Tag: ideas

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It’s the Rail Thing

It’s McTrue.

Quite a while back, I recounted the saga of Boaty McBoatface, the British polar research vessel that was christened by an internet poll (Awwww!) only to have the name rejected as frivolous by the Powers That Be (Booo!). The decision disappointed lovers of silliness and members of the media – or is there a distinction? – who had to settle for the minor victory of calling the craft “also known as…” in every relevant story and online posting from here until the Sun flames out.

But! There has been a new development!

We take you now to Stockholm, where Reuters reports that a Swedish railway operator has named one of its trains through a public poll. The train operator publicly embraced the new name, which is … yes, really … Trainy McTrainface.

And no, this was not a reluctant bowing to the ever-strange mind of the internet. If anything, MTR Express gloated in a statement that, where Britain had ignored the voice of the people, this newly chosen name “will be welcomed by many, not just in Sweden.”

All that was missing was Ringo Starr to do the narration, accompanied by a certain tank engine theme song. (And if you didn’t want that earworm in your head … oops.)

OK, it’s ridiculous. It’s not going to bring justice, health care, and a free copy of the works of Elvis Presley to every human being on the globe. But if it brings a chuckle and a smile for just a minute, that’s not to be despised.

In fact, I’ll go beyond that. It shows how powerful a force simple joy can be.

We’ve seen the opposite for a while. Anger can rally people. Fear can make them huddle together against a perceived foe or danger. Suspicion can fuel talk, and theorizing, and endless opportunities for those with an agenda to promote. After a while, it becomes a feedback cycle, a circle that draws ever tighter against a seemingly threatening world.

The trouble is, it’s hard to build anything when your fists are clenched. Anger and fear provide plenty of enemies to defeat, but little to raise in their place. It’s a hunger that always needs to be fed, so that anyone could migrate from “us” to “them” with little warning,  from a wielder of the weapon to its newest target.  Even in the less intense cases, it’s fatiguing to always be looking over your shoulder … or even harmful, if it means you don’t see a crack in the sidewalk.

Building requires wonder.

It needs a desire to explore and consider the different.

It responds to hands that are open to tools, minds that are open to questions, lives that are open to the possibility of something that hasn’t been there before.

It may even need a bit of the cockeyed. Puns work (as much as they do) because someone can see two meanings of a word at once. Ideas work because someone can see two states of being at once – what’s in the world now, and what could be.

That’s how you build ideas, companies, inventions, stories, nations. And at its best, it sparks a joy and enthusiasm that can carry multitudes in its wake.

Not every idea will be good. Not every dream will bear fruit. But all of it can open a door to conversation instead of throwing up a wall.

“Don’t just tell me the quarterback sucks – tell me who should be playing.”

“Don’t just tell me the program won’t work – tell me what would work better.”

“Don’t just tell me the story doesn’t speak to you – help me craft one that can.”

It can be silly. It can be profound. But if it’s building joy instead of sapping hope, then we’re on the right track.

Even if it’s an unusual McTrain of thought.

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Never Silent

I’ve started and stopped this column about half a dozen times so far. I doubt I’m alone. Some things, some events are just hard to wrap your mind around.

And when it comes to the murders at Charlie Hebdo, that may just be an understatement.

Understand, I’m used to people who don’t get freedom of the press. Especially this week. This week seemed to abound with folks who flunked Civics 101, reaching its peak in County Councilman Kirby Delauter of Maryland, who became a figure of national ridicule for telling a reporter to never publish his name without his permission or he’d sue. In response, the paper’s next editorial not only used his name in virtually every sentence, it used the first letter of each paragraph to spell out K-I-R-B-Y D-E-L-A-U-T-E-R.

It seemed like a perfect time to smile, laugh and remember a few basic truths. To get silly in a good cause.

Then the news out of Paris came. And it stopped being funny anymore.

I had never heard of Charlie Hebdo before the attacks. I know the type, though. Satire always carries an edge, ready to skewer the sacrosanct and roast the untouchable, whether with the neatness of a rapier thrust or the messy vigor of a chainsaw.

