.

I hire people who come prepared to make a sale TODAY.

He hadn't even made the attempt.

Maybe he could have been terrific. Maybe I missed something.

But sales begins before you open your mouth.

How you arrive.

How you present yourself.

Whether you understand the room you are walking into.

He was applying for a sales job, and his very first sales call was the interview.

You only get one chance at a FIRST impression.

He had just made his.

You do not have to be the expert in every discipline. You have to know WHO is.

A criminal looks for leverage for the wrong reasons.

An entrepreneur looks for leverage so one hour can become ten hours of value without having to live ten hours.

That may be one of the cleanest examples of the same engine changing direction.

Eventually I became a publisher. Az Tourist New and the advertising business were not accidents dropped from the sky. They were built out of sales, persistence, audience, repetition and the ability to put things together that other people treated as separate.

I hired people. I ran sales meetings. I had payroll. I had people depending on what we built.

And I kept repeating a simple creed in those meetings:

Tell people what you are GOING to do.

DO it.

Tell 'em you DID it.

That is IMAGE versus PERFORMANCE.

Anybody can talk a good game.

There is an old line I used a lot:

If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.

Funny line.

Dangerous philosophy.

Because bullshit can create IMAGE.

Only performance creates proof.

Say what you are going to do.

Do the damn thing.

Then tell people you did it.

In that order.

The converse is just as revealing: tell people what you did yesterday, tell them what you are going to do tomorrow - and when they ask what you did TODAY, repeat number one.

That is what I see too often in the Democratic Party image-makers: yesterday's accomplishment, tomorrow's promise - and TODAY? Back to yesterday.

There is a lot of image in the world.

And this is where Trump enters Tony's thinking.

The ultimate DOer, to me, is Trump.

Certainly one of the most transparent presidents I have ever watched - not because I agreed with every decision, but because he seemed determined to tell you what he intended to do, DO it, and then tell you what he had done.

That does not mean every decision is right.

It does not mean every result is good.

It means Tony's attention goes first to performance.

What did you actually do?

What changed?

What happened after you acted?

Image asks me to believe the presentation.

Performance asks me to examine the result.

Performance leaves evidence.

That became one of my tests for people, businesses and eventually politicians. I used language like makers and takers, winners and whiners, DOers and DOees.

Some of those labels were too broad. I used them politically in ways I would not use now as universal descriptions of whole groups.

And this is where GENERALIZATION IN THE ABSTRACT has to govern Tony too.

Broadly speaking, this is one of the ways I have tended to distinguish Democrats from Republicans.

I THINK I KNOW that too often Democrats participate in creating, encouraging or tolerating disorder - and then appear with the proposed solution to the very disorder Tony believes they helped produce.

Republicans, in Tony's generalization, more often present themselves as the people trying to make something happen.

And then enters the MediaOcracy - throwing a wrench into the spokes, reframing the action, questioning the motive, redirecting attention from performance back toward image.

That is Tony's assessment of a pattern.

It is NOT permission to decide what an individual Democrat or Republican is before examining the individual.

The abstract may identify a pattern. The individual still has to leave evidence.

What did you actually DO?

What happened because you did it?

Performance leaves evidence.

The useful distinction survives.

Are you producing something - or only performing the image of production?

There is a difference between a person who needs help and a person who wants the status of a contributor without the contribution.

Need gets patience.

Excuses get impatience.

And again, Tony has to be humble enough to admit he does not always know which is which from across the street.

For years I also taught a harsher business lesson: ambition TRUMPS talent.

Merit belongs in that conversation, but self-worth and merit are not the same thing. Self-worth belongs to the person. Merit belongs to performance in a particular arena. Equal human worth does not require equal qualification.

Second string is not a second-class human being. Second string is a position. It is where you are, not who you are. If you want first string, improve the thing that can be improved. Can you do the damn job? That is an assessment question, not a verdict on your value as a person.

SELF-WORTH is not entitlement. Opportunity is not a guaranteed outcome.

Ambition -> effort -> experience -> skill -> competence -> merit. The chain is not perfectly fair in every life, but pretending qualification does not matter does not make the problem fairer.

The point was not that talent is worthless.

The point was that unused talent accomplishes nothing.

I would become irritated when I saw talent - God-given talent - wasted through a lack of desire, ambition or self-worth, while at the same time hearing the person complain about the very things that talent might have helped him overcome.

Artists. Handymen. People who could actually do things.

I envied them.

If ONLY I had some of that actual talent, I thought, maybe I would not have to middle other people. Maybe I could middle myself.

Wishful thinking.

Ambition is an ACTION-oriented characteristic.

A talented person who will not move can be passed by a less talented person who will.

I had seen that in sales. I had seen it in business. I had seen it in myself.

I have also seen ambition become appetite, which is where another old Tony framework becomes important.

The Land of NEVER Enough.

The Land of MORE.

The Land of JUST Enough.

Originally I wrapped those ideas in partisan labels. Strip away the politics and the human idea is much better.

I have learned that the disciplines needed in business are essentially the same disciplines needed in life.

What will the market bear?

Life ought to ask:

What will YOUR life bear?

How much deception?

How much irresponsibility?

How much excuse-making?

How much can you lie to other people before the deceit begins mirroring the deceit you are already practicing on yourself?

Business teaches another lesson that life sometimes tries to avoid:

Tough love.

You give me performance, I give you something in return.

You meet your responsibility, you earn opportunity.

You fail your responsibility, there are consequences.

A line commonly attributed to Ayn Rand captures the idea: "You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality." Whether or not she said those exact words, the thought is unmistakable: you may evade reality, but reality does not agree to evade you.

And I have to qualify what follows. I have a strong belief system within me, built over a lifetime, and naturally that creates a bias.

Although I still have to ask myself: How can truth be a bias?

What I BELIEVE I have watched develop within the Democratic Party is something approaching a mob mentality - where a person’s value too often seems to come from being one more person added to the group, rather than from asking: What does this individual ADD to the group?

One counts people. The other counts what people contribute.

This is my conclusion, my observation, my bias if you insist on calling it that.

And cheating? I think that hit critical mass a long time ago. But what do you call it when another twenty years pass after critical mass?

I watched people with money pay people without money to help them cheat on exams.

Against that I had another model sitting in my head: the military academies.

West Point’s Honor Code was brutally simple: do not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.

Before 1976, separation was the standard consequence for an honor violation.

After the 1976 cheating scandal, discretion and developmental alternatives entered the system.

Somebody else can argue that this was progress - that character develops and people can learn from failure. I understand the argument.

But I kept asking: Where does zero tolerance go after enough incremental exceptions?

TICK. TOCK.

There is another reason the military example always interested me. Historically, the military has often served as a vanguard - or maybe more accurately, a proving ground - for what comes next: technology, medicine, communications, navigation, trauma care.

So when I watched something as fundamental as the military concept of HONOR change, it caught my attention for another reason.

I am not saying the military caused what followed. I am saying I had learned to

WATCH THE VANGUARD.

Can you imagine a business trying to survive by endlessly covering for employees who refuse to perform?

Sooner or later somebody has to ask:

What are you in business for?

Your employees?

Your customers?

Yourself?

Which comes first?

And maybe the better question is whether a healthy business - or a healthy life - can survive if nobody is willing to establish the order at all.

Compassion without responsibility can become indulgence.

Ambition without limits can become appetite.

And appetite without gratitude eventually finds its way into the Land of NEVER Enough.

The Land of NEVER Enough says: I do not have enough, therefore somebody owes me more.

The Land of MORE says: I already have plenty, but plenty can never satisfy me.

The Land of JUST Enough understands contentment.

That does not mean surrendering ambition.

It means knowing the difference between ambition and appetite.

Ambition asks: What more can I become?

Appetite asks: What more can I get?

Contentment knows the difference.

That distinction matters to a man who spent twenty years addicted to heroin.

Never Enough is not an abstraction to an addict.

More can become a prison just as effectively as not enough.

Money can do it.

Status can do it.

Applause can do it.

Being right can do it.

Even ambition, one of the virtues I have spent years praising, can eat itself if the person has no idea what enough looks like.

So WORK WISE cannot simply mean MORE MORE MORE.

It has to include direction.

What are you building?

Why?

How much of your time are you trading for it?

What is the value of that hour to you?

And at what point does the thing you own start owning you?

MIDDLE CLASS? MODIFY IT.

America loves categories. Lower class. Working class. Middle class. Upper-middle class. Upper class.

Fine.

According to WHAT?

Income? House? Car? ZIP code? Education? How many toys are parked in the driveway?

Tony has another measuring stick: CONTRIBUTION.

Do you carry some of the load? Do you accept responsibility? Do you produce something? Do you take more from THE PLAYGROUND than you put back into it?

Because I have known people with money who were LOW CLASS as hell. And I have known people without much money who possessed more class than people looking down at them.

MONEY CAN TELL ME YOUR INCOME. IT CANNOT TELL ME

YOUR CLASS.

Economic class and human class are not the same thing. That is my moral measuring stick, not a Census category.

Maybe MIDDLE CLASS ought to have a reservation sign:

RESERVED FOR THOSE WILLING TO HELP CARRY THE LOAD.

Too harsh? Yours to agree...or NOT!

The Amer-I-CAN idea grew out of the same philosophy.

Some of my older writing reduced survival to very plain instructions: the world does not owe you a living; money does not grow on trees; count your blessings; work on IDENTIFYING your shortcomings; never take what you have for granted. I once put it more playfully: you earn your acorns via work.

The wording can be crude. The principle is not. Gratitude without effort becomes passivity. Effort without gratitude can become appetite. Count your blessings.

Work on IDENTIFYING your shortcomings.

America, as I experienced it, provided a vehicle.

Opportunity is the vehicle.

But a vehicle sitting in the driveway does not move because the Constitution gave it a parking space.

You fuel it with ambition squared by effort.

That phrase showed up again and again in my writing because I liked the image.

Privilege can be a vehicle that goes nowhere fast without fuel.

I called it American Privilege - not a guarantee of success, not a denial that people begin with different burdens, but the privilege of having room to TRY.

You may not control every choice available to you.

But where choices exist, you have some responsibility for the one you make.

That is the mature version.

Self-worth gives you enough belief to get behind the wheel.

Self-ownership says you are driving.

Ambition picks a direction.

Effort supplies fuel.

Responsibility means you own more than the victory lap.

Then life does something funny.

It reprices you.

After roughly twenty-five years in advertising and publishing, after employing up to 15 people and signing checks, I found myself working for Arizona minimum wage - $7.80 an hour at the time.

That is a useful moment in a book about self-worth.

I had spent years signing other people's checks.

Now somebody was signing mine for $7.80 an hour.

My market value in that particular job had changed.

My self-worth had not.

That distinction may be more important than half the motivational speeches I ever gave.

Your wage is a price attached to labor in a particular market at a particular time.

Your human value is not the number on the check.

The old Tony language sometimes blurred those things. I wrote about "maximum worth" and sometimes made economic value sound like personal worth.

I would separate them now.

My net worth is not my self-worth.

A customer once told me I should be paid more. My salesman brain immediately turned the sympathy into an economic question: would she voluntarily pay more for the product so the worker could be paid more? What if raising the cost eliminated the job or accelerated automation?

Then there is another word people sometimes almost apologize for:

PROFIT.

Tony hears something different in that word.

Profit says, silently:

You provided something somebody needed, wanted and could afford - and there was enough left over to reward the people who took the risk of providing it.

Profit is the reward for RISK.

The greater the risk, typically the greater the return a person hopes to earn for taking it.

And people sometimes hear "profit" and imagine the owner stuffing all the money into his pocket.

Not quite.

There is gross profit, and then there is net profit.

Revenue comes in. The direct cost of producing or acquiring what you sold has to come out. Then come the other obligations: rent, advertising, transportation, payroll, insurance, utilities, equipment, taxes and whatever else it took to keep the doors open.

Only after the obligations are paid do you discover what you actually earned.

Employees of a VERY profitable company will often see the money coming in without fully understanding the money going out.

They see, in BOLD CAPITAL LETTERS, the cash coming through the door.

What they often do not see as clearly is the fine print: payroll, taxes, insurance, rent, equipment, debt, repairs, inventory, losses, risk and all the other obligations attached to keeping that door open.

The more an employee understands the other side of the ledger, the less mysterious the employer’s position becomes. And maybe contentment does not seem quite so far away.

There is a simple economic rule here. As a potential employee, your goal should be to ask for as much as you reasonably believe you can get - and perhaps a little more.

You ask high, knowing you may have to come down a little to reach the number you actually want.

Now it is the employer’s turn. His natural goal is to offer as little as he reasonably can, knowing you want the job - but also knowing that somebody else may want the value you can bring to a company.

Think of it as the LIARS' POLKA.

You start higher than the number you are actually willing to take.

He starts lower than the number he is actually willing to pay.

You both know there is probably another number somewhere between the two.

So you dance.

A little this way.

A little that way.

Until reality begins moving both of you toward the middle.

The employee pushes upward. The employer pushes downward. Somewhere between the two is the number both sides are willing to accept.

Funny, isn’t it, how often things made fair eventually LAND DEAD CENTER.

What the market can bear.

OF THE CENTER.

That is why NET profit means something to Tony.

It points directly at the person who accepted the risk and says:

YOU won.

This time.

This week.

This month.

This year.

Next year?

Get back to work.

Because performance leaves evidence - and profit is one form of that evidence.

That does not prove every wage is fair. It demonstrates how my mind worked.

I did not want pity to become the economic theory.

I wanted to understand the transaction.

The worker has an interest in getting as much as he can for his time.

The owner has an interest in controlling cost.

Those interests meet, negotiate, conflict, adjust.

Neither side automatically becomes evil merely because the interests differ.

That is OF THE CENTER again.

And there is another leadership lesson hiding in the business years.

I used an A, B, C, D shorthand for people. The model itself was too absolute, but one observation underneath it survived: secure people are less threatened by talent.

If I am secure in my own ability, I can hire somebody better than me at something without feeling diminished.

If I am insecure, every capable person in the room becomes a threat.

Self-worth -> security -> collaboration.

That is not what I understood as a young criminal. In that world strength often had to be managed, watched, competed with or controlled.

In a business, another person's strength can multiply yours.

That is WORK WISE too.

You do not have to personally be the best copywriter, designer, salesperson, accountant, programmer, publisher and manager.

You need enough self-worth to put strong people together without needing to be the strongest person in every sentence.

Wisdom TRUMPS intelligence.

Performance beats image.

Ambition moves talent.

Effort fuels opportunity.

Time is the asset underneath all of them.

That is why the twenty-three-year-old in the maximum-security cell still belongs at the beginning of this chapter.

He did not know anything about newsletters, databases, publishing companies, payroll, minimum wage reversals, websites, radio shows, meme archives or the Media-Ocracy.

But he had time.

And during my in-and-out-of-prison life, I sometimes thought of that time as a kind of sabbatical.

Here I was.

I could read.

Rarely did.

I could write.

Never wrote.

Yet I respected the written word.

I always had.

I had been using words to my advantage for most of my life without ever really thinking about what I was doing.

To sell.

To persuade.

To charm.

To bullshit.

To get myself out of trouble.

Sometimes to get myself into it.

Without knowing it, I was learning something about words.

Rhythm.

Timing.

Emphasis.

How one word could land harder than another.

How a pause could do half the work.

How the right phrase could move somebody.

I had absolutely no idea where any of that would eventually lead.

I certainly did not know that one day I would try to make sense of all of it using the same tool I had been using all along:

WORDS.

Too much of it, he would have said.

The question he had not yet learned to ask was what an hour was worth.

How much of my life did I waste before I finally figured out what an hour was worth?

I cannot recover the hours.

I can tell you what I learned from them.

Work is not merely effort.

WORK WISE is turning time into value without allowing value to turn into identity.

It is learning when ambition is fuel and when it has become appetite.

It is doing what you said you would do.

It is producing instead of performing the image of production.

It is surrounding yourself with talent without being frightened by it.

It is using the vehicle instead of admiring it in the driveway.

It is accepting that sometimes the world will reprice you and refusing to let the price become your name.

And maybe most important for a man who spent a good part of his life going in the wrong direction:

It is realizing that the engine was never the whole problem.

Sometimes you just have to point the damn thing somewhere worth going.

DON'T SCRATCH

Playing pool, there is always the possibility of a scratch.

Fine. Know where the cue ball is going. Respect the risk.

But I have watched people play life the same way too many people play pool: NOT

TO LOSE.

Don't take the shot. Don't risk embarrassment. Don't risk failure. Don't risk being wrong. Don't risk looking foolish. Don't scratch. Don't scratch. Don't scratch.

And before long - they're not really playing anymore.

I chose differently.

I never wanted to play NOT to lose. I wanted to play to WIN.

That does not mean recklessness. It means accepting that the possibility of losing is part of what gives winning its meaning.

There is excitement in the risk of losing that I do not think everybody understands. Some people call avoiding it safety. Sometimes it is simply passivity wearing a helmet.

Win, lose or draw, I'd rather be wrong moving forward than right standing still.

Take the shot. Own the miss. Learn the table. Shoot again.

The Go-Between

During the publishing years I loved THE DATABASE.

Capital letters intentional.

A database is not exciting to everybody. To me it was a room full of possibilities.

LEADS.

Leads.

LEADS.

How do you get them?

How do you use them?

How do you close them?

That was the game.

I had heard the multi-level-marketing people say something like:

Anybody within five feet of you is a prospect. Make an offer.

Fine.

But what fascinated me was how many people made the offer and then forgot the person existed.

No record.

No follow-up.

No memory of the conversation.

No system.

They were constantly starting over.

Then came the computer.

The Internet.

The database.

And suddenly every contact could become part of something larger.

YES.

Record it.

NO.

Record it.

NOT NOW.

Record it.

CALL ME LATER.

Damn right.

Record it.

Give the information proper instruction.

Follow up.

Call back regularly.

Because success is in the information.

Once I understood that, selling started looking to me like one of two things:

Fishing.

Or farming.

Fishing is baiting the hook and putting more lines in the water.

Farming is planting more seed.

More hooks in the water, more chances for a bite.

More seed in the ground, more chances for a harvest.

Simple.

Ambition -> effort -> result.

Or, as Ma might have put it:

You reap what you sow.

A database simply helped me remember where I had planted the seed.

Names. Businesses. Needs. Money. Skills. Locations. Relationships. One dot over here. Another dot over there.

I would look for the connection.

Sometimes I did not have the capital. Sometimes I did not personally have the technical skill. What I could often do was connect the person who could DO something with the person who needed it, funded it or could move it.

I became the go-between.

Sometimes what I manufactured was simply:

THE CONNECTION.

That was business triangulation before I started using triangulation as an epistemic word.

A third-party marketer is always triangulating.

Need over here. Capability over there. The marketer sees the third point: the connection.

A database is basically a room full of strangers until somebody discovers how they're related.

Come to think of it - so is life.

Where the Hell Were YOU When I Needed You?

When I look at artificial intelligence now, one thought keeps irritating me.

If I had had this fifteen years ago, could Az Tourist New have survived longer?

I THINK I KNOW it might have.

Editing. Layout. research. copy. production. repetitive tasks that required people, time and money I did not always have.

Would AI have guaranteed success?

Of course not.

There goes the Examiner again.

Technology does not repeal markets, timing, competition or Tony's capacity to make a bad decision.

But it changes leverage.

And leverage is WORK WISE.

One person can now do parts of a job that once required several people. That can threaten jobs. It can also let a small operator create something that previously required capital he did not have.

Same tool.

Different direction.

So yes, I look at AI and occasionally have one deeply philosophical reaction:

Where the hell were YOU when I needed you?

There is another version of this problem coming at us fast.

We have entered an age in which a statement about reality can arrive before the evidence for it.

Someone tells you what something IS.

THE EXAMINER still has the right to ask:

How do you know?

I have watched that argument play out in questions of sex and gender, where identity, biology, language and social courtesy can become conflated.

Each to their own.

That is also my answer to what I understand as a false narrative about racism.

I reject the notion on its face - particularly when I hear the argument, advanced by some, that Black people themselves cannot be racist.

How does that work?

Does EACH TO THEIR OWN apply in one direction, but not the other?

If racism means judging or treating somebody according to race, then I am not persuaded that one race possesses some unique exemption from the capacity to do it.

THE MODIFIER MATTERS.

I am not saying all Black Americans believe that. They obviously do not.

I am saying I reject the argument when I hear it.

As for me?

I'll remain content in my Italian-American skin.

Live your life. Believe what you believe. Call yourself what you want.

But my rejection begins when that personal belief is imposed upon me as fact.

The imposition is part of the objection.

Courtesy is one thing. Equal dignity is one thing. Objective classification is another.

And now technology brings us another version.

Somebody hands me an essay. A poem. A painting. A song. A brilliant piece of reasoning.

My first reaction may be: WOW.

Then comes the question we are all going to have to learn to ask:

Who - or what - actually made this?

Human intelligence?

Artificial intelligence?

Something increasingly difficult to distinguish from either?

Maybe someday we will call it Superior Intelligence.

SI.

And once again, perception will not be enough.

Something can look human. Sound human. Feel human. Move me like

something human.

And still leave THE EXAMINER asking:

But what IS it?

Because the future may make one thing increasingly difficult:

knowing whether what we perceive is the same thing as what is real.

CHAPTER 5A

HOW I BECAME A PUBLISHER

IT DID NOT HAPPEN IN ONE JUMP

The transition from health-club salesman to publisher of Az Tourist New had a lot of steps in between. Advertising flyer. Subdivision newsletters. A Hughes Aircraft newsletter. One small job producing the question that created the next one.

At some point it occurred to me: Why don’t you become THE printer who prints your flyers and newsletters? Dream it. Create it. Market it. Cross-market it. Sell advertising to the people you sell wholesale printing to. Sell printing to the people you sell advertising to.

One problem. I had NO money.

THE $5,000 PRESS

I saw an ad for a printing press: about $5,000. I went to the address and found a print shop whose owner was unloading old equipment. I walked around the press, saw the dust, blew some off and took my time.

“Wow. Old piece of equipment. You’re not going to have many takers, you know that, right?”

Then I made the offer: ten payments of $500. Never mind that I did not have a location, did not know how to run the press and was not quite sure where payment number one was going to come from.

He said yes.

“There’s a catch.” First payment next week. Fine. “One more thing.” I need to keep the press HERE and bring in my own pressman to run MY press. After all, you want me close enough to pay you back, right? Fine.

And, oh — one MORE thing.

He smiled. “One more?”

I would need his cutter. His folder. The stuff that turns ink on paper into a finished product.

He agreed.

That was Access Marketing Systems trying to become something before Access Marketing Systems even had a home.

It was not long before I had my own location. Then I went to nonprofit groups with another model: I would produce their newsletter free; all I wanted were the advertising rights. Printing fed advertising. Advertising fed printing. Tony’s ants-in-the-pants brain had found machinery.

THE ADVERTISING RAG

I did not decide one morning to become a publisher. I backed into it.

While I was still at International Fitness Centers, I started an advertising rag for the health club. Nothing sophisticated. A flyer. Promote the club. Get it in front of people.

I paid to have that flyer inserted into a local neighborhood newspaper, The Territorial.

For a few months I was simply using somebody else's distribution to advertise MY health club.

Then my unEducated NOSE looked at all that space and asked: Why am I the only advertiser?

I started selling some of the space to other businesses.

Now instead of merely paying to distribute my own advertising, I was making a profit distributing everybody else's advertising too.

I had accidentally stumbled into the economics of publishing.

Create something people will receive. Build an audience. Sell businesses ACCESS to that audience. Pay the distribution cost. Keep what is left.

Pretty damn simple.

THE DAY THEY COULD NOT TAKE MY FLYERS

One month I showed up with my usual supply for insertion.

The manager looked at me and said:

"CAN'T TAKE THEM."

Why not?

Then came the sentence that probably changed the direction of my working life:

"Our people can't sell advertising in your area."

Aah.

NOW I understood. I was not merely their customer anymore. I had become their

COMPETITION.

They had accidentally taught me the business and then told me I could not use their newspaper to compete with their business.

Fair enough.

But the lesson was already mine. I did not necessarily need THEIR newspaper. I could become the publisher.

A closed door did not always tell me to stop. Sometimes it showed me where the door was.

ACCESS

There were a lot of gyrations after that.

Access Marketing Systems. Access Communication System. Advertising. Printing.

Employee publications.

I kept versions of that business life going for roughly twenty-five years. I did not build wealth. I built myself a JOB nobody could fire me from.

The business resembled Tony. Ants in the pants became a busy-beaver business model: concept after concept moving from imagination to finished print almost on the fly.

ADpads — advertising on the backs of message pads in the 1990s. Fundraising discount cards. Cards sold with merchant discounts. Free-card models where the advertisers paid the cost. If an idea arrived, I did not leave it sitting on the drawing table very long.

I did not necessarily build wealth. I built independence.

I worked from home. Sold advertising. Got a printing press on payments because I damn sure did not have the money to simply buy one.

One publication became another. Eventually there were many.

Hughes Aircraft became one of the major steps. We published an employee monthly publication for Hughes and kept going through the later corporate- name change to Raytheon.

At one point we were producing roughly thirty monthly publications.

The DNA was already there in that first health-club flyer: AUDIENCE +

INFORMATION + ADVERTISING + DISTRIBUTION.

Find the audience. Create the vehicle. Sell access to the vehicle. Repeat.

That is why the company name ACCESS made sense.

THE PHOENIX CHAMBER - AND THE FAMILY I

ALMOST NEVER HAD

The road eventually included the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce newspaper and, later, Az Tourist New.

Az Tourist New eventually printed about 60,000 copies a month. Printing them was one thing. Distribution was ACTUAL work — by my definition, the thing I would rather have been doing something else instead of doing.

