On our pilot episode, author and documentarian Kevin Smokler and I talk about consequences. We also get into owning versus sharing, being ourselves, and how to think about restorative justice in a punishment-oriented world.
Recommended content from this episode:
Books
The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee
The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward E. Baptist
Movies/TV
Exterminate All the Brutes
The Work
Video
"Restorative Welcome and Reentry Circle"
Our intro and outro music is "Humbug" by Crowander
On our pilot episode, author and documentarian Kevin Smokler and I talk about consequences. We also get into owning versus sharing, being ourselves, and how to think about restorative justice in a punishment-oriented world.
Recommended content from this episode:
Books
The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee
The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward E. Baptist
Movies/TV
Exterminate All the Brutes
The Work
Video
"Restorative Welcome and Reentry Circle"
Our intro and outro music is "Humbug" by Crowander
(Transcript courtesy Louise Boydon)
David Dylan Thomas
So, welcome everybody to a brand-new podcast! My name is David Dylan Thomas and this is the pilot episode of “Lately, I've been thinking about…” where I'm going to be talking to folks literally about that topic.
I'm going to ask them, “Hey, what have you been thinking about lately?” and that's what we're going to talk about for the whole show.
My name is David Dylan Thomas, I'm coming to you from Media, Pennsylvania, which is the ancestral home of the Leni Lenape folks.
My special guest today is the wonderful, my old friend, Kevin Smokler. Kevin, for some context, let the people know what you're into.
Kevin Smokler
Hey Dave, thanks for having me. My name is Kevin Smokler. I am an author and a documentary filmmaker. I come to you from San Francisco, which is the ancestral home of the Ohlone tribe and here we truly thank them for their stewardship and we try and live by their example of how to treat this land.
I'm the author of three books about pop culture and a recent documentary film called Vinyl Nation about the comeback of vinyl records. How we relate to the things we make creatively is the thing that's most interesting to me, professionally speaking, but you and I have been friends for a very long time – the bulk of our conversations have been about that, but about a lot of other things too.
When you asked me to be your first guest, I immediately said, well, what have I been thinking about and how will it lead us in interesting directions?
The second part probably being unnecessary because it always seems to lead us in interesting directions.
David Dylan Thomas
Yeah, and a little inside baseball for folks, I am picking folks to interview who, when I have conversations with them, they never stay on topics. So, if that happens here, that is a feature, not a bug!
Kevin, let me ask the million-dollar question. What have you been thinking about lately?
Kevin Smokler
Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the word and the concept of consequences…
David Dylan Thomas
Thank you for your time! (laughing)
Kevin Smokler
The consequences of which are a very short podcast – 93 seconds to be exact!! The word – I think – is fascinating because on the one hand, the word has a slight bit of negativity to it. You know, you never talk about consequences being good things, you know, like, “oh, I exercised every day and the consequences of which are ‘I lived longer’”, you would say, “the result of which is I live longer” …
David Dylan Thomas
The outcome or the goal.
Kevin Smokler
Consequences are something you have to accept and I think contained within that is also the idea that they are usually unpredictable, unintended, not able to be seen ahead of time. I think we can have a haunting or foreboding about things we do, which we know may lead to bad consequences and I wonder if bad consequences is redundant?
But I also wonder what are we to do with that idea? Like what are we to do with this idea that we can never fully predict the outcome down the road of things we do, things we think, ways we act? And yet they will come around. They will come around.
Consequences are like that character in the film noir, novel or movie that shows up and knocks on Humphrey Bogart’s door or something like that. It's like, “you shouldn't have betrayed me in the woods! I'm still thinking about it!” …and it's 23 years later.
We have those things and they rarely show up in that obvious away. So, given that they are coming for us all, and as scary as that seems, what are we supposed to do with these outcomes of our own behavior that by definition we can't see coming. We cannot predict and take some action out ahead of time.
David Dylan Thomas
Yeah. I think it's worth delineating, there are unintended consequences, right? And then there are, “yeah, you should've known that was going to happen.” So, there's this sort of bad…what I think about a lot is a parallel conversation. Something a lot of us have been thinking about lately is accountability. Right? We see it in cancel culture. We see it in sort of the new awareness of, “oh, maybe it wasn't a great idea for the first few presidents – or teens of presidents – to own slaves.”
Thinking about how we're judging each other and accountability and consequences, the sort of idea of there are consequences for a rampant unfettered capitalism. There are consequences for different kinds of behavior. I think that's a little different because in a lot of cases, the reason that we're upset with people is they should've seen that coming, right?
I think there's a little more grace for unintended consequences, but I think in either case what it kind of invites is this conversation around grace, because I think part of the reason we have so much fear of consequences is that we live in a culture that doesn't forgive. Where the only thing we know to do with someone who has done wrong – intentionally or not - is lock them away either culturally or physically. And so, we dread the day that the chickens come home to roost because we know on that day we will cease to exist.
