Where did you go?
I was fairly active on Tumblr from 2010 to early 2016, and then I wasn’t. You know the way it is. People move on and websites update to a new format that is annoying to figure out and you don’t want to bother, and also adulthood leaves less time to blog than college-hood.
What’s going on now?
I’m getting ready to go to law school and I’m still writing.
Can I still find you online?
If for whatever reason you’re so inclined: my Twitter is @wryansmith and it is there where I vent my spleen about politics most of the time.
Are you going to delete your Tumblr?
Not for now. There’s a lot of writing on here that I don’t know if I’d say I’m proud of it, but it was a fairly accurate chronicle of the person I was throughout college and my early twenties. Maybe if I suddenly skyrocket to Famous City I’ll delete it but for now, go hogwild.
Where are you? Did you meet someone and have no time for tumblr anymore?
I did meet someone. It was nice -- for a while. And then it wasn’t, as these things go. There were no fights, there were no harsh words, there was just less, and then it simply wasn’t any more.
There were a lot of tears. There was a lot of depression. There were a lot of pep talks in the mirror. (Actually, none of those things are past tense yet. It’s still a recent breakup.) There’s been a lot of time spent at the gym sweating out whatever latent feelings I have. You can’t just flip a switch and stop loving someone, you know? (And God, I was in love.)
The more boring answer is: I just haven’t had the time or particular inclination for Tumblr much anymore. I came here when this website was text-heavy and I was 20 years old, and I could disgorge my feelings on the Internet in relative privacy. I was a sophomore in college and I thought I was in love. Now I’m closer to 30 than I am to 20, and I’m directing my energies elsewhere.
I spend a lot of time on Twitter (follow here, if you’re so inclined), because Twitter as a medium is more receptive to my long-winded political rants. (Which is funny, given that Twitter has a 140 character limit.) I’ve been trying to put more longer pieces on Medium, which is designed for more long form writing in a way that Tumblr never was.
I’m also working again, which is nice. Full time! I’m making money and can afford things like rent and apples. I’ve been unsuccessfully trying to rewrite a novel, which is coming along in fits and spurts.
I’m not dead! I’m still alive! And I’m not saying never, but for now this place may not see many updates for a while.
Remember being 12 and everything you did and everything that happened to you made you want to unzip your skin? Just be thankful you didn't wear this outfit in the 6th grade play.
Any advice about writing a good "hook" for a college or graduate level paper? All the advice I find online - using quotes, questions, stats.. feel awfully cheesy to me. I cringe a little when I force myself to do it, but my professor always marks me down if I don't. Thanks!
Yeah, sometimes the requirements for hooks seem a little silly, because if they’re not done properly they just kind of... suck. Quotes and questions are terrible ways to start. (Rule of thumb with a rhetorical question, always assume your reader will answer “No” to it and stop reading.)
My senior thesis paper in international relations was pretty well received. I wrote about the War Powers Resolution of 1973, and how it impacted presidential decisionmaking for defense policy. I started with an anecdote about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, and my professor commented that it was a good way to open the paper. Here it is in full:
On December 1, 1862, the state of theAmerican union was not strong. The country was embroiled in a civil war, andthe Union was on the verge of a crushing defeat at the Battle ofFredericksburg. Times of crisis have the mollifying effect of inspiringgreatness in mankind (or so we like to think), and in that particular time,Abraham Lincoln loomed large. At the beginning of the month, President Lincolnsubmitted his State of the Union Address to the 37th Congress of theUnited States. In between the myriad of domestic policy proposals and details,the President commented on the nature of the struggle in which the UnitedStates was now engaged. He said – or wrote, rather, “The dogmas of the quietpast are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high withdifficulty, and we must rise with the occasion.”
President Lincoln is often rightly regardedas a model for all presidents. History has been kind to the martyr fromIllinois; he is routinely ranked as the greatest American president. Anyearnest discussion of President Lincoln’s policies, however, must take note ofthe frequency with which he abandoned the confines of the United StatesConstitution to do what needed doing in order to preserve it. It is the eternalbalancing act for presidents in times of crisis: Do they follow a strictinterpretation of a limited executive, or do they take a more creativeapproach? In the era of terrorist attacks and nuclear weapons, the questionbecomes even more pressing. Congress has attempted to limit what the executivecan do with defense policy through the passage of the War Powers Resolution in1973, but the question remains: How has a constitutionally-limited executive workedaround the mandates of the Constitution to implement national security policy?
