I ask hopelessly giddy questions like, “Is there a pool?” The receptionist then either relishes in the sort of paramount joy a mother experiences when giving her child what they really, really want for Christmas with a joyous, “Yes!” Or, with jaw firmly clenched, solemnly shaking their head, then pausing tactfully, as if observing a memorial moment of silence, before consolingly indicating on the hotel map the location of the ice machine, and joining me in a wide-eyed smile of wonder.

You see, I didn’t grow up in the mainstream. My parents weren’t “hippies,” though that’s become the derisive catch-all term for anything that falls outside of a cultural environment centered around Disneyland as childhood holy grail, a refrigerator stocked with cold Cokes, and cable-enabled televisions with limitless viewing privileges. Ok, fine, at my slumber party, my parents screened Charlie Chaplin’s “Gold Rush” instead of “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.” And we had a 13-inch black-and-white TV we were allowed to watch only an hour per week (The Cosby Show and Alf). Sure, I sowed gnomies in first grade, spent a month learning about Norse Myths in fourth grade, and studied a form of 19th century German dance called Eurythmy throughout grade school.

Yes, my school invented a color coding system for days of the week, so that in second grade, while riding on the city bus home from school, I explained to a kid from another school that “My friend Erin comes over to my house on Red days, and I go to her house on Orange days.” Then I explained that some people call it Tuesday and Thursday. The kid stared out the window the rest of the way.

And from that point on, I realized I was a bit different.

I wasn’t that different. I did ride the bus, getting mugged a handful of times in a business-like manner for between two to seven dollars. I played at the city park across the street from my house, learning how to paint the corners in strikeouts, run a slant route in football, use the pick and roll in hoops, and talk enough trash throughout so that I wasn’t a pushover but not so much that I got my ass kicked.

We snuck in extra hours of TV when the parents weren’t at home (Diff’rent Strokes, Double Dare, The Smurfs), throwing the TV back into the closet when we heard them walking up the front steps, then pretending we’d been wrestling to explain the thudding. We dutifully spent afternoons playing River Raid on Atari at our friend Gabe’s house up the street. We rented a VCR from blockbuster a couple weekends a year in the early ‘90s, which probably ended up costing more than buying one, but technology less than 20 years old was suspicious to my parents.

At this point you’re probably screaming, “Dude, your parents were TOTALLY hippies!” But I’d say my parents were more just functionally bohemian up until the early ‘90s, at which point the rising tide of the roaring ‘90s lifted us to haltingly, confusedly, and somewhat guiltily bougie, which then, in the anxiety and outrage of the Bush years, drifted into a defiantly decadent bougieness.

But we never had cable. I have this vague memory of getting it for a fitful three months when my dad was away for a stretch and my mom accepted a free trial in a moment of guilt and surrender. I functioned like a hard-core addict, chain-watching episodes of SportsCenter. But it may be a false memory created by long nights of drinking Crystal Light, eating bagel dogs, and watching the Lethal Weapon trilogy at my mainstream friend’s gloriously permissive single parent Costco Club card-carrying house.

I recently stopped asking if hotels have cable, as they might interpret it as a sign of mental illness or a coded way of asking if it’s ok to bring prostitutes back to the room. (If a hotel doesn’t have cable TV, then why are you getting a room anyway?) But cable remains my drug of choice on the road.

And, sure, sometimes I find myself in a late night cable quagmire, watching, say, Forrest Gump, trying to fall asleep at every commercial break, but inevitably turning on the light after a few minutes and returning to the tragic task of again watching a movie I’ve seen multiple times, with commercials, at 3 am. My eyes burn, the dialogue’s trite, but it’s hard to fight a cable comedown. You’re always looking for what it was like the first half hour you watched.

So, yes, it’s a blessing and a curse to have been cable-less growing up. By the time I’m eating breakfast at the airport waiting for my flight home, the ESPN highlights blasting me at various angles, I’m ready for cable detox. I’d even rather hear the inevitable functional alcoholic at the bar blabbing about how he’s “lived all over the world, but nothing compares to [insert hometown here, in this case, Cleveland]. It’s the greatest place to live in the world,” as the waitress nods and pours him his second 8 am cocktail.

But I know I’ll soon be checking in at another slightly swanky corporate hotel, there will be smooth bop playing in the lobby, there will be a complimentary chocolate, or half-off breakfast offer…

…and I will be smitten.

Dan Hoyle is an actor, playwright, and journalist based in San Francisco. His solo shows Tings Dey Happen and The Real Americans have received wide acclaim, won awards, and been performed Off Broadway, across the U.S. and in Nigeria on a State Department-sponsored tour. His essays have been featured in Salon, The San Francisco Chronicle, Sports Illustrated, and Mother Jones. You can follow him on Twitter @danhoyle and read his entire HyperVocal blog archives right here.

The post Dreams of My Mainstream: Growing Up Cable-less appeared first on HyperVocal.

So frankly, who cares?

Well, in today’s highly polarized America, watching the Super Bowl is one of the last shared American experiences. To put the 106 million number in perspective, 67 million people voted Obama for President. The people power of the jubilant crowd dancing in the streets November 4, 2008 won’t compare to the army of chip ‘n dip eatin’ Americans experiencing the Super Bowl on Sunday. More Americans will watch the Super Bowl than own guns (80 million), go fishing (30 million), or are obese (70 million).