I feel like I've been thinking a lot myself lately about, well, what are alternatives to ‘if you've done the crime, now it's time to do time’, what are some alternatives to that?
I think if we, as a culture kind of have this notion of, “oh, I just got caught, I guess I have to go to the re-entry circle now, or the restorative circle now”, I think we'd be much more willing to own up to those mistakes than if it's like, “oh man, I better hope nobody finds out about that shit I did because, oh man, I'm going to have to leave the country.”
Kevin Smokler
At least in an American context.
David Dylan Thomas
Yes, I think it's a very American, very Western crime and punishment philosophy.
Kevin Smokler
I think in an American context, you're bringing up this seeming contradiction that we have such difficulty reconciling, which is we were born as a country with this mistaken idea of just limitlessness. There's always enough land. There are always enough resources. There's always enough of everything and the stuff we don't want, the garbage, the waste and the people we don't want, we can remove and throw them away somewhere and never have to think about them, because there's always enough. There's always enough space everywhere to hide away the things we don't want.
We are just now, 200 plus years after our founding coming to the notion that those things are not limitless at all and that we have to contend as people and as a society with their limitations.
On the same note, people who have already gotten theirs would love for the rest of us to think, “you know what? There's only so much pie and I took 90% of it already and you have the crumbs. So, what you really got to do is spend your time fighting over the crumbs with people, just like you. So, you can conveniently ignore the fact that I have the 90% already, however ill-gotten my 90% is”, which is a perception of scarcity that's bullshit. That's just wrong. I like to say, “wait, there's not one pie! We live in a bakery. Are you kidding?”
People like Donald Trump would like you to believe there's one pie so they can keep most of it for themselves and have you arguing over the scraps. I think this contradiction is a deep division in our national psyche. How do we confront very real limitations and at the same time, not think those limitations mean a zero sum game for our collective advancement, because we know that's bullshit too.
There's that great book that just came out called ‘The Sum of Us’ by Heather McGee, about how racism hurts everybody. Racism is like a societal-wide cancer that just drains us. The example she clings it on is after integration, cities and towns all over America took their public pools, which every white person could use and now every person could use, and just filled them with concrete.
It’s like if the public pool has to be truly public, then F* it and we'll just take it away from everybody. It's based on this totally false idea that there can't be such thing as a public good. If somebody else gets to participate, it means I lose, which is a lie. It is a bold-faced lie.
David Dylan Thomas
But a lot of the time, and it's funny, we start with land acknowledgements, a lot of the problems we're talking about are solved problems so to speak in terms of how certain indigenous cultures figured out how to live together, because what we’re really talking about at the end of the day is how do we live together?
So, we live together with a mindset of scarcity because there are yes, in fact, things that are scarce and there are things that are abundant, but as a culture, we have a lot more decision-making power in that than we think.
So, even if you just think about wealth itself, there's a limit, theoretically, to how much money you can just have exist without devaluing yourselves into like a trillion dollars for a loaf of bread, kind of like pre-World War Two Germany kind of levels.
Kevin Smokler
And that's just math.
David Dylan Thomas
But, with what you’ve got, you'd be surprised what you can get away with. So, I think that there's an idea of living together. I mean, let's just call it what it is, there's sharing. There's a way of saying we're not going to have possessions, which conceptually, even I, who like to fancy myself somewhat progressive, really have a hard time getting my head around, but for most of human history, that's kind of how people lived.
If you think about, we're only on the global scale of things, maybe a few days out of being hunter-gatherers. So, for the vast majority of that time, it was like, “what do you mean, that's your stick? What are you talking about?” Like, we own this land? No, this land owns us. Have you seen this land?
So much it gets introduced – to play armchair anthropologist for a second – so much gets introduced once you start thinking of sitting down and farming a piece of land for a generation. There's the opportunity to be like, “well, maybe I want to own that land for the next generation. So maybe I'm going to marry, I'm going to have marriage be a thing so that it gets to keep this land and decide who's in my family and who's not” versus previously it's sort of like, “well, there's a kid there. I guess he's all of ours?”
Just fundamentally figuring out where we want to be on that spectrum of sharing stuff versus owning stuff. That’s the American conundrum. To your point, and that's a lot of the notions of scarcity and abundance, kind of surreptitiously get tied to what I want to share versus what I don't. What do I want to share? Oh, there's lots of it! What I don't want to share? Oh, I'm sorry, there's no more public pools.
Kevin Smokler
Yeah. I think this sharing versus owning idea that you're raising, it comes a right up against this idea, I wonder if the debate presupposes – the internal debate of that – presupposes a kind of ratio, kind of smallness of people versus vastness of land resources ratio. It’s silly to say, “this stick belongs to me” if we are surrounded by trees that are dropping sticks all the time, it makes no sense.