It’s meant to shock people, often to make them step back and think. And it invariably makes enemies. Among reporters, there’s a saying that if you never offend anyone, you’re not in journalism, you’re in public relations. That goes double in satire, where targets are mocked deliberately and openly in a day’s work.

This time, the laughs were answered with blood.

For anyone who creates, this is the fundamental fear. And it’s one that can be fatal in more senses than just the obvious.

When ideas carry punishment, something important dies. When saying the wrong thing can get you fired, arrested, or even killed, the fences start to go up. The bravest fight on, perhaps, but most simply keep their heads down and watch their step. And self-censorship is the most insidious kind of all.

Kill one artist and a hundred more quietly die with her.

I’m aware that calling Charlie an “artist” may be a bit much for some, like putting Mad Magazine in the ring with Pablo Picasso. But freedom of expression and the press doesn’t just protect the elegant. It guards the crude, the irreverent, even the outright repulsive. The problem with saying “No, not him,” is that everyone has a “not him”; protecting those is the surest way to ensure it doesn’t become a “No, not you” someday.

All of which can sound awfully abstract when gunfire starts to ring in the streets. But it matters. Now, more than ever.

Now, a world has to show that fear will not win.

Not by declaring wars, or announcing new laws, or the dozens of things that societies often reach for in the wake of a murderous attack. But by continuing to speak. To laugh. To shout. To risk offense. To show that our voices will not be silenced, that our ideas will not be locked in a drawer and forgotten.

In a way, it’s Kirby Delauter all over again. How do you respond to a demand for silence? Speak even louder.

Delauter, of course, is still a civilized man. He apologized and withdrew his words. I doubt we’ll get the same courtesy from the Charlie shooters or those like them. But that doesn’t matter. The tactics remain the same. Hold the line. Stand the ground. And never let the walls rise.

This is about all of us, polite or obnoxious, French or American, left or right or center. This is about an idea, even a dream.

And it does not die here.

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Train of Thought

Ever since the news, my inner Arlo Guthrie hasn’t stopped singing.

Writin’ on The City of New Orleans,

Simon & Schuster, Monday-morning rail,

It’s got 15 cars of would-be J.K. Rowlings,

Three pot-boilers, 25 plots so frail …

The occasion, of course, is Amtrak’s decision to begin a “writer’s residency” program aboard its trains. As in take a seat, hit the keys and type the miles away.

No charge.

It’s a rolling dream for a lot of writers, and not just because it’s free, though that word does hold a lot of power for the Order of the Smoking Word Processor. Anyone in the press knows that the best way to draw reporters isn’t to issue a release, it’s to serve free food — an observation that has broadened both coverage and waistlines.

But while a free train ride might hold some attractions by itself, the real draw is in what the train can bestow. Separation. Focus. Time.

Time, maybe most of all.

Every writer has their own idiosyncracies. Lewis Carroll wrote standing up, Truman Capote lying down. Mark Twain needed yellow paper, Rudyard Kipling demanded black ink, and Roald Dahl had to have his Dixon-Ticonderoga pencils. Isaac Asimov didn’t seem to need more than oxygen, and if he could have made his prose literally breathless, he’d probably be writing still.

But the one thing we all have to have, the one indispensable, is time.

Not time to write. That’s actually the easy part. Anyone who can spend three hours a day looking at cat pictures on the Internet can find a way to write a page or two. The time spent watching the last Super Bowl could have produced several anthologies — and arguably would have been more productively spent, especially for Manning and Co.

No, the hard part is the time to germinate. To let ideas lie fallow. To let your brain absent-mindedly chew on a thought, a thought that mingles with others and evolves like the monster in a B-movie, suddenly alive and demanding attention.

It’s important. And these days, it’s difficult. The absent mind has a plethora of things racing to fill it, from headline news to bacon jokes. We live in a sea of stimulus and interaction — great things for starting an idea, but not always so for nurturing it.