In the beginning I personally handled most of it, and toward the end I would take the route again whenever I needed to get away. Roughly 4,000 miles a month: hotels, tourist stops, attractions, places where local and out-of-state visitors could discover the whole state rather than only Phoenix and Tucson.

I remember Tucson’s tourism bureau rejecting me and, in essentially the same breath, warning me not to compete with them. Really? I thought organizations like that existed to support entrepreneurs. Another piece of naivete identified the long way.

I remember the Phoenix Chamber publication with particular pride because Byron was working beside me.

Ian — Byron’s brother — served as our distribution manager for a time. His tireless sense of responsibility impressed me. I admired that about him.

Byron was on his way into the tourism industry. That road would eventually lead him to a Fulbright and then to a professorship at Washington State University.

His twin brother, Ian, was part of those formative adult years too.

The two of them helped me. I hope, in whatever ways mattered, I helped them.

And behind that part of my life was Pamela. The family I almost NEVER had.

Funny thing about looking backward. I thought I was building publications.

Selling advertising. Creating businesses. Making money. Trying to get somewhere.

Only later do you discover that some of the most important things you were building were not on the balance sheet at all.

For that, I thank Pamela.

PART II - THE MIND

CHAPTER 6

WHY ARE PEOPLE THE WAY THEY ARE?

I have spent a good portion of my life trying to figure people out. Not because I am a psychologist. I am not.

I am an experiential social philosopher - the PRESUMPTIVE PHILOSOPHER.

There is a difference.

The question underneath much of my writing was never simply, Why did Tony become Tony? The larger question was: Why are people the way they are?

Why can two people look at the same thing and see different realities?

Why do people follow?

Why do they conform?

Why do they make things RIGHT in their own heads?

Why can an intelligent person behave stupidly?

Why can a person know better and still do worse?

My own life became useful because I was not outside the human condition taking notes. I was one of the specimens. I have been wrong for reasons that made complete sense to me at the time. That is valuable information if you are willing to admit it.

One of the habits I developed was putting myself in the other man's shoes. Not the easy version where I imagine what I would do if I were him. I mean trying to think as he would think. What would have to be true inside his head for what he is doing to make sense to him?

Walks it.

That is not an argument against evidence from the outside. It is an argument for knowing what kind of knowledge you have. Lived experience gives access to something observation cannot fully duplicate. Observation can inform you. It can sharpen you. It can even correct you. But lived experience, when it is truly yours, gives you something else. It gives you what Tony would call the unFUCKwithAble. Not because you know everything. But because you lived it.

Experience also creates its own danger. The same dark-side experience that taught me to read fear, leverage, motive and deception can make me expect them where they are not. Experience can sharpen intuition. It can also bias it. So I have to ask myself: is my experience warning me - or prejudicing me?

That is a different exercise.

It also became part of the way I talked to people. Before criticizing someone I can often hear a quick internal question: put me in his shoes. How will this land? Is it offensive? If it is offensive, is the offense doing useful work or merely destroying the point?

Sometimes the answer is don't say it.

Sometimes the answer is say it.

I have never been especially frightened of irritating somebody. But irritation is not automatically intelligence. The useful provocation is the one that gets close

enough to insult that the reader thinks, Is this son of a bitch insulting me? - and while deciding, considers the question.

That is what sits underneath "Aren't I embarrassing you?"

The deeper Tony version is probably this: If I GET it, why don't YOU?

That can sound arrogant until you understand what I mean by "I." I am not presenting myself as the university professor standing at the front of the room. I am the guy who spent years addicted, committed crimes, went to prison, blew opportunities, rebuilt, lost things, rebuilt again and learned mostly by having consequences hit him in the face.

I am your lowest possible bar.

I AM THE LITMUS TEST

I am the litmus test.

I am the filter, the calibration point, the laboratory - and sometimes the first suspect.

Before I judge the world, I run the question through the one person

I have had a lifetime to study:

ME.

I was exposed to POPULARIZED waters. I played in them. Sometimes I damn near drowned in them. But I was not POPULARIZED. I knew the water was polluted.

If I could get here from where I started, what is your excuse?

That is the provocation.

It is also where I have to watch myself. A person can turn his own survival into a weapon against somebody whose burden he does not understand. My experience gives me perspective. It does not give me omniscience.

Need gets patience. Excuses get impatience.

The problem is that Tony has to decide which is which.

And Tony has been wrong before.

There is something underneath a lot of what people have called my anger over the years. Anger is not my philosophy. Anger is sometimes the ignition.

Fear can be ignition too. We are taught to think of fear as weakness, but fear often precedes action when the action required is uncomfortable. The question is whether the fear moves you toward thought or away from it. Same with anger.

Anger can focus the mind, or it can burn the damn house down before you remember you live there.

But grievance can also become a reason to stop assessing and start collecting evidence for revenge. An axe to grind makes a lousy measuring stick.

And this is where Tony sees something else happening politically - particularly on the Left.

I THINK I KNOW that grievance itself can become an identity.

You spend four years in college. You were encouraged to believe the degree was the ticket: education, career, income, status.

The industrialized university structure sold a promise - or at least that is how Tony sees it.

Can you imagine being told for as long as you can remember: College. College.

You MUST go to college.

Go to college and somehow, almost automatically, you will become successful.

You will get the good job. You will make the good money. Almost regardless of what you study.

I do not think so.

A degree can matter. Education can matter enormously. But a degree is not a license to practice life, and it sure as hell is not a guaranteed income.

Some students turned their studies into useful careers. Others came home with something very different: a worldview, a vocabulary, a grievance, an identity, and sometimes an activist mission - but no automatic economic value attached to the diploma.

And there it was again: TICK. TOCK.

Let the credential become confused with competence. Let education become confused with employability. Let political or social conviction become confused with occupational preparation.

Then act surprised when some graduates discover that the world outside the university never signed the same contract.

I came to believe much of the political Left understood the power of universities as places where attitudes, identities and activism could be formed.

Was it all some coordinated global plan?

I cannot prove that. But I BELIEVE the ideological direction was real enough to watch.

Step by step, inch by inch.

Then you graduate.

The job you expected is not there.

The income you imagined is not there.

Maybe the degree you paid dearly for has considerably less market value than you were led to expect.

Now you are pissed.

There is your axe.

There is your chip on the shoulder.

And somewhere along the way, Tony believes too many students were encouraged to think of themselves first as activists rather than students.

Taught what to believe before being sufficiently challenged to discover what they actually know.

There is an enormous difference.

You can be taught a belief.

But Truth has to be learned.

Examined. Tested. Argued with. Sometimes painfully discovered.

And if disappointment becomes grievance before self-assessment ever enters the equation, the question changes.

Instead of: What happened? What did I misunderstand? What did I contribute to this outcome? What can I do differently?

It becomes:

Who did this TO me?

Now Tony sees the axe being sharpened.

And once you have an axe to grind, almost everything you encounter can start looking like another reason to swing it.

As the old saying goes:

If you see yourself as a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail.

I watched people.

I watched myself.

I watched the gap between what people said and what they did.

I watched groups make people braver and dumber at the same time.

I watched belonging become a substitute for thinking.

That is where POPULARIZED becomes a people problem, not merely a media problem. Belonging feels good. Exclusion hurts. Once the price of admission to a group is agreement, your opinion can become the membership fee.

The self-check I wish I had asked more often is brutally simple: Did I THINK this - or did I JOIN it? The question has to work on liberals, conservatives, MAGA, academia, religion, corporations, families, social circles and Tony Venuti. If it only works on the other side, it is not a measuring stick. It is a weapon.

I watched people borrow identity from crowds.

That led me to an idea that connects directly back to I AM ME.

There is identity that comes from inside, and identity that has to be fed from outside.

The second kind is hungry.

It wants approval. It wants the IN Crowd. It wants celebrity, movement, tribe, ideology, applause. It can make a person defend something he would never have invented on his own because rejecting the belief now feels like rejecting himself.

That is one reason culture interests me as much as politics. Politics is usually the visible argument. Culture is the water the argument is swimming in.

Try telling a fish it is wet.

The fish has no clue.

The same question has to be asked of me: Which water was Tony swimming in without knowing he was wet?

That is a much better question than simply telling everybody else they are programmed.

I have written about the Human Condition versus the re-Conditioned Human.

The mature version of that idea cannot be that everything I like is "natural" and everything I dislike is "re-conditioned." That would be too easy.

The useful question is: How much of what I called nature was nature - and how much was the world that raised me?

Family. Sex. Work. Masculinity. Femininity. Race. Religion. Ambition. Duty.

Shame. Pride. Patriotism. Success. Failure. All of these are shaped by some mixture of biology, circumstance, family, institutions, culture and personal choice.

I do not have a formula that separates them perfectly.

What if? What if there were no hypotheticals?

Sorry. Couldn't resist.

But adulthood is one area where my patience has remained pretty consistent.

Childhood deserves protection. Adulthood demands responsibility.

And maybe my biggest indictment of PopCulture is this:

It displaced MATURITY.

We modeled the culture we consumed.

And Tony watched that culture increasingly make adulthood look like something to postpone rather than something to achieve.

The nuclear family too often became dysfunctional, ridiculous, oppressive or simply uninteresting.

Meanwhile, entertainers could be celebrated for living lives built around excess, rebellion, drugs and all the other FUN stuff - even when some of those same people ultimately demonstrated just how little value they had placed on their own lives.

Another inversion.

While we turn entertainers into gods, how often are we almost indifferent to the extraordinary advances being made by scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and self-starters?

Elon Musk comes immediately to mind.

And while I was writing this very book, President Trump awarded Musk and several other technology innovators the nation's highest science and technology honors.

Think about that.

Spacecraft.

Rockets returning to Earth and landing themselves.

Electric automobiles.

Satellites orbiting the planet by the thousands.

Human beings pushing toward accomplishments that, not very long ago, belonged to science fiction.

THAT is rock-star COOL.

No.

Strike that.

THAT is CONSERVATIVE COOL.

At least as I define it.

AMBITION > EFFORT > SELF-WORTH > ACCOMPLISHMENT.

Build something.

Risk something.

Fail.

Learn.

Build it again.

Produce something that did not exist before you arrived.

Yet we can live in a culture where the entertainer destroying himself is romanticized while the builder accomplishing something extraordinary becomes a political villain.

And there is another irony I cannot ignore.

How many people who despise Musk politically still climb into a Tesla and drive away?

The product is acceptable. The producer is intolerable.

Now THAT fascinates me.

I do not have to agree with Elon Musk on everything. I do not have to agree with Donald Trump on everything.

THE EXAMINER gets a vote.

But accomplishment ought to remain recognizable as accomplishment.

Somewhere along the way, perhaps we should reconsider who qualifies as a ROCK

STAR.

We could mourn the tragedy afterward and still romanticize the road that helped get them there.

And then came the deaths. The untimely deaths.

Musicians, performers, gifted people who must have lived in the land of NOT ENOUGH for far too long - because apparently the land of MORE kept demanding more still.

And what bothered me just as much was watching musicians treat God-given talent as though it were nothing special - as if anybody could simply pick up a guitar, sit behind a set of drums, grab a microphone and become an overnight sensation.

I would watch the excesses.

Then I would watch the wonderment of others - the almost worshipful attention paid to THE lead singer.

And I would wonder what, exactly, we were worshipping.

Talent?

Fame?

Excess?

Celebrity itself?

I would put that disappointment right up there with the Media-Ocracy - because both, in their own ways, helped shape the BIG picture by deciding what the public should admire, envy, imitate and call COOL.

More stimulation. More excess. More risk.

Keep reaching for the edge and eventually the edge takes on a whole new meaning.

Drugs? Sorry.

IDIOTS.

I rarely mourned them the way I was apparently supposed to. I was outraged.

Outraged at what I saw as the dismissal of a God-given talent - something meant to be shared with other people - traded away in a private descent into the self.

And then everybody was supposed to stand around afterward and say: Gee. Shucks.

What a tragedy.

Yes. It was a tragedy. But how much of the road to that tragedy did we spend celebrating?

Tony never understood that contradiction.

Because culture teaches by what it applauds. By what it laughs at. By what it makes COOL. And by what it stops honoring.

I remember an America that was much more comfortable publicly honoring the military, the flag, family and the institutions associated with adulthood and responsibility.

Go back through the decades as I remember them and you could see military bands, uniforms, patriotic ceremonies and displays woven naturally into major public events.

They were not always treated as something requiring an apology or an explanation.

Somewhere along the way, Tony believes we diminished - and then began displacing - pieces of traditional American culture.

Not all tradition was good. Tony knows better than that.

But throwing away what deserved changing did not require throwing away maturity, responsibility, family, duty and gratitude along with it.

That is the distinction I keep coming back to.

Progress should mean growing up. Not finding more sophisticated reasons not to.

That does not mean adults never need help. Of course they do. I have needed help.

Everybody does. It means help should not become an argument against agency where agency still exists.

What happens to a society when it becomes increasingly difficult to tell where childhood ends and adulthood begins?

What happens when culture itself encourages the adult not to grow up?

Who benefits from people who never quite become the boss of themselves?

Those are people questions before they are political questions.

Which brings us back to the laboratory.

People are not merely what they say they believe. They are what they fear, need, want, protect, imitate, excuse, envy, remember, forget and make RIGHT in their heads.

And if the book has a laboratory, that is it.

Including the specimen writing the book.

CHAPTER 7

THE EXPERIENTIAL SOCIAL PHILOSOPHER - IN THE PRESUMPTIVE

I work in the presumptive. I know what I know, and more importantly, I know what I do not know. I trust my intuit, then allow logic, reason, deduction and experience to work on the idea.

That sentence appeared in my writing long before we started organizing this book, which matters to me because it tells me I was not inventing the philosophy afterward to make the life look prettier.

Presumption is not certainty.

I AM SEXIST.

There. I said it.

Now before somebody runs off with the word, let me tell you what I mean by it.

To me, sex differences are part of nature. Men and women are equal in human worth. I never said they were the same.

I grew up believing a man takes care of women and children. Protects. Provides.

Stands between danger and the people depending on him.

A woman nurtures in ways a man often cannot duplicate.

Different does not mean lesser. Different means different.

So yes - if that makes me a sexist by somebody else’s definition, then fine.

But use my definition before you judge my conclusion.

It is permission to begin.

My mind has always been willing to run ahead of the evidence. I allow it. I put myself in another person's head. I follow the logical progression. I ask what happens if the premise is true. I connect things. I make a presumption. I give it the smell test. If it survives that, I let it swim upstream.

Sometimes it makes it.

Sometimes it dies somewhere along the river.

Theory of Duh.

Not every thought that comes out of Tony Venuti deserves to be bronzed.

The discipline comes after the idea appears.

I once wrote a version of it this way: your intuitive alerts your BRAIN; your BRAIN must confirm.

That matters. Intuition is not a certificate of truth. Intuition notices. Reason examines. Experience tests. Evidence confirms - or doesn't. Certainty comes last.

That is the logical progression of thought in action.

Logic can take me somewhere evidence hasn't reached yet. That doesn't mean I get to call the destination KNOW.

Inference is allowed to travel ahead.

Certainty has to wait for evidence.

That is why "How do you know when you KNOW?" became so important. The dangerous man is not always the ignorant man. Ignorance can be corrected. The

dangerous condition is not knowing that you do not know and manufacturing an answer anyway.

That is where confirmation bias begins: not searching for what is true, but searching for what confirms what you have already decided to believe.

I once reduced the problem to a provocation: if you think you know, you don't know. Crude? Sure. But the point was serious. There is what I know through direct experience. There is what I observed. There is what I think I know through reasoning. There is what I believe. And there is what the record can actually show.

Those are not interchangeable categories.

There is another distinction that now belongs beside those categories: Tony does not judge. Tony assesses. That is not me pretending to have no values. It is a method. Input -> output. Action -> reaction. Cause -> effect. Effort -> result.

Claim -> evidence. Then decide what the math actually says.

Do not judge the label. Assess what is inside it. Define it first. Then assess it. If everything is something, when is it NOT something? A category with no boundary does not tell you much.

So the book uses them deliberately:

I KNOW - personal experience.

I OBSERVED - something I witnessed.

I THINK I KNOW - inference, intuition, logic, deduction.

I BELIEVE - a conclusion or conviction I cannot establish as fact.

THE RECORD SHOWS - something that can be documented outside Tony's head.

That system is not there to make the prose academic. It is there to keep confidence from impersonating evidence.

The Power of Certainty begins there.

Certainty is not pretending to know everything. False certainty is nearly the opposite. Real certainty includes being able to say, "I don't know."

I KNOW what I know.

I DON'T KNOW what I don't know.

And I'm not going to manufacture an answer because somebody expects one.

There is another part that took longer to articulate. I do not need the last word WHEN the Power of Certainty has been presented.

The "when" matters.

If I have simply barked an opinion, that is not certainty. If I have explained what I know, what I observed, what I inferred, where the evidence ends and where my judgment begins, then your refusal to agree does not make the explanation disappear.

You can agree, disagree, laugh or prove me wrong.

If you prove me wrong, then I have something new to know.

The more I examined my old writing, the more I saw another danger. Certainty can explain persuasion; it cannot establish truth.

The Power of Certainty therefore has to meet performance. Certainty without action is confidence. Action without evidence is motion. Credibility begins when the claim survives the result. Promise -> performance -> proof -> assessment.

Do not tell me what you believe. Show me what your belief produces.

That became especially important in my writing about Trump. I responded strongly to what I perceived as certainty and authenticity. I believed he believed what he was saying. That is psychologically important. It may explain why an audience trusts a person.

But it does not make the person correct.

Was I responding to what Trump said - or to the fact that I believed HE believed what he said?

Fine. He believes it.

Now the Presumptive Philosopher has to ask the harder question:

Is he RIGHT?

That self-audit changes the whole book.

Definitions matter because language is the toolbox of thought. Before you build an argument, check the damn tools. Before you measure anything, make sure somebody has not bent the ruler.

DEFINE TERMS.

Or have them defined for you.

Because language can work like a sucker punch:

the first definition to land often wins.

And once somebody else defines the word, they may already have defined the argument before you even realize you are in one.

A word has a definition, a context and a history. Change the meaning and you can change the argument without announcing that the argument changed.

Sometimes language changes organically.

Sometimes people deliberately stretch it, narrow it, redefine it or load it with a new meaning.

I do not get to presume motive.

I do get to inspect the ruler.

Because an authoritarian understands something very important:

Control the language and you can begin controlling the boundaries of the argument.

Change what a word means. Make an older meaning unacceptable, ridiculous or nearly unusable. Attach approval to one definition and suspicion to another.

Eventually people begin thinking inside the new vocabulary without remembering that the ruler itself was changed.

Take the word gay.

I charge the Left with possession of stolen words.

Not every changing definition is theft, and not every linguistic change is engineered. But I have watched political language absorb words, redefine them, and then act as though the newer meaning had always belonged to them.

For generations it commonly meant cheerful, carefree, bright or lighthearted.

Today its overwhelmingly familiar meaning is homosexual. The older meaning still exists, but try using it casually and see which meaning people hear first.

That does not prove somebody engineered that particular change.

It proves something more basic:

Words can change so completely that yesterday's ordinary meaning can become almost inaccessible tomorrow.

That is why Tony watches language.

Not because every changing word is a conspiracy.

Because whenever somebody changes the ruler, I want to know what they are now asking me to measure with it.

That is why the half-full, half-empty argument amuses me. Before you two idiots finish arguing, maybe somebody ought to ask what is in the glass. Fact first.

Frame second. Assessment before allegiance.

It also explains why I found an old critical-thinking framework so interesting. In 2016 I circulated a Paul and Elder framework for evaluating thinking: purpose, assumptions, point of view, information, inference, implications, accuracy, relevance, breadth, fairness and more. I was using it to ask what standards journalists should meet.

Years later the obvious question is harder and better:

Tony - do YOU meet them?

Tony belongs on the witness stand too.

Accuracy: Did I have the facts?

Precision: Does the detail matter enough to change the truth?

Breadth: Did I actually put on the other guy's shoes, or did I merely imagine a dumber version of him?

Logic: Does my conclusion follow?

Significance: Am I focusing on what matters or what irritates me?

Fairness: Would I use the same standard on my own side?

Certainty says: I know what I know.

Humility says: and I know I could still be wrong about what I only THINK I know.

That is not weakness. That is maintenance.

I learned mostly outside classrooms. I have called myself an ORGANIC learner.

Prison, addiction, sales, business, radio, people, failure, success, Ma, consequences - those were classrooms too. That does not make formal education worthless. It explains the route by which information became meaningful to me.

Knowledge by itself is not wisdom.

Wisdom TRUMPS intelligence.

I spent enough years being intelligent and stupid at the same time to learn that.

Information can tell you something. Experience can test it. Wisdom is what survives. Certainty is knowing what survived - and knowing what didn't.

Age helps only if you are paying attention. An old fool is still a fool with more birthdays.

The Machiavelli material became one example of how my mind worked. I watched Trump meet with former opponents like Mitt Romney and Al Gore after the 2016 election. I recognized a pattern that reminded me of The Prince. I found passages that seemed analogous and asked whether that framework explained what I was seeing.

That is presumption doing useful work.

Observe behavior.

Recognize a pattern.

Find a comparable pattern elsewhere.

Run logic.

Smell test.

Then label the conclusion correctly.

"Trump was following Machiavelli" would be a factual claim requiring evidence of intent.

"Trump's behavior reminded me of a Machiavellian strategy" is an observation plus interpretation.

The difference may look small on a ranting blog page.

It is enormous in a book about knowing.

There is one more form of certainty that matters to me: action certainty.

Words are cheap because they are easy to manufacture.

Too much supply. Too little demand.

Everybody can produce words. Far fewer people produce something worth listening to.

I kept returning to a simple sequence in business and politics:

Tell me what you are going to do.

DO it.

Then tell me what you did.

Words -> action -> evidence.

Results do not automatically prove the philosophy behind them. But results give us another thing to examine. They move the argument out of imagination.

That is one reason I picketed a television station instead of only writing about media. It is one reason I kept showing up. It is one reason I respect the DOer even when I later decide the thing he did was wrong.

But I also understood something else.

No matter how many people showed up at one television station, I suspected that station could simply ignore us.

So I came up with what I called the POWER OF TEN.

The idea was simple: what if I could get even a handful of people to show up at television stations in different cities at the same time?

One station protesting one station could be ignored.

But ten stations being protested at once?

Now the Media-Ocracy had a problem.

Because media will report on media when the story is happening to somebody else in media.

And once one station reports that another station is being protested, the others may suddenly have to report that THEY are being protested too.

In other words:

Make the Media-Ocracy report on ITSELF.

That was the theory.

Not ten thousand people.

Not some giant national movement.

Just enough DOers, in enough places, at the same time, to make ignoring us harder than reporting us.

THE POWER OF TEN.

Ten DOers beat ten thousand nodding heads.

Don't tell me what you believe you can do. Do it. Then we'll both know more than we did before.

That is the Presumptive Philosopher at his best.

At his worst, he falls in love with the presumption and skips the test.

This book has to contain both men.

CHAPTER 8

A PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

Popularized

I used to use POPULARIZED as an accusation.

They had been Popularized.

The liberals.

The media audience.

The IN Crowd.

People who wanted to be cool badly enough to rent their judgment to the culture.

Then the idea got better.

Tony was exposed to POPULARIZED waters too.

That changes everything.

We who are human are ALL exposed to being Popularized. Exposure is not acceptance.

Tony played in polluted water. Sometimes I damn near drowned in it. But I did not mistake polluted water for clean water.

I knew what Ma had taught me. I knew when I was violating it. I understood the inversion even when I chose to participate in it anyway.

Knowing better and doing wrong anyway is one failure. No longer

knowing it is wrong is another. POPULARIZED is the second one.

We arrive in a world already in progress. Language is here. Family is here.

Customs are here. Religion or nonreligion is here. Ideas about masculinity, femininity, success, beauty, class, patriotism, sex, shame, money, God, authority, rebellion, right and wrong are already talking before the child knows there is a conversation.

Much of what feels like MINE enters the mind before the mind knows to ask where it came from.

I discovered that much of what I thought I KNEW had first been given to me.

That does not mean everything I inherited was wrong.

Some of it was right.

Some of it became part of who I am.

But there is a difference between being taught something and examining it for yourself.

I had inherited answers before I knew enough to ask the questions.

Later, THE EXAMINER would make me go back and check them.

The Popularized, the Popularizers, the Examiner

The first role is easy.

The Popularized.

Everybody.

The second is the Popularizers: parents, teachers, peers, churches, advertisers, entertainers, journalists, politicians, governments, movements, celebrities, algorithms, authors, Tony Venuti.

But the Popularizers are themselves Popularized.

That is important because otherwise the theory turns into a cartoon with evil programmers on one side and innocent programmed people on the other.

The parent teaches what the parent inherited.

The journalist frames through a lens the journalist did not invent from nothing.

The rebel rebels in a language supplied by the culture he is rebelling against.

The conservative is Popularized.

The liberal is Popularized.

The atheist.

The believer.

The professor.

The prisoner.

The guy writing this book.

Then comes the third role.

The Examiner.

The Examiner is not another character and not some external authority. It is Tony’s rhetorical instrument for metacognition: Tony watching Tony think.

What do I know? Why do I think I know it? What was handed to me? What did I observe? What am I assuming? What am I missing? Am I being compelled toward one conclusion — only? Did I check my work?

The Examiner does not destroy certainty. It earns it.

The third validates one's intellectual integrity by the very virtue of ExaminING.

Not by always getting the answer right.

By being willing to examine why the answer feels right.

Intellectual integrity is not proven by what you believe. It is proven by your willingness to examine why you believe it.

