True Blue Grit and a Pleasant Phone Call with Customer Service
Broken internet, Thucydides and The Big Lie, Tommy Lasorda on grit, and a belated list of the best books I read in 2020
We lost our internet service Wednesday. Christina turned to witchcraft and got her computer online, albeit in a limited capacity, by using her phone as a mobile hotspot. Unfortunately, my mobile data plan doesn’t include magic spells (that costs extra), so I paced around the house and cursed a telecom god called Spectrum. In the afternoon, with the work day basically shot, I decided to call this telecom god.
At first, the telecom god’s robot answered. It informed me that there was an internet outage in our area. Tell me something I don’t know, robot. The robot also reminded me that I had called six times that day. I think the robot was trying to make me feel guilty, but I’m familiar with robots that answer customer service lines, and I know they don’t feel anything at all.
“Operator,” I said. “I want to speak to an operator, please.”
It took a few minutes, but eventually a human who works for the telecom god answered. She told me her name was Helen.
“Hi Helen, my name is Michael.”
I explained that our internet had been out all day, and that I realized she was powerless to help me.
“The thing is, Helen, I just want to know what’s going on. I know that won’t get it fixed any faster, but I hate being in the dark. Do you know what I mean?”
I might’ve added that in addition to losing a day of work, I had to cancel a Zoom lunch with my buddy Norm, who always lifts my spirits, and that my spirits were low because of an ongoing coup / insurrection and a pandemic that’s ravaging Los Angeles.
“I know exactly what you mean,” Helen said. “Most people just yell, but you sound so nice, so let me take a look.”
Score one for humanity, I thought.
“Yowsers!” Helen said.
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“It’s not.”
“Hit me with the bad news, Helen. I can take it.”
“Did you have some weather come through?” she asked.
“We’re in Los Angeles, so we don’t really do weather, per se. But the Santa Ana winds are blowing. They’re known to drive people mad, start fires, and wreck stuff.”
“I’ve heard of those winds.”
“Where are you located, Helen, if I may ask?”
“I’m in Kentucky.”
I’ve never been to Kentucky, but I’ve cursed it many times for sending a cruel and greedy turtle to lead the Senate. Of course, politics can be divisive, and Helen and I have a good thing going, so I tell one of those little white lies.
“Kentucky! Beautiful state! The Derby. Mint juleps. Louisville slugger. I hear Kentucky is a great place to live, Helen.”
“It’s not that bad.”
That’s the only thing Helen will say about Kentucky, which is hardly a ringing endorsement. But then again, maybe Helen shares my feelings about the consequences of empowering a cruel and greedy turtle.
“It looks like there are seven pieces of equipment that are down,” Helen said.
Seven!? Now, it’s my turn to say, yowsers.
“Yowsers, Helen.”
“The computer estimates that it’ll be repaired later tonight,” Helen said.
“Do you trust the computer?”
“I do, but I think the estimate is ambitious.”
An ambitious computer. That’s all we need. First, it takes out our internet, then Skynet. I’ve seen this movie before. I’ve seen the sequels too. They don’t end well.
“I think your service will return tomorrow morning,” Helen said. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize, Helen. You’ve actually been very helpful.”
That part was true. I can’t work without internet access or socialize (pandemic!), but with Helen’s help, I can adjust my schedule, and that’s good enough.
“Would you like to know the size of the outage?” Helen asked.
“Sure.”
“Give me one second, Michael.”
I gave Helen thirty seconds—on the house. She told me the four streets that formed the perimeter of the outage.
“Yup, we’re right in the middle of this mess,” I said.
“Well, if it’s any consolation, you sound like you’re taking it well, Michael.”
“What else can I do? There are bigger fish to fry in this world than a day without internet.”
“Exactly.”
Last Sunday, I wrote about the ongoing coup and insurrection. I closed with a promise to say more about repairing democracy and teaching our children the lessons of history.
Careful observers will note that you can’t spell history without the word “story.” You also can’t spell history without the word “his,” which should tell you a lot about who gets to tell the stories that make up history.
The “father of history” was a man named Thucydides. He wrote the story of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides chronicled the war between Athens and Sparta because he knew that history is written by the victors, even though he died centuries before someone coined that adage. As far as I can tell, Thucydides received three rewards for his work.
By telling the story, Thucydides, an Athenian, made sure that the glory of Athens would echo throughout the centuries and resonate to this very day.
Thucydides set himself up for some serious publishing royalties. His book is still in print, much to the chagrin of history majors. Sadly, his agent blew it, which is why the Untitled Peloponnesian War project, along with the Untitled Thucydides bio pic, remain in development hell.
Thucydides claimed the title “father of history.” That’s a really cool title, at least among historians. But it’s certainly a lie. There was a long tradition of oral history before Thucydides, but those historians are lost to time because they did not write their names on their homework. How did Thucydides manage to sustain a lie for thousands of years? Repetition. Because if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.
