Near-Earth Object

“I am getting really sick of all these Bloomberg ads!”

This was spoken by my 10-year-old son who watches shows on Hulu with his mom and has therefore been exposed, repeatedly, to ads for the presidential campaign of Mike Bloomberg.

When Bloomberg formally entered the race for the Democratic nomination last year, I railed to the heavens (you couldn’t hear me, but trust me, I railed), “WHY?” I don’t have any major objections to Bloomberg as a candidate or potential president, though he’s certainly not one of my top choices. But I simply couldn’t understand what he thought his path to the nomination could possibly be.

I know what the pundits have said, and what the line of the campaign is: Bloomberg can afford (both in terms of money and political capital) to skip the early states, use his wealth to blanket the later states with ads, and eventually squeeze past a muddled field of candidates currently lacking an overwhelming frontrunner, with the promise that his business acumen and aura of competence would seal the deal.

But, you know. Come on.

While technically possible, there is nothing plausible about Bloomberg’s prospects. Polls showed for months that the Democratic electorate was plenty satisfied with its existing options, and that the top four or five candidates regularly bested Trump in head-to-head general election polls, particularly Joe Biden — who Bloomberg would have to totally neutralize to even have a shot at the nomination.

How many times have we seen a late entrance into a presidential primary contest go on to win a party nomination? As we learned from would-be party saviors Wesley Clark, Rick Perry, and Fred Thompson (and eventually Deval Patrick), pretty much never. The fashionably late just don’t get to be president.

But let’s say none of this is the case. Let’s sat a latecomer could in fact ride in and shake everything up and that the Democrats are utterly despondent over their choices. Even then, in what universe does this imply that what progressives really want is the stop-and-frisk, former-Republican, Bush-endorsing, women-belittling, 80-pushing one-tenth-of-one-percenter? Perhaps there was some alternate dimension in which this made sense before the Crisis on Infinite Earths, but not on this Prime Material Plane.

Mike Bloomberg knows all of this. So my only explanations for his decision to run anyway are, one, that he is surrounded by advisors and consultants on his payroll who have a vested interest in convincing him that he will be president, and two, perhaps most importantly, he just really, really wants to be president, and at age 77, this is his last chance.

In recent weeks I’ve finally started to see some of those Bloomberg ads myself, either on social media or, yes, on Hulu. They’re really quite good. They’re not blockbuster, knock-your-socks-off, windsurfing-swiftboat ads that blow up the race, but they’re good. Perhaps the most effective thing about them is how reassuring they are. In general, his ads lightly contrast Bloomberg with a reckless Trump by highlighting Bloomberg’s competence and, well, normalness. They send a message that’s similar to Biden’s, in that they tell you that the country would be back in sane hands under this candidate, only Bloomberg’s ads layer on an actual record of governance. Twelve years as mayor of the city at the center of the universe can provide that kind of record.

Biden, for all his decades in public office, has never really been an executive in the way a mayor or a governor would be, and no one would mistake his role as vice president for that of a buck-stopping decision maker. So his ads rely on character; he’s got it, Trump doesn’t. He’s not wrong.

But without saying it, Bloomberg’s ads communicate that same message, that same feeling. Maybe it’s because I have been so skeptical about Bloomberg’s campaign that my reaction is disproportionate to their actual effect, but I have been very surprised to see how invested he appears in the people he’s shown listening to, how convicted he appears in the candidate-with-voters B-roll that are the standard filling for every political ad.

“That’s a good ad,” I find myself saying out loud. Hmm, I find myself thinking, the field of candidates is still pretty muddled. Hmm, I think, Bloomberg is often polling third and fourth nationally.

Nah. I mean, come on.

But then Iowa happened.

Put aside the procedural shitshow of the caucus tabulation debacle. What the Iowa caucuses showed us was that the race is a mess. Nationally, Sanders and Biden are wrestling for a small plurality to claim the top spot, with an undulating rotation of Elizabeth Warren, Bloomberg, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Andrew Yang in the next few slots. Sanders people will always be Sanders people no matter what, but the rest of the field has not been sufficiently winnowed to clarify who Sanders’ prime challengers are. Maybe it’s Joe Biden, maybe it’s eventually Pete Buttigieg, but it’s no clearer today than it was a week ago.

By the looks of the final alignment results, as I type this on February 4, Joe Biden wound up with a pretty bad fourth place showing in Iowa. He was never banking on an Iowa win, but a distant fourth-place finish is pretty damned embarrassing for the erstwhile national frontrunner and former vice president.

