Month: October 2011

The reason he strikes such a huge chord with an entire generation lies, it seems to me, beyond his immense technical and business and design skills. It was because he became the bridge between the 1960s and the 1980s, the counter-culture and the counter-counter-culture. He was the hippie capitalist. He was the fusion of two great American forces – personal actualization and a free market. Listening to his Stanford Commencement speech above is a revelation, isn't it? He was a baby turned over for adoption by his biological parents. He dropped out of school. He was fired at the age of 30 by the very company he had founded. And in the face of early humbling, he focused on his own vision and his own passion – an individualist creed forged in the crucible of a sure knowledge of his own mortality, of his own death.

This passage resonates very deeply with me:

Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

These are the words of a man with great spiritual insight, and the courage to live it (because true spirituality requires extreme courage). His worldview was forged by an eery prescience of his own mortality. He got there long before his cancer diagnosis, which, perhaps, was why he transcended it with six of the most spectacularly creative and successful years of his life. And this fusion of counter-cultural courage with capitalist genius is what defines our time – as well as the fear-ridden reaction against it.

Jobs simply defied convention at every stage in his life. He saw how the arts could deeply inform the sciences in revolutionizing human life and interaction. He dropped out of college in order to intensify his learning. And that learning came from many sources:

After dropping out of Reed College, a stronghold of liberal thought in Portland, Ore., in 1972, Mr. Jobs led a countercultural lifestyle himself. He told a reporter that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life. He said there were things about him that people who had not tried psychedelics — even people who knew him well, including his wife — could never understand.

Decades later he flew around the world in his own corporate jet, but he maintained emotional ties to the period in which he grew up. He often felt like an outsider in the corporate world, he said. When discussing the Silicon Valley’s lasting contributions to humanity, he mentioned in the same breath the invention of the microchip and “The Whole Earth Catalog,” a 1960s counterculture publication.

This is the fusion that has made the best in our modern world – and those who reflexively mock the counterculture miss its spiritual genius because they are incapable of the courage needed to understand it better. Think of Pixar. I remember during the darkest days after 9/11 feeling bleaker about the future than ever before in my life. And I went to see a Pixar movie. For some reason, I came out feeling better about the world and its prospects. If a civilization could produce that kind of genius conflation of the left and right sides of the brain, if it could also turn that into exquisite beauty and laughter and even sadness, then this civilization was a formidable force against its nihilist fundamentalist enemies at home and abroad. No politician – save Obama at his best – ever reassured in quite that comprehensive a way. And what was reassuring was that this had been rooted in a vision from an individual who took no-one else's lead and had the courage to realize it, to his own exacting standards of perfection. That's America at its best.

Steve Jobs' approach to life is terrifying for most of us, because it demands firstly the hardest thing – facing death – and then its necessary, scary corollary – living your own life, and no one else's. These are difficult things, the bequests of a modernity we were born into, and perhaps beyond most human beings. Hence the enduring nihilist appeal of fundamentalism in all its forms – a fundamentalist approach to religion, in which fallible words are turned into literalist gods; a fundamentalist approach to politics, in which every problem is defined by a dogma and every solution found in a catechism; and a fundamentalist approach to life, which is rooted in obedience and rules and the false comfort of Manicheanism, rather than freedom and love and terrifying, liberating existential doubt.

You cannot teach these things in a book. But you can see them in a life. And every life lived without fear is a life that can sustain and nourish others. And Jobs truly lived without fear – which enabled him to create beyond the measure of most mortals. That he had, in the end, everything to fear – a rare pancreatic cancer slowly moving toward him – only makes his energy and spirit more vibrant.

He was alive when he died.

How many of us live as if we were already dead?

I wrote that, now that we know Palin isn't running, "we can stop worrying about the threat she posed to this country." Pejman crosses this fingers:

So that means no more obsessive Palin-blogging? That means Sullivan will hang it up and call it a career as an Internet gynecologist and obstetrician?

This meme on the right – simply equating genuine, real, empirical questions about the insane stories made up by Palin about her last pregnancy with some kind of creepy fascination with vaginas – is one more dodge from the Palin partisans. Trust me: I am the last man on the Internet with an interest in gynecology. I am, however, duty bound, as I see it, to say when a leading politician is saying something obviously nuts or, at the very least, wildly implausible, and asking for empirical proof. That used to be called journalism, until "deference" became the norm.

There are many individuals in the world nutty enough to make up stories about pregnancies, and this blog covers none of them. Indeed, I couldn't care less if someone capable of such a thing walks around in a free country. All I ever cared about was that someone who was incapable of understanding reality, who was, in my view, clinically disturbed, intellectually incapable and emotionally crippled, should not be foisted on the world as a potential US president because John McCain had a temper tantrum.

The record shows I had an open mind in the first blissfully data-free minutes I absorbed her candidacy. I had no desire to spend hours on a story out of a movie-of-the-week. But as a blogger, I owe my readers honesty. I could not disguise the fact that I did not believe her on Trig, and that if the worst were true, we had a fullscale nutjob potentially in line for global power. What was I supposed to do? I took a day off when it dawned on me I shouldn't lie, and yet knew I would be pilloried for airing the question. That day off was entirely my own choice, and I used it to try and think skeptically about what was in my head and to pray for the right response. The obloquy and ridicule from my fellow hacks was close to universal, and I put awful strains on my colleagues at the Dish. The only reason I did this was that I simply didn't believe her. None of it made sense to me. I regard it as a sacred rule of this blog that I will not bullshit you. So I didn't. Fuck the consequences.

If her loss of power leads to some kind of resolution to some of the mysteries, the Dish will cover it. And in so far as a child with Down Syndrome may have been tossed into the scarring chaos of Palin life, one should simply pray for him. But that's it. At some point, history will have its say. Or we will never know (one reason, I suspect, she quit while she was ahead). But there's no need any more to even think, let alone blog, about her. I did what I could to expose her and the corrupt system – in politics and the media – that made her possible. And she's over. Mission, as they say, accomplished.

Cue the music from "Jaws".

(Images: an email from Palin trying to get paid for the two days she allegedly spent in hospital having a premature child with Down Syndrome; an extract from Palin's own letter to her family and friends, in the voice of the Almighty, miraculously predicting a premature birth she would subsequently describe as a total shock – "It's far too early.")