Which brings me to The Big Lie. Students of history will recognize the phrase. I won’t unpack that story here, except to say that The Big Lie technique began with Adolf Hitler and ended in genocide. Hitler’s Big Lie was supported by countless little lies, the millions of people who carried his toxic water, and the tens of millions of people who drank it down, no questions asked.
This week, The Big Lie entered the lexicon of American politics. President Donald Trump told The Big Lie. He said the 2020 election was stolen. That was false (Big Lie!), but it worked well enough to launch an insurrection. Why? Trump constantly repeated The Big Lie to an audience that had bought the little lies along the way. Of course, other people told The Big Lie too; they were the same people who sold all the little lies along the way. Here’s a brief list of liars.
Republican elected officials.
Conservative media outlets.
Tens of millions of Americans who lied to their families, neighbors, friends, and ultimately, themselves.
In days and months ahead, there will be a reckoning for those who told The Big Lie. Years from now, future historians will identify and contextualize the little lies that made The Big Lie possible. But this story—history—doesn’t write itself.
Question: How do you defeat The Big Lie?
Answer: Tell the truth.
Maybe you were expecting a more complicated answer, one with a three-part plan, catchy slogan, and billion-dollar ad blitz. But if The Big Lie is a virus, the vaccine is the truth. It’s just that simple.
The difficult part is that we need to continue to tell the truth about The Big Lie from now until our final days, and we need to make sure that our children do the same, and that they teach their children to do it too. That’s how a story becomes history. That’s what Thucydides has to teach us.
But you don’t have to be a historian to tell truth. You don’t have to be a journalist either, although that profession carries the awesome responsibility of writing history’s first draft. Anyone can tell the truth, regardless of their profession or politics.
Personally, I thought Arnold Schwarzenegger did a good job pushing back on The Big Lie, but maybe I’m partial to actors who have the range to play an evil robot sent to destroy humanity in one movie, and then a good robot sent to save humanity in the sequel.
But maybe that’s a lot to live up to. After all, Arnold embodies a quality the master storytellers in Hollywood call “real deal hero shit.” I don’t embody real deal hero shit, and you probably don’t either. That’s OK. Actually, it’s perfect. Because a hero can’t save us from The Big Lie. We have to save ourselves.
Which brings me to Tommy Lasorda, who passed away the day after the insurrection began. Growing up in Los Angeles, the Dodgers manager was a hero of mine. I met Tommy once. When I was eight or nine, my dad took me to Dodger Stadium. We got there a few hours before the first pitch. As usual, Tommy was hanging out near the dugout, signing autographs. There was a line of kids waiting their turn to meet Tommy. When it was my turn, I handed Tommy a baseball to sign.
“Are you a ballplayer?” Tommy asked me.
“Yes.”
“What position?”
“Left field.”
Tommy looked over his shoulder at the Dodgers shagging fly balls in the outfield.
“We could use some help there,” Tommy said.
My heart stopped. Me? In left field? For the Dodgers? Wow!
“Are you any good?” Tommy asked.
“I’m OK.”
“You need to keep working,” Tommy said. “You understand? Practice. Every day. Do you know what grit is?”
I didn’t.
“Grit means you keep going, no matter what,” Tommy said. “Nothing gets accomplished without grit. Understand?”
I understood. Tommy signed my baseball, and sent me on my way. A few years later, when I was eleven, I watched Tommy’s grit inspire a team to make history. A pitcher Tommy nicknamed Bulldog because he was anything but, found his grit and pitched the Dodgers into an improbable World Series birth. But in game one, in the bottom of the ninth, with one runner on base, two out, and the Dodgers trailing 4-3, it looked like we had hit the limit of where grit could take us. The smart move would’ve been to send a healthy batter to the plate, but Tommy bet on grit. He chose Kirk Gibson, who hobbled to the plate on two bad legs, worked the count full, and with nothing but his upper body strength and the grit that had propelled him from Little League to Dodger Stadium, cranked a walk-off home run over the right field fence. The Dodgers won game one, and went on to win the World Series. They weren’t the most talented team in baseball that year, but they won it all because they had grit.
My playing days ended when I was fourteen. No matter how much grit I had, I just couldn’t hit the pitchers who dominated the Sherman Oaks Little League in the early 1990s. But that doesn’t matter. The lesson Tommy shared with Little League me was one he shared with everyone he met. Most of those people weren’t professional baseball players, either. They were children who came of age at the end of the last century in a city called Los Angeles. Tommy’s lesson about grit didn’t just apply to baseball because grit is a universal tool, just like objectivity.
Which brings me back to The Big Lie. It’s not enough to tell the truth once or twice. We have to tell the truth from now until the end of history. That takes grit. The source of your grit—a childhood hero like Tommy Lasorda, your parents, your teachers— doesn’t matter. What matters is what you do with that grit.
Tell the truth about The Big Lie.
Keep telling the truth.
And when the truth telling becomes difficult, summon your grit.
Now, for my favorite books of 2020. That’s an awkward transition, I suppose, but I’ve been promising this list since December, so it’s time to get the show on the road.