I made sure to keep it related to my thesis, but if I’d just started with the central question of my paper (“Do [presidents] follow a strict interpretation of a limited executive, or do they take a more creative approach?”) I’d have been putting my readers (and we did have readers for this paper) to sleep. Academic writing is rarely the kind of thing you want to read for fun, so you may as well try and make it as enjoyable as possible.
It's nearly midnight, and I'm just getting home from work. I've been working a contract position at a law firm since January, and the hours are weird and long. I'm stressed out and tired, and I don't know what's going to happen with my job in the next few weeks. I've been in Chicago eight months this week, and I haven't been home in three. I love living in Chicago - I love the pace of life in the city, the excitement, the people, and the opportunity, but I think of the city as a place I live. Michigan - southwest Michigan - is home. Oberon tastes like southwest Michigan. It's warm and sunny and the lake is nearby and everything seems in its rightful place. It's my first taste of Oberon this year and it's comforting.
Media outlets covered the attacks in Beirut as well as Paris. Why do readers think they didn't?
This may be one of the most compelling things I’ve read in the aftermath of the attacks in Paris and Beirut in the way it examines culpability of the media vs. culpability of the media’s audience.
Here is an important part:
At the most basic level, I suspect this may reflect a very human tendency with which we in the media are all too familiar: People start with a narrative they feel is true, and then look for evidence to support that narrative.
In this case, people began with the narrative that the world gives lesser weight to the suffering of non-Westerners — absolutely true — and then latched onto a piece of evidence, the supposed lack of media coverage, that supported their narrative. The fact that the media has in fact covered Beirut, and that the tweet capturing this outrage contained a photo from 2006, was in many ways beside the point.
We like to find stories, and we like stories to make sense. We try and be conscious of the fact that on the whole, Western media gives more weight to Western tragedies. But midst the sound and the fury, not everyone is going to pay attention to every news item that the AP and the New York Times are reporting on.
(Did you know there was a bombing today in the Nigerian city of Yola? 32 people were killed, 80 people are injured, and I’m sure those numbers will change. Here is the New York Times covering it. Here is the BBC’s coverage. Hell, here’s Al Jazeera’s coverage of it. Now you can claim you knew about it.)
Guardian reporter Jamiles Lartey said it better than I could. “You can raise attention to underconsidered suffering without guilting and judging people for being upset by the wrong things” and “It simply isn’t possible to treat every individual tragedy & moment of suffering with objective or equal consideration, and no one does this” are both important to note, as well as this final Tweet:
The world is messy and complicated, and we should all be aware of our own (and others’) biases and predispositions. We treat tragedy with unequal weight, and there is something fundamentally wrong about this, but I also think there is something fundamentally wrong with the race to redirect attention. Are tragedies really comparable? There are human lives ripped apart, communities that will never be the same: in Paris, in Beirut, in Yola. But it’s just as important to know that even if you, personally, have not seen any reporting on something, that does not mean it’s not being covered.
It's this notion that writing happens at the level of the sentence. The sentence is what you have. It's your sole tool, and so your sentence has to be perfect.
It has to be crafted in the way that a chef is aware of every ingredient that goes into the full meal. I think a lot of writers focus on the meal and not the ingredients.
I didn’t get home from work until midnight last night. There’s a kind of exhaustion that you don’t learn about until it’s 10:30 at night, you look at the clock, and think, fuck, I still have 45 minutes of work left.
I told everyone working second shift wouldn’t be a problem, because I’m such a night owl, and it largely isn’t. I miss being able to socialize on weeknights, but I do like having my mornings to myself. But I’m so tired all the time, tired in a way I’ve never been with a job before.
It’s strange to go from a year and change of unemployment to working full time with a tight deadline. I wouldn’t go back to unemployment for even ten minutes, but life has a more leisured pace to it when you’re not going to work every day. I got more sleep unemployed than I ever have in my life.
I don’t mind the walk home at night, because I am a white man living in a wealthy neighborhood. My mom called once and said she wasn’t comfortable with me walking home alone from the train station in Chicago at 11:30 at night. I told her there’s a giant Anthropologie store with big, elaborate window displays that stay lit up all night just a few blocks away from where I live. It’s fine.
The city at night is different. There are times when Chicago – when any city – doesn’t sleep, but those are rarely on Wednesday nights. Last night it was still and soft and quiet, such that I could hear the click click click of my shoes on the sidewalk. I wondered what this walk down this particular stretch of land was like a century ago, or two centuries ago, a millennium ago, if it was still so still and soft.
But there’s also the view from my office window, perched above the Chicago River, where I can see the whole city sprawling and glittering out before me. Daylight brings noise, and it is cacophonous: jackhammers and traffic and barges on the river and people, people, people, all in a rush with the occasional surprising lull.