For comparison, the World Series’ peak audience of 44 million in 1978 has dwindled to the teens in the last five years. The Wire, that paragon of television drama, peaked at a measly 4 million.

The success of something like The Wire is the triumph of “narrow-casting.” The explosion of Internet, cable and satellite media has allowed niche programming with small audiences to thrive. This is a good thing. Network TV’s heavyweight champion is “Two and a Half Men,” (14.7 million) whose punch lines seem written by a circle of nice elderly people in a retirement community. (No, no wait, what if he didn’t know the milk was sour, but drank it anyway! What a hoot!)

The downside is everybody reads the blogs that reinforce their own views — blah, blah blogsheep, you’ve heard it all before. Media is fractured. Society is fractured. But the Super Bowl unites us.

So I burst out laughing when President Obama asked that we raise the bar, saying, in his State of the Union speech, “We need to teach our kids that it’s not just the winner of the Super Bowl who deserves to be celebrated, but the winner of the science fair.” You could almost hear the collective “huzzah!” of science geeks across the country. Yet the only time our nation will be rapt by model volcanoes erupting Rice Krispies is if it’s part of a clever Super Bowl ad.

Super Bowl Ads! The modern day world’s fair of cleverness and marketing. When the national collective consciousness is assaulted with great anticipation and glee. A celebration of American ingenuity, consumerism, and mythology. There will be Clydesdales, Doritos, Pepsi. There will be deep emotional appeals of which we aren’t aware; they will prod our most base urges.

Of course you could opt out, go for a bike ride, fly a kite, read a book. But then you’d be abandoning your country when we are most united. It might be alienating to watch yet another cars.com commercial as the chemical bomb of sour cream ‘n onion flavoring, Mountain Dew, and Sour Patch Kids congeals in your stomach. You might feel depressed and deflated as the post-game theme music rocks your addled brain.

But take heart, you will be joined by millions and millions of your countrymen. For a few hours every year, we are together.

Dan Hoyle is an actor, playwright, and journalist based in San Francisco. His solo shows Tings Dey Happen and The Real Americans have received wide acclaim, won awards, and been performed Off-Broadway, across the U.S. and in Nigeria on a State Department sponsored tour. His essays have been featured in Salon, The San Francisco Chronicle, Sports Illustrated, and Mother Jones. You can follow him on Twitter @danhoyle and read his entire HyperVocal blog archives right here.

The post Hoyle on Super Bowl XLV: Tuning In to Your Country appeared first on HyperVocal.

And then I’d ask about political views, and that’s when things would often get a little wacky. It might start with a comment about the Gold Standard, or the Federal Reserve. Pretty quickly I’d scrunch up my face, bracing for the authoritative list of socialist plots, the coming apocalypse, the Muslim terrorist government infiltrations.

The right-wing yakkers have made a mint whipping up a sort of paranoid apocalyptic babble and calling it self-taught wisdom. (See Sean Wilentz’s essay in The New Yorker detailing how Glenn Beck’s microphone has popularized what were once only extremist, John Birch Society views.)

And although 9/11 Truthers make sure the Left will not be denied it’s paranoid wing, these voices remain on the fringe. Right-wing fears of a “socialist takeover” have become daily Republican talking points.

It seems the leap to link Jared Lee Loughner to the right-wing populist backlash was premature. More than anything, he seems to be severely mentally ill. But it wasn’t an unreasonable link to make.

For the past year, I’ve been playing a character onstage in my play — based on real people I met on my trip — whose beliefs in imminent government takeover, international monetary conspiracies, and possible mind control are similar to what we can discern of Loughner’s. The people I met who espoused these views were everyday Americans in every way: they held down jobs, paid their bills, tended to their marriages. But they had the worldview of a madman.

When paranoid nonsense becomes respectable and mainstream, when we have no universally trusted referee of rhetoric, it becomes difficult to agree on basic facts. And when we can’t agree on basic facts, then we lose a common understanding of American identity, we lose the common cultural mores that the right-wing is so hysterical about.

Sarah Palin’s continued popularity is to many on the Left, and even Center, a squawking index of how ridiculous mainstream political rhetoric has become. Her insistence in her recent video address that we’re doing fine, favorably comparing contemporary public discourse to the days when disputes were resolved with “dueling pistols,” epitomizes the proud ignorance that is her alluring brand.

But it makes no sense. It’s like shooing away concerns about unemployment by pointing out how well we’re doing compared to the 1930s. Her explanation that “when we take up arms, we’re talking about the vote,” well, that’s actually not an explanation. If I said that, I’d plead brain fart. She’s basically asking us to re-imagine what certain words mean. This is useful if you’re trying to win an argument with your girlfriend (no baby, when I say, “You’re acting crazy” it means “I love you”) but otherwise it’s a line even Phil Davison would have a hard time dramatizing.

The importance of words was a pre-occupation of Loughner’s, and according to a friend (via Mother Jones), Laughner once said, “I’m pretty sure I’ve come to the conclusion that words mean nothing.”

