Dickish Me

Am I a dick? Let me count the ways.

I put a circle in the middle of a sketch-pad sheet of paper. I labeled that circle "Dickishness". I spent ten minutes jotting down my every negative trait that came to mind. Every time a fresh one popped into my mind, I drew a spoke away from the circle, and I labeled it with that trait. Some spokes had little spokes extending from them, fleshing out the faults. Whenever I stopped writing because fresh faults stopped popping into my mind, I just sat until more came.

This was not a time to mitigate, justify, or excuse. It was not a time to balance the unhappy traits of my character with the happier traits. It was a time to express my inner dickishness, which otherwise I express only with conduct. It was a time to inventory my faults, lest, overlooking them, I over-esteem myself.

This is what I came up with. In the limited time that I set aside.

I'm impatient with people in grocery-store lines who don’t pull out their cash-cards until the checker finishes scanning their groceries. You can pass the card through the card-reader after the first grocery item is scanned. People who wait hold up people in line. Of course, impatience is a form of greed – greed about time.

That one maybe isn’t so bad.

On the way out of the grocery store, I never say "hello" to the security guard. He has a terrible job. I don’t know how he bears standing there doing nothing for hours on end. I assume that a cheerful greeting would break the stultifying monotony. But I withhold greeting. I withhold greeting because I don’t want to feel obligated to greet him every time I pass by. I cherish my obliviousness.

Now, he might not welcome my greeting. For all I know, he cherishes being lost in his own thoughts from the beginning of his shift to the end.

But that’s not why I walk past him and say nothing. It’s all about me.

I get irritated with people in the swimming pool where I do laps. Especially when I do laps in the deep end where the lanes aren’t separated by lane-lines. When someone from another lane swims into mine, I fume.

I fume instead of putting up with less skilled swimmers for the sake of having a clean, well-kept, convenient pool to work out in, for a reasonable yearly fee. That thought should make me patient. But it doesn’t.

I don’t like young children, particularly. Maybe I like pictures of young children that can’t scream in restaurants or interrupt adults. Even as a young man, I didn’t enjoy teaching swimming lessons to the three-and-four-years-olds.

A few years ago, I paid a modest fee to upgrade to a first-class seat for a Mexico City flight. The stewardess plopped into the empty seat next to me a woman and her crying infant. It was a free upgrade for the woman. Done for kindness’s sake.

I hated it. Hated it. But I was the only one who did. All of the Mexican men in the first-class cabin spent the flight looking over at the crying infant and grinning. I spent the flight wishing that I could separate the infant’s vocal chords from his lungs.

Woah.

I flip off other drivers. There’s a hierarchy to my dickishness on the road. If I'm slightly vexed, I'll look at the other driver as I pass him (to see what kind of person does what he did). If I'm more vexed, I’ll glare at him. If I'm really vexed, he gets my middle finger.

Real mature.

I file my tax returns late.

I sometimes wait to pay utility bills until I get a shut-off notice. It’s not that I don’t have money. I just can’t be bothered.

On Facebook, sometimes I just have to correct other people. As if the world were waiting for me to deliver to the discussion-thread my highly-principled insight, like Moses delivering the Ten Commandments to the Israelites. Sometimes, it seems like bullying.

I have angry discussions when I’m alone in my car. With other lawyers – who aren’t there. With my brother/law partner – who isn’t there. With judges – who aren’t there. With the lady who told her little child to get a bag of potato chips from the grocery-store shelf, then put it back after the little child shook the bag like a toy, so the chips inside became crumbs – who wasn’t there. Come to think of it, my car is my rage room.

Some things maybe I should fault myself for, but I don’t. I don’t fault myself for talking back to cops who I think have stepped over a line. I don’t fault myself for not giving to beggars, unless they look like they really need a handout.

There were three faults that I thought of but didn’t write down.

So this was the product of ten minutes reflection. A good start.

I wish others would get the habit of making these lists.

I think we need humility – which is the gift of seeing ourselves as we really are. The worse society gets, the more we suffer from an optimistic view of our own character. And society is sinking.

Part of me wants to look at other people’s lists, hoping that I won’t measure up so bad.

But maybe that’s a false hope.

In the meantime, there’s no reason that I can’t add to and refine this list from time to time. Maybe it will keep my pride in check.

Back Off, Olbermann

Liberals like Keith Olbermann and Paul Krugman are screaming and spinning about President Obama's tax compromise with the Republicans. They forget that compromise is fundamental to American politics.

We owe our existence to it. Many of the men who signed the U.S. Constitution had mixed feeling about it. Why? Compromise.

I’m reading Pauline Maier’s Ratification, about the, well, the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Sixteen of fifty-five participants in the Constitutional Convention did not put their names on the Constitution. Of these, many rejected some of the compromises that were needed to break the Convention’s gridlock. Some felt that safeguards were missing from the Constitution. Some of these men became powerful anti-ratification forces. They did their best to bring down the Constitution that probably saved our republic.

These opponents of the Constitution wanted to allow state ratification conventions to propose changes to the Constitution. They hoped in those state conventions to re-fight the battles they had lost at the Constitutional Convention.

Their idea to allow the state conventions to propose changes sounds reasonable. But here is the problem. The Constitution was a carefully-calibrated compromise among the interests of the various states. This compromise was possible because each delegation to the 1787 Constitutional Convention was free from instructions from their states. Their hands weren’t tied. They had the ability to compromise.

But at the state ratifying conventions, each state would amend the Constitution to suit their interests. So each state ratifying convention would propose different amendments than other state ratifying conventions would. The plan was that a second constitutional convention would iron out these differences. But the state delegations to the second constitutional convention would go with state-dictated instructions. These instructions would have destroyed the delegations’ ability to compromise.

The proposed second convention almost certainly would have ended in failure. And it wouldn’t have improved the product of the first convention.

The U.S. Constitution became the law of the land because the states accepted what was to them an imperfect federal government. Our nation survived because the states were willing to give a straight up-or-down vote on what they believed was a flawed document. The world was forever changed because the states accepted what was good, and did not hold out for what was perfect.

And that’s Obama’s take on legislation. He lives the old adage: You know a good deal because each side walks away a little bit unhappy.

But well-known liberal pundits are very unhappy to be a little bit unhappy. They expect Obama to beat the Republicans bloody in every contest. To them, legislation isn’t log rolling. It’s a Rambo movie. They would rather go down in defeat than compromise. Maybe they really do expect an action-adventure plot to unfold in Congress: the hero gets beat up by the bad guys at the beginning of the movie, and he beats up the bad guys at the end.

But this is not Commando. This is Congress. And Obama is operating in the American tradition. It isn’t flash-and-bang stuff. It’s the prose of politics.

So back off, Olbermann. Take a deep breath, Krugman. Obama is doing what he’s supposed to do.

Obama's problem: he was elected to be the cool friend; but he's governing as the responsible adult.