I’ve lived in this city eight months now, and I still feel like an interloper. I pointed out that I’ve not been to any other city in Illinois since moving here, and that while I do think of myself as a resident of Chicago, I don’t think of myself as a resident of Illinois. I think about this when I’m waiting for the train to take me home after eight and a half hours of work at 11:30 at night, how everyone in this city seems to be from somewhere else.
In the group I work with, one is from Wisconsin, one is from Michigan, one is from Poland, and one is from Britain by way of India. We all strike out on our own into the night when work finally lets out, and I wonder if any of them have trouble coming to terms with where, exactly, they live.
I miss the sprawling space that comes with not living in a city. I miss seeing long stretches of field and forest on the highway. I miss driving for hours at a time at night and feeling like the only thing stopping me from just going until I hit the ocean was common courtesy (and gas money). But when I’m walking home and it’s edging close to midnight and the city is yawning – cities never sleep, really, but they do get tired – I feel a little more at home.
It's gray out today. And cold. My train is late, I won't get home from work until close to midnight, and I've been feeling sick for three days now. The other night I was grousing about my job. It's a contract position with no guarantee I'm going to be hired on full time once April arrives. I'm making less than I made at 22, and my responsibilities mostly include fighting with the copy machine. But two months ago I didn't even HAVE a job. The yawning gap in my resume was getting wider and wider every day. I had no money, and if things didn't turn around I'd be forced to move back in with my parents. Now I may be working crappy hours for no pay and no benefits, but I am working again, and for that above all else I am grateful.
My senior-year high school English teacher was killed by this man, in the city sister’s distance from my hometown. He was captured behind my extended friends’ familiar brewery. An ex-coworker of mine saw the shooter pick up an uber fare in between attacks, she was parked in front of his car on the curb she has three sons at home what if what if. I can’t put into words how much my heart hurts that this happened here - my home, my home - and I suddenly understand all the knee-jerk reactions when it happens “somewhere else”. The world is so big and “somewhere else” is so far away but I drive through it once a month from home to home. I claim the city out of deference.
Do not make excuses for this man. None. Never. Do not drag me into the same mud with this man when the fucking phrase “mentally ill” comes out of your mouth.
I’m glad they took him alive; I want justice, real justice, punishment.
I want to be able to say there wasn’t another one not 24 hours later.
Three of the women killed in Kalamazoo were my mother’s age, from the city I grew up in, doing something my mother and her friends have done a hundred times. They went to see a play in Kalamazoo and then stopped for dinner.
I am probably one of the most outspoken people I know on the issue of gun control. I have alienated family members because of my stance on the issue: the Second Amendment needs to go. I have genuflected at the altar of Political Pragmatism for a long time on this issue in my professional life -- when I worked at the State House, my office introduced the only gun control legislation introduced in the three years I was employed there. (The now-Speaker of the House, Kevin Cotter, was chairman of the committee our bills were referred to, and he never gave them a hearing and ignored all of our phone calls, emails, letters, and personal pleas to hold a hearing on the legislation.)
Every mass shooting in America unnerves and horrifies me (there have already been 42 this year, and the year is only 52 days old), because there is an easy solution to this problem, but the political will to tackle it is simply not there. This one, however, has broken my heart in a way that leaves me feeling scared and helpless.
Many of my close friends from high school live in Kalamazoo. I have family living in Kalamazoo. I have gone out to many of the places this man attacked, I have taken Ubers in Kalamazoo. Kalamazoo is twenty minutes away from where I grew up, and it was a place we went to multiple times a month: for restaurants, for bars, for movie theaters, for shopping. I have never lived in Kalamazoo, but it is in my orbit in a way few other places are.
There are a thousand ways one tiny detail could have changed and I would see someone I knew and loved the victim of gun violence.
It is easy to feel indifferent to political issues. I understand it. You go to work, you pay your bills, you go grocery shopping, you live your life. You hear of some politician, somewhere, writing a jeremiad against the Second Amendment and you think, “I don’t like that” without giving it much thought. And I can understand the impulse: there is a gun culture in the United States. People hunt. We are bombarded with images in pop culture of “good guys with guns” stopping bad guys. A gun is an object of power, something that gives you the sense that you are strong, that if someone threatened you, you could defend yourself.
It is easy to feel indifferent to political issues until you have to put a face to them. But it is so hard to make the vast majority of people put faces to this issue. 19 first graders were slaughtered two weeks before Christmas and the United States Senate still failed to act. The biggest obstacle to political progress isn’t entrenched interests, it is indifference. 55% of Americans favor stricter gun control legislation. That’s 175 million Americans, 49 million more than the number of people who voted in the 2012 presidential election.