Pete Buttigieg’s showing was the breakout of the night, for whether or not he “won,” he certainly wrestled Sanders to a functional tie. But he’s polling in single digits nationally. Unless Iowa has an impact on voters that is even more outsized than usual, I don’t see how he turns a tied-for-first-but-technically-second-place showing into meteoric rise. And I suspect there’s not going to be a lot of bounce to be had out of this particular Iowa caucus.

I don’t really get what’s happening with Elizabeth Warren. It seems like the voters all really like her a lot, but too few of them are willing to cast their lot with her. I think that’s a huge shame and a big loss for all of us.

This is all to say that where I once did not see an opening for Mike Bloomberg, now I think I might. Skipping Iowa certainly seems to have proven to have been a net plus for his campaign, though also missing New Hampshire seems like an unforced error. That’s a whole other week of coverage in which he won’t be part of the conversation about who will be the next president.

But maybe it doesn’t matter, and if so, that’s largely because of his money. (It’s also because of his name recognition, as everyone knows who Mike Bloomberg is, and hardly anyone recognizes Tom Steyer, the other billionaire.) For all the media that Bloomberg won’t earn, he’ll buy, ten-fold. He’s already run a Superbowl ad and is reportedly planning to double his already gargantuan ad spending in the coming weeks. If his polls go up soon, he’ll qualify for the debates after New Hampshire, and I suspect that even after New Hampshire votes, we won’t be much closer to knowing who Bernie Sanders’ real competition is. That’s a good spot for Bloomberg to find himself in.

And here’s what might be the biggest thing. Bloomberg obviously wants to be president badly. Those other late-arrival candidates I mentioned earlier were largely ushered into the race by draft campaigns and twitchy party insiders. They didn’t jump in because of an insatiable desire to become President of the United States. Bloomberg’s got that desire, and one should never underestimate the guy who just wants it more.

It remains the case that Bloomberg’s chances at being the Democratic candidate to take on President Trump are incredibly slim, requiring a near-perfect falling-domino execution to create the circumstances for his ultimate nomination. But for the first time, I can see it.

I personally support Elizabeth Warren. My 7-year-old daughter agrees, and even more strongly, often screaming “WOOOOO ELIZABETH!!!!” when the election comes up in conversation — which it does a lot in my house. My 10-year-old son has found a lot to like about several candidates, and I think he misses Beto O’Rourke and Kamala Harris. But the other day, as I’m driving him home from a lesson, he started asking me to tell him about Mike Bloomberg.

Those are some good ads.

Listen: There are things we are supposed to want out of life, and there are the means by which we are supposed to attain them. There are cultural events, life milestones, rites of passage, and personal interactions which we are supposed to eagerly anticipate, and those we are supposed to bemoan. There are standards of comportment we are supposed to uphold, degrees of amiability we are supposed to project, and durations of eye contact we are supposed to maintain.

We are supposed to know when to laugh and when not to laugh. We are supposed to stand a certain way and sit in a certain way, and ways in which we are not supposed to stand or sit. We are supposed to have street smarts, as opposed to book smarts, but we should have enough street smarts to know how to attain those book smarts. We are supposed to be honest, except when we aren’t supposed to be. We are supposed to be careful and we are supposed to take big risks.

We are supposed to have jobs and we are supposed to seek to advance in both position and compensation in these jobs. We are supposed to look forward to lunch. We are supposed to care a great deal about food and eating and sporting events and and acts of geographical transit and the weather. We are supposed to care a great deal about many, many things, and we are supposed to know what those are without being informed in advance.

I have lived my life riven by “suppostas.” From the very first moment I realized that the world had expectations of me beyond the routine of elementary school classrooms, I was in a state of near constant bewilderment as to how I should go about my existence. All rules were unspoken and yet somehow universally understood and viciously enforced. I never received instructions, only penalties for failing to follow them.

So I flailed about in search of guidance; examples to follow and role models to emulate. But I never found any templates that I could build upon, no maps I could interpret, no ciphers I could even attempt to break. In day-to-day moments, there were ways to sit, to stand, to walk, to move, or not move, and I coudn’t make sense of them, which often meant defaulting to keeping very still. In my education, there were crucial tasks to accomplish that had nothing to do with that was in the syllubus, and yet were somehow clear to my peers. In the professional world, the litany of unwritten rules, agendas, rites, and rituals were so perplexing and numerous that it caused a kind of paralysis.

From the quotidian to the global, I simply could not figure out how to be. How I was supposed to be.

The problem may already be obvious to you. My error has been to seek meaning and validation through my perceptions of what other people value. I don’t know how I could have known any better. To observe other humans is to see them behave based on some combination of motivations that are invisible to me, guided by some set of rules that is equally inaccessible. Existing, as I do, as a single individual with no way to read the contents of anyone else’s thoughts, all I can do is look and guess, like trying to describe the constellations in the night sky by looking through a paper towel tube.