MCC NEW YORK — TEN TEETH

One of my last prison episodes — as best I remember — was at MCC New York, the federal high-rise in Manhattan. Today I sit here with dentures. A good part of the reason goes back to one day just weeks before I was supposed to be released.

A Black inmate cut directly in front of me in the lunch line. I told him, “Hey, pal. Get behind me. Anywhere you want — but behind me.” Minutes later I was sitting at a table with no wall at my back. In maximum security I would have guaranteed myself that wall. This was a lower-security setting, and I got careless.

He came up from behind and introduced my face to an industrial mop wringer. I fought back, kicking and swinging, while spitting blood and teeth. I lost about ten teeth that day.

And here is where GENERALIZATION IN THE ABSTRACT earns its keep. That man was Black. That man attacked me. Those are facts. What I am NOT entitled to say is that the next Black man I meet has inherited his guilt.

Some of the coolest, most mature men I ever met in prison were Black. I knew both experiences. The individual gets assessed as the individual.

A generalization may describe a group. It cannot convict the individual standing in front of me.

Conventional Wisdom

I used to wonder about the phrase conventional wisdom.

What the hell does that mean?

Wisdom because it survived examination?

Or wisdom because enough people repeated it?

In 2017 I wrote about "Wisdom PROGRAMMED to affect We the

People's critical thought."

Maybe I overstated who was doing the programming.

But I was asking the right question.

How does an idea become so familiar that nobody remembers to examine it?

Repeated.

Accepted.

Familiar.

Assumed.

And eventually -

KNOWN.

Except maybe it isn't known at all.

Maybe it is merely Popularized.

That gives me one of the important sequences in this book:

POPULARIZED -> accepted -> familiar -> assumed -> "known" -> challenged -> examined -> IS.

The Examiner does not reject conventional wisdom because it is conventional.

He asks whether it is wisdom.

I had been drawing this argument long before I had all the academic language for it.

First create the story.

Then repeat it.

Let entertainment make it familiar.

Let authority make it respectable.

Let polling tell you how many people now believe it.

Then point to the belief itself as proof.

Seal of Approval.

Pop-CULT-ure Approved.

And eventually:

Conventional Wisdom.

While actual wisdom may have you running the other way.

Because "conventional" only tells you what became accepted.

It does not tell you whether it was ever wise.

Conventional wisdom tells you what people accept. Actual wisdom asks whether they should.

The MediaOcracy keeps the "Conventional" alive...

The Mickey Mouse Club - The Beginning...

Get them young.

Model behavior.

Create envy.

Develop loyalty.

Harbor agreement without thought.

At that young age, who knew?

Looking back, I see the beginnings of what I would later call POPULARIZED - the process by which belonging, imitation, repetition and group approval can begin shaping what feels normal before we ever stop to examine why.

The Reward System

Why do people surrender judgment?

Usually because judgment does not live in a vacuum.

Belonging feels good.

Exclusion hurts.

Approval is a reward.

Ridicule is a punishment.

Status is a reward.

Shunning is a punishment.

A human being can begin by agreeing with a group and end by needing the group to keep agreeing with him.

At that point belief and identity become roommates.

Changing your mind starts to feel like moving out of your own house.

That is why self-worth belongs before Popularized.

COOL does more than tell us what to like. It tells us what to aspire to.

There was a time when America seemed to me to be an ASPIRATIONAL country.

Success was what you put out front.

Television, advertising, movies - they showed you the handsome guy, the beautiful woman, the athlete, the winner, the person who looked like they had

ARRIVED.

As a kid, I remember thinking something almost embarrassingly simple:

Boy, I'm glad I'm not bad-looking.

Because it seemed to me that if you wanted the good job, the attention, the opportunity - whatever was being presented as success - you had better not show up looking too far outside the ideal.

Was that fair?

Probably not.

Was it real?

I OBSERVED it.

The culture held up an image and said:

That is what you should aspire toward.

Then, somewhere along the way, I watched the emphasis begin to change.

Aspiration started giving way to accommodation.

Instead of saying, Here is something to reach for, the culture increasingly seemed to say, Whatever you are right now must never make you uncomfortable.

And there is a difference.

Acceptance can be humane.

Compassion can be necessary.

But if compassion becomes an excuse never to improve, never to become healthier, never to become stronger, never to reach...

then compassion has crossed over into something else.

Aspiration morphed into feeling sorry for.

And that, to me, is another inversion.

Because there is nothing cruel about saying:

You can become MORE.

Sometimes that is the most respectful thing you can tell another human being.

If I AM ME does not require your applause, I can afford to examine an idea that my crowd loves.

If my identity depends on the crowd, examination becomes expensive.

Popularity Is Not Verification

A thousand repetitions are not a thousand independent sources.

A viral claim can feel corroborated because it appears everywhere, while every appearance traces back to one original statement.

I learned that the hard way in my own archive.

Ten data points are not triangulation if all ten come from the same original source.

Maybe you have one source - with three grandchildren.

Repetition is not corroboration.

Popularity is not verification.

That is an obvious media lesson.

It is also a Popularized lesson.

A belief can become socially expensive to question long before it becomes evidentially strong.

The Lens

Everybody has a lens.

Family.

Religion.

Politics.

Education.

Class.

Race.

Sex.

Experience.

Success.

Failure.

Fear.

Pride.

All of it changes what we notice and how we interpret what we see.

The problem is not that we have a lens.

The problem is forgetting that we are looking through one.

And then comes confirmation bias.

Once I decide what I believe, the mind has a nasty little habit of becoming a lawyer for the conclusion.

I notice what supports me.

I remember what supports me.

I search for what supports me.

And evidence that threatens the conclusion somehow becomes

easier to dismiss.

At that point I am no longer searching for truth.

I am searching for confirmation of what I already decided was true.

That is why THE EXAMINER matters.

THE EXAMINER has to occasionally turn the lens around and ask:

What am I not seeing?

What evidence would prove me wrong?

Am I examining the evidence - or recruiting it?

Everybody has a lens.

Wisdom begins when you remember you are wearing yours.

It tells you where to look for distortion.

Bill O'Reilly gave me an interesting measuring stick.

Whatever somebody thought of him, one particular skill stood out to me:

You could watch him and still find yourself scratching your head.

Democrat?

Republican?

Conservative?

Independent?

Damn. I can't quite tell.

That interested me.

O'Reilly described himself as a registered Independent and said he did not publicly root for candidates because he believed that would interfere with fair coverage.

Now THAT is closer to what I want from somebody presenting

himself as a newsman.

Not:

Tell me who you voted for.

I do not need your private ballot.

I need your work to make me wonder.

If I can predict your conclusion before you examine the evidence, then I am no longer just examining the story.

I am examining your lens.

Everybody has one.

The professional challenge is whether you can keep yours from

doing the reporting for you.

WHEN THE ENTERTAINER ENTERTAINED

Johnny Carson understood something that seems almost quaint

now.

He had political opinions. Of course he did.

But he also understood the difference between having an opinion

and possessing a nightly television platform capable of helping

manufacture one.

Carson once asked:

"Who am I to foist my opinions on the public?"

Years later, he explained that he deliberately kept his political identity at arm's length. Kennedy, Nixon, Johnson, Reagan - if

there was a joke, the joke got made.

Imagine that.

THE JOKE came before the ideology.

The entertainer did not first ask:

Which tribe will this help?

He asked:

Is it funny?

Jay Leno later described essentially the same philosophy - make fun of both sides, because once the entertainer becomes identified with only one political tribe, part of the audience stops hearing the joke and starts hearing the allegiance.

And that raises the question that interests me:

Am I entertaining the audience - or recruiting it?

There is a difference.

The problem is not that entertainers have political opinions.

Everybody has opinions.

The problem begins when entertainment, advocacy, news and

cultural instruction become so intertwined that the audience no

longer knows which one it is consuming.

And that brings me right back to POPULARIZED.

Because once the entertainer becomes the instructor, the instructor becomes the celebrity, the celebrity becomes the authority, and the authority becomes COOL...

who is actually teaching whom?

Words Are Tools

Words alone, without context, mean diddly...squat.

That is Tony language for a serious point.

Words are tools for thought.

If the hammer changes shape while I am using it, I may still think I am building the same argument when I am not.

If Square suddenly means Circle, the carpenter has a problem.

If Level means NOT level, the building has a problem.

Changing a label does not change what IS.

But changing a label can change what people believe they are looking at.

That is why the Examiner asks for the thing beneath the word.

Define it.

And not just the word. Define the image. Define the symbol. Define the feeling it produces before you even have time to think.

Human beings have always responded to things we can understand at a glance.

Hieroglyphics. Religious icons. Flags. Uniforms. Logos. Political cartoons. Road signs. Advertisements. Photographs. MEMEs.

All of them can take something complicated and compress it into an image that produces an immediate feeling - sometimes before understanding ever gets a chance to arrive.

Sometimes an image explains a truth faster than a thousand words ever could. But the same power works just as well in the other direction.

I often see the old "a picture is worth a thousand words" metaphor inverted.

Because an ideologue can look at one image - one event, one moment, one person - and then spend a thousand words telling you what you are supposed to see.

Not necessarily what IS there.

What it is supposed to MEAN.

One image. One thousand words of interpretation.

And if the interpretation is repeated often enough, loudly enough, and by enough people with enough prestige...

eventually the words can overpower the picture.

The image shows.

The ideology tells.

The Media-Ocracy's engine sends it out - as NEWS.

And too often, the telling wins.

What can simplify truth can also simplify a lie. What can explain can also manipulate. What can inform can also provoke.

That is why propaganda loves symbols.

It does not always need you to understand. Sometimes it only needs you to FEEL.

React first. Think later. Or maybe never.

THE EXAMINER says: slow it down.

What am I actually looking at? What does it really mean? And who benefits if I react before I understand?

Show me the boundary.

Show me when it is NOT the thing.

Then we can assess.

The Human Condition

Popularized is not a conspiracy theory.

It is the human condition.

We begin inside somebody else's world.

Wisdom begins when you discover that includes YOU.

POPULARIZED -> Awareness -> Examination -> Intellectual Integrity -> IS.

That is the route out - not out of influence, because nobody lives outside influence.

Out of unexamined influence.

The goal is not a mind nobody ever touched.

The goal is a mind willing to notice the fingerprints.

CHAPTER 9

HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN YOU KNOW?

Tony Corrects Tony

One of the best things that happened to this book was discovering Tony was wrong.

I had repeatedly referred to a list of "Communist goals" as though it came from Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto.

It did not.

The specific list I was using came from W. Cleon Skousen's The Naked Communist and was later inserted into the Congressional Record in 1963 at the request of a constituent by Representative A. S. Herlong Jr.

Tony had the quotation.

Tony had the wrong source.

Did I KNOW the source?

No.

I THOUGHT I KNEW.

That is exactly why I had to develop THE EXAMINER - the part of me that examines the part of me that is so damned sure.

The Answer Was on My Own Damn Page

The correction became funnier - and more useful - when I found that one of my own pages had the correct attribution sitting right there.

The answer was on my own damn page.

Tony had evidence.

Tony had the source.

Tony still got the source wrong.

How do you know when you KNOW?

Sometimes start by reading your own footnotes.

That is not humiliation.

That is maintenance.

The Five Labels

The Examiner does not ban strong conclusions.

He labels them honestly.

I KNOW.

I OBSERVED.

I THINK I KNOW.

I BELIEVE.

THE RECORD SHOWS.

The labels do not weaken the prose.

They tell the reader what kind of claim Tony is making.

If I say I KNOW something I directly lived, you can still challenge my memory, interpretation or completeness. But you know the basis of the claim.

If I say THE RECORD SHOWS, I owe you a record.

If I say I BELIEVE, I am not asking belief to masquerade as proof.

The Examiner does not require Tony to abandon strong convictions.

He requires Tony to stop disguising conviction as proof.

THE POWER OF CERTAINTY

Certainty is not valuable because it guarantees I am right. It is valuable because it lets me commit. Use the best critical thinking I have. Reach a conclusion. Say it out loud. Act on it. Risk being wrong.

Someone who never becomes certain enough to take a position may avoid being wrong. He may also avoid ever becoming more right.

I would rather be wrong moving forward than right standing still.

The harder part is not merely taking the chance. It is being comfortable enough in your own skin to survive the negative retribution when you ARE wrong — criticism, embarrassment, the I-told-you-so crowd — and still be able to say:

Fine. I was wrong. Check the work. Learn. Move again.

Certainty without the ability to recheck yourself becomes arrogance. Certainty WITH the ability to correct course becomes growth.

THINKING WAS WRITING

Somewhere along the way I heard it, read it, surmised it - who can recall? - that

THINKING WAS WRITING.

Not literally.

But strangely enough, LITERALLY from that moment on, I began thinking of myself as a THINKER.

"Tony...what are you up to?"

Thinking.

I was always turning something over. Comparing it to something else. Arguing with myself. Following one thought into another and wondering where the hell it was going to end up.

Then I understood the practical problem: other people could not climb inside my head.

If I wanted somebody else to understand what Tony was thinking, I had to PUT

IT ON PAPER.

Wait a minute...you mean I can WRITE?

Thinking was Tony talking to Tony. Writing was Tony letting somebody else listen.

PAMELA GIVES TONY A WORD

Years later Pamela watched the way my mind worked and told me, in effect, that I thought about what I was thinking.

Metacognition.

SAY WHAT?

I had apparently been doing something for years before I knew somebody had given it a name.

NOESIS - SAY WHAT?

Somebody else once told me I possessed noesis.

Another big word. Fine. Give Tony a word he does not know and you have probably given Tony something to THINK about.

As I came to understand it, noesis has to do with intellectual or cognitive apprehension - with grasping or seeing something with the mind. The academic definitions are more careful than Tony, as they should be.

I do not know whether Tony possesses some special intellectual gift. I will leave that one for somebody else to decide.

But I DO know I have spent most of my life trying to SEE.

People especially.

I have been something of an unofficial counselor to a lot of people over the years.

Not because I hung a diploma on a wall and announced that Tony was now qualified to understand human beings. Life gave me a different resume.

Marriage. Women. Men. Children. Money. Work. Fear. Failure. Success.

Whatever the subject, sooner or later it usually became a PEOPLE question.

Information tells me something. Noesis helps me SEE something.

But seeing a pattern does not automatically make the pattern true. Intuition starts the trip. Observation adds something. Experience adds something. Logical progression adds something. Then LIFE GETS A VOTE.

Maybe my insight survives. Maybe it does not. Maybe I recalibrate.

That is why I can say I THINK I KNOW with confidence without pretending I

KNOW.

Confidence is not refusing to be wrong. Sometimes confidence is knowing you'll still be standing there after somebody proves you wrong.

Absolutely correct - UP TO NOW.

THE KNOWING PATH

OBSERVE

COMPARE

FIND THE PATTERN

ASSESS

JUDGE

TEST AGAINST LIFE

RECALIBRATE

CLOSER TO IS

HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN YOU KNOW?

I KNOW - lived experience

I OBSERVED - witnessed

I THINK I KNOW - inference / intuition / logic

I BELIEVE - conviction

THE RECORD SHOWS - evidence outside Tony's head

Intuition Starts the Investigation

Learning was never something I consciously reached out for.

But I found myself knowing things through observation.

Curiosity came from almost everything I looked at, felt, touched or experienced.

Don't go clothes shopping with me.

I have to touch the fabric.

Feel it.

Get a sense of it.

Somehow, before I could say I KNEW something, I needed to experience some part of it first.

That is how I learned.

Not always from books.

Often from contact.

Often I sense the relation before I know the academic name for it.

For decades, I came to believe education was increasingly being sold to us - not merely taught. Credentials. Presentation. The right language. The right institutions. The right image.

And sometimes I wondered whether we had become so accustomed to

recognizing the signals of intelligence and sophistication that we stopped asking often enough what was underneath them.

I remember the story David Brooks later told about meeting Barack Obama before he became president. Brooks had been impressed by the conversation, but what became famous was something else he remembered: Obama’s perfectly creased trousers.

The crease became part of the package. Educated. Controlled. Sophisticated.

Presidential.

The image confirmed the expectation.

THE EXAMINER asks what is beneath the crease.

My curiosity was always the starting point for a lot of my "education."

Something pings.

Then I go looking.

That can be useful.

It can also be dangerous.

Intuition can START the investigation.

It cannot be allowed to END it.

My dark-side experience taught me to read leverage, motive, fear and deception.

That experience can make me unusually alert.

It can also make me suspicious when suspicion is not warranted.

The Examiner asks whether experience is warning me or prejudicing me.

The Forest and the Trees

McCarthy became one of the places where I had to learn the difference between a larger danger and particular claims.

Soviet espionage in the United States was real. Later evidence, including Venona material, documented serious espionage and infiltration.

That does not transform every accusation Joseph McCarthy made into a proven fact, nor does it retroactively validate every method associated with McCarthyism.

A man can be right about the larger danger and wrong about particular claims.

Sometimes you can see the forest - and still misidentify some of the trees.

That principle is much bigger than McCarthy.

It applies to Tony.

It applies to everybody who falls in love with a pattern.

When the Category Became the Person

Years ago I heard the phrase white privilege and reacted personally.

I did not hear a sociological category.

I heard:

Tony, YOU were privileged.

And I looked at my life.

Ma working three jobs.

And I looked at how I grew up.

Back then, in my world, there were White people, Black people - and then there were ITALIANS.

At least that was how it felt to me.

Italian meant something. Family. Culture. History. Pride.

Leonardo da Vinci. Michelangelo. A whole inheritance that felt distinctive.

And later somebody wanted to reduce all of that to: white.

Really?

So when I was told I had been privileged, THE EXAMINER naturally asked:

Compared to what? Compared to whom?

Because labels can describe a group. They cannot automatically explain a life.

No money.

Dad mentally ill.

Crime.

Prison.

Nobody handing Tony much of anything.

But the Examiner forces a better question.

Can a general pattern exist while failing completely as a description of one particular person?

Of course it can.

That is the danger of turning categories into people.

Averages are not individuals.

Statistics are not biographies.

A generalization may describe a population and still misdescribe the person standing in front of you.

And no label - racial, political, economic or otherwise - gets to examine a human being for you.

What I Saw - and What I Added

Prison gave me another lesson in the size of experience.

Beginning around 1971 and through years of coming and going from institutions, I personally observed a noticeable number of Black prisoners become Muslim.

That I observed.

I also observed that prison religion could carry practical benefits: food rules, clothing, routine, community, identity, protection or structure depending on the institution and the person.

That I observed too.

Then Tony did what Tony sometimes did.

I connected the dots.

And kept connecting them.

Until I was making claims about Black America, Black politics and Islam itself.

Hold it.

What did I actually KNOW?

I knew what I had seen inside the prisons I had lived in.

Everything beyond that required another category:

I THINK I KNOW.

Do not confuse the size of your experience with the size of the world.

Fact Is Not Interpretation

Fact is fact.

Interpretation is interpretation.

The trouble begins when we forget which one we're holding.

THE RECORD SHOWS is not the same as I THINK IT MEANS.

Good intentions do not solve that problem.

A person can mean well and reason badly.

A person can be angry for a good reason and accuse the wrong person.

A person can have the right moral instinct and the wrong factual support.

Does the logic hold?

That is the question.

I WILL OWN THE ASSESSMENT

I do not judge people in the final, moral sense. I assess.

I look at conduct, consequence, motive, pattern, harm, effort, character - whatever evidence is actually in front of me.

And if I make that assessment, I will own it.

I may be wrong. THE EXAMINER gets a vote. New evidence gets a vote.

But I will not pretend I made no assessment simply because somebody dislikes the conclusion.

There is a final point because people sometimes misunderstand intellectual humility as moral surrender.

No.

I can believe something strongly that I cannot prove.

The Examiner does not make me pretend I have no judgment.

He makes me own the judgment as judgment.

I BELIEVE.

And if THE RECORD SHOWS I am wrong?

Then the Examiner has only one respectable thing to do.

Change his mind.

Not because the crowd demanded it.

Not because Tony lost nerve.

Because IS won.

CHAPTER 10

IN SEARCH OF IS

I spent a lifetime asking what is true before I had a clean word for the destination.

Eventually I reduced the destination to two letters.

IS.

Not what I want to be true.

Not what my side says.

Not what the audience rewards.

What IS.

Truth IS

In 2019 I wrote something that surprised even me:

I have never approached God as an inherited slogan. In my lifelong search for Truth — for IS — I found GOD.

FEARING GOD?

As early as I can remember, I scratched my head at the phrase “fearing God” as though fear were a testament to love. Fear, to me, is a negative spark in the universe.

Respect? Yes. Awe? Absolutely. I understand that respect can contain a kind of fear on its face. But FEAR me? I do not want anyone I love to fear me. Love me.

Respect me. Stand in awe if you must. But fear? Really?

The older I got, the more I understood that religious traditions often use “fear” to mean reverence, awe or humility rather than terror. Fine. That distinction mattered to me because words matter.

WHEN TRUTH LED ME TO GOD

When I was young I looked for Truth. God came to me in the search for Truth.

THE RECORD SHOWS

Life as we know it depends upon a remarkable stack of conditions: persistent liquid water; a workable temperature range; an atmosphere with enough pressure and the right chemistry; a natural greenhouse effect that keeps Earth from becoming far colder; protection from dangerous radiation; enough gravity to retain an atmosphere; a stable energy source in the Sun; long-term carbon cycling and climate regulation; and other planetary conditions that make complex life possible.

The Moon helps stabilize Earth’s axial behavior over long periods. Earth’s magnetic field helps shield the atmosphere and surface from charged solar

particles. Plate tectonics participates in long-term geochemical cycling, although science does not claim every one of these factors is an absolute requirement for life everywhere.

Change some of the truly fundamental conditions far enough and there is no life as we know it.

I BELIEVE

Then Tony asks: what are the odds? Science cannot honestly hand me one clean multiplication table for all of these conditions. The variables are not all independent, and Earth remains the only life-bearing world we know for certain.

But that does not end the question for me. It starts it. Coincidence upon coincidence upon coincidence. Too much coincidence for Tony.

Most people do not understand odds. I do. Not enough to pretend I can calculate the universe on a napkin — enough to understand what accumulating conditions do to probability.

Therefore I believe.

Prove it? I don’t need to.

I was not looking for proof. I was looking for Truth.

IS, I found GOD.

I was not announcing a conversion to organized religion.

I have often thought of religion as man's interpretation of God. Interpretations can conflict. Institutions can fail. Believers can be hypocrites. None of that answers whether there is an underlying order.

My route was backwards from the route people usually describe.

I did not begin with doctrine and then explain reality through it.

I kept asking what reality appeared to obey.

Cause.

Effect.

Action.

Reaction.

Nature.

Consequence.

Order.

Limits.

And somewhere in that search, God became a reasonable conclusion to me.

That is I BELIEVE.

Not THE RECORD SHOWS.

The distinction makes the belief stronger, not weaker, because I do not need to counterfeit proof to own it.

Intellectual Housekeeping

My route became:

WHAT IS? -> TRUTH -> NATURE -> NATURAL LAW -> GOD -> OF THE

CENTER -> political conclusions.

Notice politics comes last.

That is intellectual housekeeping.

If I begin with a political answer and work backward until Nature agrees with me, I can make Natural Law endorse almost anything Tony already wanted.

The order matters.

IS came first.

Truth existed before parties.

Gravity did not wait for a committee vote.

Human appetite did not wait for an ideology.

Birth, death, scarcity, time, sex, strength, weakness, cooperation, conflict - the raw materials of human life existed before anybody called them conservative or liberal.

That is why all things original are OF THE CENTER.

You Can't Repeal Reality With Rhetoric

I once wrote:

You can't REPEAL REALITY with RHETORIC.

That is the practical meaning of IS.

You can rename a cost.

The cost remains.

You can declare an action consequence-free.

The reaction is not required to read your press release.

You can call perception reality.

Perception may elect a president, sell a dress or ruin a reputation.

Perception still is not reality.

It is perception OF reality.

Mistake perception for reality, and you are living inside an illusion.

The image may feel real. The story may feel real. The emotion may be real. But none of that guarantees that your understanding of what happened is real.

A person can live confidently inside a false picture of reality and never know it - unless something forces the picture to be tested.

THE EXAMINER does exactly that.

What did I actually see? What did I assume? What do I know? What only feels true?

Once perception is allowed to become reality without examination, illusion gets promoted to truth.

That difference may be the whole argument.

THE MODIFIER MATTERS

This took me years to understand clearly because anger has a way of dropping the modifier.

I would say Jews, when what I was really arguing about were liberal Jews. I would say Blacks, when what I meant were liberal Black Americans whose politics I disagreed with. I would say white women, when what I was actually reacting to were liberal white women expressing ideas or supporting policies I opposed.

Those are not small distinctions.

The first version defines somebody by what they are. The second identifies the belief system or behavior I am assessing.

My argument was never that being Jewish, Black, female, white - or anything else inherited - made somebody the problem. My argument was with what I came to identify as a liberal political and cultural worldview, wherever I encountered it.

Drop the modifier and suddenly criticism of an idea sounds like condemnation of a people.

THE EXAMINER eventually forced me to put the modifier back.

Words are tools. Categories are tools. The trouble begins when the tool becomes a substitute for the thing.

A noun can tell me the neighborhood. A modifier can take me closer to the address.

THE MODIFIER MAINTAINS THE HIERARCHY.

Human -> American -> White -> Italian -> Sicilian -> Tony.

Each modifier narrows the description without necessarily erasing the broader category above it.

The category may tell me where you belong. The modifier tells me WHAT KIND.

Culture loves the noun. Reality usually lives in the modifier.

The noun puts me in the neighborhood. The modifier takes me to the address.

A modifier does not change what IS. A good modifier helps expose what IS.