The NRA, by contrast, has five million dues paying members.
They are a powerful organization, but 175 million Americans agreeing on something is more powerful. But it is indifference that stops this idea -- this idea that most Americans favor -- from going anywhere.
My home is the latest in a long line of cities where mass shootings occurred. Newtown, Aurora, Tucson, Ft. Hood, San Bernadino. Kalamazoo. Do you want to see your hometown next on the list? No.
I have no idea why pride in a refusal to compromise is so in vogue now. There are reasons why our values are our values, and it is absolutely necessary to hold fast to our principles. But there is wisdom in recognizing not everyone on the planet will agree with you 100% of the time, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
For a long time one of the reasons I was most proud to be a Democrat was my party's lack of dogma. The Republicans in Congress were the ones who signed a pledge to never, ever raise taxes, ever, and that’s led to 25 years of revenue crises. The Republicans were the ones who booted sensible members of their party out because they wouldn’t stick to the script. That sort of thinking is what’s led Ohio Governor John Kasich -- one of the most anti-choice Republicans in the country -- to be labeled “moderate.”
This sort of rigor led House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi to make this analogy in 2012:
"When the Republican leadership tells its members, 'there is a blue cup on the table,' every Republican repeats, 'there is a blue cup on the table,'" she said. She sighed. "When I tell my fellow Democrats, 'there is a blue cup on the table,' one will say 'there is a blue cup on a round table.' Another will say, 'there is a blue cup next to Nancy Pelosi's cup.' Another: 'a blue cup on a brown table.'"
By now, of course, it should be obvious I’m talking about Bernie Sanders.
I’ve had a positive opinion of the Vermont Senator for a long, long time. In 2010 he made headlines when he filibustered a tax bill for eight hours. It was the first time in seven years since any Senator had actually followed through on a threat to filibuster, and only the third time since 1990.
But the tax bill in question was one that extended the Bush tax cuts for two years. Most everyone noted that these cuts to the tax rate, made in 2001 and 2003, were most generous to top income earners in the United States. I won’t bore you with the economics of it all, but the tax cuts had a significantly negative impact on the economy, increasing the deficit and the national debt, and -- sorry, I’m boring myself right now. They were not good tax cuts.
But the bill President Obama signed into law in late 2010, the one Senator Sanders filibustered, did not just extend the Bush tax cuts. In November of that year -- just after “the shellacking,” the midterm elections that returned the Republican Party to power in the House and saw them gain six seats in the Senate -- all Republican Senators said they would block any legislation until an agreement on extending the tax cuts was reached.
In December 2010, the unemployment rate in the United States was at 9.4%, and economic growth had barely recovered from the Great Recession. There are certain things the government can do to ease the transition from a recession to a growing economy: things like extending unemployment benefits, reducing the FICA payroll tax, increasing the Child Tax Credit, and increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit (which noted liberal Ronald Reagan noted -- correctly -- is one of “the best anti-poverty, the best pro-family, the best job creation measure to come out of Congress”). These are part of the social safety net, the network of policies and refunds that can and do help alleviate poverty. Without these things, whatever anemic economic recovery the United States had made by December 2010 would have been reversed, and the Great Recession would have turned into a second Great Depression.
Incidentally, the 2010 tax bill that Bernie Sanders filibustered included all of these measures.
So in 2010, here was where things stood: Republicans were using their legislative powers to stop the U.S. Senate -- and by proxy the rest of the government -- from functioning whatsoever unless they got an extension of these tax cuts. Democrats, and the White House, had a laundry list of programs they wanted to see enacted. Democrats were opposed to the extension of the tax cuts, but knew they would have the chance to renegotiate thanks to the Byrd rule.
(They did renegotiate in late 2012, and the tax cuts on top income earners were repealed. So they made a short-term trade-off for a long-term gain.)
Bernie Sanders filibustered this bill for eight hours because he wanted to make a point: the Bush tax cuts were bad. But in December 2010, Senator Sanders knew that the bill would eventually become law. He made his point, liberals across the country (including yours truly) agreed with him, and we all benefited from the compromise President Obama brokered.
I wonder what would have happened in 2010 if it was Bernie Sanders and not Barack Obama sitting in the Oval Office. Would President Sanders have vetoed the legislation, allowing Republicans across the country to campaign on the line that Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Care About Poor People, Look, He Vetoed All These Nice Tax Credits! The president doesn’t have the luxury of a line-item veto like 44 governors do, so President Sanders would either have to swallow his pride and sign the damn bill, warts and all, or he’d have to wait for the perfect tax bill to arrive on his desk after making it through an emboldened Republican Congress.