I read 42 books in 2020, but only a few stuck with me.
The Plot Against America by Philip
This was the last book I read in 2020. It’s been on my TBR list since 2017, but the idea of an alternate history about a demagogue in the White House felt too real these past four years. In the waning days of 2020, I gave it a go because I thought I was safe on safe ground. Turns out, there’s no such thing as safety from demagogues.
Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby
In 2024, with any luck, you’ll meet some friends to see the movie based on S.A. Cosby’s breakout novel. The movie will be compared to the Fast & Furious franchise, and reviewers will note the power of a Black hero taking ownership of a Southern noir. Hopefully, the movie is amazing, but it won’t be better than the book.
Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran
A reviewer described the Claire DeWitt novels as a cross between David Lynch and Raymond Chandler. I’d say that’s an understatement. Gran’s writing hits all the right mystery buttons, but her real gift is the way she reminds the reader that the truth is always there for the knowing—if we’re willing to face it.
A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
I have this theory that Dick’s body of work is too important to binge. His novels hit you like a ton of bricks, and the aftershock never leaves you. As it turns out, 2020 was the year Dick’s semi-autobiographical novel about drug abuse, a creeping police state armed with whiz-bang surveillance technology, and the unreliable nature of reality came crashing down on me. So… pretty much on brand for 2020. But for all the big ideas in A Scanner Darkly—and there are plenty—it’s the personal aspects of the novel I find haunting. Dick dedicates the book friends, including himself (how meta!), who suffered death and disability due to their drug use. As Dick wrote in the afterward, the novel is about “people who were punished entirely too much for what they did.”
Wind / Pinball, Wild Sheep Chase, and Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami
These books are known as the trilogy of the Rat, although technically there are four books because Wind and Pinball are two novellas that were published together. This isn’t my first dance—see what I did there?—with Murakami, but 2020 was the first time I actually finished one of his novels. Maybe 2020 was the year I finally understood obsession (one of Murakami’s major themes), or maybe it was a year for nostalgic melancholy that’s Murakami’s trademark. Like his unnamed protagonist, I really can’t say for sure. But I enjoyed these books, and reading them helped me unlock a personal mystery about the dozens of people in my life who have insisted that I must be a Murakami fan. I always thought they were wrong, but it turns out I don’t know myself as well as I think I do. Maybe that’s true for everyone.
Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman
The thesis of this ambitious history is that we’ve got our species all wrong, and that as a result, we’ve engineered society rather poorly. Bregman examines the assumption that humans are inherently bad, illustrates how that assumption serves as the foundation for much of Western thought, and offers counter examples for what society might look like if we assume that humans are basically good and more-or-less keen to cooperate. He also spends a lot of time taking the hammer to a novel I’ve always despised, Lord of the Flies. Turns out, there was a real life Lord of the Flies—but those boys worked together, survived their ordeal, and became lifelong friends.
You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington by Alexis Coe
In the American mind, George Washington is more myth than man. The beauty of Coe’s book is that she brings the man to life for history buffs and neophytes alike. Coe’s writing is smart, funny, and she does double duty by telling Washington’s story while simultaneously pushing back on the mythology that, after 200 years, has hardened in the minds of an unquestioning American public.
No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier
I try to read several books a year about Big Tech. I found Frier’s work especially illuminating because in telling the story of Instagram, she reveals a great deal about Instagram’s parent company, Facebook. If you read one book about Big Tech, this probably shouldn’t be it, but if you want a prey’s-eye-view of Mark Zuckerberg’s relentless need to dominate all that he sees, No Filter is a great read.
White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty
There are so many good books on race, but Beatty’s first novel, a coming of age story about an awkward Black surfer who becomes a basketball star, poet, and reluctant messiah, is sublime. I don’t know if the devil is real, but if he’s offering one of those Robert Johnson deals, I’d trade my soul to write with an ounce of Beatty’s talent.
How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr
Americans don’t talk about our empire, not really. Empire just doesn’t fit the narrative for the Land of the Free & the Home of the Brave. But just because we can’t see our empire, doesn’t mean it’s not real. I’ve read hundreds of books about American history, and I still have questions. But reading Immerwahr felt like many of the unused puzzle pieces about our story suddenly fell into place. Warning: once you see the American Empire, you can’t unsee it.
The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry
I know, I know… who wants to read a book about a pandemic in the middle of a damn pandemic? But this was the perfect book to read as the world closed down in March because it helped me set expectations for myself, Los Angeles, the United States, the world, and humanity. To cut to the chase, we’re doing about as poorly I thought we would after finishing Barry’s book. As Barry observed, a virus exploits the fissures in a society, and our society is broken in so many places. Still, there’s good news in Barry’s book too. Humans have beaten pandemics before, and we’ll beat this one too.
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
Years ago, a friend told me this was “the most dangerous book ever written.” You were right, Dillon.
That’s it for this week. I really appreciate you reading!
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