THE MODIFIER MAINTAINS THE HIERARCHY

HUMAN

AMERICAN

WHITE

ITALIAN

SICILIAN

TONY

The Power and the Restraint

Searching for IS can make a man arrogant if he starts believing he owns it.

I do not own Truth.

I am looking for it.

That is where the Presumptive Philosopher and the Examiner have to work together.

The Presumptive Philosopher says: follow the idea.

The Examiner says: label what you found.

IS says: neither one gets to vote on reality.

What if? What if there were no hypotheticals?

Sorry.

The class looked too serious.

From IS to the Center

If Truth IS, then truth cannot belong to a party.

A party can occasionally belong to truth.

A philosophy can approximate it.

A policy can respect it.

A person can discover part of it.

But Truth is not an ideology.

That is why OF THE CENTER eventually outgrew my earlier idea that conservatism occupied the political center.

The deeper thought was not that one side owned the middle.

The deeper thought was that reality existed before the spectrum.

The spectrum came later.

IS came first.

CHAPTER 11

OF THE CENTER

The world is governed by Natural Laws.

That idea sat near the beginning of my book notes in 2013 and had been showing up in my writing even earlier. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Every coin has two sides - and do not forget the edge.

That edge became important to me.

We are trained to talk as though reality has only two chairs: left and right, yes and no, good and bad, this team and that team. But original things do not begin at the extremes. They begin somewhere before the argument divides them.

I came to call that place OF THE CENTER.

All things original are OF THE CENTER.

That is one of the statements I make with the most certainty, but even here the reader is entitled to know what I mean.

OF THE CENTER does not mean splitting every difference. Halfway between truth and a lie is still a lie. Halfway between a correct answer and a wrong answer is not automatically wisdom. The center is not a political waiting room where everybody agrees to be less certain.

It means looking for the thing before it was captured by a side.

Family.

Responsibility.

Liberty.

Fairness.

Sex.

Work.

Compassion.

Reward.

Consequence.

What did these mean before an ideology claimed them?

That is why I distrust one-sided coins. In the world of consequences, benefits have costs. Freedom has responsibility. Compassion can help and can also disable.

Strength can protect and can become tyranny. Risk can destroy and can create.

Every action sends something back toward you.

Good cop. Bad cop.

SAME police station.

DOMINANCE: To Be - or Not to Be - Dominated

Good Witch or Bad Witch?

Hierarchy does not disappear because we dislike the word dominance. Families, prisons, workplaces, institutions and politics all contain authority, influence, status, dependence and power.

My question became less romantic: not simply whether influence exists, but WHO or WHAT is doing the influencing, by what mechanism, and toward what result.

I'll take an imperfect good witch over a perfectly awful bad witch any day.

THE EXAMINER: That is Tony making a value judgment, not discovering a Natural Law. Power can be necessary, abused, distributed, resisted or shared. The point is to examine what the hierarchy actually produces.

That little Tonyism says a lot about the two-party system as I came to see it.

Apparent opponents can still operate inside the same institutional building. They can fight over which office gets the desk without asking who owns the building, who wrote the rules or whether the public was ever offered another door.

OF THE CENTER asks the earlier question.

Before the teams tell you which answer you are allowed to choose, ask whether the question itself was framed to keep you inside their building.

DOMINANCE: WITH INJURY - OR WITHOUT IT

I eventually came to believe that dominance itself was not the problem.

Somebody is always going to dominate something.

The question is: what kind of dominance?

Dominant power without injury? Or dominant power with injury?

Strength is not automatically evil. Authority is not automatically evil. Power is not automatically evil. What matters is what the person possessing that power intends to do with it.

THE CONUNDRUM

People tend to project their own moral compass onto everybody else.

A decent person gives somebody the benefit of the doubt because that is what he would want somebody to do for him.

He thinks:

Maybe there is an explanation.

Maybe I misunderstood.

Maybe he didn't mean it that way.

Because that is how he thinks.

But the person operating with bad intent may be doing the exact opposite.

He may look at decency and see weakness.

He may look at patience and see opportunity.

He may look at the benefit of the doubt and think:

Good. I can use that.

And there is the conundrum.

The decent person can have difficulty recognizing genuine ill will because he does not naturally think that way.

The person with ill will can have difficulty recognizing genuine decency because he does not think that way either.

Each is projecting his own moral compass onto the other.

Sometimes goodness mistakes danger for misunderstanding.

Sometimes danger mistakes goodness for weakness.

That is why character matters.

That is why judgment - or, in my language, ASSESSMENT - matters.

And that is why power itself is not the whole question.

Dominant power without injury? Or dominant power with injury?

That is the question.

This is where Natural Laws enter the moral argument for me.

I BELIEVE there is a God.

I do not mean that in the institutional religious sense. I have often described religion as man's interpretation of God. My belief comes more from order, consequence, nature and what I see as laws that operate whether we like them or not.

That is belief, not laboratory proof.

For me, liberty is part of that order. If a person has free will, then choice matters.

If choice matters, consequence matters. If consequence matters, responsibility cannot be removed without changing the meaning of freedom.

That is why "I AM the BOSS of ME" is not merely a cute independence slogan.

It is the personal version of liberty.

I own me.

Therefore I choose.

Therefore my choices can produce consequences.

Therefore I cannot spend my whole life assigning the bill to somebody else.

This is also where I have to resist turning Natural Law into a magic stamp for every opinion I already hold. If I call something "natural" simply because I prefer it, I have not proven anything. That is the same old problem of making something RIGHT in my head, only with a philosophical label on it.

The Presumptive Philosopher still has to ask: What do I know? What am I observing? What am I inferring? What part is belief?

Natural Law does not excuse sloppy thinking.

Neither does OF THE CENTER.

Power is another place where I now prefer assessment to slogans. There will always be a dominant SOMEONE - a person, institution, faction, culture, ideology, government, class, market force, majority or minority with enough leverage to shape the field. The question is not whether power exists. The question is WHO has it, what they do with it, and what restrains them.

Dominance is an outcome. Supremacy is a claim. Winning a contest does not establish superior human worth. Power is inevitable. Liberty is not. Liberty has to be engineered - divided, restrained, countered, made answerable.

You can destroy an authority structure. You cannot destroy authority. You only change who has it. Destroy the dominant someone and you do not destroy dominance. You create an opening for the next dominant someone.

Dominance is inevitable. Injury is not.

Nothing simply operates on its own. There is always some organizing force, hierarchy, authority, intelligence, incentive or structure directing what happens.

Even Superior Intelligence - once known as Artificial Intelligence - would not repeal that question. It may only make the question more important.

Who - or what - is dominant, and what does that dominance DO?

The concept should make thinking harder, not easier.

It asks me to get beneath labels.

Who is this person BEFORE somebody tells me which category he belongs in?

What is this idea BEFORE the parties tell me who owns it?

What is the human need BEFORE a movement packages it?

What is the cost nobody put on the brochure?

What reaction follows the action?

There is a systems version of the same question: forget what the system promises.

What does the damn thing PRODUCE? Structure -> input -> process -> output -> assessment. A policy, a family, a business, a culture or a government can have beautiful intentions and still produce ugly results. Intention is evidence of intention. Output is evidence of performance.

That is also where precision matters and where it does not.

Dates, quotations, chronology, accusations and facts require precision because precision can change truth. If a date changes who knew what when, get the date right. If I am accusing somebody of doing something, I owe the reader evidence.

But there are observations about human life that die when you sterilize them trying to satisfy every possible objection.

Precision is important in most things, not all things.

When I say a man can be intelligent and stupid at the same time, I am not proposing a neurological measurement. I am describing something I have lived.

When I say unintended consequences are called LIFE, I am not denying that some consequences can be predicted. I am reminding myself that systems are full of reactions the designer did not put in the sales pitch.

That is one of my oldest Tonyisms because it keeps Natural Law from becoming sentimental.

Action generates reaction whether the actor likes the reaction or not.

Think of the man who steps into the street believing his rights protect him.

He has the walk signal.

He has the right of way.

He thinks that means security.

So why look?

After all, if he gets hit, it will not be his fault.

True enough.

It may not be his fault.

He may be morally right.

He may be legally right.

He may be dead right.

Because having the right of way does not make the truck disappear.

Rights are not security.

Rights matter.

Reality still gets a vote.

Natural Law does not suspend itself because somebody is innocent.

It does not stop cause and effect because blame belongs elsewhere.

That is why I say: do not just talk to me about rights.

Talk to me about reality.

Talk to me about consequence.

Talk to me about what IS.

Rights?

Fine.

Try Natural Law.

When I say freedom has responsibility, I am not saying every person begins with equal resources. I am saying that where agency exists, responsibility exists with it.

That distinction is essential to the book.

I have never believed perfection is a useful standard. As soon as you claim perfection, you have exposed the imperfection. Life works by degree. Better and worse. More and less. Enough and not enough.

The older formulation was even more provocative: Perfection IS imperfection.

True perfection is IMPERFECTION. I do not mean error is automatically good. I mean error is built into human learning. Imperfection -> error -> consequence -> assessment -> correction -> experience -> wisdom.

That also returns me to ownership. Imperfection is human. Hypocrisy is pretending you are not imperfect while demanding everybody else treat your mistake as virtue. I can say, "I know I am wrong, but so damn what," and still understand that the consequence belongs to me. Ownership is accountability, not absolution.

That last pair - enough and not enough - would later become another Tony framework: the Land of MORE, the Land of NEVER Enough, and the Land of JUST Enough.

Even there, OF THE CENTER appears.

Not poverty.

Not endless appetite.

Enough.

Contentment without surrendering ambition.

The point of OF THE CENTER is not to announce another political position.

Equilibrium is one of the reasons the center interests me. I have used husband and wife - the family - as one example:

1 + 1 = 1.

Not math - a functioning whole.

Husband and wife.

Different parts.

Complementary forces.

One system.

Like two teepee poles leaning against each other - separate, but stronger AS ONE.

Equality does not require sameness.

Difference is not inequality.

In fact, difference is often the very thing that makes equilibrium possible.

ARCHIVE

BATTLE OF THE SEXES - A MAN'S PERSPECTIVE

Written in 1973 during an earlier imprisonment, when I was twenty-three. I reposted it decades later because I wanted the record to show that I was thinking about men, women, self-worth, manners, rejection, aggression and relationships long before I had today's vocabulary for any of it. What follows is my original argument, lightly cleaned only for spelling and readability.

The Battle of the Sexes, a Man's Perspective.

In the upcoming weeks in this new advice column, based upon understanding relationships among men and women, we'll discuss and answer problems people have in dating, relationships, and the social settings of life.

I will bring the male point of view and, I hope, the woman's point of view into perspective, having encountered many problems amongst friends of both genders.

I will strive to bring an understanding of the sexes and an awareness based on compassion for others and their own selves, for we cannot truly love others till we love ourselves.

I will seek to take away, to some degree, the egos in a relationship, or a social encounter, that tend to fog up the reality of what's taking place and in turn destroy what very possibly may!

From time to time, I will concentrate on a particular letter - problem, if you will - and devote some space not only to solving the issue but to the principles involved in solving that problem, so one may utilize said formula for a problem of a different sort.

The Battle of the Sexes, from my, a man's point of view, is one war that, in spite of its changing nature with women playing a more aggressive part, will continue to go on as long as life itself.

Not enough of us have fun chasing or being chased by the opposite sex. Such a shame, because it is, and can be for the most, if, like life, you don't make it a life- or-death venture. It need not be. Just like in other "sports," even the best team doesn't always win... imagine winning every game. How boring would that be?

In dating and relationships in general I've applied one principle that brings on positive results in most situations. The foundation of this principle is something Mother taught me since memory allows: "killing with kindness" and "you catch more bees with honey than with vinegar." It was many years before I knew I was using it, and with success.

To me, it is the very essence of the word CLASS! I don't mean appreciation of material things, or how you may or may not dress. What I mean by CLASS is simply enough the manner in which you behave when making an overture to anyone: MANNERS. Such a shame so many of us - men and women alike - forget these lessons. Sometimes I wonder if they were taught at all.

If all of us had a better understanding of its meaning - CLASS - and the practice of it, how our endeavors in a relationship would exceed our greatest hopes, never mind expectations.

First of all, if we can accept in general the theory that one person may not be right for another, no matter how acceptable he or she believes themselves to be to that person, it doesn't necessarily make it be that they're meant for that person. If we can accept this theory, then we must practice it.

This is where man, via his ego, goes wrong. During a social encounter an overture to the opposite sex doesn't bring on the hoped-for response. What does he do?

Does he smile anyway, leaving the lady with a good feeling about himself? The smart ones do, but the high majority have to forget they're adults and start acting like a child, taking this rejection as a direct affront to his masculine ego.

He responds in such a negative manner that it now becomes a cause-and-effect factor for women to be rude not only to the man she is currently confronted by, but also to the next unsuspecting man coming her way. One unfairness perpetuates another unfairness and before the night's out all you hear women say:

Men, they're all alike. And, of course, the men are all saying exactly the same about women. So the battle is not only unchanged but self-perpetuating, a chain unbroken.

What is important for women to understand is that it takes GREAT COURAGE for even the most confident and accomplished man to make the first approach to a lady. To reject is fine; after all this is what it's all about. But to reject without the slightest consideration - even compassion - for another human being's feelings is no class. Remember, MANNERS.

Unfortunately the man who is rejected now turns on the next woman with the same lack of consideration the one before had shown him. One never-ending merry-go-round of men and women both feeling THEY are the victim.

One way of accepting rejection as a positive statement instead of a negative statement comes directly from the heart of self-esteem. One must say to themselves: well, it's OK if he or she does not want me. It's their loss, not mine.

They don't know what they're missing. What an enlightened change this would be to some who seem to take delight in adolescent responses.

I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would want someone who does not want them. I would, if really interested in a particular person, find it more important in trying to make that person first want me on a human level, and then accept me on what terms are proposed.

To have a person accept me on the initial terms just because they were pressured and afraid to be rude would be an insult to me personally. I also see how this would be an easy read for a third party on the character of this person who wants acceptance at any cost. To be accepted on the same terms as a housewife accepting a purchase order of magazines from a high-pressure salesman just "to get him off my back" would be demeaning to me in any relationship.

That would not be high self-esteem.

And I would question the self-esteem of anyone who does not understand why.

Both men and women, I venture to say, exclaim that it is THEY who have the hardest part of social gamesmanship. With the exception that modern women have brought upon the "game" notwithstanding, I think we can agree it's still

pretty much the same ritual: a man asks, a woman accepts or rejects, via any flirtations a lady may give to a man to indicate she is attracted to him.

The strong point in favor of this ritual for the lady is she doesn't have to develop the courage to make the first move; consequently, have to deal with DIRECT

REJECTION.

Of course the flip side of this coin is apart from the various signals a lady might be able to throw out, she can only sit and wait for "the man of her dreams" to come over - and she just might wait forever. In the meantime she must fend off, unfortunately sometimes with a "straight arm" instead of manners, the men she has no desire for or interest in.

As for the man, it's turned around. Their advantage is they can choose; they don't have to encounter those who are distasteful to them. On the other hand their disadvantage is they face the very calculated risk of being directly rejected by someone who they find appealing.

So much is this a disadvantage, I can fairly say most men would prefer a knock- out punch. It puts a good majority of men standing around at parties and clubs completely stifled by the opposite sex from just one rejection - or even worse, a rejection from last week still fresh in their mind.

From personal experience I would say only 10% of men at a club actively engage, from one hour to the next, in the ritual of finding a dance partner. To meet a lady who says yes sometimes takes anywhere from one to ten rejections. I sometimes wonder myself how I can withstand that little voltage that comes when you hear, "No, thank you."

But if the man has a healthy attitude with esteem he feels the lady that says "yes"

was worth the ongoing sting of pain one hears in "no thank you" once again. Men don't realize that the rejections are the encounters that give good practice toward the next "yes" - and I always remind myself nothing good comes easy.

As a man, I make it a point to compliment a woman who rejects me with consideration of my feelings, and perhaps with humor. The reason I do this is to reinforce her in the right way to act. To reward her with a compliment, hoping she'll show the same consideration for the next man rejected down the road.

This could also lead to a consequential benefit on my behalf. Having done this, I have, in effect, "killed her with kindness" and maybe, just maybe, she'll have a change of heart about me, perhaps because I'm not like "all the rest." The more you "kill with kindness," the more changes of heart will go your way, and this will reinforce and reward you, hopefully, in turn, creating more positive reactions from rejections before.

One must not forget, though, that the initial intent for "killing with kindness"

was to reward the lady for her consideration of your feelings. If she doesn't have a change of heart, it's OK. It is more important to be a "nice guy," a gentleman with class, than it is to be pushy with a woman. If the consequences go your way, fine, but remember the reason for the initial attempt.

It is unfair to say that all men go for is good looks - man's first question, "What does she look like?" - as it is unfair to say that monetary success is all women care for - woman's first question, "What does he do for a living?"

A lot of what I say about a woman can be applied to a man and vice versa. For example, be aware of a man who is obviously self-centered. The same advice could hold true for a man whose girl believes the world revolves around only her.

What is important for both sexes is that personality and proper behavior by far will accomplish much more in the dating world than good looks alone. I personally guarantee a woman who perhaps is not the greatest looker, but is well groomed, who has an open, honest, pleasant personality with a bit of humor and charm, will have more call-backs, more second dates, and fewer one-night stands than any beauty with few other qualities.

Anyone who finds a shallow person, perhaps with just good looks going for them, enjoyable is just as shallow themselves. You can bet your paycheck on it!

For me personally, women with good looks who lack personality are such a disappointment. Such women's favorite first question is "What do you do?" - translation: how much money do you make? Second question: "What kind of car do you drive?" - translation: the same. I mean I'd like to think there's more to life than that.

If a woman cares enough about this man for himself she will find out the answer to all those shallow questions sooner than she thinks and probably without asking. Ladies, it's an easy read: BORING.

Much understanding must be given to so many attractive ladies who all of their lives boys, and now men, find her beauty so intimidating as not being able to realize that what they judge to be snobbery is really shyness perpetuated by men themselves, their own lack of courage to tackle her beauty and face the possibility of rejection.

Beautiful women all their lives have been told, over and over again, since being a toddler, how beautiful they are. It's a pity but most of these women believe that's what life is all about. So it is no wonder why these women want only good- looking men. Of course, not all beautiful women are like this, fortunately.

In my opinion, though, it's closer to the rule than to the exception. With age, though, these women soon start to learn beauty isn't the only thing. Aah, but like wine. That's the life!

For men to understand that being aggressive does not necessarily mean being pushy. Pushy is bad; aggressiveness is necessary. He who sits still and wishes gets nothing. He who goes out with the risk of rejection staring him in the face has a healthier dating life.

Be forward, be gentle, and adhere to the wishes of the lady who says, "NO!" She has as much right to say no to you as you do to come up and enter her immediate space or privacy. I say it's alright to approach a woman in any location, time, and situation; however, if you find it is not welcomed, respect that!

And so it goes, The Battle of the Sexes, and so it will always be. Regardless of who plays what roles, as long as the human element continues to exist, "man's inhumanity towards man" providing the most conflict. All we can strive to do is to perhaps rise above it.

Forty-plus years later, I do not have to defend every sentence twenty-three-year- old Tony wrote in order to recognize the pattern. I was already trying to separate aggression from pushiness, confidence from ego, rejection from humiliation, equality from sameness, and self-worth from somebody else's approval.

I did not have THE EXAMINER yet. I did not have POPULARIZED. I did not have OF THE CENTER. But I was already looking for equilibrium.

The inversion of male and female roles did not happen only in the family. It happened throughout society.

To my way of thinking, men and women were never designed to be identical.

They were different strengths operating AS ONE.

Men, generally speaking, carried more of the aggressive tendency. And aggression is not automatically a bad word.

Properly directed, aggression becomes assertiveness.

Assertiveness becomes courage. Competition. Risk. The willingness to step forward, speak plainly, protect, build, challenge, lead and act.

Aggression without discipline can become cruelty.

Assertiveness is aggression under control.

It is strength with a boundary.

Power without unnecessary injury.

The willingness to climb steel hundreds of feet above the street. To work underground. To fight fires. To log forests. To work an oil rig. To build bridges, skyscrapers, roads and railroads. To operate dangerous machinery. To go where somebody could get hurt and do the damn job anyway.

Women historically brought another strength into the equation.

Nurture. Patience. Restraint. Human connection. The protection of life in a different way.

Not every man. Not every woman.

THE MODIFIER MATTERS.

I am talking about tendencies. Not cages. Not rules every individual has to obey.

Then technology changed the equation.

A steering wheel that once took strength got power steering. Heavy lifting got forklifts. Machinery got hydraulics. Controls became electronic. Tools became lighter. Automation removed more and more of the brute-strength requirement from work that had once been overwhelmingly male.

And women walked through the opening. Why would they not?

They proved they could become doctors, lawyers, executives, scientists, pilots, police officers, soldiers, contractors, equipment operators and providers in every sense of the word.

Women did not simply stop doing what women had traditionally done and start doing what men had traditionally done.

Increasingly, they did BOTH.

They entered the professions. They earned the money. They competed. They managed. They provided.

And they still remained the only sex capable of carrying and giving birth to a child.

They still remained disproportionately involved in nurturing and caregiving.

Women these days are doing it all.

And that made THE EXAMINER ask a question I do not hear asked nearly enough:

If women increasingly perform the traditional female function AND much of the traditional male function - what happened to the man's function?

That is not an argument against women doing anything. It is an argument about equilibrium.

Men can nurture. They should nurture. A good father who cannot hug his kid has missed something important.

But nurture was never the only thing a father brought to the equation.

There was a time when a misbehaving child might hear:

"I am going to speak to your father about your behavior, young man."

And the response was:

"No, Mommy. No!"

Remember when KIDs were once called children?

I digress.

The point was not that Dad was supposed to be some monster waiting in the other room.

Dad represented something different.

Authority. Consequence. Discipline. The boundary you knew you had crossed.

Mom could certainly discipline. Dad could certainly nurture.

THE MODIFIER MATTERS.

I am talking about tendencies and roles that were disproportionately expressed, not absolutes.

And I have always believed that tough love is LOVE.

Not some colder version of it.

LOVE.

Because sometimes loving somebody means knowing what must be done even when neither one of you is going to enjoy it.

Responsibility. Consequence. Saying NO when yes would be easier. Making somebody face what they would rather avoid.

Take the tough out of tough love and, to my way of thinking, you begin taking something essential out of the nurturing equation itself.

Because nurturing is not simply comforting.

Nurturing is preparing somebody to live.

To function. To become responsible. To survive without you.

Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is make somebody live with the consequence of what they did.

That is not the opposite of nurturing.

That IS nurturing.

Tenderness is good.

So is firmness.

A child may need somebody to understand why he did it.

Sometimes he also needs somebody to tell him:

You did it. It was wrong. Here is the consequence.

That too is love.

So when I ask whether mothers and fathers characteristically bring something different to a family, I am not arguing for the cold father and the warm mother.

I am arguing for complementarity.

Different tools. Different instincts. Different strengths.

AS ONE.

And if we eliminate every distinction because distinction itself has become suspicious, THE EXAMINER has to ask:

Who performs the function we just eliminated?

The family worked.

In other words, it was successful.

Not perfect. Successful.

And I came to believe that the equilibrium of America itself depends, in part, on whether the family is supported or undermined by the larger system around it.

Government policy matters. Tax policy matters. Housing policy matters.

Education policy matters. Welfare policy matters. Marriage policy matters. The culture matters.

If the family is one of the primary structures through which children are raised, values are transmitted, responsibility is learned, and people care for one another, then public policy cannot pretend the family is incidental.

Support the family and you support the equilibrium of the country.

Weaken the family long enough and the larger structure has to absorb the consequences.

That does not mean every family looks the same.

It means the country has an interest in whether families are able to function, endure, and raise the next generation.

1 + 1 = 1.

Husband and wife. Family. Society. Different parts. Complementary forces.

One system.

And here is where I hit another fork in the road.

Five years before this book went to print, if you had told me that something like Klinger from M*A*S*H - a man in women's clothing played for comedy as part of his attempt to get out of the Army - would one day sit anywhere near the center of a serious national argument about sex, identity, rights and reality, I would have thought you were kidding.

Klinger was not presented as a transgender woman. The joke was that he was trying to convince the Army he was unfit for service by cross-dressing.

Yet here I was, years later, watching questions of male and female identity become politically explosive.

And I found myself thinking:

How did we get from THERE to HERE so fast?

Now I have to be careful here, because suspicion is not proof.

I cannot prove some giant hidden operation.

But I can tell you what it felt like to me.

It felt coordinated. Accelerated. Reinforced by culture, institutions, media, language, policy and repetition.

And when a social understanding changes across so many places in such a short span of time, THE EXAMINER in me starts sniffing around.

Something smells like a rat.

Maybe I am wrong about the mechanism. Maybe the change was more organic than it looked.

But Tony's question remains:

What made so many people adopt so much of the same framework so quickly?

That is the part I do not dismiss.

Because POPULARIZED does not require everybody to receive the same memo.

It only requires enough institutions, enough repetition, enough prestige, enough social pressure and enough time for an idea to begin feeling inevitable.

And once it feels inevitable, people forget there was ever a fork in the road.

That applies to institutions too. Good cop, bad cop... SAME police station.

Apparent opposition can still live inside one structure. OF THE CENTER asks what the structure is before choosing which actor inside it deserves applause.

It is to recover the original question.

Go find the original thing.

The same standard has to apply to America. You do not have to pretend something is perfect in order to love it. Self-worth does not require self- delusion.

Patriotism should not either. Criticism is not automatically rejection; sometimes criticism is what loyalty looks like when the thing you love starts drifting.

See where it lived before everybody started pulling on it.

Equal Does Not Mean the Same

One of the easiest ways to turn equality into nonsense is to make it mean sameness.