As all sane people know, words mean a lot. Words are the basis of civilization. But the crazier the ideas and words of sane people become, the more difficult it is to separate the ill from those who just listen to a lot of right-wing radio at work, or troll far-out conspiracy websites at night.

And if we can’t discern who is mad, and who is just spewing crazy talk, then it’s not until that madman has taken up arms and written his will in blood that we learn.

Dan Hoyle is an actor, playwright, and journalist based in San Francisco. His solo shows Tings Dey Happen and The Real Americans have received wide acclaim, won awards, and been performed Off-Broadway, across the U.S. and in Nigeria on a State Department sponsored tour. His essays have been featured in Salon, The San Francisco Chronicle, Sports Illustrated, and Mother Jones. You can read through his entire HyperVocal blog archive right here.

The post Hoyle: On Loughner, On Normal People Talking Crazy appeared first on HyperVocal.

Essentially, five middle-class kids were selling some drugs to their friends and classmates to cover living expenses that were not part of their financial aid packages (all were on financial aid). One of them, David Harrison, got cocky and stupid, and began selling in larger quantities to a larger circle of clients, including an undercover agent with the NYPD. Eventually it caught up with him, and he led the undercover NYPD agent to the four other students, who were dealing in smaller quantities and keeping a lower profile. All of them got busted, had to pay serious bail (about what a year at Columbia costs, or more), and almost certainly won’t be able to continue their studies at Columbia, where all were carrying above a 3.0 average. In effect, they sabotaged an extremely bright future for some short-term profits. Why?

When I went to college, I knew more than half a dozen guys who sold small quantities of drugs to their friends and classmates. “Drug dealer” was not part of their identity, and it’s almost too strong a term. They were serious scholars, athletes, artists, strivers, and student drug suppliers on the side. A few times a week, usually around the weekend, they sold a few bags of pot, a few pills of ecstasy, a handful of pharmies (Adderall, Xanax etc).

A few did it to cover the cost of their own pot smoking. But most did it to cover the costs of books, rent, and living expenses that financial aid didn’t cover. They also often had University supplied “work-study” jobs. But these minimum-wage jobs were terribly inefficient. You could work ten hours a week for seventy dollars, or make a couple of five-minute sales to well-funded students with fresh-out-the-ATM twenty dollar bills (often supplied by their wealthy parents) and make the same amount. At a rigorous academic school like Northwestern University, where I went, or Columbia University, those hours are precious.

I worked two work-study jobs, so I had ten hours less a week than other students to participate in extra-curricular activities, or to hang out. This may seem trivial. But at an elite University, you are partly paying for the connections and friendships you make with the leaders and entrepreneurs of tomorrow. (I didn’t know this as a bumbling twenty-year-old, but consider how “who you know” has helped you get where you are today. Now try not to punch yourself for failing to befriend more rich kids). Supplying drugs to your peers was a very efficient way to make money without losing time, and heck, it’s a social activity. You meet lots of people, some of whom may put your resume at the top of the pile down the road.

Student drug suppliers were performing a public service, dealing with a more serious “real world” drug dealer in the city so the less street-smart kids didn’t have to, and bringing the drugs onto campus with discretion, and critically, no violence. (Though the less street-savvy student clients still had to be taught not to babble on the phone about specifics, they were spared the train-wreck of buying drugs from serious drug dealers).

But as the arrest of the Columbia kids case shows, the risks were not shared like a public good, and neither have the consequences. Just imagine if every kid who bought a bag of weed or a pair of ecstasy pills had to pay a little towards the busted kids’ bail, or more crucially, had their academic status slightly demoted. The kids who got busted were not violent, predatory drug dealers. They did it because it was so easy, and it was so easy because American college students really want to take drugs.

After graduating college, I did extensive interviews with street corner drug dealers in the Rogers Park neighborhood where I lived (I intended to write a play about it, but as yet, have not). The guys I talked with and observed were all in their early twenties and smart, exactly like the guys who supplied drugs on campus. But they were also poor, hadn’t graduated from high school, had criminal records which made anything but McDonalds employment almost impossible, and were black guys who wore baggy pants, used a lot of slang, and were perceived as threatening to the upper-middle class, predominantly white world of higher achievement (and elite universities). Given the limited alternatives, their chosen lifestyle made sense.

There are thousands of young black men in jail for doing exactly what the Columbia Five did. But black street corner drug dealers will never be sympathetic to most Americans.

Maybe the Columbia Five shouldn’t be either.

But perhaps when their classmates, propelled by their elite education, become prosecutors and judges, they will remember the sacrifices their student drug suppliers made to provide them with the complete college experience they craved. And perhaps they’ll state to a jury what is so obvious at almost every level of drug dealing: that though wealthy drug consumers can afford to pay someone else to assume the risks and consequences of procuring drugs, it’s unfair.

Dan Hoyle is an actor, playwright, and journalist based in San Francisco. His solo shows Tings Dey Happen and The Real Americans have received wide acclaim, won awards, and been performed Off-Broadway, across the U.S. and in Nigeria on a State Department sponsored tour. His essays have been featured in Salon, The San Francisco Chronicle, Sports Illustrated, and Mother Jones. You can read through his entire HyperVocal blog archive right here.