On the other hand, anybody who has sort of peaked in, even for a moment, to the environmental movement of the last two decades, realizes that whereas the attitude used to be we live surrounded by acres and acres of endangered virgin nature, and if the people just stayed the hell away from it, it will be fine – that was the 1960s earth-first attitude about the environmental movement. And we don't live on that planet anymore, literally.
Now the idea of the environmental movement is human beings have altered the ecological destiny of the planet to such a degree that we have to manage it now. We cannot pretend that it doesn't belong to us, or the E pluribus Unum idea that we are one of many, it doesn't work anymore. It's a real crisis of the soul to the environmental movement, because the environmental movement for a very long time was like, we are not the most important species on the planet where in actuality we are because we're the most destructive one so we have a certain responsibility to be grownups about that.
The other thing that raises for me, ownership. I do not want to make this a conversation about creaky rotting, copyright law, but I think the question of ownership is incredibly problematic and filled with flaws, but it leads me to how do we have a creative economy of people if we don't own things? Or if we don't have a system of exchange based on ownership. I fear we have this bullshit you and I have talked about where someone's like, oh, “well you made a movie or a book or painted a painting or something like that. Well, you can license it for a period of time and me, iTunes or whomever can be the toll at the bridge, charging you every period of time that you want to interact with it. I don't know, I have a feeling that complicates rather than simplifies the notion of ownership.
David Dylan Thomas
It's funny though, because I agree, but I also feel like that's where we have the most opportunity to share because that's what we do already. So, for some context, folks, I remember a conversation that Kevin and I had, I want to say 17 years ago, whenever the, The Gray Album…was it Danger Mouse?
Danger Mouse created this thing called The Gray Album, which is a mashup of Jay-Z’s Black Album and the Beatles White Album. At the time I was the stingy motherfucker, because I think Paul McCartney was upset about it or something and I was team Paul, I was like, “yeah, it's his work. He should get to decide how it gets used”, and you were all like, “no, once you create something, it belongs to all of us now.” I was like clutching at pearls there. I was like old white guy in the club.
Then I’ve since very much evolved into this where I'm almost on the other end of the spectrum, like, “fuck you, Paul, you've got your royalty check, it's over! We’ve got to do whatever the fuck we want with this thing”, you know?
And that's a more interesting outcome, right? We get The Gray Album if we do that and I think the truth there is extremely fuzzy, but what I like to think about is what is the most useful way to think about that?
I have come to think more around the terms of something like Patreon, there is a degree to which I am paying for the product, the comic book or whatever it is you're producing that I want to make sure you're able to produce, but really, I'm not subscribing to that comic, I'm not subscribing to that work of art. I'm subscribing to you. The thing that has value is you the artist, right? And that to me feels more adherent to the truth than to the value is this digital thing that is infinitely replicable. You paint yourself into a corner, especially in the age of digital reproduction if you tie all of the value to the thing.
There are ways to kind of create artificial scarcity there. I can put it behind a paywall. I can – God help us – invent NFTs, but at the end of the day, once you acquire it, there is no fewer of it in the world. It doesn't behave like a physical object and I feel like that to me is a great opportunity to have not just a conversation, but an actual working prototype of, well, what does it look like to produce stuff that can't be owned? The friction around ownership is extremely high and the friction around sharing is extremely low.
What does it look like to have a sustainable economy, because at the end of the day, the reason I am paying for that thing theoretically, or the reason we want copyright theoretically, is so that the person producing it has a reason to keep making it?
That was one of things about copyright, which I think you can quibble with a little bit. You can sort of say, okay, here's the counter experiment to that, to fight confirmation bias. If that's true, then if I were to make sure that person had all of their basic needs met, if I did UBI, would all art cease? If I did UBI and nobody could be paid for their art would all art cease? I am willing to bet that is bullshit.
You would actually see an increase in the amount of art produced, right? I will even go further and say that there will be people who, even though they don't have to pay for the art, will still pay the artist to make sure that they can continue to make work. I think there's a lot of, I agree it's problematic in a way that other ways of thinking about ownership and sharing are not, but I think it's a much more fertile ground to have that conversation because the sharing part is actually easier.
It's easier for me to share this podcast. I'm not going to charge anybody to listen to this podcast. It's easier for me to share this podcast than it is for me to share my computer. That's a lot harder to share. It's like, I don't know about sharing that or to share my home, I don't know about that. Share the podcast? Yeah, of course!
Kevin Smokler
Yeah, what you're saying raises so many like interesting questions and I'm going to cherry pick here.
David Dylan Thomas
List them all in alphabetical order!
