What happened to our leaders?

Like many Americans, on October 3, 2008 my world changed. That afternoon, Congress had passed the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, also known as the Wall Street Bailout.  Like many Americans, I had written Congress, had called the Congressional switchboard, had done everything I could to let my voice be heard. But my government had not listened. I grew up in the 80s, at a time when kids were still taught America was a good idea, because we were a free people with a voice. That Friday I discovered, along with many other Americans, that I no longer had a voice in my government. Somehow, now I was no longer a member of We The People. On paper I was, but in the unwritten evolving “Constitution” of Congressional precedent, Wall Street and special interests were The People who mattered now. Standing there in my kitchen, washing my dishes, watching my kids play in the dwindling daylight, I felt small before the face of my government, and I felt a deep solidarity with all those people who had called the Congressional switchboard with me.

But unlike many Americans, I happen to be a college professor who researches how to understand and model complex systems. My doctoral work dealt with how metaphor and narrative model complexity in economics and neuroscience. All very wonkish to be sure. This work earned me an invitation to research and lecture at the Joint Forces Staff College, Norfolk VA, on how military commanders can lead, understand, and model complex operational environments in real time.

It was my days working in development and movie production in Indie Hollywood that first convinced me of the power of narrative. Narrative is not only found in literature books, or movies themselves, but in days on set, in the hundreds of production details, in shot choices, in schedules, in actor issues, and all financial decisions that go into making a feature film. Complex systems are understood through narrative.

During the week that followed the passage of TARP, I reviewed the news coverage of the Bailout and sensed parts of the story were missing. DC and the media all said that TARP was necessary, but was it? Really? Why had TARP encountered so much opposition in the House when all the power brokers supported it? Why had the Bailout failed on the Monday vote? Why did it pass so easily in the Senate? What changed the minds of those who flipped their votes to support it? Who were the people on the inside who were actually fighting the bill? What did the power brokers do to stop them? And why aren’t those who fought the Bailout getting to tell their side of the story?

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The star of Smokey and the Bandit was, of course, Burt Reynolds, a man of great passions, great flaws, and ultimately great loyalty to the people and place he came from. “I love the South,” he emphatically states to this very day. His is a career that — sometimes for worse but more often for better — stands as a testament to that simple heartfelt sentiment.

The man who would become one of the most popular movie stars of the last quarter century was born in 1936, the son of a small-town police chief in Florida. He grew up handsome and tough, randy and reckless — by fourteen, he had lost his virginity to a much older woman, and soon after knocked up the prom queen (his attempts to cajole her into marriage were rebuffed by the girl’s society-maven mother, who forced her daughter to abort the baby). Such antics were an early harbinger of both the charismatic charm and voracious, self-destructive appetites that would define (and sometimes decimate) his later career (a typical joke — Q: Why didn’t Burt Reynolds ever take Loni Anderson out to dinner? A: He made it a rule never to date married women.) (more…)

I opened TimeOut NY magazine this morning and saw that I was featured in their “Essential New York” issue. Excellent. I’m overjoyed, as most performers are when they get some press. Now among the other nice things in their profile, they said this:

“He’s the only conservative Republican comedian who’s actually funny.”

Now, what do you think was the first thing I did when I saw that in print? Defend the honor of Evan Sayet and Steven Crowder? No.

My act is personal, not political, and those are two different things, unless you believe what it says in that dog-eared copy of “Our Bodies, Ourselves” on your ex-girlfriend’s bookshelf. But since Andrew invited me to “come out” on this site last year and air my (comparatively moderate) center-right views, the word has gotten around to some of my fans and associates that I might be playing for the other team. I’ll be at a showbiz cocktail party and someone will playfully say, “I heard a rumor about you…” They’re not trying to be mean or McCarthyite-they genuinely like the idea that they may have a right-wing acquaintance. It’s fun for them! But then they want to pick my brain. “How did it happen? Was your dad a minister?” They begin to introduce me to their friends as “their favorite Republican.” (more…)

On September 12, 2009, I grabbed my MiniDV camera and moseyed on over to the Tea Party protest in West Los Angeles to chat with some super-charged “Astroturf.”  I spoke with numerous varieties from a vast spectrum of turfdom including the ever-vivacious, Evan Sayet polypropylene turf with advanced Anti-Intellectual Dishonesty Guard™, and the high-performance, all-weather Sonja Schmidt turf. 

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