The post Turn On, Study Hard, College and Drugs Mix Fine These Days appeared first on HyperVocal.

Memories of past New Year’s Days’ funk compound the exhaustion, which can easily lead to a general apathy about the world in general, the disappointments of your life, etc.

I’ve been reading about the rapid and gory death of quality journalism in Alex Jones’ book “Losing the News,” so that’s been bumming me out too. Basically, print newspapers are dying, which means original reporting is getting massively reduced, which means ‘core news’ that performs a watchdog function on governments, corporations, etc. is getting less widely read, which means people are getting less informed, which means we can’t agree on facts, which means our democracy becomes an echo chamber of ignorance. Yeah, big time brain bar-b-que, right?

Some stats if you don’t believe me: Newspapers account for an estimated 85% of original reporting. Eighty percent of articles referenced by blogs come from just five news organizations (NYT, BBC, CNN, WSJ and The Washington Post). It costs a lot more to report ‘core news’ like government embezzlement, Wall Street loop-hole exploiting or Afghanistan ministry shenanigans than it does to cover local fires and robberies, so it’s the easiest to cut. And whereas family-owned local newspapers used to mix profitability with a larger sense of public service, many of these papers have been bought by publicly traded companies that (under pressure from corporate boards and shareholders to increase profit margins) have drastically reduced their news staffs.

It’s a problem, folks, and here’s hoping 2011 finds some bright solutions.

But since I didn’t party that much this NYE, I’ve sought to avoid wandering down my usual path of woe and doom by considering all the incredible reporting I’ve read this year. Check out what the ol’ Grey Lady did with its “A Year at War” story, which followed a powerful exhibit of digital shorts and quick moments online with a front page story on the last day of the year that captured the courage of a military family in Wisconsin and Fort Drum, NY.

Or NYT photographer Michael Kamber’s salute to his wounded colleague Joao Silva, “the last working member of the fabled Bang Bang Club” of conflict photojournalists from South Africa who cut their teeth shooting the township wars during the waning days of apartheid. As Kamber reports, on October 23rd Silva stepped on a cheap plastic landmine, and is now recovering and walking with prosthetic legs at Walter Reed.

Kamber is a colleague and friend. I met him in the Niger Delta of Nigeria in 2005 where I was a Fulbright Scholar. He is incredibly hard-working, generous, thoughtful, intense, dedicated — he’s done at least six stints in Iraq, he photographed Liberia’s macabre civil war in the early 2000s. It piles heroism upon courage when we realize that he is Silva’s replacement in Afghanistan. (As a visual testament to the endurance and commitment of these journalists, Silva took three frames as he fell to the ground after getting hit.)

As Kamber tries to answer what makes him and others continue to take such great personal risk, he tells of learning of the Vietnam War through photos in LIFE Magazine and his local newspaper Portland Press Herald growing up in the 1960s. Without front-line reporters and photographers, the country’s understanding of the war would have been vastly different.

The two American wars of my youth have remained distant. I visited an Army recruiting office after college, but I did it out of curiosity, to know what it’s like. That’s as far as I got. I haven’t done research or reporting in Iraq and Afghanistan because I’m scared of losing my legs. The journalists who do are heroes, plain and simple.

And yet foreign bureaus have fallen like dominoes this past decade, and the amount of foreign news that local newspapers print is ever shrinking.

Most likely you go to NYT.com and get all you need. But you are a member of a minority elite who does this. Most people get their news from local newspapers or television news, and so if there aren’t stories there, they ain’t learning about what’s happening. And if people aren’t informed, they let their leaders do stupid things.

So do me a favor this year. Buy a newspaper. Read a well-written article. Mention it to other people. It’s the least we can do to honor the service of journalists like Joao Silva and Michael Kamber.

Dan Hoyle is an actor, playwright, and journalist based in San Francisco. His solo shows Tings Dey Happen and The Real Americans have received wide acclaim, won awards, and been performed Off-Broadway, across the U.S. and in Nigeria on a State Department sponsored tour. His essays have been featured in Salon, The San Francisco Chronicle, Sports Illustrated, and Mother Jones. You can read through his entire HyperVocal blog archive right here.

The post In Lieu of New Year’s Mental Soreness & Apathy, The News… appeared first on HyperVocal.

Even after Sen. Chuck Schumer and the Dems said, ok fine, just let the tax cuts expire for those making over one million dollars a year, Republicans still said, f*$k you very much.

It pained me because no one who’s a part of the “populist” Tea Party movement thinks there’s anything wrong with this. Populists used to rail against fat cats, now they worship fat cats and rail against anyone who questions their wisdom. And it pained me because the Left’s response is to blame it on Obama again, instead of getting fired up and politely calling their Republican friends and saying, “Are you f*#kin’ crazy, bro?”

Tax policy helps insure the American Dream. Before we get to that, a quick reminder: The American Dream is the mythical embodiment of the reality that in the United States where you end up in life is less determined by where you are born and raised than any other country in the world. Lock yourself in the cage of identity politics, psh-a the prison of suburban conformity til you can’t psh-a no more, but anybody can become somebody in this country.

