Angst Report

About two hours ago, I was going to call this post “Good Enough is the New Not-Good-Enough.”  That’s because of a paragraph in Seth Godin’s book “Poke the Box,” which said that quality is not good enough anymore because it’s become the norm.

If you have quality and they have quality and that’s all either of you offers, then you’re selling a commodity and I’ll take it cheap please.

That distresses me because I’m in the journalism business, and the publication I started seven years ago, Baristanet, now has more competition than ever, particularly from the local edition of Patch, hatched by corporate giant AOL. Godin is saying that just doing my job well, producing a quality product, isn’t enough.

About two months ago, people started talking to me about Seth Godin, a guru of marketing and entrepreneurship who has divorced himself from the official publishing industry to go it alone as a self-publisher. A few weeks ago, Godin materialized briefly in my life when I saw him talking to Jeff Jarvis at an event at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. When another friend mentioned Godin again last weekend, I was finally moved to buy one of his books, “Poke the Box,” for $4.99 on Kindle.

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Yes, the world is still falling apart. The U.S. began ground strikes on Libya and Japan is still counting its dead. So why was so much of my angst this weekend focused on my inability to stop eating Thin Mints?

Luckily, we only had one box. But I must have eaten a dozen, at 40 calories apiece, before it occurred to me to brush my teeth as a strategy to stop cramming them into my mouth. That’s 480 calories that of course I didn’t need, especially at a time when I am supposedly trying to lose weight. And 11 cookies that tasted identical to the first. Oh, the self loathing!

But this is what it’s like to be an American in the 21st century. There are the beautiful thin people all over TV and film, who make us feel bulky and inadequate. And on the other hand, temptations … Christmas, Thanksgiving, dinner parties, hand-passed hors d’oeuvre, new restaurants to try out and of course Girl Scout cookies.

Even if I had the metabolism of a hummingbird, I’d think there was a special circle of hell reserved for the Girl Scouts of America, for turning sweet little girls into an unpaid sales force of empty calories. Because who but a cretin could turn down the darling pig-tailed creature who rings your doorbell with form in hand, mother protectively at the curb? And who, in the parlance of the official Girl Scout FAQ, “closes the sale.” And close the sale she does, too!

But it is the self loathing that is important to The Angst Report. Because this is a daily war, a constant battle of will. Temptation is set in my path. It snags me. And then I hate myself. The same culture that insists I be thin continuously tempts me with treats that will make me fat.

It seems like a silly thing to talk about, let alone write about, but a $35 billion diet industry indicates that I am hardly alone.

Nobody knows where the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant will wind up. The headlines get worse daily. Today, the New York Times reports that Japanese authorities have raised their assessment of the situation to a 5 on a 4-to-7 international nuclear incident severity scale. That puts it, for the time being, at the Three Mile Island level, rather than Chernobyl.

Japan’s radioactive fall out has already begun to reach the western United States, but officials say that levels are nothing to fear.

But anyone who’s ever seen a science fiction movie knows what to make of that kind of reassurance.

In the 1950′s, the words Japan and nuclear fuzed in the creative sci-fi imagination to create monster Godzilla. We’re sure that modern sci-fi minds would create something closer to Showtime’s The Walking Dead. After all, pop culture hasn’t been lapping up zombie books and movies for the past five years for nothing.

Meanwhile, back in the (sort of) real world, Americans scrambling to stock up on potassium iodide pills to thwart the deadly radiation have depleted stocks and fattened the wallets of fraudulent vendors. Fake potassium iodide for a fake health threat, anyone?

3-D model of potassium iodide via Wikipedia.