Kevin Smokler
And that will be the remainder of our conversation! Reenlisting, taking 45 minutes to list what Dave said in three. This has been a question since reproduction was possible, and when Walter Benjamin wrote Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, he wasn't like, “hey, have you heard about this thing called reproduction?” Reproduction had been around for a very long time. He was talking about something that was just on the upswing, that was accelerating.
To make a stupid joke about what you said, the cavemen and cavewomen who painted the pictures of the animals on the walls, in the caves at Lascaux were not like, “Oh and next to it here's my royalty check” They were just like “listen, younger folk. You may not understand what it means to see wild animals running across the fields and so to warn you, so one of them doesn’t plow you over, we are going to paint this image of wild animals running across the field, and by the way, we're going to paint them repeatedly, so when you look at it, the feeling you get is animals running, even if you've never seen them before.”
I mean, that's remarkable, that's a very like big fat example of what people cite when they cite the earliest examples of human creativity.
David Dylan Thomas
For an extra fee, you can have your own signed part of the wall.
Kevin Smokler
Right, exactly! We'll let you put your hand print on here! I mean, you think about like fast forward to another giant fat, obvious example of human creativity. Everybody knows what the Mona Lisa looks like. So, thousands upon thousands of people do not go to the Louvre Museum in Paris every year to see what the Mona Lisa looks like. They know what it looks like. They want to be in its presence and it is far and away the most visited aspect of the largest museum in the world. I don't know if you've been to the Louvre?
David Dylan Thomas
It's ridiculous, I saw 0.1% of it and it took like five hours!
Kevin Smokler
Exactly! You can walk in one door of the Louvre in Central Paris and walk out and be in Spain. That's how that's how big the Louvre is. People, like homing pigeons, come to like the Mona Lisa because they want to be in its presence.
I know Benjamin and other people like him, other thinkers like him, have talked about how a physical object exerts an aura, like a presence around it and I think when you're talking about something like that, where the creator is long dead and so are all of his or her great grandchildren, you're talking about almost the object is not simply creative at that point. It's civic.
It's like what you are paying for to visit the Louvre, is the museum's custodianship of this rare and precious thing. What you are paying for is everybody employed by the Parisian tourist economy. I mean, what are tourists’ A-plus tourist destinations in Paris? The Eiffel tower and the Mona Lisa, right? What else are people there for? I mean, maybe the Champs Elysse and the Ferris wheel?
So, I think, be that as it may, I think that that's a reality, but it's very hard to detach the sort of, I think we, as human beings, we take on the singular notion of something that is a brilliant thing that is created. We sort of adopt this false mindset that like, oh, the genius of Leonardo DaVinci painted that painting and it was about a woman that maybe he knew, and maybe here's the vague narrative we know about the Mona Lisa, and so therefore it cannot exist as anything else. Even though it shapeshifts all the dang time. It's the focal point of the DaVinci Code. I've just positioned it as a civic object and there's probably some truth to that.
David Dylan Thomas
It's a T-shirt, it's a cap.
Kevin Smokler
It's a hundred million things and that actually says something about that…that to me is a victory. That's not a loss, that doesn't devalue what Mr. DaVinci painted hundreds of years ago. That means the object is now part of our collective consciousness as human beings, the same way Angkor Wat is in Cambodia, the Great Wall of China or something like that and that's amazing. It took hundreds of people, hundreds of years to build the Great Wall of China. It took Leonardo da Vinci a few months maybe? I don't know quite where I'm going with this!
David Dylan Thomas
It's interesting because the argument you're making, or the situation describing, I think is very pro-sharing, because at the end of the day, the other thing you're paying for to go to the Louvre is access. You're not paying to own all the paintings in the Louvre, you're paying to get to look at them. To see them in a certain context at a certain time, to see the original, all of that, sure. But that's what you're paying. You're not paying to own anything.
I always find it kind of curious when folks like to take pictures of – not even necessarily just of themselves with famous works of art, but just the work of art. You'll see people pull out their camera and take a picture of the thing, which it's kind of amazing to me, because it's not like there aren't pictures of the thing already.
But it's not their picture of it. So, there is an ownership that you can take away from that, which is, “this is my ownership of the moment I saw the Mona Lisa”. That you can own, but like at the end of the day, what you're paying for is access.
I feel like we've overvalued ownership and undervalued access. There are certain things like my computer or my home even, where it's like, “really don't want anyone to just have access to that”, but there are other things like, you know, like a rake that is sitting in my mudroom that barely gets used because frankly we usually pay someone else to do that because we hate it. That rake, if it were sitting in a shed that everybody in my neighborhood could access, would get used a lot more. So, it'd be less of a waste and it would be more about access to the rake rather than everybody has to own a rake.
Early on in the collective consumerism movement there's this phrase that came up called items with a high idle time. Items that spent most of their lives just sitting there. So rakes, cars, there's a lot of really big ticket items that just spend most of lives just sitting there that with enough flow of information and willingness to share can actually get a lot more use. That's sort of a niche market even today. But I feel like there should at least be as much of that going around as the, “I bought this, I own it, fuck off.”