So yeah, it’s maddening that we keep sweetening the deal for those at the top (our top tax rates are some of the lowest in the world, and half what they were in the go-go postwar economy of the 1950s and 1960s). It pisses me off to no end.

And it’s weird to be screamed at by small-time methed-out contractors making $50,000 a year about how “America makes a new millionaire everyday,” so we shouldn’t tax millionaires anymore than we should tax struggling methed-out contractors like themselves (’cause their payday is just around the mythical corner). It’s as weird as it sounds. It’s like if everyone at a bar started demanding that the people in the VIP room shouldn’t pay more to be in the VIP room. And then started yelling at the bartender to give a free bottle of Grey Goose to everyone in the VIP room in hopes the VIPers might pass you over a free drink. You just don’t do that. Except when it comes to tax policy, cause that’s trickle down economics, and as this week showed, it’s still popular.

And so the Left wants Obama’s head. As Matt Bai points out, several prominent lefty heavyweights have called for a Democrat primary challenger. They think Obama should have called the Republicans’ bluff and taken this fight to the final round. In a compelling column, Paul Krugman argued that letting Americans weather the blow of tax increases might not be a knock-out blow to the economy. But politically, it’s a TKO. If Obama let all tax cuts expire, Republicans would shout, “Obama’s a Tax-Raiser!” and that would be the first and final words on that for most Americans.

I once believed in an American public that responded to logic and reason, I believed that you could say, “Obama fought for tax cuts for most Americans, but Republicans demanded tax cuts for rich Americans too, so Obama said I’m going to fight so that’s why taxes went up,” and people would nod and serve you milk and cookies and have their minds changed. But I’ve since hung out with that public in real life and those appeals start sounding like Muslimmy Commie Terrorist talk real quick. So they’ll nod, and serve you milk and cookies and say, “So Obama’s a Tax-Raiser!”

Nobody writes as soulfully about taxes as David Leonhardt, the nebbish New Yorker who was destined to write soulfully about taxes no matter where he was born. As he points out, the deal actually amounts to a second stimulus of $900 billion, with unemployment benefits extensions, earned income tax credits and yes, and more tax breaks for the middle class too.

But the Left doesn’t care. For some reason the Left is convinced that when America voted for Obama they were going to get Dennis Kucinich or Ralph Nader. But this is America, those guys have and will always represent less than 5% of the country. And what stood out more than anything at Obama’s post-deal press conference was his full understanding that he’ll never do enough for the Left, never convince them that what’s he done is extraordinary and will have long-lasting impacts, and that persuading them has become almost as difficult as persuading Mitch McConnell and John Boehner. And the Left, in this country, under a winner-take-all system, has simply nowhere to go. Obama is as good as it will get. For a committed liberal in America, all one can do is work for progressive change locally, and make compromises nationally. Otherwise you relegate yourself to the irrelevant and righteous Left.

Of course, since the extension is only for two years, this will come up again in 2012. And perhaps Obama is gambling that maybe then, in the spotlight of the campaign, he can make a speech that warms the hearts and turns on lightbulbs for methed-out construction workers and cookie-serving nice ladies across the land.

As for urban liberals, Obama’s best bet might be to let soul legend Darondo croon his classic track “Didn’t I” to liberals—which begins, “Didn’t I treat you right, now? Didn’t I do the best I could?”—and let the chips fall where they may.

Dan Hoyle is an actor, playwright, and journalist based in San Francisco. His solo shows Tings Dey Happen and The Real Americans have received wide acclaim, won awards, and been performed Off-Broadway, across the U.S. and in Nigeria on a State Department sponsored tour. His essays have been featured in Salon, The San Francisco Chronicle, Sports Illustrated, and Mother Jones. You can read through his entire HyperVocal blog archive right here.

The post Death, Taxes, and the Death of the American Dream by the Death of the Death Tax appeared first on HyperVocal.

Folks expected the South to go hard right, but the Midwest did as well, with Republicans capturing both Statehouses in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Indiana and Minnesota; Wisconsin ousting liberal lion Senator Russ Feingold; and numerous Tea Party candidates being sent to Washington to represent the raging Rust Belt.

As NY Times columnist Matt Bai muses, it’s not clear whether the rightward lurch will mean culture war redux or a return of Reaganomics. And many commentators have warned that the Democrat’s “shellacking” of 2010 could be as short-lived as the Republican “thumpin” of 2006 and 2008. But as David Brooks points out in his patentedly pesky and persuasive way, the economic problems voters are rebelling against are structural.

America has not figured out a good game plan for a post-industrial economy. And the guys who used to get a job out of high school with a middle class wage have gone through several stages of grieving. We made it through the hard times of the 1980s with a jolt of Rambo/Hulk Hogan America working-class patriotic pride, as can be seen clearly here:

The 1990s featured a slight reprieve as the economy added jobs and incomes increased across the board. But it also gave birth to right-wing talk radio in its current Rush-esque form. And Limbaugh, and then Sean Hannity, and now Glenn Beck, demonstrate by their life stories and in their lectures that education doesn’t matter, and let humility be damned, you need to let your voice be heard. They transformed Nixon’s humble Silent Majority to an “I am angry white guy, hear me roar” populist rage.