The brain chemistry of the psychopath was the subject, loosely speaking, at last night’s lecture at the Rubin Museum of Art, a New York City museum that focuses on Himalayan art and occupies the former Barney’s department store. Officially, the program was part of the museum’s “Brain Wave” series of lectures about dreaming, and the subject matter assigned to thriller writer and lawyer Scott Turow and neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga was “The Murderous Mind.” I think I expected, or hoped for, an experience like something out of Justin Cronin’s voluminous literary vampire novel of last summer, “The Passage,” in which the lonely band of humans on the run from the vampires who have overtaken earth are tricked and seduced by their dreams. But dreams weren’t on the agenda at all, and the conversation was fairly arid and ultimately academic.

We did learn that the relatively new field of social neuroscience is working to zero in on the brain chemistry that fuels the criminal mind. “Neuroscience is going to find out what’s wrong with psychopaths,” said Gazzaniga. And both panelists seemed pretty sure that criminals will eventually be able to be rehabilitated with psychotropic drugs. Imagine, a pill instead of a penitentiary! “[It will be] far less invasive to control the mind than to eradicate an entire human being,” said Turow, who served on the Illinois Commission on Capital Punishment. We also learned that the wacky filmmaker Sacha Baron Cohen has a brother, Simon Baron-Cohen, who is an authority in this field and has a book coming out, “The Science of Evil,” this May. I’d love to see the two Baron Cohens (Simon hyphenates, Sacha does not) on the same panel. Maybe the Rubin Museum can arrange that for next year’s “Brain Wave” series.

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The landing page of Ready.gov, the FEMA website that encourages us to get a kit, make a plan and stay informed so we’re ready in the event of a disaster, has a picture of an all-American family sitting on a porch, smiling placidly at the camera. It’s got the same creepy blandness as those safety messages they play on airplanes about where to find your flotation device and how to start the oxygen — the ones where the passengers almost look pleased to see their oxygen masks descending from the ceiling.

In other words, it’s nothing like the images of disaster we’re seeing in Japan.

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We interrupt our daily agonizing over Japan to celebrate the Ides of March with the Hash House Harriers of Rome, who celebrate this most inauspicious day with a famous toga run and a raucous reading of Julius Caesar.

Whatever happened to soothsayers? Oh yeah, we call them pundits now.

It’s hard to believe that just 11 days ago we were writing about bedbugs on The Angst Report. What a difference a tsunami makes in putting things in perspective.

The global rubbernecking continues — whether you watch on CNN or YouTube — and it just keeps getting worse. The death toll is rising dramatically, and towns have been virtually wiped off the map, It appears that attempts to cool down the endangered nuclear reactors by pumping them with seawater are failing. And news that obsessed us just a week ago, like Libya, is being pushed to the margins of the front page.

But it’s the individual anecdotes that break the heart: story after story of survivors seeing their loved ones literally torn from their arms by the waves.

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Can things get any worse for Japan? Yes, it seems, they can. Though news stories are not definitive at this hour (12:40 a.m. on Sunday March 13), it appears that meltdowns are underway at two nuclear power plants devastated by the earthquake and tsunami.  This photograph, by Kim Kyung-Hoon of Reuters, is particularly distressing. In it, a small child with a worried expression holds his or her arms high while a worker decked head-to-toe in protective garbs checks for radiation. Achingly, it  brought back memories of watching the “The Door,” a haunting 2010 Oscar-nominated short film about a village that was evacuated after the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown.

“That day we didn’t just lose a town,” the main character says in voiceover as we see him bury his beautiful daughter Lena. “We lost our whole world.”

I pray that the children of Koriyama fare better than the ones in Chernobyl. Watch the movie, just 17 minutes long, in the jump.

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Layoffs, childhood bullying, a computer hoax and McCarthy-like hearings in Washington. How up on the angst are you?

Tsunami.

Ever since the Dec. 26 tsunami in Thailand, the word fills me with dread.

While the east coast of the United States slept, an 8.9 magnitude earthquake hit Japan, triggering a tsunami, which is now hitting Hawaii and heading to the U.S., where the entire West Coast is under a tsunami warning.

All of it just slightly more bizarre because just yesterday on the Angst Report I mentioned Ani Knipping’s precog dream of the Thailand tsunami. Read the rest of this entry »