Kevin Smokler
Yeah. Because then all we're doing is like life is one big Oklahoma land rush, right? Like, here's my shit and I'm going to just build fences around it and, and defend it. I'm not saying I don't understand that very human view of existence, but it’s also not the world we live in, if it ever was.
Like, that’s great but how do you build highways? How do you build playgrounds and schools and stuff like that? The truth is, people who talk, particularly in an American context, people who talk about not believing in a collective anymore, that the government is always out to pick your pocket and is not out to do you any good. I guess I haven't had enough conversations with those people to answer my own question, but those people always look the other way at things like roads and sewage systems and public parks and trees and airports and stuff like that, which are all things that unfortunately are too big to build and too risky to leave to the private sector.
The reason they're too risky to leave to the private sector is we believe in our hearts, even if we don't want to acknowledge it, that they belong to everybody. We can absolutely have a system right here in America where everything is privatized and then we essentially have a system as legitimate as it may look on its face, that isn't that much different than organized crime.
David Dylan Thomas
Absolutely. Yeah.
Kevin Smokler
You privatize the electricity system, it is very easy for whoever owns that system to say, “unless you pay 20% more rates, we're just turning off the electricity at noon every day, sorry.”
David Dylan Thomas
I mean the fire company, right. You used to have to pay if you wanted your house put out and I feel like it's only when things get pretty dire, we're like, okay, fine. Fire will be a public thing that everybody gets, everybody's fire gets to get put out, probably because if that fire didn't get put out, your house could get put on for fire. If fire didn't spread, I feel like we'd still live in a world where you have to pay to keep get your fire put out. I think is it more human to own or is it more human to access? Have you watched ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’ yet?
Kevin Smokler
No…
David Dylan Thomas
You’ve gotta!
Kevin Smokler
I need to.
David Dylan Thomas
It’s SO good!
Kevin Smokler
I was going to say, you may have just given it to me, but I need a little bit of advice on what the correct palliative will be. I'm not saying, because learning about colonialism is hard, I should not watch…
David Dylan Thomas
It’s super entertaining though. It's just tough material, but like, it's weird. You're going to watch it. It's four one-hour episodes, and you'll get to the end of an episode and be like, “that was harsh, but I cannot wait to see what happens next”, click.
Kevin Smokler
Okay, so I do not need like a giant bowl of M&M's to stick my face in after this?
David Dylan Thomas
You do you, but understand that this highly compelling thing – you are going to talk about genocide, you were going to talk about eugenics, we're going to talk about all that shit. And most of all, we're going to talk about the narratives that support it. One of the narratives that supports the overwhelmingly huge project of wiping out 90% of the Western hemisphere – that's not a thing most people wake up wanting to do – is this belief that you are doing it for their own good.
You weren't doing it because you actually own that property, which again, even concept of ownership has to be introduced for that narrative to work.
So that land rush mentality, that is very pro-ownership and that benefits from, it's basically a way to feed covetousness. It's a way to feed, “Hey, that person has something, I want it. They're not willing to part with it. So, I need to find a way to take it”. If I want to scale that, that’s when we get into narratives about, “Hey, we're going to find a new trade route.” So is that more human or comes more naturally to us than, “hey, we've been living on this land long enough to know that if we don't rotate our crops, we're going to starve. We've been living here long enough to know that if we all fight each other for scraps, the tribe next door do that, and they’re all dead”, because sharing was more tied to survival. It was clear that sharing kept you alive longer than coveting.
I say more human, less human, I mean it. To a certain extent I think that there is a certain way of living in harmony with the land, with my limited knowledge of how hunter gatherer societies work and how certain indigenous populations work that seems more sustainable. There was an actual indigenous phrase I came across, “we belong to the land”, and if you think about the consequences of global warming, if you think about the past two years and how fire and disease and flooding and hurricanes. Earth has owned us for increasingly, that's another way to think of climate change, is the earth coming home to roost. It’s saying, “yeah, so you think you're in charge. Okay, Let's see how you feel after we have so many hurricanes that you have to come up with a new alphabet, let's see how much you own the earth after that.”
No, it's pretty clear we belong to the land and so we need to treat it with respect. We need to treat it like someone who can kick our ass at a moment's notice. That perspective is what I see when I look at cultures that were more about living in harmony with land, it wasn't just, “oh, trees are beautiful”, It was “oh man, these trees are gonna fuck with us if we do not treat them well”.
Kevin Smokler
I am astonished how fast, I mean, take everything we're saying here and human beings can seem as intractable as just like giant boulders, giant boulders that you would need whole teams of cranes and dynamite and all that kind of stuff, mountains, maybe. I think anyone would feel a big heaping dose of cynicism to say like, “well, people do shitty things and people suck and it's somehow inherent in our nature. “I think there's some truth to that.