I would be 38 by the time I realized why the behavior of my fellow humans baffled me so, and why I was so lost navigating this ocean of “suppostas,” for that’s when I was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, when I found out I am autistic. One aspect of this neurological difference is difficulty with ascribing agency to other people. Another is difficulty deciphering, or even perceiving, nonverbal communication. There are many more parts to being among the neurodivergent, but it all boils down to this: I don’t think or behave the way everyone else does, and I have a lot of trouble understanding what is happening around me if it’s not being explicitly stated. I have a neurological supposta deficit.

But forget that. Placing too much value on external validation is not solely the burden of autistics. Being baffled by the motivations and behavior of other people isn’t exclusive to the neurodivergent. We austistics are more likely to face these kinds of difficulties, often to greater degrees of severity, but feeling misunderstood or alienated is part of being human. We all fear being lost or alienated.

We can’t just dismiss this phenomenon as an error in thinking and move along, though. Whether or not we’ve identified the error, we still have the underlying problem, which is, really, how are we supposed to have meaning in our lives? How are we supposed to matter?

I think I have looked to others to tell me what is meaningful because I couldn’t work it out for myself analytically. When I think about the whole life-cycle trip we’re all taking down this mortal coil, it looks like this: We’re born ignorant and helpless, and starting from absolute zero we then spend twenty-odd years learning how to be a human in the world, and then spend what time we have left deteriorating until we eventually expire and utterly cease to exist at all. Good lord, what, I ask you, is the point?

Given that it looks so plainly like there is no point, and that existence has no meaning, the anxious young mind eagerly looks to the example of others. What’s meaningful to them? To what ends to they direct their finite time and energy? What do they celebrate and what do they revile? In short, what do they value? I hoped that by aping the moves of the humans around me, I would know what I was supposed to value.

This was never going to work.

Of course, society at large will always, at the least, set up the guardrails for what we find meaningful about life. We all learn by example from our family, our peers, and our broader culture. None of us find meaning in a vacuum.

What I didn’t realize, and what I think many people don’t realize, is that there is no meaning there to be found. Those expectations that society places on us, or that we place on ourselves, those “suppostas,” can nudge us in one direction or another or, hopefully, keep us from finding meaning in the grotesque or destructive.

Meaning itself, however, is not something that anyone or anything can provide or even define. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the supercomputer Deep Thought is built in order to answer the great question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Famously, after millions of years of calculations, Deep Thought declares the answer to be 42, which of course makes no sense to its egregiously disappointed audience. Obviously, the Answer is supposed to have a Question, so it builds another, even more unfathomably advanced computer to figure out what the question is that would spit out the cryptic answer 42. More hilarity ensues.

The first (several) times I read that book, I took it as I suspect most people did, as a wonderful example of humor, literary cleverness, misdirection, and a great poke in the eye to know-it-alls everywhere. And it is all of those things. But only now, at this point in my life, do I actually get it.

As a miserable, alienated, and frightened pre-adolescent, terrified of each new school day, I would have given anything to have a Deep Thought of my own to tell me What The Hell It Was All About. Throughout my adulthood, even with whatever wisdom I had accumulated, I would have no less welcomed an algorithmic answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. But it doesn’t exist. It can’t exist.

In recent years, coming closer to terms with who I am has allowed me the psychic space to better appreciate those things that do not fit into a formula for optimal meaning generation. An atheist and skeptic through and through, I have yet developed warmer feelings toward practices and frames of mind that are usually the domain of religion. I don’t need to believe in the literal existence of supernatural beings in order to find peace, connection, or motivation through ritual and story. I am developing a love for the numinous and the immeasurable.

Ritual, for me, can come in the form of artistic creation. Writing essays like this is a kind of prayer or meditation, allowing me to have a conversation with myself, to interrogate and beseach my own mind for insight. Making theatre is not unlike having a church, where great stories are told by a congregation of participants in order to be shared and experienced by the community. Indeed, theatre and religion are siblings, both born from the stories told by our earliest ancestors around the fire.

These things are not, in and of themselves, meaning. Theatre may have an effect on me that is akin to “spiritual,” and I might just really like doing it, but that’s not what makes it meaningful. It’s not even enough to say that something in my life has meaning because I have chosen to bestow meaning upon it. Really, it’s the fact that I’m not at all sure that it has any meaning at all. Or that anything does.

For our lives to matter, and for what we do to have meaning, we have to endow it with meaning ourselves. But, remember, in the sense of some core, cosmic truth, meaning does not exist. So for me to bestow meaning on something is the same as my granting myself a knighthood. I can do all the bestowing I want, but it doesn’t make it so.