I believe men and women are equal in human worth.

I do not believe equality requires them to be identical.

There are average differences between groups, enormous overlap inside groups, and individuals who will violate almost every average somebody tries to turn into a rule.

That last sentence is the Examiner keeping Tony honest.

My concern begins when equality comes to mean sameness - when

acknowledging a difference is treated as assigning superior worth.

A healthy society needs caregiving impulses and protecting/providing impulses.

Individuals can carry them in different proportions. Families organize them differently. Culture changes how they are expressed.

The principle I care about is equilibrium, not a costume department.

Difference is not automatically inequality.

Equality of worth is not a command that Nature produce duplicates.

Too Smart for Our Own Good?

There is a larger worry behind much of my cultural writing.

We the People can become too smart for our own good when explanation becomes a way to argue around obvious reality.

We build theories so sophisticated that ordinary distinctions begin to embarrass us.

Can and can't become interchangeable with will and won't.

Need and preference blur.

Equal and same blur.

Explanation and excuse blur.

Feeling and fact blur.

Compassion without boundaries can disable the person it intends to help.

Strength without compassion can become cruelty.

OF THE CENTER asks for the counterweight.

Not because every answer is halfway between two extremes.

Because most living systems collapse when one necessary force persuades itself that the balancing force is immoral by definition.

PART III - THE CULTURE

CHAPTER 12

BOYCOTT - OR PICKET THE MEDIA?

Many people would tell me:

Boycott this.

Boycott that.

But when I challenged them to picket the media, I

saw a difference.

A boycott is passive.

Picketing is IN YOUR FACE.

React or don't react.

Either way, I learn something.

Even when you do nothing, I know this is YOUR

RESPONSE.

That is the difference between action and non- action.

And here is where I part company with a lot of

people:

NOT doing something is not DOING something.

It is doing nothing.

Tell me non-action is action?

I THINK NOT.

The picket line did not begin with Day Twenty.

It began with irritation.

Then talk.

Then Tony started thinking:

Let's make the news outlets THE news.

They do that inherently anyway.

News organizations watch one another. Compete with one another. Report on one another.

So why not take advantage of that natural tendency?

"But Tony, they won't report it."

Maybe not.

Me and ten people standing in front of one television station? Probably not.

But what about ten people in front of two news outlets?

Then three?

Then five?

Then ten?

Now other news organizations have a different story sitting in front of them.

One outlet is being picketed. Then another. Then another.

Are you kidding me?

I could foresee the draw.

Eventually the story would no longer be merely Tony complaining about the MediaOcracy.

Why are people picketing the news media?

And once one news organization began reporting on another, Tony believed the competitive instinct would start doing some of the work for him.

News outlets telling on news outlets. Watching one another. Trying not to be the outlet that missed the story.

But there was a catch.

It required critical mass.

One picket could be ignored. Maybe two.

But if the number of outlets - and the number of people - kept growing, I believed eventually they would have difficulty ignoring one another.

That was the theory anyway.

Reach critical mass and the MediaOcracy helps make itself the story.

Fail to reach it?

Tony fails.

Simple as that.

Then the realization that talk was becoming one more product Tony could manufacture cheaply.

Talk is cheap... too much supply, too little demand.

So what does the talker do when he believes his own talk?

Walk.

The Power of Ten

Before KVOA, I kept imagining a simple number.

Ten.

Ten people who would repeatedly show up at a local media outlet.

Not ten thousand followers clicking a button.

Ten bodies.

Ten signs.

Ten people willing to be inconvenient.

A fly at a picnic can be ignored.

A swarm of bees changes the picnic.

That was the image.

I was making lists of signs before I had enough people to carry them.

Twenty of them. Maybe more.

Tony never lacked for signs.

Time to turn talking to WALKING!

It Starts

By December 2013 the idea had become physical at NBC's local affiliate, KVOA, in Tucson.

I had spent years writing MediaOcracy, complaining about framing, talking about what media did and did not cover.

Now I was outside the building.

It is starting.

That matters more than whether the campaign eventually became the movement I imagined.

NOT doing something isn't DOING something.

There is a difference between believing an idea and scheduling Tuesday around it.

Day Eight

By February 2014 I was still there.

Never more than ten.

Always at least one.

Sometimes the one was Tony.

On one of the signs I managed to get the date wrong.

Rich, huh?

The guy picketing the media about accuracy gets the date wrong on the damn sign.

Put that in the Examiner chapter too.

Relentless tenacity will prevail, I wrote.

The fly was supposed to become a hornets' nest.

Mostly the fly kept showing up.

Day Twenty

By August 2014 I called one of the posts Day Twenty.

I had been holding my breath waiting for others to arrive.

Eventually I wrote:

I have BEEN holding my breath, but I'm going to have to take a breath...

Then another line:

I shall. I have the rest of my life.

That is the line I care about now.

Not because KVOA surrendered.

Not because a national movement marched behind me.

Because Tony had to decide whether the meaning of the action depended on applause.

Win, lose or draw...I'd rather be wrong moving forward than right standing still.

There is a correction even inside that Tonyism. Moving forward is not proof of being right.

But standing still guarantees you learn nothing from the road.

Alone, Not Lonely

Years later I looked back and estimated that I had gone out there for more than a year, roughly every other week, more than two dozen days. Most days I was alone/NOTlonely. A handful of people joined me on occasion.

Memory is approximate. The dated posts are better than my head for reconstructing the exact count.

The lesson does not require an exact number.

I wanted a movement.

I mostly got Tony.

And Tony showed up.

Sometimes the lesson isn't whether the movement followed you.

Sometimes the lesson is whether YOU followed through.

CHAPTER 13

MEDIA-OCRACY

Who DIED and left YOU boss?

WHAT IS NEWS?

What happened? THAT is news. Why it happened may be analysis, interpretation or commentary. The moment the reporter tells me WHY before I have even absorbed WHAT, the frame has begun doing work on me.

Tell me WHAT happened. I’ll decide WHY I think it happened.

And listen to the language: “What’s your reaction?” Why reaction? Why not response? Reaction is immediate. Emotional. Reflexive. Response at least leaves room for thought.

Don’t ask for my reaction. Give me time for a response.

To Tony, that wording is a tell. MediaOcracy thrives on REACTION. Forget proactive. Keep the audience reacting and the traffic never stops.

THE GLIB MEDIUM

MediaOcracy is a GLIB medium. Everything has to be cute, clever, light, ironic. Serious subjects arrive wrapped in banter, smirks, jokes and personality. Fine. But where’s the actual joke?

Tone is part of the frame. It can tell an audience how seriously — or unseriously — to receive something before the facts have had a chance to stand on their own.

I had already been calling the system a Media-Ocracy. What bothered me was not simply bias in the ordinary partisan sense. It was power over framing: the ability to define the terms before the argument began, apply a generalization to a particular case, reverse the generalization when convenient, highlight fear, choose the exception, repeat it until it feels normal and then call the resulting perception reality.

Define your terms or someone will define them for you.

That became one of the practical rules.

Tell me where you are standing and I can evaluate what you are telling me. Hide where you are standing while pretending you have no position at all, and my trust drops fast.

Media, in my formulation, should REFLECT reality more than SHAPE it.

Of course that distinction is not clean. The moment a reporter chooses one story over another, a frame exists. The moment an editor chooses a headline, attention has been directed. There is no magical view from nowhere.

Back in the 1970s, one of the popular questions was:

"Where are you coming from?"

Tony never really stopped asking it.

Not necessarily: Who did you vote for?

But: What assumptions are you carrying? What experiences shaped you? What do you already believe before you approach the story? What are you predisposed to notice - and what might you overlook?

The stronger question is not:

"Show me your private ballot."

It is:

"What are you bringing to the story?"

The problem begins when framing is disguised as pure reflection.

That became one of my obsessions: who controls attention?

Before you ask whether a story is true, there is an earlier question worth asking:

why THIS story? Who aimed the spotlight here? What was left in the dark? Media power is not only the power to tell you what happened. It is the power to influence what you spend your time thinking happened.

That does not make every omitted story censorship or every editorial choice conspiracy. Attention is finite. Somebody has to choose. The assessment begins by making the choice visible.

When the tree falls and no one reports it, it simply didn't happen - at least not in the public mind.

That is an exaggeration with a point. Events can exist without coverage. But public awareness does not. Something can be physically real and culturally invisible at the same time.

That led to another distinction I kept making.

We the People were not always silent.

Sometimes we were SILENCED.

Silent means you chose not to speak.

Silenced means you spoke and the channel carrying public attention did not carry you.

That is how I understood my picketing. I was not trying to prove one local station controlled America. I was protesting the gatekeeping function itself and trying to turn a complaint into an event the gatekeeper had to look at through the window.

There was another lesson buried in all those signs: persistence matters. A one- time demonstration is an event. Repetition becomes a presence.

That was the salesman in me before I was willing to admit how much sales had shaped everything else.

Attention.

Interest.

Desire.

Action.

AIDA.

Memes were made for that sequence. I called myself a Meme Whisperer. A picture could compress an argument, an emotion and a direction into one glance - something for the quiver AS needed. But compression is not proof. A meme can get attention faster than evidence can catch up.

The same instinct pushed me from curator to activator. I did not merely want an audience nodding along. I wanted people to DO something: show up, call, write, picket, share, organize, repeat. Ten DOers beat ten thousand nodding heads.

Before every picket day, I worked Facebook for a full week.

I had hit Facebook's friend limit - 5,000 friends - and beyond that I had built group after group.

It has been so long now that I do not pretend to remember every number perfectly, but I had more than twenty groups, and I remember a dozen or so of them reaching somewhere around twenty thousand members or followers - whatever Facebook happened to call the metric.

The point is, on the screen it looked like I had an army.

So for the entire week before a picket I worked them.

Posted. Reposted. Invited. Reminded. Explained what I was doing. Told people where I would be. Told them when.

Then picket day came.

I would go out there and wait.

Surely some of these people are going to show up.

Rarely did they.

There I was.

Thousands upon thousands of digital connections - and Tony holding the damn sign.

That taught me something too.

Clicking is not showing up.

Agreeing is not acting.

Following is not commitment.

And a crowd on a computer screen is not necessarily a crowd standing beside you when somebody actually has to do something.

Facebook eventually disabled my account. I called it "Catching FLAK means knowing you are over the target."

Was that really why they disabled me?

I cannot prove that.

That was my interpretation.

But the larger lesson I could prove to myself:

Digital support and actual support are two very different animals.

For all those names on the screen, when it came time to stand on the sidewalk - most of the time, I stood there alone.

I did not invent it. I learned it in sales. But once you understand that sequence, you start seeing it everywhere - advertising, headlines, politics, radio, memes, protest, entertainment.

The radio show became another version of the same instinct. I was part talk host, part DJ, part curator and, looking back, part traffic cop.

I would find a story, an article, a clip, a statistic, a cultural moment - something people normally did not see - and wave the audience toward it:

Hey. Look over HERE. You're missing this.

A traffic cop does not manufacture the cars. He sees what is coming from different directions and notices where they are about to collide.

Politics, pop culture, family, sex, economics, religion, movies, a caller, an article found at three in the morning - I kept seeing intersections.

Culture belongs in that intersection because culture does not merely show us what exists. It teaches us what to admire. A movie can make a character heroic before anybody argues his philosophy. A song can make rebellion feel noble. A comedian can make an idea ridiculous before the audience has examined it. Art makes an idea felt before it is argued.

That is why PopCulture matters to my own fork in the road. PopCulture did not change right into wrong. It changed what looked COOL. The same transmission system can sell courage, duty, rebellion, irresponsibility, patriotism, vanity or sacrifice. The medium is not automatically the villain. The question is what prestige it assigns and what behavior follows.

POPCULTURE - THE FORK IN THE ROAD

This was one of those places where I came to a fork in the road.

And as the old line goes:

When you come to a fork in the road... take it.

Johnny Carson's Carnac would have appreciated that one.

But mine was not a joke.

I really did have a choice.

I could have looked back at everything that had happened to me and accepted victimhood as a badge of honor.

I had enough material.

A rough childhood. Prison. Addiction. Violence. Failure.

Plenty of reasons to say:

Look what the world did TO me.

And PopCulture was increasingly willing to hand me that explanation.

Wear the wound. Build an identity around it. Let the injury explain the person.

I could have done that.

But then I would have been DIShonoring my mother's lessons to me.

Because Ma had already taught me something else.

Responsibility. Effort. Endurance. Do what has to be done. Get up. Keep moving.

I was not going to deny HER truths simply because another explanation was becoming more popular.

That was the crossroad.

One road said:

What happened to you defines you.

The other said:

What you do with what happened to you defines you.

I took Ma's road.

I had already been wrestling with that idea years earlier.

In 2015 I was writing about what I called THE CULTURE OF COOL.

To be popular was becoming more important than to be right.

If victimhood could be made COOL, people would compete for victim status. If rebellion could be made COOL, rebellion gained prestige. If being offended carried social status, then being offended could become its own kind of currency.

And then along came Trump.

What interested me was not merely the politics. I thought I was watching somebody grab hold of the same PopCulture machinery and turn it around.

Trump had usurped the PopCULT.

He understood spectacle. Repetition. Branding. He understood that politics had already entered the world of entertainment, image and COOL.

The lesson was bigger than Trump: the culture-making machine does not care who uses it.

Who decides what becomes COOL?

And what happens after enough people decide they want to be part of it?

Looking back, I can see that I was often forward-looking before I had the language to explain what I was seeing.

That started early. I would notice a pattern. Feel that something was moving.

Sense where it might lead. Only later would I find the terminology, the theory, or the evidence that helped me explain it.

That was not magic. It was curiosity. Observation. Experience. Pattern recognition. And sometimes - yes - getting there a little early.

That explains some of the apparent disorder in the old archive. On the page it can look like a traffic jam. In my head I was directing traffic.

That curator role matters because a third-party article was rarely the point by itself. The Tony method was more like:

You probably haven't heard this.

I found it.

Listen to this.

Now let me tell you why I think it matters.

Find it -> recognize significance -> put it in front of people -> add Tony.

That is Media-Ocracy from the other side of the gate. If somebody else can direct attention, so can I.

And that requires the same self-audit I demand of them.

If I accused journalists of failing standards of accuracy, relevance, breadth or fairness, I have to ask whether my own headline did the same thing. Did I take two anecdotes and promote them into a national trend? Did I know a motive, or did I THINK I knew it? Did I use the most inflammatory example because it generated attention?

The answer, sometimes, is yes.

Tony belongs on the witness stand too.

That does not erase the Media-Ocracy argument. It makes it more credible.

Then there are the mechanisms:

Polls. Studies. Surveys.

Perfectly legitimate tools.

Until somebody starts asking:

Who framed the question?

Who selected the study?

Who decided which result deserved airtime?

Who repeated it?

Who advertised it?

And who benefited?

I THINK I KNOW the MediaOcracy has learned how powerful the sequence can become:

Frame the narrative.

Popularize it.

Advertise it.

Repeat it.

Then POLL IT.

Now report the poll as evidence of what "the public thinks."

But Tony wants to know something else:

How much of what the public thinks was influenced by what the public had just been repeatedly told?

That is where the process begins to look circular to me.

Narrative creates attention. Attention creates reaction. Reaction creates polling.

Polling becomes another story. The story reinforces the narrative. And around it goes.

Then follow the money.

Political controversy creates political advertising. One side pushes a message. The other side spends money trying to counter it. More controversy. More airtime.

More advertising. More revenue.

Tony's rule applies again:

NOTE WHO BENEFITS.

That does not prove conspiracy.

It gives me another reason to check the work.

Popularize it first. Poll it second. Then point to the poll as proof that it has been popularized.

Attention is finite. Whoever controls your attention can control more of you than you think.

Mass media also creates a strange kind of belonging. People separated by hundreds or thousands of miles can watch the same face, repeat the same phrase, admire the same celebrity, and feel as though they are standing in one room.

And too often, that room seems to be in New York.

New York - one of the great centers of American media - can begin to behave as though New York is where America lives.

But America is not one city.

People across the country do not necessarily hear their own values reflected back at them. Instead, they can find themselves inundated with values formed in cultural centers that may be very different from their own.

That is not simply hyperbole. The national media workforce is disproportionately concentrated in places like New York, Los Angeles and Washington, while Americans themselves remain sharply divided by geography, culture and politics.

And that creates another illusion:

the illusion of EQUAL-ness.

Equal exposure does not mean equal representation.

If one cultural viewpoint owns the microphone longer, louder and more often, repetition can begin to masquerade as consensus.

And once consensus is perceived...

POPULARIZED has already done part of its work.

The shared image creates a shared emotion. The shared emotion creates belonging. Belonging creates pressure to conform. That is POPULARIZED at scale.

That includes the person asking the question.

One of my later arguments about "gotcha" questions was really an argument about agenda. Not every question deserves to become the center of the conversation merely because somebody asked it. Some questions require study.

Some are distractions. Some expose something essential.

The person asking the question should not automatically get to decide what matters most.

But "gotcha" cannot become a magic word for any question I don't like.

The test is harder:

Is this question exposing something important - or merely dragging the conversation away from something more important?

That is agenda control without cowardice.

Then came another image I liked: mirror versus sponge.

BEING a mirror BEATS being a SPONGE any day.

A sponge absorbs whatever is thrown into it.

A mirror sends the image back.

As a communication strategy, I saw Trump doing that constantly. Criticism arrived, and instead of simply absorbing the frame, he attacked the frame, the source or the premise and sent the audience back toward the people who had aimed it at him.

That can be effective.

It can also distort.

A mirror is not automatically accurate just because it reflects.

So the mature lesson is not "reject every criticism." It is: don't automatically absorb somebody else's framing of you. Examine it. Decide what is true. Reflect back what isn't.

That connects straight back to I AM ME.

The media problem therefore belongs to a larger question than politics.

Who directs attention?

Who defines the frame?

Who decides what matters?

Who decides what a word means?

Who decides what gets repeated until it feels true?

And once somebody has successfully pointed the crowd in one direction, how many people still turn their heads and ask what is happening behind them?

My name is Tucker...err, Tony. No SUCKER.

That is the joke.

The serious proposition underneath it is simpler:

Do not surrender judgment to the person delivering the information.

Listen.

Look.

Ask where he is standing.

Then think.

Who Thanks Whom?

A politician appears on television and the interview ends with a sentence so ordinary nobody hears the hierarchy inside it.

Thank you for having me.

I kept asking:

Who thanks whom?

If the elected official has all the power, why is he grateful for the microphone?

Shouldn't the network be saying, "Thank you for coming"?

It is only a social ritual. I know that.

But rituals reveal prestige.

Politics may make the laws. Whoever controls the microphone has enormous power over what people hear, what they discuss and eventually what they think matters.

That was Media-Ocracy.

THE O.J. EFFECT — TONY’S ASSESSMENT

Reasonable doubt did not begin with O.J. Simpson. The law was there long before him. What changed for Tony was cultural: millions of Americans watched a defense demonstrate how multiplying possibilities could make certainty harder to hold.

What if this? What if that? What about contamination? What about the police?

What about the glove? Possibility after possibility until Tony began asking: at what point does reasonable doubt become unreasonable doubt?

The legal standard is not supposed to mean every imaginable possibility. But culturally, Tony believes O.J. became a lesson every defense lawyer and every television viewer could see: doubt works.

And that leads to another Tony question: have we become so anxious to EXPLAIN conduct that explanation sometimes becomes exoneration?

Mental illness is real. Most mentally ill people are not violent. A diagnosis can explain something important. But Tony refuses the proposition that attaching a diagnosis automatically erases moral language.

Evil does not cease being evil merely because somebody can explain something about the person who committed it.

"Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent."

"Justice delayed is justice denied."

I keep coming back to that because I believe we have watched an inversion take hold in parts of the criminal-justice system.

Compassion for the accused is necessary. Due process is necessary. Second chances can be necessary.

But what happens when mercy toward somebody with a known history of serious criminal behavior places another innocent person in harm's way?

We have all seen the kind of story: arrested before, convicted before, released again, and then somebody else is hurt - sometimes hours or days later.

That does not mean every previously convicted person is destined to commit another crime.

THE MODIFIER MATTERS.

It means risk is real, and pretending otherwise does not make the risk disappear.

Mercy has consequences too.

From where I stood - an Italian kid often looking at America's Black- and-white racial argument from somewhere outside both camps - the racial disproportions in crime and punishment never struck me as something that could be explained by slogans alone.

Nor did I think statistics, by themselves, told me the moral worth of any individual.

Generalization in the abstract. Individual evidence for the individual.

That distinction matters.

What troubled me was watching a difficult problem become morally inverted: accountability increasingly described as cruelty, consequence treated as oppression, while the innocent person who eventually absorbs the consequence can disappear from the conversation.

To me, that is not merely baffling.

It is diabolical.

Because compassion that forgets the innocent is no longer operating OF

THE CENTER.

Mercy matters. Justice matters.

And the innocent matter too.

That thought eventually feeds a later conclusion: TOO SMART FOR THEIR OWN GOOD. We can become so educated, analytical and certain of our sophistication that being wrong no longer occurs to us — so we stop checking our work.

CHAPTER 14

WHEN POP CULTURE TOOK THE WHEEL

I used to think politics drove culture.

Then I thought I watched the traffic reverse.

Politics asks for your vote every few years.

Culture has been talking to you every damn day in between.

Which one got there first?

It's the Culture, Stupid

By 2012 I was already using a culture-first frame.

I did not yet have the mature vocabulary of Popularized, Popularizers and the Examiner.

I had the irritation.

It's the Culture, Stupid.

The phrase was a play on an older political slogan, not a Tony invention. The point underneath it mattered more than the wording.

If millions of people change what they admire, laugh at, condemn, imitate and reward, politics eventually has to respond to the people those habits produced.

A law may command behavior.

Culture can make the behavior feel cool before the law ever arrives.

Hollywood Became the Other Parent

Parents do not raise children alone.

Neither do schools.

Entertainment is a teacher that rarely announces the lesson plan.

A character becomes heroic.

A villain becomes ridiculous.

A lifestyle gets music under it.

A rule becomes a joke.

A taboo becomes brave.

A responsibility becomes old-fashioned.

A rebellion becomes sexy.

None of that proves the message is good or bad.

It proves the message is doing work.

8 HOURS WORK.

8 HOURS REST.

8 HOURS LIFE.

And what did we do with that third eight?

We learned how to play.

We learned how to entertain ourselves.

We learned how to fill every empty minute.

But somewhere along the way, I think we forgot to STUDY.

WORK. PLAY. STUDY.

Work keeps us productive.

Play gives us pleasure.

Study keeps us free.

Because study means more than school.

Read. Think. Compare. Question. Learn.

Check your work.

Replace study with play long enough and eventually you get the results that substitution produces.

And then comes the Tony question:

How's that working out?

Who raises the culture?

That question became more interesting to me than simply asking which party won an election.

Perception Is Not Reality

I spent years in advertising. I know perception matters.

Perception can sell.

Perception can elect.

Perception can make a brand worth more than the physical object wearing the label.

But perception is not reality.

It is a perception OF reality.

That distinction is exactly why culture is powerful and dangerous.

Culture can change what something MEANS to people without changing what the thing IS.

And once perception is allowed to trump reality, life itself can become an illusion.

The label lesson from the garment factory returns.

Same cloth.

Different name.

Different price.

Now scale that to politics, morality, identity, celebrity and status.

That is PopCULT.

POPULARIZED - WHO MAKES "COOL"?

THE RECORD SHOWS

Long before Tony came up with POPULARIZED, some pretty serious people were already talking openly about the machinery behind public opinion.

Walter Lippmann wrote in Public Opinion in 1922 about the "manufacture of consent" and the opportunities for manipulation that arise when people depend on simplified pictures of a world too large and complicated to experience directly.

Then Edward Bernays, the man widely associated with the development of modern public relations, went further. In Propaganda in 1928, he wrote of the "conscious and intelligent manipulation" of the organized habits and opinions of the masses. He even described those operating this machinery as an "invisible government."

Well, there it is.

Make it COOL.

Make it POPULAR.

Make people believe everybody else already accepts it.

And eventually popularity itself begins masquerading as proof that it is RIGHT.

Then along come Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt School. They gave their famous chapter a title Tony could almost have stolen:

"The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Their argument was that film, radio, magazines and commercial entertainment had become a standardized system capable of encouraging conformity rather than independent judgment.

Sound familiar?

POPULARIZED.

Herbert Marcuse took the idea into another neighborhood. In One-Dimensional Man, he argued that society could manufacture what he called "false needs."

Among his examples were pressures to consume according to advertising and even to "love and hate what others love and hate."

There's Tony's COOL again.

If everybody I identify with loves it - I love it.

If everybody I identify with hates it - I hate it.

If they approve of me - I must be okay.

Self-respect?

Or rented approval?

Marcuse later became even more explicitly political. In Repressive Tolerance he argued for what he called "liberating tolerance," including tolerance for movements from the Left and intolerance toward movements from the Right, because he believed supposedly neutral tolerance could preserve an oppressive status quo.

THE EXAMINER

Hold it, Tony.

Bernays, Lippmann, Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse were not sitting around the same table issuing cultural marching orders.

Bernays was developing public-relations techniques. Lippmann was analyzing public opinion and democracy. Horkheimer and Adorno were criticizing commercial mass culture and capitalism. Marcuse wanted radical social transformation.

Similarity of mechanism is not proof of coordination.

TONY

Agreed.

I don't need them sitting at the same table.

That isn't my point.

My point is that, from entirely different directions, intelligent people were telling us for decades that human opinion could be shaped, desires could be manufactured, conformity could be encouraged, and mass culture could influence what people accepted as normal.

I came along years later, watched it happening in real life, and gave it my own name:

POPULARIZED.

Make it COOL.