I also weigh that against like how fast our attitudes about things that once seem intractable can change. I have asked the question before, why did George Floyd's death lead to the kind of reckoning it did when six years before Eric Garner died, largely in the same way, also captured on video and it didn't. It's not because George Floyd was a better person than Eric Garner. I don't know the answer to that, I'm not sure there is an answer to that, but I know how fast it happened following the horrible murder of George Floyd. I know it took way, way less time for us to acknowledge the inmate civil rights of gay people that it did people of non-white races, that it did women.
I think we are certainly capable of that. The two things I wonder is – there's a brief detour, very brief detour – I have this notion that I've been playing around with for the last five or six months that everybody has a favorite genre of movie and it is not any of the conventional descriptions you'd see in a video store or next to something on a streaming sale, it's not action or romance or historical drama or any of that stuff. It's the particularities of a certain story that really move you, light you up from the inside.
My favorite one of those is when people who seem very different end up being friends, working together. That's like buddy movies, ‘Lethal Weapon’ and it's also movies like ‘Kiss Me, Guido’ and stuff like that. Which tells me that – and I think what speaks to me about those kinds of movies is this whole idea that it's very easy to hate gay people until you have a gay neighbor who isn't dangerous to you and brings in your garbage cans when you forget. Hating takes work and internal labor. What the hell have I been troubling myself over if this person isn't hurting me in the way I once thought they were, by their very existence.
So, I think familiarity is a huge part of feeling fellowship with other people and I wonder if, and this is – forgive me because this is an old side I’ll keep coming back to, I wonder if some of this is just phrasing? Language framing? I try and phrase complicated ideas in a simple way as possible because I think simplicity is sort of the common human language. How hard is it to get around this idea that everybody sort of fundamentally deserves to be themselves and not feel being yourself is something you have to explain or work harder to be than anybody else?
Isn't that sort of spiritually, if not actually what the whole enterprise is about in the first place? I wonder if we set it in that direct way? I wonder what the outcome of that would be?
David Dylan Thomas
So, there's a phrase I'm fond of using now, which is “the past has a huge advantage over us because it got here first”.
Going back to what we were saying about the speed with which our attitudes can change. I suspect that as something, and I forget what it's called, but there's a mathematical curve that describes a certain kind of phenomenon. It's the phenomenon you see if you boil a pot of water. Boiling a pot of water, basically you're applying the same amount of heat to the same amount of water and nothing happens and nothing happens and nothing happens and nothing happens and then all of a sudden, holy shit, it's all boiling! You’ve kind of got a catastrophic curve. It goes from nothing to something very quickly. Now, that all of a sudden something happening would not have happened unless you've been boiling nothing happening for a long, long, long time.
Ditto George Floyd. George Floyd it was like, holy shit, everything happened! It's like no, a lot of stuff was happening in boiling for a very long time and you just saw when it finally caught. Black Lives Matter had been at work for a long time, many networks of civil rights movements, of churches and people have been working on this for all long, long, long time and creating the conditions. And then COVID kind of comes in and makes a little bit, even more fucked up. But all of these circumstances and even with the seeming rapidity with which, at a federal level, we were able to accept men marrying men and women marrying women, a lot under the hood there.
The aids crisis is doing a lot of work there. The activism and the networks that were created during that crisis are doing a lot of work there up through decades to get you to the point where it seems all of a sudden, oh, wait, you can have gay people on NBC on a Thursday night? What the fuck? And then all of a sudden, whoa. Wow. Okay. They're getting married and they're not getting arrested? Okay. By the way, I always find it amusing that that gets to the federal level faster than weed.
But the other thing I want to say is unique about racial division, specifically black and white divisions, and again, I'm going to recommend if you haven't read it already, The Half Has Never Been Told, is that we didn't build our economy by forcing gay people to work for free.
Kevin Smokler
No, no.
David Dylan Thomas
You don't do that for 400 years without some consequences, without a bigger hurdle to get over than just, “hey, tell everyone to be themselves.” We built – and to some degree still build – but we built our economy. We built this city on slavery – and rock and roll! But we built this economy on punishing people for who they were and you can't just turn that off overnight. You can't just say, okay, we're going to be cool with people being who they are now, even in the back of our little lizard brains, we inherited so much of, and we built a whole culture around, oh no, it matters a great deal who you are. If you just say that to some degree very practically and to some degree just subconsciously, it's like, the hell you can be who you are! Have you been out there? You can't be who you are. I don't know where you live? I can’t be who I am.
Kevin Smokler
I think there's a naivete behind stories like the one in ‘Green Book’ that I think we really need to acknowledge. ‘Green Book’ is a shit movie, by the way.