The point, then, is not to discover meaning. The point is to look for it. It’s the search, the investigation, and yes, the agonizing doubt. There are precious few creatures living, that we know of, that are blessed, or cursed, with the ability to even engage in this kind of inquiry. It is a quest to satisfy a yearning for that which can never truly be had.

And there is no single way one is supposed to go about it. “Suppostas” are meaning-repellents.

I was about 10 years old when I realized I was something of an alien among other humans. After college, a dear friend of mine told me I’d figure myself out by age 27, and that didn’t happen. At age 41, still fresh off of an autism diagnosis and a divorce, I looked at an actuarial table that showed that I was at the precise midpoint of my lifespan. Barring unfortunate events, I had lived the first half of my life. A few weeks ago, I stepped into the second half.

Maybe it’s age. Maybe I’m just too old at this point in my life to care anymore what people think of me. Maybe it’s not the result of personal enlightenment, but that I simply no longer have the energy to care. Or maybe being fatigued by all the pretending, all the masking, all the passing as “normal,” maybe that very exhaustion is what has allowed for clarity. I just know that my life is likely more than half over, and I’m tired of the suppostas.

I no longer want to fit in. I want everyone else to make room.

So now I actively combat my old instinct to worry about what it is I’m supposed to be like. It is a daily battle, but at least now I’m waging it. Now I am more interested in that yearning, the endless inquiry into meaning and mystery. And I often feel frustrated by the lack of solid answers and despairing of my failures, but I can also accept that the frustration and despair are themselves part of the story, as much as anything else.

It turns out the question was always the answer. And it just so happened that I would arrive at this understanding at this particular time in my life. So, in a way, the answer was, in fact, 42.

Arthur C. Brooks writes about how Ludwig van Beethoven dealt with his gradual hearing loss, which, while crushing to a genius composer, ultimately lead him to new heights of greatness.

It seems a mystery that Beethoven became more original and brilliant as a composer in inverse proportion to his ability to hear his own — and others’ — music. But maybe it isn’t so surprising. As his hearing deteriorated, he was less influenced by the prevailing compositional fashions, and more by the musical structures forming inside his own head. His early work is pleasantly reminiscent of his early instructor, the hugely popular Josef Haydn. Beethoven’s later work became so original that he was, and is, regarded as the father of music’s romantic period. “He opened up a new world in music,” said French romantic master Hector Berlioz. “Beethoven is not human.”

Brooks takes this as a lesson in loss. He says that here Beethoven shows us how losing something precious can open up new possibilities and ideas, and all of that is true. But that’s not the lesson I take.

When Beethoven lost his hearing, he could no longer be aware of what others in his field were doing. Whatever music was being lauded or pilloried at the time, Beethoven had no way to know what it sounded like. He had no way to compare his work to anyone else’s. All he had were his memories of what had come before.

To me, the lesson isn’t how Beethoven turned the tables on fortune and made something beautiful out of loss. (And I do have my own, albeit far less severe, experience of hearing loss to draw from here.) The lesson is that his loss meant that he was no longer burdened with his own perception of what great music is supposed to be. Beyond what he could still hear in his own mind from his musical memory banks, there was nothing for Beethoven to compare himself to. The energy spent and wasted on anxiety and self-doubt brought on by the desire to suit the tastes of the time, his genius was liberated, freeing him to make the best music he was capable of at that moment.

Before I sat down to write this, I caught myself wondering whether the traditional early-2000s-era blog format was still viable, whether anyone would want to read a post by a relative nobody responding to an article by a relative somebody about an indisputably significant somebody. I worried whether the format would make me seem unhip. I worried that whatever I wrote might better suit a magazine essay, which would never be written (nor published if it were), or if it might be best to simply tweet a condensed version of my thoughts, and leave it at that. In other words, I wasted time and energy on anxiety about what my writing is “supposed” to look like.

Imagine that I came to this piece with no preconceived notions of the form my thoughts should take. Imagine I had no respectable essays, eye-catching blog posts, or pithy tweets to compare myself to. Imagine that all I had were my thoughts and my skills as a writer, whatever they happened to be at this moment.

Beethoven’s loss forced him into a position of ignorance. His deafness gave him no choice, but that ignorance freed him. His earlier work sounded like somebody else’s, the work of people he thought were “doing it right.” When he could hear no one else, “doing it right” meant only what was right to him in his own mind.

I, and we, do not have to wait for loss. We do not have to be forced into a kind of ignorance. We can choose to learn from what others have done, build on what we have already accomplished ourselves, and then let everything go. Then we can be free, and we can know it, too. We can open up a new world without loss.

Beethoven is not human, and neither am I. Thank god.