Make it popular.

Make it normal.

Make it accepted.

Then watch accepted become RIGHT in their own head.

Fake Believe.

Tick.

Tock.

Source Notes

• Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1922).

• Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928).

• Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, "The Culture Industry:

Enlightenment as Mass Deception."

• Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (1964).

• Herbert Marcuse, "Repressive Tolerance" (1965).

ARTISTS SAY IT OUT LOUD

Artists themselves have often described art as something more than decoration.

Nina Simone: "We will shape and mold this country..."

James Baldwin: "Artists are here to disturb the peace."

Pablo Picasso described art as an "offensive weapon" rather than mere decoration.

Toni Morrison: "This is precisely the time when artists go to work."

And Massimo Vignelli supplied the useful counterweight: "Design cannot change a society."

THE EXAMINER: Those quotations do not prove a coordinated cultural program. They prove something narrower and more useful: artists and designers themselves have argued - and disagreed - about how much art can or should shape society.

FIDDLER — TENSION AS SUGGESTION

I remember seeing a production of Fiddler on the Roof while I was incarcerated — I believe at Concord in Massachusetts. What stayed with me was TRADITION being put on trial by life itself.

Fiddler is more complicated than “tradition bad.” Tevye bends on some traditions and holds on others. That is exactly why it works as an example for me.

The TENSION itself becomes suggestion.

Nobody has to stand up and order the audience to reject a boundary. Put the boundary onstage. Show the human cost. Make the challenger sympathetic. Let the audience feel the conflict. The suggestion has entered the room before anyone issues an instruction.

Power of Suggestion does not require a manifesto.

Artists openly talk about pushing boundaries, challenging convention and shaping culture. Fine. My Examiner asks only: if you are shaping culture, why should I not examine what direction you are shaping it?

SOFTENING THE TARGET

Suggestion -> familiarity -> reduced resistance -> normalization -> acceptance.

Tony calls that “softening the target.” That phrase is my interpretation of the EFFECT, not proof that every writer or performer sat in a room planning the same destination.

THE DOG WHISTLE THEORY

Some of the most powerful coordinated-looking behavior needs no instruction sheet at all. X did this -> Y learns that it can be done. X got away with it -> Y learns the risk may be acceptable. X was rewarded -> Y learns what gets rewarded.

The most powerful signal may be the one nobody ever has to say out loud.

That is suggestion, imitation, precedent and incentive. It is not, by itself, proof of conspiracy. The Examiner keeps that distinction alive.

Tony doesn’t need proof to form a personal assessment. Tony needs to understand the knowledge in front of him — and the forces compelling him to think about that knowledge in one particular way only. Objective claims still have to earn objective evidence.

IMAGE OVER SUBSTANCE - ANOTHER INVERSION

Advertising taught me that perception matters. Perception sells. Somewhere along the way, though, IMAGE can stop introducing SUBSTANCE and start substituting for it.

Keeping up with the Joneses is not necessarily about BEING better. It is often about LOOKING better. Bigger house. Newer car. Better neighborhood. Better label. More status.

Same cloth. Different name. Different price. The garment factory already taught Tony that one.

MAKE-BELIEVE can become MAKE-YOU-BELIEVE. And if I repeat the

image long enough, it can become MAKE-ME-BELIEVE.

If I can make YOU believe the image, I can acquire status. If I can make MYSELF believe the image, I can avoid looking too closely at the substance.

IMAGE OVER SUBSTANCE. MORE OVER ENOUGH. APPEARANCE

OVER IS.

The Land of JUST Enough asks the question the Joneses cannot answer: When is enough...ENOUGH?

JUST Enough is not poverty. It is not anti-ambition. It is not settling. It is knowing the difference between becoming more and needing to LOOK like more.

AMBITION = becoming more. POPULARIZED = needing to LOOK like

more.

Shaping, Not Reflecting

I once wrote that media was SHAPING opinion, NOT reflecting opinion.

The mature version is less absolute.

Every medium does some of both.

It reflects what audiences already want and shapes what audiences notice next.

The important question is the loop.

Culture shapes audience.

Audience rewards culture.

Media studies the reward.

Politicians study the media.

Politicians become performers.

Performers reshape culture.

And around it goes.

Eventually the old direction - politics downstream into culture - can invert.

Culture begins pushing politics upstream.

The Question Changes

Old Tony asked:

What are THEY doing to the culture?

The Examiner asks a better question:

What shaped ME?

Which movies made something feel normal before I had an argument for it?

Which songs made rebellion sound noble?

Which heroes taught me what strength looked like?

Which villains taught me what weakness looked like?

Which jokes decided what could be laughed out of the room?

That is Popularized again.

Not because culture is evil.

Because culture is powerful.

And then along came a man who did not merely understand PopCULTure.

He had already been living inside it for decades.

CHAPTER 14A

THE PLAYGROUND

THE PLAYGROUND

THE PLAYGROUND IS LIFE

I do not mean only the schoolyard.

THE PLAYGROUND is LIFE itself - any bounded human arena where people share space, rules, status, conflict, consequence, cooperation, competition and belonging.

Schoolyard. Workplace. Prison yard. Neighborhood. Marketplace. Family. Social group. Government.

A book can tell you honesty matters. A teacher can explain responsibility. A preacher can talk about morality. THE PLAYGROUND asks: WHAT ARE YOU

GOING TO DO?

Ma did not merely lecture me about work. I watched Ma WORK.

The lesson was not only what Ma said. The lesson was MA.

Children do not begin by studying philosophy. They study US.

THE PLAYGROUND

MODELING is the curriculum.

EXPERIENCE is the teacher.

CONSEQUENCES grade the paper.

Equilibrium on THE PLAYGROUND is not a photograph. It moves. People arrive. People leave. Alliances form. Rules get challenged. Somebody pushes.

Somebody pushes back.

Equilibrium is adjustment, not sameness or stillness.

And THE PLAYGROUND does not guarantee justice. The bully can win. The weak can be excluded. The crowd can follow the wrong person. That is why rules, enforcement and enough people willing to uphold them still matter.

Otherwise everybody eventually becomes his own law and order.

AND BY DEFINITION - THAT IS DISORDER.

Long before there was social media, there was the PLAYGROUND.

That was where humanity was learned. At least a lot of it.

You learned how to get along with your playmates. The strong ones. The weak ones. The good-looking ones. The fat ones. The ugly ones. The smart kid. The dumb kid. The bully. The kid everybody picked on.

And let's not romanticize children. Kids can be vicious.

That observation is part of why I have never automatically accepted the idea that human beings arrive naturally filled with goodwill toward everybody else. I BELIEVE we arrive much closer to ANIMAL than ANGEL.

At our most basic level, we compete. For food. Attention. Territory. Status. What belongs to us. Sometimes what does NOT belong to us.

Then something has to happen. We have to be CIVILIZED.

Ma called a lot of that MANNERS.

Don't hit. Don't steal. Wait your turn. Say please. Say thank you. Do not humiliate somebody just because you can. Learn how to lose. Learn how to win without being an asshole.

That is civilization beginning on the playground.

What stands between GOOD behavior and BAD behavior? Sometimes something as simple as manners. But if manners were all humanity required, we would not need LAWS.

Law is what civilization builds when manners, conscience, family and voluntary restraint are not enough.

And even law needs something more: judgment, proportion, consequence and, I believe, REDEMPTION.

You hit somebody - something happened. You cheated - somebody called you a cheater. You acted like an asshole - eventually somebody did not want to play with you. Natural Law in short pants.

Natural Law, as I understood it before I ever had a name for it, was morality with consequences.

It was the understanding that life eventually asks you to account for what you do.

You get what you deserve.

You reap what you sow.

Cause produces effect.

Choices produce consequences.

You can argue with people. You can argue with rules. You can even argue with morality.

Reality does not have to argue back.

It simply delivers the consequence.

Nobody called it that. We were kids. We were learning how to become people.

THE DIGITAL PLAYGROUND

Then something changed. The PLAYGROUND became DIGITAL.

The old playground had consequences. Say something vicious to somebody standing six feet away and you might have to deal with the reaction. Maybe he cried. Maybe everybody turned on you. Maybe he punched you in the nose. Not necessarily good outcomes - but REAL outcomes.

You knew another HUMAN BEING was standing there.

Today the playground fits in your hand. A screen. A username. An avatar.

Sometimes NO NAME AT ALL.

Anonymity changed the equation.

It made the cowardly brave.

People who might never say something to your face discovered they could say almost anything from behind a screen.

Now you can insult somebody you will never meet. Damage a reputation without looking into the person's eyes. Spread something you do not even KNOW is true.

Start a fight and disappear. Stir the shit pot - then walk away before anybody knows who held the spoon.

Where is the consequence? Where is the social correction?

The playground did not disappear. It became EVERYWHERE.

MAKE-BELIEVE -> MAKE-YOU-BELIEVE

SEX, GENDER AND A CHANGING FRAME

When I was growing up, the ordinary mainstream framework did not ask children to define an internal gender identity apart from biological sex. Gender- variant people existed; the modern framework and vocabulary developed later and then moved into everyday culture.

That distinction matters to Tony because I watched the FRAME change. Klinger on M*A*S*H wore women’s clothes trying to get a Section 8. In Some Like It Hot, two men disguised themselves as women to escape gangsters. Bosom Buddies used disguise to get housing. Tootsie wanted an acting job. Mrs. Doubtfire wanted access to his children.

Those characters were not presented as declarations that biology had changed.

The clothing was disguise, comedy, strategy or role-play. Tony watched later culture attach a different interpretive framework to gender presentation.

I do not present that as proof that every new idea is false. I present it as another Tick Tock: a cultural meaning changed during my lifetime.

LIES OF OMISSION

One biological fact does not depend on anybody’s cultural label: ordinary human reproduction requires male and female reproductive cells — sperm and ovum.

Tony believes contemporary popCULTure can foreground identity while backgrounding that foundational dependence.

That is my “lie of omission” argument. Not that the information is unavailable.

That the culture can choose what to emphasize and what to leave quietly in the background.

When I was a kid, we played MAKE-BELIEVE. Cowboys. Soldiers. Cops and robbers. We knew it was make-believe.

Today technology can turn MAKE-BELIEVE into something else: MAKE-YOU-

BELIEVE.

An image can be manipulated. A story can be manufactured. A rumor repeated ten thousand times starts looking like information. Popularity begins masquerading as evidence.

The IN Crowd does not simply tell you what is COOL anymore. It can tell you what is REAL - or at least make you believe it is.

Add anonymity. Add instant outrage. Add algorithms rewarding attention. Add millions of human beings carrying the same ancient animal instincts we had on the schoolyard - competition, status, belonging, jealousy, fear, aggression - and remove many of the immediate consequences that once taught restraint.

What do you expect? FURY. The technology changed. The animal didn't.

Maybe that is the mistake. We built a digital playground assuming the children using it had somehow stopped being human.

They had not.

Neither had the adults.

And THAT may be the most frightening part of ChildrenIzation: The playground did not disappear when we grew up. We brought it with us.

CHAPTER 14B

INCREMENTALIZING - TICK. TOCK.

TICK. TOCK.

You do not turn a culture upside down in one afternoon.

Nobody would accept it.

You move it an inch. Then another. Then another. TICK. TOCK.

One exception. One explanation. One new definition. One behavior we are told not to judge. One old standard we are told is outdated. One more slider moved on the human MIXING BOARD.

Nothing looks revolutionary while it is happening. That is the trick.

Each movement is small enough to explain away. What's the big deal?

Fine. Maybe THIS one is not a big deal. But then comes the next one. And the next one. And the next. TICK. TOCK.

I call it INCREMENTALIZING.

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO CONTROL THE PERSON - CONTROL

WHAT FEELS NORMAL

Different thinkers have described different mechanisms by which public norms move: Gramsci wrote about cultural hegemony; the phrase "long march through the institutions" became associated with Rudi Dutschke; Marcuse argued about tolerance and social transformation; Joseph Overton described a window of politically acceptable policy; Timur Kuran wrote about preference falsification.

They are not the same theory. They do not prove coordination. They do give me a common question: what happens when the boundaries of NORMAL move before most people notice they moved?

Don't prove the conspiracy. Prove the mechanism.

POPULARIZED asks whether repetition, prestige, embarrassment, reward, punishment and group identity can make a new position feel ordinary without anybody issuing a single master command.

Did YOU assess it - or did you simply become accustomed to it?

THE HAND IN THE COOKIE JAR - CLOWARD AND PIVEN

THE RECORD SHOWS: In 1966, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven proposed a mass effort to enroll welfare-eligible poor people in existing programs.

They argued that the resulting financial and political pressure could create a crisis and help force national legislation for a guaranteed income.

That is what they wrote. It is not necessary to turn it into a secret master plan.

My reaction when I later encountered it was simpler: hand in the cookie jar.

My conspiracy theory learned how to introduce itself.

THE EXAMINER: A documented 1966 strategy does not prove that every later welfare expansion, fiscal crisis, protest movement or political decision came from Cloward and Piven. Similarity is not causation.

TONY: Agreed. I do not need every later event to trace back to two professors. I need to know the mechanism existed, then compare it with other mechanisms and outcomes without smuggling motive into the evidence.

Observe. Compare. Find the common denominator. ASSESS. Then judge.

I THINK I KNOW — THE WAITING ROOM

There is another tactic I use when I THINK I KNOW something, but I don't yet KNOW it.

Sometimes I FEEL something is true. Strongly. Maybe strongly enough to take a stand. Maybe not.

But feeling something and KNOWING something are two different things.

So I COMPARTMENTALIZE.

I have a place in my head where I put those thoughts. Almost like a waiting room.

I tell myself: KEEP THAT HERE.

Don't throw it away. Don't necessarily act on it. And don't promote it to something you KNOW just because you WANT it to be true.

Leave it there. WAITING.

Waiting for something to happen. Something I observe. Something I experience. Some evidence that either supports what I suspected or tells me I was wrong.

And sometimes the evidence never comes. That's okay, too.

Because the purpose of that compartment isn't to protect my belief.

It's to protect my ability to REEXAMINE it.

And when enough evidence finally arrives, THE EXAMINER gets another turn.

Was I right? Was I wrong? Or am I STILL not certain?

Because there is an enormous difference between:

I FEEL IT.

I THINK I KNOW IT.

And... I KNOW IT.

And knowing when you DON'T know something may be just as important as knowing when you DO.

Not necessarily some grand conspiracy with one person behind a curtain directing every move. I do not KNOW that. I do not need to know that.

Culture has momentum. People imitate people. Institutions imitate institutions.

Politicians follow applause. Businesses follow customers. Media follows attention.

Children imitate adults. Then adults begin imitating children.

Remember my HUMAN MIXING BOARD — all those sliders representing human characteristics: ambition, compassion, envy, greed, generosity, selfishness, courage, fear, conformity, independence, and everything in between?

Well, culture has its fingers on that mixing board, too.

Everybody moves those sliders a little. Some intentionally. Others without even realizing it.

And because everybody moved them, nobody thinks anybody moved them.

TICK. TOCK.

And before we know it, the human characteristics haven't necessarily changed — but the CULTURAL BALANCE between them HAS.

JFK - SUSPICION, EVIDENCE AND THE DEEP STATE

And then there is Kennedy.

For Tony, JFK may be one of the best examples of why suspicion and proof cannot be the same thing.

THE RECORD SHOWS: Congress's House Select Committee on Assassinations eventually concluded that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as the result of a conspiracy.

It could not identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy.

The committee also concluded that the investigation into the possibility of conspiracy had been inadequate and that earlier conclusions had been presented too definitively.

Now put Tony in the room.

Decades of secrecy. Records withheld or redacted. Intelligence agencies.

Assassination. A government investigation later criticized as inadequate. Then, generation after generation, more documents becoming public.

What do you expect Tony to do?

NOT ask questions?

This is where the modern phrase DEEP STATE enters my suspicion.

Did some permanent intelligence or governmental apparatus participate in Kennedy's assassination?

I DO NOT KNOW.

And the released record does not establish that the CIA, FBI or Secret Service killed him. In fact, the House committee said it found no evidence those agencies were involved.

But neither does Tony look at decades of secrecy and say: Nothing to see here.

The newer releases have given the public more information about intelligence operations and what government agencies knew and did. They have not established a Deep State assassination.

So Tony puts it where it belongs:

I THINK I KNOW territory.

Suspicion. Not verdict.

A reason to investigate. Not permission to invent the answer.

Because The Examiner still gets the final word:

A hypothetical can help me figure out what to CHECK. It cannot tell me what I found.

More than sixty years later, the questions survived longer than the certainty.

THE TICK-TOCK OF INCREMENTALISM

PRIVATE PRESTIGE -> PUBLIC PRESTIGE

I remember an America in which the private sector carried the glamour, money and prestige. Government work meant something different: stability, civil service, a pension, a working-class path for many families.

Then I felt an inversion. Through the 1960s and 1970s public-sector employment and collective bargaining expanded. Federal employee organizing had been formally recognized under Kennedy, and Carter’s 1978 civil-service reforms put federal labor-management relations more firmly into statute.

Tony began SEEING it in the 1970s. The machinery had begun moving before I noticed it. That matters. Tick Tock is often like that.

I THINK I KNOW — THE UNIONS DIDN'T DISAPPEAR

Here is another example of TICK-TOCK. And another example of my MediaOcracy at work.

For YEARS, I remember hearing about the decline of labor unions. Unions were losing members. Unions were losing influence. Unions were disappearing from the American workplace.

That was the story I kept hearing. And I accepted much of it.

But something didn't feel quite right. So there it sat. In that compartment of my mind where I keep things I THINK I KNOW but cannot yet prove.

Then, over time, bits and pieces began coming together. A news story here. A statistic there. Something I observed. Something I read. Something I suddenly connected to something ELSE.

And finally... DUH!

The unions hadn't simply DISAPPEARED. THE CENTER OF GRAVITY HAD SHIFTED.

While private-sector union membership was declining, public-sector unionization had become an enormous force.

THE RECORD SHOWS: Public-sector unions expanded substantially during the latter half of the twentieth century. President Kennedy's 1962 executive order helped establish collective-bargaining rights for federal employees, while state and local government unions grew through their own legislative and institutional changes.

In 2025, 5.9% of private-sector workers belonged to unions, compared with 32.9% of government workers.

I THINK I KNOW: Now THAT is an inversion worth examining.

Once upon a time, the image of organized labor was the factory worker negotiating with the private employer. Now a substantial part of organized labor operates inside GOVERNMENT itself.

And when public employees organize, negotiate, contribute politically and exert collective pressure, the relationship between employer, employee, taxpayer and elected official becomes considerably more complicated.

The people paying the bills are ultimately WE THE PEOPLE. Yet the people negotiating those bills may also help determine who occupies the political offices across the negotiating table.

I BELIEVE that arrangement creates opportunities for political influence that can become weaponized when circumstances permit.

DIABOLICAL? That's how the implications struck me.

But THE EXAMINER has to make a distinction. Private-sector unions didn't physically migrate into government, and the expansion of public-sector unionism wasn't a secret event. The historical record documents it.

What I am describing is the change in the BALANCE of organized labor — and how long it took ME to recognize its significance.

Because while I kept hearing what organized labor was LOSING, I wasn't hearing nearly enough about where organized labor had become most firmly established.

MediaOcracy.

WHAT was happening? Unions were declining. But WHY wasn't the other half of the picture equally prominent?

That was the question that finally occurred to me.

And by the time I recognized the larger pattern, decades of institutional change had already occurred.

TICK. TOCK.

Sometimes the biggest change isn't what disappears. IT'S WHAT TAKES ITS PLACE — WHILE EVERYBODY IS LOOKING SOMEWHERE ELSE.

By the early 1980s public-sector unionization was far higher than private-sector unionization, and that divergence persisted. My interpretation is that government work increasingly acquired status, compensation and security that earlier generations associated more strongly with private enterprise.

And to me, that did not feel organic. It felt organized. Preordained. It did not come close to passing my smell test.

Because the private sector has a built-in corrective mechanism: performance.

If you cannot function, cannot produce, cannot contribute value, sooner or later somebody notices. A business that carries too many people who cannot perform eventually pays for it.

Government employment struck me differently. More protections. More insulation. More distance between poor performance and consequence.

And I believed there was another effect: talent began shifting away from the private sector.

If government work increasingly offered security, benefits, status and insulation from risk, why would talented people not be drawn toward it?

To me, that changed the balance. The private sector depends on talent willing to take risks, innovate, compete and produce.

Not every government employee. Not even close. But the structure itself seemed far more capable of protecting mediocrity than the private market was.

Unions are another example of my larger human-condition question: what happens to a GOOD IDEA generations after people no longer remember why the good idea was necessary? Protection can become institution. Institution can become entitlement. Entitlement can become power. Power can protect itself.

That last progression is Tony’s assessment, not a mathematical law. The historical movement underneath it is real enough to examine.

Sometimes the change is visible only in percentages.

One point this year. Another point next year. More women in a school, a profession, a workplace. Fewer men somewhere else. A role shifts. An expectation moves.

TICK. TOCK.

I remember watching those percentages move over years and wondering less about whether women COULD do something - of course they could - than about what happened to the larger equilibrium when traditional roles moved.

That is I THINK I KNOW territory. Not every man is a warrior. Not every woman is a nurturer. Individuals vary enormously.

But cultures still distribute functions: provision, protection, nurture, continuity, authority, care.

So my question became: when one part puts down a traditional function, WHO

PICKS IT UP?

And if a traditional male role is redistributed, what did we tell the man his new job was?

EQUILIBRIUM is an equation, not a slogan.

One and one is ONE. Not sameness. Wholeness.

Like two teepee poles leaning into one another: each remains itself; the strength comes partly from the relationship.

Difference is not always imbalance. Sometimes difference is precisely what creates balance.

And in Tony’s mind, the clearest illustration of that concept is the essential relationship between man and woman.

One plus one is one. Not because the two become identical. Because two distinct parts can create a whole neither creates alone.

Before you celebrate changing the parts, ask what job the old parts were performing in the whole.

Small change -> repetition -> familiarity -> normalization -> forgotten origin -> new conventional wisdom.

Yesterday the exception. Today the expectation. TICK. TOCK.

FROM MADE IN AMERICA TO SERVICED IN AMERICA

There was another TICK-TOCK I had been watching long before I knew what I was watching.

Brockton.

The Shoe City.

As a kid in the 1950s, manufacturing was not an economic theory to me.

It was where I lived.

People MADE things.

Shoes. Clothes. Products.

Jobs existed because somebody somewhere actually produced something another person wanted to buy.

Then little by little I watched it move.

Out of Brockton. Out of New England. Toward lower-cost parts of the country.

Then increasingly outside the country. Mexico. Asia. China.

I did not understand the economics of all that when I was a kid.

I only knew something was disappearing.

TICK. TOCK.

Years later, when Trump began talking so relentlessly about American manufacturing, Tony heard something familiar.

My interpretation?

Trump saw what Tony had seen - except Trump understood what he was looking at.

America had gradually moved from:

MADE IN AMERICA

toward something Tony might describe as:

SERVICED IN AMERICA.

We would finance it. Market it. Sell it. Manage it. Service it.

But somebody else could increasingly MAKE it.

And somewhere along the way Tony sensed another cultural change.

Work - especially hard, physical, industrial work - began being discussed almost as though it were something Americans should be rescued from.

Say what?

My mother worked. Brockton worked. Factories worked. America worked.

Nobody had to convince Tony that working conditions could improve. Of course they could.

But improving work and eliminating the cultural value of work are two different things.

That distinction mattered to me.

And underneath it was another feeling I carried for years.

I THINK I KNOW that I watched pieces of what made America distinctive being diluted in the name of making us more like everybody else.

More like Europe.

Why?

I grew up believing that part of the American experiment was precisely that we did NOT have to reproduce every old hierarchy, limitation and assumption we inherited from Europe.

Experiment?

Experiment meets empirical evidence... TIME.

At some point, the passage of time stops being theory and starts becoming evidence.

Say what?

An experiment that has proven its integrity over centuries is still an experiment?

Really?

When does the experiment end?

Most experiments last days. Months. Years.

We are talking centuries.

At some point, if something survives war, depression, expansion, immigration, industrialization, technological revolution, cultural upheaval and generation after generation of people living under it - maybe it is no longer an experiment.

Maybe it is a system that proved something.

So when I hear the phrase "the American experiment," THE EXAMINER in me now asks:

Experiment according to whom?

Because language matters.

Call something an experiment long enough and you leave open the suggestion that the result is still provisional.

Still unsettled.

Still waiting to be replaced.

I am not buying that.

No way. No how.

To my way of thinking, that is another false narrative hiding in familiar language.

America may have begun as an experiment.

But centuries later?

I THINK NOT.

That was the attraction.

LIBERTY.

But LIBERTY distorted is LIBERTY no longer.

And if you continually dilute the values, habits and building blocks that created something exceptional, eventually you may still have the name while possessing less and less of the thing the name once described.

That is what Tony feared he was watching.

Not America for a few of US.

The inheritance belonged to WE - ALL OF US.

THE OLD SALESMAN'S TRICK

There is an old sales line: MAKE THEM THINK IT WAS THEIR IDEA.

That is good sales. Do not force the customer. Move him far enough that eventually HE explains to YOU why he wants what you are selling.

Now apply that to culture.

You do not announce: Tomorrow, RIGHT becomes WRONG. That would never work.

You change what surrounds the belief. What is COOL. What is embarrassing.

What gets rewarded. What gets laughed at. What gets called compassionate.

What gets called cruel. What gets called normal.

Do that long enough and the customer begins selling himself. MAKE-BELIEVE

-> MAKE-YOU-BELIEVE -> MAKE-YOURSELF-BELIEVE.

Nobody has to stand over you anymore. You defend the new belief yourself.