The Senator has been serving in Congress since January 1991, longer than most of you reading this have even been on this planet. He shouldn’t have any delusions about how his Republican colleagues operate. Rightly or wrongly, that is the way things are, and absent his much hoped for “political revolution,” that won’t change.
When you are a single Senator, representing one of the least populated states in the country, there is a lot of power in staging a symbolic filibuster, and in never compromising on your values. You are one of one hundred, and it is rare that any vote is decided by just one Senator. You can make your stand, you can say you didn’t compromise on your values, your constituents can applaud your principles while still reaping the benefits of the half a loaf you turned down waiting for the full one.
The President of the United States never has that luxury in almost any situation. In domestic policy, in foreign policy, in dealing with the military, in dealing with members of Congress, in dealing with China’s permanent veto in the United Nations: as president, compromise is a necessity. The greatest presidents who have ever lived were masters of the art of compromise. Watch Lincoln for a dramatized version of the sausage-making it took to pass the 13th Amendment and you will see why Abraham Lincoln is regarded as the best president in American history. Not only was he a crusader for justice, but he was also a really good politician.
The Republican Party has made its unwillingness to compromise into a badge of honor. Their voters are evenly divided on the matter. This attitude led to two of the least-productive Congresses in history. What would happen when Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and President Bernie Sanders came to hammer out a budget deal? A government shutdown? Who benefits from that? (Answer: nobody.) When do you draw the line?
Another thing to take note of with Senator Sanders: as I said above, he has served in Congress since 1991. 162 current members of the House served with him. All 99 Senators that are not Bernie Sanders have, quite obviously, served with him. Only two Members of Congress (Raul Grijalva and Keith Ellison) have endorsed Senator Sanders. Hillary Clinton has the endorsements of 39 Senators and 157 Representatives. This includes the other Senator from Vermont, Patrick Leahy. She also has the endorsements of the sitting Governor of Vermont, two of its former governors, and Bernie’s successor as Mayor of Burlington.
Bernie Sanders rubs people who work with him the wrong way. Take this from a September editorial (emphasis mine):
Mother Jones magazine related the story of how Sanders swatted down a fellow Vermont activist for posing an innocent but off-script question. It was during Sanders' 1972 run for Vermont governor that Greg Guma asked Bernie why he should vote for him. Guma recalled Sanders responding: "If you didn't come to work for the movement, you came for the wrong reasons. I don't care who you are; I don't need you."
Sanders has much mellowed since then, but he still inhabits a self-righteous cocoon that has made him an ineffective and marginal figure in the Senate.
Even Democrats express frustration at working with Sanders, an independent who caucuses with them. Moderates bristle at his moralizing and refusal to make compromises required to pass needed legislation. The undeniably liberal Barney Frank, former rep from Massachusetts, complained of Sanders' "holier-than-thou attitude."
Are there complaints to be made about the clubby nature of the United States Senate? Absolutely. Is Senator Sanders delivering the right message? Yes: the haves in the United States have more power than the have-nots, and that is atrocious. Things need to change.
But does change happen because a hectoring, moralizing man with a noted self-righteous streak insists it will happen? I don’t know. Change is hard. The first Democrat to win the popular vote twice since Franklin Roosevelt with a much lauded cool head, a “no drama” approach to governance, and a cerebral, deliberate leadership style couldn’t effect change the way he wanted, but he still changed a great deal for the better in the United States.
I do not think Senator Sanders’s temperament would have been conducive to productive governance over the last eight years. I have little doubt that it would facilitate any sort of legislative victory in the next four to eight, either. Temperament is what Donald Rumsfeld would call a known unknown and what the French would call a je ne sais quoi, but it is key to presidential success.
Barack Obama said at his inauguration in 2009, “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works -- whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.” Government is more than sending out Social Security checks every month and collecting your taxes every April. It isn’t about grousing that you don’t have as much as your neighbor, it’s about making sure your neighbor has enough. It’s about trust -- trust in each other, in the people we vote for, in the system, in the better angels of our nature and judgment.
When government is at its best, it can be the single most powerful force for good in the world. The American government, right now, has more influence and more ability than any other organization in the history of the world. When we elect a president, we elect to entrust that power in someone with the belief that they will really, truly make the world a better place, that at the end of their term the United States is better off than it was before they came into office.
When government is at its worst, it is a collection of the arrogant, of the power-hungry, of the small-minded. It leads to petty bickering, to regressive action, to kicking the can down the road. It leads to the continuation of slavery, to the Great Depression, to invading Iraq. The one thing that unites participants in bad government is an unwillingness to compromise.