It’s like trying to plant a flower garden on the interstate. And daylilies versus Peterbilts was never a fair match.

And so — separation.

The retreat is an old idea, especially in religious tradition; to step away from the world for a while in order to refocus your mind and soul on what matters. Like most things, that deliberate loneliness gets more valuable as it gets harder to find. Not just for writers, either; who couldn’t use even 20 minutes to get away and let the mind be a field instead of an engine?

The Amtrak idea, of course, promises a lot more than 20 minutes. (Well, so long as the WiFi is turned off, anyway.) But while that’s attractive — OK, downright seductive — it doesn’t have to be that extreme. It can be an hour at night after everyone else has gone to bed. Or a weekend away. Or even an uneventful drive on a boring road, one of my favorite spots for musing on columns, fiction and intractable problems.

If you’ve ever been behind me in traffic, by the way, I do apologize. And I swear, that light was yellow when I entered the intersection.

Time set apart. Mind set apart. A chance to be quiet, even bored. That’s where souls are refreshed and ideas are born.

That’s priceless.

In fact, it’s worth volumes.

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Gone To Potter – And Thank Goodness

“No story lives unless someone wants to listen.” – J.K. Rowling, 2011.

Don’t look now, but Harry Potter may just save the world.

OK, granted, he’s famous for doing that. I’m intimately familiar with the battles of England’s favorite boy wizard against the forces of Voldemort. I’ve cheered him on as he raised his wand against evil, selfishness and – most frightening of all – government bureaucracy.

But I’m not talking about the fictional confines of Harry’s hidden magical universe. I’m talking right here. Right now.

Or at least, that’s what Anthony Gierzynski is saying.

Gierzynski is the author of “Harry Potter and the Millennials,” a political science book that looks at the children who grew up among tales of Hogwarts and now make up a young voting bloc of their own.

What sort of voters? That’s the interesting part. Based on Gierzynski’s studies, the millennials who grew up reading the Potter books were more likely to be tolerant of differences and less likely to support using deadly force or torture; more likely to be politically active and less likely to be authoritarian.

In short, the sort of people we seem to need so much these days.

“I give Dobby most of the credit!” teased a friend.

Maybe so. Maybe there’s something to be said for an early exposure to Dobby, the fearful house-elf with an unlikely potential for heroism … or to a world where wizards’prejudices have visible consequences … or even to an orphaned boy who belongs to two worlds and sometimes feels out of place in both.

But proceed with caution. And not just because of the giant spiders.

Gierzynski himself warns that correlation may not be causation. For those not used to the difference (a majority, it seems, on the Internet), it works like this: After it rains, I go out and find the roof of my house is wet. But that doesn’t mean soaking my roof will make it rain.

Applied here, it means be careful which way you point the sign post. Sure, it might be that reading Harry Potter creates a tolerant, activist personality. But it could also be that people with tolerant, activist personalities were the most likely to read about him in the first place. Or even that it’s pure coincidence.

Either way, it gives me some hope.

Remember, Harry Potter books in their heyday were the most popular books in the world. At a time where the National Security Agency competes with online marketers to see who can make our lives the most transparent, when ideological differences repeatedly become hard-and-fast battle lines, when rights are treated like conveniences – well, it’s a little encouraging to know that a solid chunk of that record-breaking readership believes in a better way.

More, that they believe in fighting for one.

I know, it’s a long way from imagination to reality. But the way is there. And it’s a road that J.K. Rowling herself has been forcefully pointing to for a long time.

“The Potter books in general are a prolonged argument for tolerance, a prolonged plea for an end to bigotry and I think it’s one of the reasons that some people don’t like the books,” the author once said. “But I think it’s a very healthy message to pass on to younger people that you should question authority and you should not assume that the establishment or the press tells you all of the truth.”

Yes, it’s a story. A fiction. A dream.

But people who have a dream and the passion to see it through, for better or worse, have had an amazing impact on the world before. They will again.

Choose your dreams well.

That’s the magic that lasts.