I THINK I have watched versions of that happen over roughly three generations.

That is an interpretation, not a stopwatch.

The grandfather remembers one standard. The father lives through transition.

The child arrives after the transition and says: "What are you people even arguing about? This has always been normal."

No. It has not.

But the child did not watch the movie from the beginning. He walked into the theater halfway through.

YOU'RE LOOKING IN THE WRONG PLACE

There it is in a nutshell: YOU'RE LOOKING IN THE WRONG PLACE.

You keep looking at the politician. The law. The school. The media. The bureaucrat. The parent. The kid. The criminal. The victim. The LEFT. The

RIGHT.

Fine. Look at all of them.

But eventually somebody has to look UPSTREAM.

THE CULTURE.

I BELIEVE culture has been rearranging priorities for decades. Not necessarily by issuing commands. Culture seeps in. Movies. Television. Music. Schools.

Advertising. News. Celebrities. Friends. The IN Crowd. Now algorithms.

Little by little the sliders move. IMAGE over SUBSTANCE. COOL over RIGHT.

FEELING over INFORMATION. EXPLANATION over CONSEQUENCE.

Eventually the priorities become inverted and the inversion feels upright.

FAKE BELIEVE

For years I treated the old line "If I have to explain it to you, you would never understand" mostly as a smart-ass remark.

Now I am not so sure.

Because we HAVE explained. Again and again. And some people still do not understand.

Some - I BELIEVE - WON'T.

There are people manipulating cultural machinery who may not believe half of what they are selling. For them I have another phrase: FAKE BELIEVE.

The belief is useful. Power. Status. Money. Votes. Attention. Control. So they perform belief.

Then there are people downstream. They hear it. See it. Repeat it. Their friends repeat it. The screen repeats it. Everybody they consider COOL appears to believe it.

Eventually repetition stops feeling like repetition. It feels like reality.

For them it may not be fake at all. It may be cultural self-deception - not a clinical diagnosis, but a belief absorbed so thoroughly that the inversion now looks upright.

You cannot always reason somebody out of something that was not reasoned into them.

The argument may be occurring in the intellect while the belief is living somewhere else on the MIXING BOARD: approval, belonging, status, fear, image, certainty.

I was exposed to POPULARIZED culture. I participated in plenty of it. The distinction is that I kept recognizing the inversion — even when I failed to live by what I knew.

Suggestion -> repetition -> normalization -> institutionalization. Tick. Tock.

If you don't understand, I can't explain it to you.

DUH!

GOODWILL WITHOUT VIGILANCE

Resentment can become political identity. A chip on the shoulder can become an axe to grind.

Getting even is not the same thing as seeking justice.

Good people want fairness. That is a virtue. But a virtue can be manipulated if nobody asks where the pavement leads. Goodwill without vigilance can be manipulated. Fairness without consistent standards can become selective.

Exceptions can eventually redefine the rule.

I am less interested in somebody's announced motive than in what the mechanism produces. I do not question your intentions. I question the pavement.

WHY I'M PISSED

That is why I get pissed.

Not because everything is simple. Of course it is complicated.

But complicated does not mean unknowable. Complicated does not mean consequence disappears. Complicated does not mean nobody is responsible. And complicated sure as hell does not mean we should spend forty years admiring the problem.

I have been the prisoner. The addict. The defendant. The bailiff. The employer.

The publisher. The father figure. The businessman. The asshole. The good guy.

Sometimes in the same damn week.

So when somebody tells me something is wrong, my next question is: WHAT

DID YOU DO?

When I believed the media was behaving badly, I stood outside NBC's local affiliate, KVOA, in Tucson, with signs. Maybe I looked ridiculous. Maybe nobody cared. But I DID something.

When a newspaper told me I could not use its distribution anymore, I became the publisher.

Action without judgment can make you an efficient idiot. I proved that plenty of times. Nothing is absolute.

But there is something worse than occasionally being wrong while moving: Being absolutely correct - and doing NOTHING.

NOT doing something isn’t DOING something. It’s doing NOTHING.

That is the modern Tony I want in this book. Not tough for the sake of being tough. ROUGH. Unpolished where polish hides the point. Uncomfortable where comfort becomes an excuse. If you are pissed - ACT pissed. If you are certain - TEST your certainty. If you are compassionate - SHOW me what your compassion produces.

THE PAVEMENT

The road to hell may be paved with good intentions. I became interested in the

PAVEMENT.

What exactly are we laying under our feet, one good intention at a time?

Somewhere between INTENTION and RESULT...there is PAVEMENT.

Good intentions do not suspend cause and effect. Compassion does not repeal consequences. Good motives do not immunize bad results.

When somebody says, "We were only trying to help," my unEducated NOSE asks:

Fine. What happened?

That question leads directly into RESPONSIBILITY.

WHEN YOU CAN'T EVEN SEE WHAT YOU'RE LOOKING AT

That is the danger of incremental change.

You do not experience the distance. You experience the steps.

One step does not feel very far. Neither does the next. TICK. TOCK.

Then one day you turn around and the starting point is gone.

Now you are staring directly at the result and you cannot even see WHAT YOU

ARE LOOKING AT.

The object did not disappear. Your FRAME changed. Your language changed.

Your tolerance changed. Your expectations changed. Your idea of RIGHT changed. Your idea of WRONG changed. Your idea of COOL changed.

Because the changes arrived one at a time, each with an explanation, the final inversion feels perfectly upright.

Culture does not always command. It CONDITIONS. It does not always force. It NORMALIZES. It does not always erase a belief. Sometimes it moves everything around the belief until the old belief looks strange, then unreasonable, then offensive, then unthinkable. TICK. TOCK.

And the big deal can finally stand directly in front of us while we keep asking:

What's the big deal?

CHAPTER 15

THE TRICK BAG

I spent years arguing about left and right before I began asking whether the argument itself had become a trick bag.

Good cop.

Bad cop.

SAME police station.

That little line became one of my favorite ways to describe the two-party paradigm.

The cops can genuinely dislike each other.

Their methods can differ.

One can be easier to deal with than the other.

They are still standing inside the same station.

The parties can genuinely oppose one another and still, collectively, help pull the country away from what I call OF THE CENTER.

One pulls from the Left. One pulls from the Right. They may fight furiously over direction while both helping to orphan the original center.

And Trump does not get an exemption.

If Trump pulls toward a different extreme, THE EXAMINER measures him by the same standard. OF THE CENTER does not belong to Democrats. It does not belong to Republicans. It does not belong to Trump.

It existed before all of them.

The Building

Politics trains us to stare at two rooms.

Republican room.

Democrat room.

Then everybody screams about which room is destroying the building.

The Trick Bag asks an earlier question:

Who designed the building?

What assumptions do both rooms share?

What interests survive regardless of who changes offices?

What choices never make it onto the ballot?

Don't become so fascinated by the argument between the two rooms that you forget to examine the building.

That is OF THE CENTER applied to politics.

The Other Party

By September 2015 I was writing about Trump as something other than simply another Republican.

I called the system a TWO-IN-ONE party.

And I wrote:

There is no "third" party...there IS..."the OTHER party."

That is what interested me.

Trump seemed to be running against Democrats, yes.

But he also seemed to be running against Republicans.

Against consultants.

Against political manners.

Against the approved language.

Against the Media-Ocracy.

Against the whole damn arrangement.

Was I right about everything I attached to Trump?

Of course not.

The Examiner wasn't fully developed yet.

But I think I understood something about his appeal very early.

People were not necessarily searching for another position on the political spectrum.

A lot of them were searching for somebody who did not seem to belong to the spectrum's management committee.

Trump was not standing outside Washington asking:

Which room should I enter?

His appeal was:

Why the hell should I accept your building?

That was the bridge between the Trick Bag and what I later called the Trump Phenomenon.

THE INVERSION OF WHO PAYS

Trump, Tariffs, and the American Marketplace

I THINK I KNOW

One of the more interesting INVERSION discoveries Trump brought to my attention — almost by osmosis — concerned something I had never examined closely enough.

TARIFFS.

Once upon a time, tariffs were one of the principal ways the United States financed its federal government. Not the income tax. TARIFFS.

Think about what that meant. America had something of enormous value. OUR MARKETPLACE.

Foreign manufacturers wanted access to it. They wanted to sell their products to American consumers. And our government recognized that access to this marketplace had economic value.

You want to compete for the American consumer's dollar? There may be a price for bringing your merchandise into our marketplace.

And while collecting revenue, tariffs could also give our own manufacturers some protection from imported competition.

Now, that is not to suggest that tariffs were free money. Importers paid them, and American consumers could ultimately bear some of the costs through higher prices.

But the underlying philosophy interests me. OUR MARKETPLACE HAD VALUE. And that value could help finance OUR government.

THEN ALONG CAME WILSON

THE RECORD SHOWS

In the earliest decades of the Republic, customs duties supplied most of the federal government's revenue. During the nineteenth century, excise taxes, especially after the Civil War, became another substantial source.

America experimented with income taxes during the Civil War, and another attempt in 1894 was struck down by the Supreme Court.

Then came 1913. The 16th Amendment authorized Congress to tax incomes without apportioning the tax among the states.

Woodrow Wilson's administration followed with legislation that significantly reduced tariffs while establishing a permanent federal income tax.

Initially, that income tax affected only a small percentage of Americans. It was not originally the enormous revenue-collecting system that subsequent generations would come to know.

But the door was open. And through that door came expansion. World War I. More taxation. World War II. More Americans paying income taxes. More government revenue collected directly from the earnings of We the People.

TICK. TOCK.

THE INVERSION

I THINK I KNOW

Here is what struck me. Historically, the American marketplace itself had been a substantial source of federal revenue through taxes on imported merchandise.

Over time, the government's principal source of revenue shifted increasingly toward the incomes earned by Americans.

We went from a system substantially financed by taxing goods entering our marketplace to one substantially financed by taxing the money people earned participating in our economy.

And the shift was so gradual, so institutionalized, so thoroughly absorbed into everyday American life, that most of us simply accepted the modern arrangement as though it had always been that way.

It HADN'T.

Now, I understand the arguments for income taxation. I understand that tariffs can raise consumer prices, reduce competition and invite retaliation. And I understand that the federal government of 1913 was not the federal government of today.

But those considerations do not erase the philosophical question.

At what point did we stop thinking principally about the revenue-producing value of ACCESS TO OUR MARKETPLACE and begin accepting that the federal government should principally finance itself by taxing the income of We the People?

And did we ever stop to examine the implications?

Trump's emphasis on tariffs caused me to look backward.

What I discovered was not that everything he said about tariffs was necessarily correct.

What I discovered was that a financing system I had taken for granted was the product of historical choices, not some eternal economic law.

There had been another way.

And whether returning to more tariffs would make America better or worse is a separate examination.

THE EXAMINER

Hold it, Tony. A shift is not automatically an inversion in the moral sense. And a historical system is not necessarily superior because it came first.

TONY

Agreed. But when something once central to financing our government becomes secondary, while something once marginal becomes central, I have witnessed a genuine reversal of emphasis.

And when generations grow up scarcely aware that the reversal ever occurred? THAT is what interests me.

POPULARIZED.

What becomes familiar becomes normal. What becomes normal becomes accepted. And what becomes accepted eventually stops being questioned.

TICK. TOCK. PERSONIFIED.

 

CHAPTER 16

THE TRUMP PHENOMENON

The Golden Elevator

The image almost writes the chapter for me.

A golden elevator opens.

Donald Trump comes down.

Celebrity becomes candidate in real time.

The political class saw a businessman entering politics.

I saw PopCULTure walking into politics.

That is a different interpretation.

Trump had been a brand, television personality, tabloid character, rich guy, punchline, celebrity, salesman and public persona long before he became president.

The political identity did not replace the celebrity identity.

It fused with it.

I wrote early that Trump was the effect of the cultural change, not simply its cause.

The culture had spent decades learning to reward image, attitude, character, spectacle and conflict.

Then the culture produced a political figure already fluent in all of them.

By March 2017 I was explicitly arguing that Trump's popCULTure appeal could diminish traditional media gatekeeping.

He did not have to wait for the evening news to tell the audience who he was.

The audience already knew the character.

And the character could talk directly back.

Long before Donald Trump became the center of American politics, I had been writing about the relationship between politics and culture.

As a kid I remembered politics influencing culture. Later I believed I watched the direction reverse, slowly, until pop culture increasingly influenced the body politic.

I watched the direction of influence change.

That is the frame through which I first found Trump interesting.

The important chronology is this: Trump did not give me the principles that  made him interesting to me. I recognized Trump because I had already arrived at  many of those principles by another road. Tony spent a lifetime learning certain  lessons and then one day recognized some of the machinery walking onto a  political stage.

Not policy first.

Persona first.

Culture first.

I THINK I KNOW

There is an important distinction I want to make here.

Neither Tony nor Trump necessarily understood the full extent of what was happening while it was happening.

But we were observing something. Recognizing something. FEELING something.

The difference?

I HAD A WORD FOR IT.

POPULARIZED.

I had spent years developing that word to describe what I believed I was witnessing — the gradual shaping of public attitudes, perceptions, and cultural acceptance.

I cannot tell you whether Donald Trump sees those same mechanisms exactly as I do.

But when I listened to him, I recognized similarities between some of what he was saying and what I had been observing for decades.

He didn't give me my philosophy. I already had it.

And I had a name for what I believed I was seeing.

POPULARIZED.

Whatever else he was, he appeared to understand something professional politics had forgotten: people do not experience leaders only as white papers. They experience them as characters.

By 2015 I was writing that Trump was "cool." By 2016 I was writing versions of "Trump is the Pop Culture." That matters to this book because it proves the idea was not invented in hindsight after years of watching him dominate attention. I was trying to describe the phenomenon while it was happening.

My formulation was that politics used to push culture downstream, then culture became strong enough to push back upstream.

Carter, Reagan, Clinton, celebrity politics, television, entertainment news, Obama - whatever chronology one prefers, I believed the political class was becoming increasingly fluent in pop culture.

Then along came Trump.

He did not merely use pop culture.

He was native to it.

Celebrity, branding, conflict, insult, catchphrase, spectacle, television timing, character, controversy, repetition, nickname, cliffhanger - these were not campaign accessories added by consultants. They were already part of the man the public knew.

For decades politicians tried to influence culture.

Trump figured out how to become culture.

Politics became the show.

"Politics is show business for ugly people."

I BELIEVE — AS I SEE IT

I've come to look at the political landscape through another version of my HUMAN MIXING BOARD.

POSITIVE. NEGATIVE. NEUTRAL.

When I observe the Democratic Party, I see much of its political energy expressed through dissatisfaction. MALCONTENT. Fix this. Change that. I don't like this. And sometimes, if I don't get my way, I'm going to STOMP MY FEET.

That's my impression of the political temperament, not a claim that every Democrat thinks or behaves alike.

Where I see the Republican CENTER, I perceive a different emphasis — one that begins with what its members believe is best for the country. PERIOD.

Then there's the Republican RIGHT.

I tend to see that faction as occupying a different position on my mixing board. Not necessarily positive or negative, but closer to NEUTRAL in the function it serves — sometimes reinforcing the center, sometimes confronting it, sometimes playing the political bad cop.

GOOD COP. BAD COP.

The Republican center and Republican right don't always agree, but their competing approaches can create a political dynamic of their own.

Now, THE EXAMINER reminds me that people in every political camp believe they're acting for the country's benefit. Their motivations cannot be established simply by observing their rhetoric.

Fair enough.

But I'm describing what I perceive in the political performances I have watched.

The issues change. The actors change. The volume changes.

THE HUMAN MIXING BOARD remains.

And the question I keep coming back to is whether we're evaluating what politicians actually DO — or merely responding to how they make us FEEL.

The old circulating line fits the mechanism even if the attribution has wandered over the years.

That does not mean he controlled every reaction. Quite the opposite. People who despised him often helped make him impossible to ignore. Attention itself became power.

The more I look back at those pages, the more I see that I was responding to authenticity - or at least the perception of authenticity.

Trump did not appear to be asking permission to be Trump.

That connects to a much older Tony line:

I AM MY AUDIENCE.

I did not mean that I was the only person worth entertaining. I meant that I trusted my own reaction enough to believe that if something interested me, irritated me, amused me or made me think, there were other people wired similarly.

Trump seemed to operate that way at an enormous scale.

Maybe Trump's greatest political instinct wasn't knowing how to FIND his audience.

Maybe it was being so completely himself that his audience FOUND HIM.

Trump was his audience - and the audience found Trump.

That idea gained another layer when I wrote about the mirror. I believed Trump reflected something back to his supporters that professional politics had stopped

reflecting: anger, pride, contempt for political manners, nostalgia, patriotism, frustration with institutions, a desire to win, a desire to be unapologetic.

The audience saw something of itself looking back.

That is the meaning behind one of my more ridiculous-sounding lines: I AM TRUMP. No, I am not Donald Trump and he is not Tony Venuti. I meant recognition of an operating system - instinct, self-belief, certainty, salesmanship, provocation, action, contempt for inertia, willingness to offend, a preference for moving over waiting for permission.

Trump did not give me those ideas. I recognized Trump because I already had them. That is why the line belongs in the book as provocation, not worship.

That does not make every reflection healthy.

It makes the relationship worth examining.

I also kept returning to Motown as a crossover metaphor. Motown did not become successful by remaining inside one narrow audience. It crossed over.

Trump, in my interpretation, had a similar instinct for crossing categories that political professionals treated as sealed compartments.

Again: interpretation, not mathematical proof.

This is where the Power of Certainty enters the Trump story and where the Presumptive Philosopher has to keep it on a leash.

I saw certainty.

I recognized authenticity.

I responded to it.

Then the harder question has to arrive:

Was I responding to what Trump said - or to the fact that I believed HE believed what he said?

Certainty can explain persuasion.

It cannot establish truth.

That sentence may be one of the most important restraints in the whole book.

Maybe this is the salesman in Tony again.

One of my problems with politicians - particularly conservative politicians - is that too many of them simply do not know how to SELL their point of view.

You can have the greatest product in the world.

If you cannot explain why I need it, want it or should choose it, somebody with an inferior product and a superior salesman may eat your lunch.

That is politics too.

And I THINK I KNOW this is one of the paradigms I see in Trump.

Tony sees the quintessential salesman.

The Art of the Deal is not mystical to me.

Start by asking for considerably more than what you may ultimately be willing to accept.

Push. Create leverage. Make the other guy wonder just how far you might actually go.

Then negotiate.

Presidential power gives that sales technique one hell of a bargaining chip.

When Trump exaggerates what he might do, Tony sees part of the leverage in the uncertainty itself:

Does he really mean it?

Maybe. Maybe not.

But now you have to negotiate with the possibility that he does.

Put a little fear of God into the negotiation.

Then settle for less than the original demand while still obtaining more than you might have gotten by beginning with your minimum acceptable deal.

What do you know?

A plea bargain.

Start with the maximum exposure. Negotiate downward.

Different arena. Same Tony recognition:

Ask. Leverage. Bargain. Close.

That does not mean every deal is a good deal.

It means Tony recognizes the salesman when he sees one.

Trump also interested me because he behaved like a DOer in a culture filled with professional explainers. Whether every action was wise is separate. The attraction was action itself.

Tell people what you are going to do.

By March 2016 I had written the political version plainly: I will tell what I will do.

I will DO it. I will show you that I did it. The mature sequence is promise -> performance -> proof -> assessment. The last word is essential. Doing something proves that you did it. It does not prove the thing was wise.

DO it.

Tell them you did it.

That was already part of my sales philosophy. So of course it caught my attention in politics.

The danger is obvious. A man can efficiently do the wrong thing.

Results are evidence of performance, not proof of virtue.

Still, the cultural appetite for action was real enough for me to see.

The populism thread came later but belonged to the same map. I wrote, "We the People IS Populism" and "Wave your freak flag high."

My definition was less academic than instinctive. I understood populism as bottom-up political agency: ordinary people asserting themselves against institutions they believed no longer represented them.

That is not a complete scholarly definition of populism.

It is what I meant.

And it connects straight back to self-ownership.

I AM ME.

I am the BOSS of ME.

We are the people.

Government is not the owner of the citizen.

That is the philosophical chain as I experienced it.

CULT - OR MOVEMENT?

The word cult gets thrown around so casually in politics that THE EXAMINER has to stop and ask: What exactly are we describing?

A cult of personality is centered on the PERSON. Jim Jones is an extreme example: the leader became inseparable from the belief system and loyalty ultimately ran through him.

But not every intense political following is the same thing. What interested me about Trump was whether the loyalty ran first to the man - or to an IDEA the man came to represent.

I had watched the Tea Party movement before Trump. What I saw was decentralized, often leaderless and already angry about government, spending, taxation, borders, national direction and the political establishment.

Trump saw an opening. More important to Tony, he recognized an audience whose ideas overlapped with themes he had already been talking about for decades.

Maybe the followers did not simply adopt Trump's idea.

Maybe Trump adopted - or recognized - THEIR idea, discovered that it paralleled convictions he already held, and became its loudest salesman.

That is a distinction I think the Media-Ocracy too often omits.

The suggestion is that when Trump leaves, the followers leave with him.

Tony says: WRONG.

Not because I can predict what every voter will do. I cannot.

Because an IDEA can survive the person who became its most recognizable spokesman.

I look at Vice President JD Vance, Marco Rubio and what I have called a cabinet of political "rock stars," and I see people already carrying pieces of that vocabulary beyond Trump.

The personalities may change. The factions may argue. The policies may evolve.

The IDEA can remain.

And THE EXAMINER has a simple test:

If the man disappears, does the idea survive?

I THINK SO.

The next political fight may be over who inherits the idea - not whether the idea survives.

Manifest Destiny II was always bigger than Trump.

It began in my notes as an idea about America, Natural Laws, culture, liberty, responsibility and a return to founding principles. Trump became part of that story because I saw him as evidence that culture and politics had come full circle - not proof that the journey was complete.

That distinction is necessary because otherwise this chapter becomes campaign literature, and that is not the book I want.

I do not need Trump to be infallible. I do not believe he is. I do not need to like everything he does. My question is narrower and harder: does the direction he points America better align with the principles I reached before he arrived than the available alternatives do? That is an I BELIEVE conclusion, and it still has to survive assessment case by case.

Trump is useful here as a phenomenon.

A test case.

A cultural mirror.

A demonstration of attention.

An example of certainty and its limits.

A reminder that the line between politics and entertainment had become almost impossible to locate.

A question about why people respond to one personality and reject another.

And, for Tony, another opportunity to ask the question that has followed me through the whole book:

How do you know when you KNOW?

I thought I saw something in Trump very early.

Some of it I still think I saw correctly.

Some of it deserves re-examination.

That is not weakness in the Trump chapter.

That IS the Trump chapter.

The phenomenon is not that one man was always right.

The phenomenon is that one man became almost impossible for American popular culture to ignore - and millions of people recognized themselves, their anger, their aspirations or their entertainment instincts somewhere in the reflection.

The audience found Trump.

And Trump found a way to stay in the middle of the traffic.

CHAPTER 16A

I AM MY AUDIENCE

I AM MY AUDIENCE

That is the foundation. I AM MY AUDIENCE.

I never meant that I was the only person worth entertaining. I meant that I trusted my own reaction enough to believe there were other people wired something like me.

If something interested me, irritated me, amused me or made me think, there was a fair chance somebody else would react too.

That is a salesman's instinct. A publisher's instinct. A broadcaster's instinct.

JOHNNY CARSON AND THE CHAIR

Somewhere along the way Johnny Carson got into my head.

Not that I thought I could BE Johnny Carson. Hell, there was only one.

But I learned a lot from Johnny Carson.

More than jokes.

Carson would have accomplished authors and other fascinating people sitting across from him, and I would listen to them talk.

I learned language that way.

Somebody would use a word I did not know. Tony would hear it. Remember it.

Eventually figure out what it meant and add it to the toolbox.

I learned something else watching those interviews too:

The person I thought I knew from the screen and the actual human being sitting in Carson's chair could sometimes seem like two entirely different people.

There it was again:

IMAGE versus the PERSON.

The actor was not necessarily the character. The public personality was not necessarily the private human being.

And I certainly did not know I was watching another linguistic TICK-TOCK beginning.

Actor. Actress. Steward. Stewardess. Policeman. Policewoman. Fireman.

Chairman.

Little distinctions built directly into the language.

Today much of that has become: actor, flight attendant, police officer, firefighter, chair.

And then there is one that still jumps out at Tony:

GUYS.

Walk into a room containing six women and somebody - quite possibly one of the women - says: "Okay, guys..."

Nobody even blinks.

Fifty years of separation lets Tony see something the younger Tony could not possibly have seen.

Language did not change in one afternoon. One distinction disappeared. Then another. Then another.

Some changes were practical. Some were attempts at fairness. Some simply evolved because people started talking differently.

I do not get to manufacture motive merely because I can see the change.

I do not get to presume motive. I do get to inspect the ruler.

And this is where Tony's political interpretation enters.

I THINK I KNOW that parts of the modern cultural Left have increasingly treated male/female distinctions themselves as something requiring correction, neutralization or explanation.

That is my assessment.

It is not proof that every woman who says "guys," every person who says "actor," or every institution using gender-neutral language shares some hidden motive.

Generalization in the Abstract still applies.

But Tony is allowed to notice the direction of travel.

Because fifty years gives you something five years cannot:

DISTANCE.

Language is one of the places where culture leaves fingerprints.

And Tony has learned to look for fingerprints.

But I could imagine sitting in that chair.

Talking. Listening. Asking the next question. Taking whatever somebody handed me and finding somewhere interesting to go with it.

Conversational.

That part I understood.

Men talk about women. Women talk about men. Parents talk about children.

Children talk about parents. Workers talk about bosses. Bosses talk about workers. Strip away enough titles, professions and labels and it usually becomes a PEOPLE question.