The problem with being uneducated and opinionated is that you don’t know what you’re talking about. As Vanity Fair’s Todd Purdam noted to Terry Gross, polls show that a majority of Americans are in favor of the individual changes that Health-Care Reform has brought. But call it ObamaCare and a government takeover, and it’s the number one talking point for conservatives on the campaign trail this fall.

Trying to tell the American people, however, that they’re not all clear on the facts is a non-starter now. Liberals have complained that Obama didn’t lead enough in his first two years, but that’s just wrong. The president actually produced historic legislation among extremely tough circumstances, as SFGate’s Mark Morford put it so pointedly.

It’s a conservative country. I’ve already given that lecture, but it’s also increasingly difficult to lead, what with every Internet scholar having an opinion that they can blast with no filter (yours truly included). Governing is becoming more like campaigning; one has to navigate a viscious media minefield, and the message is more important than the delivery of legislation. Obama gambled and tried to take the high road, convinced that Americans would respond to results over rhetoric.

Republicans are now saying that no, it was a repudiation of Obama and his policies, not some error in messaging. But a lot of people don’t even know what his policies were! Only 10% of Americans know Obama cut taxes (in the stimulus package), 47% think that he bailed out the banks (in fact Bush did, and they have paid almost all of it back), the stimulus has been shouted down as a colossal failure (when the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates it saved 3 million jobs) and the temporary takeover of General Motors saved another 1 million jobs, and will probably make the government some money back when it sells its stake.

In a democracy as proud as ours, every politician has to suck up to the vision of the American people. For once, I’d love for a candidate to get up there and say, “American people I have nothing but love for y’all, but you don’t know what the heck you’re talking about, and as glad as I am that you’ve found your voice, please think before you speak.” I’d vote for him.

The post Hoyle: The Good, Humble American’s Humility Problem appeared first on HyperVocal.

I was told this a few weeks ago, but not by a right-wing radio listening trucker with a lip full of dip and a cab plastered with spread-eagle pin-ups. No, it was a middle class white kid at a free concert in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Then he asked if I wanted to smoke a bowl.

It wasn’t the first time I’ve heard relatively liberal twenty-somethings bash unions. They complain that their union reps are shiftless hacks, notable mostly for trying to avoid work. The anti-union sentiment among young people is growing, and there are several reasons.

Partly it’s ’cause kids these days are all D.I.Y.in’ to death. We’ve been told we can do anything we want in life since before we learned to crap outside of pants, so every bad singer/songwriter and lazy graphic designer can start a production company that goes nowhere. And with a smartphone and a sense of entitlement (what came first, the phone or the entitlement?), it’s easy to “take meetings,” and take oneself seriously, and next thing you know those Blackberry commercials (“do what you love, love what you do”) are making you cry so hard that mommy agrees to pay your phone bill again for this month, “but just this month, sweetheart, and have you thought about law school anymore?” Rugged individualism has been reborn as a skinny-pants poser who’s going to conquer the world if he can just sell that next worthless I-Phone app, so who wants a union and regulation to mess up the moment?

Partly it’s ’cause who can imagine having kids with health care and a mortgage and all the responsibilities of shackledom when you’re just beginning your life journey and you haven’t yet gotten dumped twice in two months and “accidentally” hacked your ex’s Facebook account and read that it’s ‘cause you put on weight and got rejected from the job that was a foot in the door to your dream job and told, “you know it’s really hard to make it in this field and you seem to be doing really well in retail, maybe you could make sub-management,” and gotten your wallet stolen twice on your trip to Costa Rica and realized that eco-tourism is kind of boring and none of the locals liked your idea anyway, and gotten so drunk one night that you woke up retching and praying “Oh God, please let me find a partner and get married and get a mortgage and kids and shackledom before I’m too old/fat/bald to appeal to anyone.” It’s difficult to imagine that a living wage and good benefits could save yourself from overwhelming depression in your 40s when you don’t end up being wildly successful and instead settle for a nice family and some fun hobbies when you’re still pursuing the dreams of your twenties.

And partly it’s ‘cause union membership has been on a long, steady decline…so unions are, like, so not popular. The statistics are worth repeating. In the 1950s, a third of American workers were in unions. Now just 12 percent are. Most union members today are in the public sector or are in the service economy. So most young people don’t get handed down their father’s job at the GM plant or the steel mill along with proud union membership. Instead they join by getting some paperwork sent to them by a union representative they’ve never met when they start their job as a teacher, a government administrator, or food service worker.

Whatever the reason, unions have lost public confidence among young people. My generation sees overweight autoworkers making $35/hour plus benefits and pension, and they don’t feel a sense of solidarity. They hustle to string together multiple income streams from various part-time and freelance jobs, pay their own health insurance, while accruing no retirement benefits, and wonder why public employees get to retire at 60 with nice pensions.

