Now that I’ve read Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes
, I’ll never look at elections or election coverage the same way again. More importantly, I’ll never look at media criticism the same way again.
First of all, let me start by saying that it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read, period. It’s brilliantly constructed and incredibly well written. Ezra Klein wrote about the book’s impact when Richard Ben Cramer passed away earlier this year.
The most brilliant thing about the book is that Cramer writes with sympathy for all of the candidates that he covers. I wouldn’t have wanted most of the book’s subjects to be President, but I felt bad for all of the losers and the eventual winner as the book unfolded.
I think, though, that the lasting impact of the book is that it makes it clear that all of the political themes we discuss today are just echoes of the same themes that we’ve been arguing about for decades. For example, here’s a snippet from a 1988 Gary Hart speech:
Agriculture and energy, that’s another. … Infrastructure—now what is that? That’s our roads and harbors, and public works, our sewer systems, transit systems, and bridges—there’s bridges falling down in this country in every state of the union! That’s how to put our people back to work!
That sounds like something any Democratic politician might say today. His explanation of Texas conservative politics decades ago that could be a word for word description of the Tea Party today. None of this stuff is new.
Most importantly, he lays the idiocy and destructiveness of horse race campaign coverage bare. The desire to reconstruct actual events into a narrative that the pack can write about, the eagerness to chase pseudo-scandals to keep things interesting, and the need to discipline candidates who don’t meet the expectations of the media horde — he sees and reports on it all.
If you’re interested in politics at all, I’d skip the contemporary accounts and go back and read What It Takes. It’s all already there.
The human body is a tool for experts
Lately I’ve been thinking about exercise, mainly because I’ve been experimenting with Crossfit. Too much has been written about the good and bad of Crossfit, this isn’t one of those posts. What I’m interested in is some of the exercises people do at Crossfit, and how they make me think about how we use our bodies to do work.
Crossfit emphasizes Olympic weight lifts — the clean and jerk and the snatch. They’re both techniques for getting weight from the ground to over your head. With the clean and jerk you do it in two movements, the snatch involves one continuous movement. Both require a large amount of skill, and even people who have been doing them for awhile tend to be pretty terrible at it.
All but the most skilled can lift more weight using simpler approaches. What’s interesting, though, is that if you can perform these lifts well, you’ll be able to lift more weight than an equally strong person could using other techniques. Mastery enables you to make the most of your own physical potential.
Olympic weightlifting teaches you to be an expert in using a particular tool (your body) for a specific task (getting some weight from the ground to over your head). It’s is a pure example of a case where doing things the hard way takes a person further than easier paths can provide.
I find this really motivating. Currently I am at the point where I feel my weakest when I’m trying to do the proper Olympic lifts. The simpler the approach, the more effective I am. I am intrigued, though, by the idea of learning how to use my own body like an expert.