David Dylan Thomas
I have surprisingly mixed feelings about ‘Green Book’.
Kevin Smokler
I do too. I’m being flip.
David Dylan Thomas
‘Bagger Vance’ is a shit movie. ‘Green Book’ is problematic.
Kevin Smokler
‘Green Book’ is problematic. It features two incredible performances by the two lead actors and I think the movie sort of does not contend with any of the larger issues it raises, that's its problem. But I think we have to look at some of the stupid, you know, ordinary unsexy practicalities of stuff like that.
I think the story of Daryl Davis is fascinating and I think this black jazz pianist from Maryland who decided to become friends with grand dragons of the Ku Klux Klan, that's an amazing story and it says something about the kind of person Daryl Davis is. I really think if Daryl Davis was not six foot three and bulging with muscles and the kind of guy that physically you really don't want to screw with, I'm not sure he could have done the kind of daring outreach to strangers who hated him on site that he did. I wonder if, I guess this is all by way of saying, we cannot get around these very fundamental notions of physical safety and people feeling okay.
David Dylan Thomas
It's even deeper because this is where we come back to consequences. Where we come back to the difference between individual stories and systemic racism because I can find, even in the most twisted system, I can find individuals who are willing to buck that system.
If I get the right individuals in the right place at the right time, they can do the thing the system doesn't want them to do. We have black billionaires, not a lot of them, but we’ve got them! Oprah can be Oprah, Prince can be Prince, but they are the exceptions.
The system never wanted Prince to happen. The system never wanted Oprah to happen. And they will tell you how much the system didn't want them to happen and there's a lot of Monday morning quarterback and you're being like, oh yeah if she did that, why can't you?
Kevin Smokler
Right!
David Dylan Thomas
So, what you end up having to talk about then is how do we move forward in a way that acknowledges and rebuffs the system? Because that's a lot harder conversation. And what are the consequences of the system? Consequences are difficult, but they're easy to think about an individual levels because you can sort of go back through your life and be like, I did this, I did that, I wish I'd done that.
I hadn't been thinking we can talk about regret. We can talk about accountability on the individual level. It is comparatively super easy on the notion of a system that lasts for hundreds of years and whose impacts are still being felt hundreds of years later. Accountability goes right out the window because yes, you are benefiting from something you did not ask for.
How do you think about accountability then? You're benefiting from the subjugation of others that you yourself did not instigate. Good luck unwrapping that little moral fortune cookie!
Kevin Smokler
Oh yeah, man!
David Dylan Thomas
And yet we have to. We were talking earlier about that notion of ownership and that sort of land rush mentality. But I think about very much, whenever we talk about sort of corporations whose only focus is growth, and that we celebrate growth, and why does Facebook or Amazon have the business model it does for growth? Not for money. You can make money, lots of ways. No, for growth, rapid growth and I think about what in the natural world exhibits rampant growth and only is interested in growth and its cancer.
Kevin Smokler
Cancer, viruses or weeds, those are the three examples that come to mind from the natural world immediately.
David Dylan Thomas
Yeah. The literal definition of a cancer is rapid, unfettered, cell growth. It's just growing too much and it ends up killing the host eventually. So, we understand what that system looks like but what we don't understand is what if one day the cancer grew a conscience? What if one day the cancer is like, “oh crap!” This gets back to what we were talking about before where humans and the relationship with the environment, you can no longer just sort of say, leave the environment alone. We get to a certain point with the cancer where it's not like the cancer could say, “my bad” and just stop being cancer and everything's fine. It's like no, cancer you've done too much damage.
What is the relationship now between that cancer and the body if it can't just “poof” disappear, because it's done too much? It's too integral to the system now, but if it doesn't find a way to live in harmony now, everything dies. That I feel is kind of where we are right now where we're at this point where we have these cancers, we have these things, we have this history that's metastasized, it's come to this huge thing that's sucking the land dry.
The land is fighting back by having actual major organs shut down and we're like, oh no, what do we do? I have no idea what restorative justice looks like for a cancer! You know what I mean? That’s the question I’m trying to get my head around right now.
Kevin Smokler
I wonder if there's a sort of…I understand what people mean when you say we are all benefiting from a terribly unfair system. Those of us who did benefit from it. Those of us who did, benefited from a terribly unfair system, this was unfair before we were born. We did not choose when to be born, but here we are.
It is understandable that to some extent that it feels like blame for something that you weren't responsible for creating and to some extent it feels impossible to ask someone to do something about it because that's a very human reaction. It’s like, well, what do you want me to do? What do you want me to do about slavery? Slavery was legally abolished in this country 150 years before I was born. What do want me to do about that? The answer is not, go and relitigate the past – although we do need to do a certain amount of that. The answer is the work of justice, as I see it, this is my answer, it is not THE answer.