I put this question to one of my many friends who is a union public-school teacher. He works hard and doesn’t make anything close to be able to buy a house (though who does in insane property markets like SF and NY?). He pointed out that there are two ways working class people get squeezed: by lowering taxes, which inevitably lessens public services, and by beating up on unions. Certainly this was one of the stories of the 1980s, when Reagan’s Morning in America led to tax cuts, union busting, and solidified flat working-class wages as a fact of American life (stagnant wages began in the 1970s and continue through today for working-class Americans).

I’ve been in three unions in my life: the stagehands union, SEIU, and the graphic communications workers union. I benefited. The good wages helped me to quickly pay off $20,000 in college loans, and I felt the large corporations employing me could plenty afford my pay. Now I’m self-employed and make my living as an actor and writer, and union contracts can be one of the most expensive parts of my low-budget productions. But my self-produced productions are the minority.

Unions are an essential counter to the tremendous power of big business and corporate management, and the basic provisions unions seek—a living wage, affordable health care, and benefits to ensure a healthy retirement—are achievements any advanced civilization should aspire to provide for its citizens.

But when I encounter union-bashing bowl smokers, these larger moral questions fall on deaf ears. And when I begin to throw facts about stagnant worker pay, I can see the eyes roll as if to say, “Facts are for losers, perception is reality, and don’t try to talk like you know something I don’t, ‘cause I’ll just turn up the Kid Cudi and you’ll wish you could understand how complicated I am.”

I have very little yearning to return to 1950s America, but I wonder what those packed union halls must have been like, all those men and women ushering in a middle-class American lifestyle that we’ve come to expect as our birthright.

Who knew that they would be threatened not just by international competition, big business lobbying campaigns, and union-busting, but also by the indifference and circumspection of their grandchildren?

Dan Hoyle is an actor, playwright, and journalist based in San Francisco. His solo shows Tings Dey Happen and The Real Americans have received wide acclaim, won awards, and been performed Off-Broadway, across the U.S. and in Nigeria on a State Department sponsored tour. His essays have been featured in Salon, The San Francisco Chronicle, Sports Illustrated, and Mother Jones. His show The Real Americans is playing San Francisco, Santa Fe, Philadelphia, and New York this Fall.

The post Why Unions are Losing the Young appeared first on HyperVocal.

But principally I was a ballpark vendor. It was a complicated job, as chronicled for Sports Illustrated previously, but one thing was simple: when Barry Bonds was batting, you didn’t sell. You couldn’t really, except to four-year-old kids torquing between churro sugar highs and the Jumbotron cap dance. But you didn’t even try, out of respect. Barry mashed the ball like no one else.

A lot of other people were hitting the ball hard back then. Previously light-hitting shortstops were belting 30 home runs a season and the rail-thin prototypical speedy outfielder of the ‘80s gave way to plodding robo-hulks who let balls bounce on their heads and over the wall for home runs in the outfield, assured that they’d hit one out next time anyway. Baseball fell in love with the money shot, and it was raining long balls from every angle.

And though the San Francisco Giants were good, making the playoffs three out of the first four years of the aughts—coming within seven blasted outs from winning their first ever World Series—I didn’t follow them much.

Not like I had in 1987, when I learned to read because I wanted to know how the Giants had done the night before, and reading the Sporting Green was the only way to find out back then. Or like I did in 1997, when a pre-roided out Giants team scrapped it’s way into the playoffs on the guts of the late hillbilly hero Rod Beck, the slap-hitting of Billy Mueller and Daryl Hamilton, and the junk-ballers Kirk Reuter and Mark Gardner.

The 2010 Giants have captured the hearts of this city like no teams of the Bonds Era did. It’s a team led by four young stud starting pitchers and a rookie sensation catcher, a shaggy-beard bullpen of steely flamboyance, and a motley crew of battle-scarred and late-blooming position players, memorably likened to the Expendables by one incisive blogger.

They are excruciating to watch. “Giants Baseball: Torture” has been the unofficial team slogan since broadcaster Duane Kuiper first declared it on air. But baseball is exciting again, and it’s because we aren’t watching hopped-up talent. Of course if these guys are on the juice, it’s the worst advertisement for the stuff around. But there’s just no way; they hit into more double plays than any other team.

These Giants are using only what their Mamas gave them, and baseball, a 19th century game from when America was a rural country, is best played as pure as country lemonade.

The post SF Giants 2010: Steroids are Gone, Baseball is Back appeared first on HyperVocal.

I’m here to call BS on the bogus broness. If you’re going to talk like a bro, act like a bro. Jesus: That Guy was a bro’s bro. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you? That’s the bropitomy of brodom. Lately that’s as rare as an evangelical megachurch leader who doesn’t grope on boys.

Perhaps it starts at the top. Before Iraq and Afghanistan we never fought wars and cut taxes at the same time, which makes sacrifice ultimate for the few and zero for the many. In 1960, CEOs earned 42 times as much as the average worker; now they earn more than 300 times as much.

I don’t know any CEOs, but the anti-social behavior surrounds me in the middle too. At campsites, people just leave their toilet paper on the ground after shitting. Right by the river. Since it’s hot, and you’re going to go swimming, that’s like shitting in the pool at your friend’s pool party. Stephanie definitely wouldn’t hook up with you if did that, bro.