And people? I knew people.

I had lived with them, worked with them, sold to them, fought with them, conned them, loved them, disappointed them, been disappointed by them, watched them in prison, business, bars, families and politics.

So I rarely went into a conversation thinking, Gee, I hope I know enough about this subject.

There are people involved. I can work with THAT.

KEEP THE BALL IN THE AIR

The confidence was not pretending to know. The confidence was not being afraid NOT to know.

"Ya know...I really haven't given that one very much thought."

No problem.

"Where did YOU hear that?"

"Are you sure?"

Again - no problem.

I DON'T KNOW can be every bit as entertaining as I KNOW. If I know, I can tell you the story supporting my knowing. If I do not know, now we have somewhere to go.

Sometimes I would even push back on purpose. A purposeful confrontation. Not necessarily because I disagreed, but because the conversation needed a shove.

Poke it. Turn it over. Ask the uncomfortable question. Give the other person something to hit back.

I rarely disappoint. Not because I always have the answer. Because I can usually find the next interesting question.

I JUST need to keep it alive...keep the ball in the air.

I don't need to WIN the conversation. I need to keep it ALIVE.

That is conversation.

And that is I AM MY AUDIENCE in practice. I do not begin by asking what an imaginary demographic wants Tony to be. I begin by asking: Would I listen to this?

If it interests me, if it makes me laugh, if it makes me stop and say SAY WHAT?, I trust there may be another human being wired enough like me to stay in the chair.

Then I watched Trump.

I saw a man who did not appear to be asking consultants for permission to become Trump. TRUMP IS HIS AUDIENCE.

He was already the character. Celebrity. Branding. Conflict. Insult. Catchphrase.

Spectacle. Television timing. Controversy. Repetition. Nickname. Cliffhanger.

Those were not accessories added to a politician. They were already part of the public man.

THE AUDIENCE FOUND TRUMP

Professional politicians spend fortunes trying to FIND an audience.

Maybe Trump's greatest political instinct was not knowing how to find his audience. Maybe it was being so completely himself that his audience FOUND

HIM. TRUMP WAS HIS AUDIENCE - AND THE AUDIENCE FOUND

TRUMP.

That is why I recognized him.

Not because Tony Venuti and Donald Trump are the same man.

Because I recognized an operating system: instinct, self-belief, certainty, salesmanship, provocation, action, contempt for inertia, willingness to offend, refusal to ask permission to be himself.

That does not make every output of the operating system correct. Certainty can explain persuasion. It cannot establish truth.

But recognition is recognition.

I AM TRUMP. TRUMP IS ME. I AM TRUMP. TRUMP IS ME.

Not literally.

Not worship.

Not agreement with every policy, statement or act. Recognition of the machinery.

Tony watched PopCULTure become politics.

Trump learned how to make politics perform as PopCULTure.

That is why the sequence matters. The line I AM TRUMP is not the beginning of the argument. It is the conclusion of the recognition: I AM MY AUDIENCE.

TRUMP IS HIS AUDIENCE. THE AUDIENCE FOUND TRUMP. I AM TRUMP.

TRUMP IS ME.

By the time the reader gets there, the provocation has a meaning.

 

CHAPTER 17

THE GOLDEN YEARS... TARNISHED

WHO WILL DO THE CARRYING?

I see another generational inversion coming. My generation was raised with an expectation — spoken or not — that when our parents got old and needed help, we were supposed to be there.

Then more parents reached their so-called golden years and discovered they were still taking care of grown children. The children were supposed to become support. In too many families the parents remained the support.

Another Tick Tock.

If you are still being carried when your parents grow old, how do you suddenly become the one doing the carrying? Maybe some won’t care. But I suspect the larger problem will often be more basic: they won’t be able to.

Not enough money. Not enough independence. Not enough stability. Not enough room in their own lives to absorb another human being who now needs them.

The distinction may be the whole point: caring ABOUT someone is not the same thing as being capable of caring FOR them.

When WHY Becomes More Important Than WHAT

A terrible thing happens.

Before we finish saying WHAT happened, modern life rushes toward WHY.

Trauma.

Mental illness.

Medication.

Childhood.

Environment.

Diagnosis.

Social pressure.

Brain chemistry.

Those explanations can be real.

But they can also be used to GASLIGHT an entire populace by conflating EXPLANATIONS with EXCUSES.

Understanding WHY someone did something does not necessarily JUSTIFY what they did.

An explanation may help us understand the behavior.

It does not automatically EXCUSE the behavior.

And when a society loses the ability to distinguish between the two, accountability itself becomes negotiable.

They can matter enormously.

Understanding WHY matters.

But the first stubborn question remains:

WHAT happened?

THE DAY AMERICA DIED?

The World Does Not Owe You a Living... OR DOES IT?

The question mark matters.

I am not declaring that America literally died on one day in one Massachusetts courtroom. I am telling you about the moment Tony looked at something and said: SAY WHAT?

In January 2023, Lindsay Clancy killed her three young children in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Her 2026 trial centered on criminal responsibility in light of her mental condition. The defense argued severe postpartum mental illness; prosecutors argued she understood what she was doing. The trial ended in a mistrial after the jury deadlocked.

Then I saw the split: 11-1.

Naturally - and I mean naturally to Tony - I first assumed eleven jurors had favored criminal responsibility and one had held out.

Then I learned it was the reverse: eleven favored a finding that she lacked criminal responsibility; one favored conviction.

SAY WHAT?

The legal question is real. Mental illness is real. Psychosis can radically alter capacity. Psychiatric evidence matters. Massachusetts law required the jury to decide criminal responsibility under a legal standard, not merely moral horror.

All true.

Now my question.

Can we become so sophisticated at explaining WHY that we become

embarrassed to say WHAT?

Lawyers can explain the statute. Psychiatrists can explain diagnosis. Experts can explain diminished responsibility. Scholars can tell Tony he is oversimplifying.

Fine.

Explain away.

Eleven to one.

Maybe this is exactly what I mean when I say WE HAVE BECOME TOO SMART

FOR OUR OWN GOOD.

We can analyze WHY until WHAT becomes almost impolite to leave standing in the room.

Three children were killed by their mother.

That is not the whole legal analysis. It is still the starting fact.

I understand the legal distinction.

Rhetorically speaking, I don't care.

Because this is not Tony delivering a closing argument to a jury. It is Tony asking a culture a question.

When explanation becomes powerful enough to overcome our most elemental moral response, what are we becoming?

The Day America Died? Deliberately unfair. Deliberately provocative. Supposed to bother you.

Did America die? Or has the measuring stick been moving - tick...tock...one comfortable inversion at a time?

The question remains: Does the world owe YOU a living... or do YOU owe the world something for the LIFE you were given? And if our answer changes, what else changes?

Explain Is Not Excuse

I have spent a book explaining Tony.

Father mentally ill.

Poor family.

Culture.

Heroin.

Prison.

Peer influence.

Opportunity.

Need.

None of those words acquit Tony.

If explanation automatically erased responsibility, this book would be one long defense brief.

It isn't.

Ma gave me a simpler structure.

Right.

Wrong.

Then life taught me the harder structure.

Right and wrong can coexist with diminished capacity, coercion, ignorance, necessity, addiction, fear and disease.

The existence of complications does not make the original act disappear.

The job is to assess responsibility accurately, not abolish the category.

IF NOBODY KNOWS

There is that old philosophical question:

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, did it make a sound?

Tony has another version.

If nobody knows what I did...

Did it really happen?

Of course it happened.

The act does not disappear because there was no witness.

The harm does not disappear.

The good does not disappear either.

Integrity is often described as doing the right thing when nobody is watching.

Tony would add another side to it:

Not doing the wrong thing when nobody is watching either.

No applause. No witness. No punishment waiting. No reputation to protect. No one who will ever know.

That is where the test becomes real.

If I do something good and nobody sees it, the good still happened.

If I choose not to do something wrong and nobody sees that either, the choice still happened.

Maybe character is measured most honestly by the things that leave no public evidence at all.

Because sometimes the only witness is:

YOU.

A tree does not need an audience to fall. And neither does Truth.

Truth does not require an audience. Integrity does not require one either.

#38 and #39

For years I connected this concern to items #38 and #39 in the list I mistakenly called the Communist Manifesto.

Here is what those two items actually say:

#38: Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand or treat.

#39: Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.

SOURCE: W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Communist; reproduced in the Congressional Record, January 10, 1963, Appendix, pp. A34-A35.

That attribution was wrong.

The list came from Cleon Skousen's The Naked Communist and was later entered into the Congressional Record in 1963.

Skousen was not quoting Marx and Engels. He was interpreting and synthesizing what he regarded as Communist objectives and strategy and presented 45 "Current Communist Goals."

Representative A. S. Herlong Jr. later placed that list in the Congressional Record at a constituent's request. Its appearance there did not make the list an official Communist Party document or a congressional finding.

I THINK I KNOW - looking back across more than sixty years - that all or virtually all of those propositions have recognizable analogues in later American life.

But I cannot honestly label that THE RECORD SHOWS. Some items are objectively testable historical developments. Others are broad cultural propositions whose "accomplishment" depends on interpretation. That conclusion belongs to Tony.

Correction accepted. Judgment not automatically surrendered.

I BELIEVE the underlying proposition can be dangerous: behavioral wrongdoing can be redescribed in psychiatric language until ordinary moral judgment becomes secondary to professional explanation, and authority can shift toward whoever controls the explanatory system.

Can I prove modern psychiatry, a political party or American law is deliberately executing Skousen's program? No. That would be claiming more than the evidence establishes.

I BELIEVE I recognize the principle. Not: I KNOW I have proven the program. That distinction is the Examiner doing his job.

I WILL OWN THE ASSESSMENT

I don't judge people in the final, moral sense.

I assess.

I look at conduct, consequence, motive, pattern, harm, effort, character - whatever evidence is actually in front of me.

And if I make that assessment, I will own it.

I may be wrong.

THE EXAMINER gets a vote.

New evidence gets a vote.

But I will not pretend I made no assessment simply because somebody dislikes the conclusion.

Responsibility without cruelty.

Explanation without erasure.

Can we understand WHY something happened without losing the courage to say WHAT happened?

CHAPTER 18

MANIFEST DESTINY II

Manifest Destiny II was never supposed to mean taking more land.

The phrase was my attempt to name a second American journey.

Not outward across a continent.

Inward toward the principles that make self-government possible.

Self-worth.

Self-ownership.

Responsibility.

Liberty.

Work.

Family.

Truth.

Examination.

A citizen who can say I AM ME without needing the state, the crowd or the celebrity to supply the rest of the sentence.

Bigger Than Trump

Trump became part of this story because I believed his arrival exposed a cultural condition.

He did not create PopCULT.

He was native to it.

He did not create distrust of institutions.

He found an audience already carrying it.

He did not invent the desire for a DOer.

He stepped into a culture tired of professional explainers.

That makes Trump evidence of a phenomenon.

Not proof of a philosophy.

Manifest Destiny II has to survive Trump.

If the idea requires one politician to be infallible, the idea is too small.

WHEN THE FAMILY PUTS SOMETHING DOWN

I fear the more people have, the less obvious the old lessons can become.

Not because money automatically makes somebody foolish. That would be another lazy generalization.

My narrower point is the one Ma taught me by living it: some wisdom comes from acquiring, not receiving.

Prosperity can preserve the fruits of wisdom while slowly erasing the memory of what produced them.

THE RECORD SHOWS that American marriage patterns have changed

substantially since the 1950s. Census historical marital-status tables document long-run changes by sex and race. Divorce, separation and nonmarriage are different measures, and older categories do not always line up neatly with current ones, so I do not want to fake precision.

What does Tony DO with that record?

I THINK I KNOW the family is not merely a private arrangement. It has historically performed work: belonging, identity, discipline, modeling, protection, nurture, economic cooperation, moral instruction and the first lessons of THE PLAYGROUND.

So when the family puts something down, my question is not automatically

WHO IS TO BLAME?

My question is: WHO PICKS IT UP?

School? Government? Media? PopCULTure? Peer group? Internet? Somebody fills the space.

Who is filling the glass?

MARX - MODIFY IT

For years I connected family decline to Marx in language that was too broad.

THE RECORD SHOWS Marx and Engels explicitly discussed the "abolition of the family" in the Communist Manifesto, but the passage was specifically about what they called the bourgeois family and its relationship to capital, private gain and social organization.

That is not the same thing as proving that Marx wrote a master plan saying:

weaken the family so you can conquer the masses.

Tony does not get to smuggle motive into the record just because the larger idea smells familiar.

Correct the overreach. Keep the question.

What happens to a society when the family really DOES diminish as the place where identity, discipline, responsibility and belonging are first modeled?

I THINK I KNOW somebody else eventually takes more of the job.

And whoever takes the job gets more opportunity to fill the glass.

Build Something

In March 2016 I made a constructive appeal that tells you more about what I wanted than another hundred angry posts could.

Bring back something like Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps.

Not because Tony suddenly became FDR.

Easy, class.

Because the idea made sense to me.

Take young people who are drifting.

Teach them a trade.

I THINK I KNOW

Trump and his Cabinet recognize the value of vocational training. Skilled trades can produce SIX-FIGURE incomes without crushing college debt, while expensive degrees can leave graduates owing fortunes. WORK/REWARD. RISK/REWARD. Education should be measured not merely by its price or prestige, but by what it PRODUCES.

Building.

Electrical.

Plumbing.

Health care.

Infrastructure.

Let them learn something useful while doing something useful.

I wrote that I could see unemployed young people being saved from lives of crime and prison.

Why did that matter so much to me?

Because I knew the other road.

I had driven it.

Crime.

Courts.

Prison.

Another break.

Another blown break.

Another prison.

I do not believe everybody who gets into trouble is waiting for government to rescue them.

But I believe opportunity matters.

Training matters.

Work matters.

Being needed matters.

And maybe most of all - discovering that you can become GOOD at something matters.

Ma's lesson was:

No one owes you a living.

Correct.

But there is another side to the lesson.

If we are serious about telling young people to earn their way, giving them a place to learn HOW is not weakness.

It is investment.

Build the road.

Build the bridge.

Build the hospital worker.

Build the carpenter.

Hell - build the kid.

Then maybe you do not have to build another prison cell.

The American Adult

That is my Manifest Destiny II.

Not nostalgia for a country that never had problems.

Not a demand that everybody become Tony.

God help us.

A return to adulthood as a civic principle.

Freedom paired with consequence.

Opportunity paired with effort.

Compassion paired with assessment.

Equality paired with the courage to acknowledge difference.

Patriotism paired with the willingness to criticize what you love.

Belief paired with the humility to label belief.

And culture paired with an Examiner who can ask whether what is popular has anything to do with what IS.

AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL...OR AMERIKAKA?

That may be the question underneath Manifest Destiny II.

Not Republican America. Not Democrat America. America.

America the Beautiful was never perfect. The country has been hypocritical, brave, cruel, generous, wrong, right and unfinished - sometimes all at once.

But a civilization still needs a measuring stick strong enough to distinguish improvement from inversion.

What happens if passivity, cowardice and comfort make us unwilling to defend any standard long enough for it to survive?

IMAGE over SUBSTANCE.

FEELING over FACT.

EXPLANATION over ACCOUNTABILITY.

POPULARITY over PRINCIPLE.

MORE over ENOUGH.

APPEARANCE over IS.

One inversion at a time, the flag can remain the same, the name can remain the same, the geography can remain the same - while the cultural equilibrium underneath them changes.

AmeriKaKa is not another country. It is my deliberately ugly name for what I fear America can become when enough inversions become NORMAL.

Do I KNOW that is where we are headed? No.

Do I THINK the question is worth asking? Absolutely.

Yours to agree...or NOT!

The Chain

The whole book finally reduces to one chain.

I AM ME.

If I value me, I own me.

If I own me, I am responsible for me where responsibility is possible.

If I am responsible for me, I need to know what I am choosing.

To know what I am choosing, I have to examine what I was handed.

POPULARIZED -> Awareness -> Examination -> Intellectual Integrity -> IS.

IS -> Truth -> Nature -> Natural Law -> OF THE CENTER.

Then - only then - politics.

That is the order.

I spent too many years doing it backwards.

The Destination

Maybe the greatest American resource was never land.

Maybe it was the idea that an ordinary human being could become the boss of himself.

Not perfectly.

Not alone.

Not without help.

Not without law.

But enough to own a life.

That idea gave a good kid room to become a bad man, a bad man room to become something else, and an old man enough nerve to look back at all of them without pretending they were different species.

Manifest Destiny II is not Tony's demand that America become what Tony believes.

It is Tony's demand that Americans examine what they believe before handing the answer to somebody else.

We THINK for YOU, so you WON'T have to.

No thanks.

My name is Tucker...err, Tony. No SUCKER.

And YOU don't have to be one either.

 

EPILOGUE

THE BOOK LIVED

TOO SMART FOR THEIR OWN GOOD

That phrase stays because it is not an attack on education. It is a warning about what can happen when education, credentials, theory and sophistication harden into certainty that no longer remembers how to doubt itself.

We became smart enough to explain everything — and maybe too smart to recognize some things for what they actually are.

The danger is not intelligence. The danger is becoming so certain of your own reasoning that the possibility of being wrong no longer occurs to you.

Maybe the smartest thing an intelligent person can do is occasionally wonder if he is wrong — and CHECK HIS WORK.

That is My Last Word territory. The Examiner does not ask me to become uncertain about everything. It asks me to earn my certainty again and again.

I began writing this thing years ago - 2008ish, by my best memory - because I believed I had a story to tell.

That was true.

It was also incomplete.

The story was not the prison.

Not the heroin.

Not Vietnam.

Not the porn years.

Not the businesses.

Not the radio show.

Not the picket signs.

Not Trump.

Not even Ma, though Ma is as close to the beginning as I can get.

The story is what one man did with all of it.

Lived something.

Noticed something.

Thought about it.

Got it wrong.

Tried again.

Developed a principle.

Applied it too broadly.

Got corrected.

Kept the part that survived.

That is the book.

Some read books.

Some write books.

FEW live the lives people write about.

I wrote that years ago because I liked the sound of it.

Now I understand it differently.

Living a book does not make the book true.

It gives you material.

Examination is what you do with the material.

Never neglect one of life's truths: For every EXPERT, there seems to be an equal and opposite EXPERT.

And experts, too, can mistake THINKING THEY KNOW for actually KNOWING.

Expertise deserves consideration. But it doesn't automatically establish certainty.

CHECK THEIR WORK.

And while you're at it... CHECK YOUR OWN.

I spent a lifetime trying to figure out what IS.

In the process I figured out at least one thing with enough certainty to put it on the last page.

WHAT WILL THE MARKET COMMAND?

Somewhere along the way I developed another little Tony equation:

SUPPLY + DEMAND - SQUARED BY WHAT THE MARKET

COMMANDS.

Don't go looking for that one in an economics textbook. It is Tony economics.

Because eventually all the theories, projections, surveys, opinions and expert analysis run into one stubborn little reality:

What will somebody actually PAY?

You can tell me what something cost to make. You can tell me what YOU think it is worth. You can tell me what somebody else charged.

Fine.

Put it on the shelf.

NOW WE FIND OUT.

The market gets a vote.

That does not mean the market determines intrinsic worth. It determines what the market will presently COMMAND.

There is a difference.

I learned that selling. I learned it publishing. I learned it in advertising. And apparently, at seventy-something years old, I am learning it again writing a damn book.

Chat and I were talking about what ARE YOU POPULARIZED? might sell for.

$9.99?

$14.99?

More? Less?

Then Chat said something that stopped Tony.

At $9.99 somebody may think: Hell, I will give it a shot.

At $14.99 it is still affordable enough to take a chance - but the book is also saying: Tony thinks he has something worth telling me.

SAY WHAT?

He's right.

Price communicates something before the first page is ever read.

Too high and I may price myself out of my own audience. Too low and I may unintentionally tell that same audience: this is not worth very much.

There it is again.

IMAGE and SUBSTANCE. PERCEPTION and REALITY. SELF-WORTH and

MARKET WORTH.

They overlap. They are NOT the same thing.

I can believe this book is worth fifty bucks.

Wonderful, Tony.

Will anybody BUY it for fifty bucks?

Now Tony meets THE PLAYGROUND.

Reality gets a vote.

So we start at $14.99 for the paperback.

Not because $14.99 establishes the value of what is inside. Because, at this moment, it may represent the intersection of what I created, what I think it is worth, what a reader is willing to risk and WHAT THE MARKET COMMANDS.

And then?

We find out.

Absolutely correct - UP TO NOW.

I wrote a book about not letting popularity determine what is TRUE. Now I am putting that book into a marketplace where popularity may determine how many copies I SELL.

There's a difference.

If nobody buys it, that doesn't automatically make Tony wrong. It DOES mean Tony better ASSESS why nobody bought the damn book.

Take the shot. Own the miss. Learn the table. Shoot again.

My brothers asked:

Who are you?

I AM ME.

Everything after that is examination.

The book lived.

Now the Examiner can have at it.

I've told you what I KNOW.

I've told you what I THINK I KNOW.

I've told you how I got there.

Yours to agree...or NOT!

But whatever you do...

DON'T YOU BECOME POPULARIZED.

A SUCKER'S BET.

SELECTED RECORD NOTES

These notes are not an academic bibliography. They identify a few places where the distinction between memory, belief and the outside record materially affects the manuscript.

1. Cleon Skousen / the "45 goals." The list Tony repeatedly attributed in older posts to the Communist Manifesto was not written by Marx and Engels. Skousen presented the 45 items in The Naked Communist as his synthesis/interpretation of Communist goals and strategy.

Representative A. S. Herlong Jr. inserted the list into the Congressional Record on January 10, 1963, at a constituent's request. Presence in the Congressional Record does not make the list an official Communist Party document or a congressional finding. Tony's belief that all or virtually all of the goals later found analogues in American life is labeled I THINK I KNOW, not THE RECORD SHOWS.

2. Joseph McCarthy / Soviet espionage. Later archival material, including Venona decrypts, confirmed that Soviet espionage and Communist penetration of parts of the U.S. government were real. That fact does not establish that McCarthy's individual accusations were uniformly correct or that every method associated with McCarthyism was justified. The manuscript deliberately separates the larger problem from particular claims.

3. Lindsay Clancy. Clancy killed her three children in Duxbury, Massachusetts, on January 24, 2023. Her 2026 murder trial focused on criminal responsibility in light of her mental condition. On September 4, 2026, the judge declared a mistrial after the jury remained deadlocked; reporting described an 11-1 split. The manuscript's discussion is Tony's moral/cultural argument about explanation and responsibility, not a claim that psychiatric evidence is irrelevant.

4. KVOA picketing chronology. Tony remembers picketing NBC's local affiliate, KVOA, in Tucson for roughly a year, generally about every other week, often for much of a day, with little help and many signs. Dated blog posts establish multiple picket days in 2013-2014; exact totals and durations remain approximate where memory and surviving posts do not establish them precisely.

5. Noesis. The APA Dictionary of Psychology defines noesis in philosophy as the exercise of higher reason or nous in apprehending truths, and in psychology as the functioning of intellectual or cognitive processes. The manuscript uses the word autobiographically and cautiously; it does not claim a clinical or academic credential.

6. Marx / family. Marx and Engels explicitly discussed the "abolition of the family" in Chapter II of the Communist Manifesto, but in context they described the bourgeois family in relation to capital, private gain and social conditions. The manuscript therefore does not present "destroy the family to conquer the masses" as a documented Marx quotation or proven strategy.

That broader connection is Tony's interpretation and is labeled accordingly.

7. Barack Obama / health-plan promise. Official White House transcripts from 2009 and 2010 record Obama repeatedly saying that people who liked their health-care plan or doctor would be able to keep them. FactCheck.org had warned that the promise could not be guaranteed to everyone; in 2013 it documented individual-market cancellation notices and Obama's later apology to people affected based on assurances they had received from him. The manuscript uses this as Tony's example of delayed discovery. It does not establish that every Affordable Care Act consequence was intentionally concealed.

8. Marriage patterns. U.S. Census Bureau Historical Marital Status Tables (Table MS-1, 1950 to present) document substantial changes in marital status by sex and race. The manuscript uses the broad decline in the share married as the cleaner long-run comparison and avoids pretending older and current divorce categories are perfectly interchangeable.

9. Lindsay Clancy jury split. Associated Press reporting after the September 4, 2026 mistrial described one juror favoring criminal responsibility while the other eleven favored lack of criminal responsibility. The legal issue remains distinct from Tony's rhetorical and moral reaction to the split.

10. Public opinion / mass culture. Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion (1922), Edward Bernays' Propaganda (1928), Horkheimer and Adorno's "The Culture Industry," and Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man and "Repressive Tolerance" are used as documented examples of differing theories about public opinion, conformity, culture and social influence. Their presence together in this manuscript does not imply coordination among the authors.

11. Cloward-Piven. Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven's 1966 article "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty" proposed recruiting eligible poor people onto welfare rolls and argued the pressure could create a political crisis leading toward a guaranteed income. The manuscript distinguishes that documented proposal from claims that later events were centrally directed by it.

12. Artist quotations. The Nina Simone, James Baldwin, Pablo Picasso, Toni Morrison and Massimo Vignelli quotations are used as examples of artists and designers describing - and disagreeing about - art's relation to culture and society.

They are not presented as evidence of a coordinated political program.

13. JFK assassination records. The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded in 1979 that President Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy, but it could not identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy. The committee also concluded that the Secret Service, FBI and CIA were not involved, while criticizing the investigation of possible conspiracy as inadequate. National Archives releases in 2025 and 2026 made additional assassination-related records public; the manuscript treats "Deep State"

involvement as Tony's suspicion, not as an established fact.