Our sense of civic and community pride is at all-time lows. And this is something that angers people on all sides of the political spectrum. The Right blames the Mexicans, the Left blames the Rednecks. The pious are not immune; I swear, Prius drivers jump more stop signs than anyone else. We’ve become a nation of nineteen year-old bros, acting daily as though we just took a half-minute keg stand.

And if you try to call anyone out on it, the reflex is “I can do what I want. It’s a free country. Bro!” True. But our freedom is guaranteed not by acting as toolish as humanly possible, but by exercising limits on excessive behavior. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve torn up some dancefloors and worn out some party shirts. But a flagrant disrespect of anything but one’s own environment and immediate needs is anti-social.

I wrote a terrible and sporadically hilarious screenplay called Bromance that was meant to be a clarion call on this topic. I sent it to the only contact I had, a high-level producer of prestige films. Yeah. Probably needed a more grassroots marketing plan: If your community of bros needs a staged reading, holler at your brother.

The post Hoyle: Don’t Be Such a Bro, Bro appeared first on HyperVocal.

But our country is f—kin crazy. I don’t speak simply of recent news like the much bloviated upon Pew poll showing that nearly 1 in 5 of us believe Obama is a Muslim, or Glenn Beck and the angry idiots claiming to restore MLK’s vision. I speak from experience. I’ve traveled our great land far and wide, most recently while living out of my van for three months, talking to people towards the goal of writing a play about it. That’s what I do for a living. Yup, I’m a new media entrepreneur, I’m a start-up of one. Goddamit, I’m as red, white and blue as they come.

I’m also from San Francisco. No, I wasn’t raised by lesbian biker she-wolves and fed only avocado sandwiches and LSD-laced Rice Dream. But I was a scrappy, product of lingering ‘70s bohemian artists, so I learned to question things at a young age and quickly hide our 9-inch black and white TV when my Mom came home ’cause we were only allowed an hour of TV a week. I also own three American flag T-shirts which I wear with no none-so-subtle hipster irony, I went to college in the Midwest, and I enjoy moonshine, going to the shooting range, and baseball on the radio.

But to understand what is going on in this country, you have to understand that reason and logic will only take you so far. If you want to live and die by reason and logic, live in Europe. It’s a much better place to be an average working-class dude. They also admit to having a working class over there, unlike here, where even the strugglin’est GED-totin’ dude with creditors crawling up his ass, a house with duct-tape on every piece of meth-abused furniture will humbly “admit” between three crooked teeth that “I’m just a regular middle-class guy.” The next sentence will be cursing Democrats for raising taxes on the rich, cause that throws a wrench into his whole “becoming a millionaire” plan he’d outlined for the coming year, part of the great exercise in aspiration that might define us kooky Americans more than anything else.

(You think you’re immune? C’mon, you secretly expected to be famous until you turned 26 and realized you’d been floating on pipe dreams, and thank God psychologists have decided that’s a new stage of life, as laid out in the NYT magazine recently).

Yes, in Europe there’s more job security, less inequality between rich and poor, the government funds artists, and high school graduates can read, write and find on a map Afghanistan and the other backward countries we have tried to pump 500 years of development into over the past decade.

And yet, have you been to a Swedish art museum? Terrible stuff. German Hip-Hop? Nein! And guess who invented the Internet? Yippie-ki-yay, motherfucker, that’s who!

America doesn’t make sense, and that is the wonder and beauty of it all. Only 39 percent of us believe in evolution. A full third think dinosaurs and humans were around at the same time. Which is pretty awesome. Imagine riding dinosaurs to work. Oh wait, that was a cartoon. Oh, double wait, for a third of us that cartoon is reality-based. Trip on that next time you catch The Flinstones on a late stoney night. Or check out Alec Soth’s latest video journal entry watching broke people trying, trying and trying to just get rich. It’s a bad decision, clearly. And yet it’s a thrill. And yet it’s painful. God Bless America!

Richard Hofstadter called it The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Fifty called it Get Rich or Die Trying. I call it The U.S. of WTF.

To take an example that’s near and dear to my visceral memory: On my recent trip around the country, I’d spent three days in West Texas and hadn’t met a Democrat. Finally, I met a sweet old couple, who set to yammerin’, “Democrat’s party for the workin’ man, the union man.” It was refreshing. Relaxing into their couch I said, “Wow you’re the first Democrat I’ve met in Texas. Everyone seems to hate Obama!”

No sooner had I dropped it, the eyebrows furrowed and narrowed. The sweet old lady drew close, looked me in the eye, and in a voice she last used to tell her grandchildren that Santa wasn’t really real, said, “Oh honey, Obama…he’s a Mooslim.”

Dan Hoyle is an actor, playwright, and journalist based in San Francisco. His solo shows Tings Dey Happen and The Real Americans have received wide acclaim, won awards, and been performed Off-Broadway, across the U.S. and in Nigeria on a State Department sponsored tour. His essays have been featured in Salon, The San Francisco Chronicle, Sports Illustrated, and Mother Jones. His show The Real Americans is playing San Francisco, Santa Fe, Philadelphia, and New York this Fall.

The post The U.S. of WTF: America Doesn’t Make Sense appeared first on HyperVocal.