The work of justice is what do we do going forward? And that's really just a macro example of what parenting is. You have kids and I don't, but I am positive that in the course of raising your son, you've been like, listen, there were ideas that I received when I was growing up, when I was his age, that were useful to me and there were ideas that were just plain wrong and that were not useful to me and that were not going to make his life as a grown member of society any better and might in fact hinder it.
So, there are certain things I need to do to make sure that going forward, this person who I am responsible for getting ready for the big, bad world out there knows these things and is correct and their perspective is a correction and improvement upon the mistakes of the past.
I don't know. I come from a family of psychologists where self-improvement was kind of in the water where I grew up, but I also think it's easy to sell someone on self-improvement. It's easier than we think to sell someone on self-improvement because who wants to be 50 and 60 and 70 and sitting there and saying, “well, all downhill from here.”
We live a lot longer than we did when you and I were children, Dave. I don't know, there's a falsehood in this idea that we as people and we as a culture peaked a long time ago and there’s no fixing it now.
This is what I say, if back then the system was so great, why did it not produce a great outcome now? If it was so great, however long ago you think it was great, why aren't we living in the afterglow of that? What the hell happened then?
David Dylan Thomas
I think it's about looking beyond even self-improvement to community improvement, or looking at self-improvement as a function of community improvement. Going back to psychology, there's a whole story about how Maslow, the Hierarchy of Needs guy, spent time with Siksika people – this indigenous group in America, and that some of his ideas about self-actualization came from them and super oversimplified version of things.
Maslow has this thing that builds to self-actualization to serve an ultimate goal, or harder to fulfill goal than just food and shelter. Siksika, on the other hand, thought of self-actualization – they didn't use that actual word, but thought of self-actualization as something with which you are born. You start out self-actualized and you live that throughout your life, which impacts all sorts of things, about how you treat children, parenting is much less restrictive because you're really just trying to keep your kid from getting eaten. You're not trying to alter them in any functional way because – well - they're already cool, why would you mess with that?
A crime when someone does something that hurts the community, you don't lock them away, no, they've just lost their way. You sit down in a circle – and I literally yesterday for the first time ever saw a reentry and restoration circle, which was for a student at a school, they were coming back into the school after being in prison and it was around the people in these communities, family members, social workers, teachers, all getting in a circle and just going through this process of saying, “this is what we expect from you. This is what you can expect from us.”
Just this very powerful moment of saying – and this was one of the most outstanding things about it – was when you failed, when you ended up in prison, that was not simply your failure. We failed as a community.
That perspective, I think puts a very interesting lens on ownership, on access, on systems. That approach I think could have a very interesting approach for how do we deal with, to your point, how do we move on and build the new system and not throw up our hands? Because the very act of that circle was the opposite of throwing up our hands. The way we usually think about criminal justice is throw up your hands and say, “okay, you have done this wrong thing. We've proven that you have done this wrong thing. Therefore, we can conclude that you are worthless. We don't care what we do with you.” Throw you in a hole.
The opposite of that is to say, “no, we believe in you. Yeah, you fucked up. Yes, something went wrong somewhere and we own that too, because if our system worked, you wouldn’t have done that.
It's where you’re putting the blame. Is it completely on the bad egg or is it no, clearly we are at fault here too. We are going to share the blame and hopefully as a result of that, the system, the community will get better. That is a space I don't think we're very used to playing in at all.
Kevin Smokler
No. I wonder, I'm asking this question of you, partly because I'm curious and partly because I just don't want to miss an opportunity to mention it, how do we reconcile the circle that you're speaking of? What is the relationship between the circle you're talking about and that documentary, the work, that you and I have, which exists within the confines of the traditional penal system, and yet is a confronting of causes of crime that exists sort of spiritually and physically beyond the simple punishment and retribution model?
David Dylan Thomas
Was it Folsom or San Quentin? The documentary Kevin is referring to I highly recommend y'all see immediately, it's called The Work and it's about, well Kevin, you describe it, you introduced it to me.
Kevin Smokler
The documentary, ‘The Work’, is about a program at Folsom prison here in Northern California, where, prisoners – and this is a max prison - so these are people who have done serious crimes, get into a literal circle and face each other and confront emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically what led them to where they are now. It is enormously moving to watch; this is a men's prison. So, you are watching, of course, men who have been told to confront these internal parts of themselves.
The sort of narrative hook of this documentary is every once in a while, this program, which has been around for a good couple of decades at Folsom prison, lets ordinary people from the outside world in to see it at work and actually has them participating in these circles. Maybe you can describe sort of what you're seeing on screen when this happens?
David Dylan Thomas
It's literally just a big, giant gymnasium sized room with groups of people sitting in a circle of chairs and they're each having their own little group therapy sessions and there's a lot of hugging and crying, but in a very aggressive, almost violent way. There are people who are extremely skilled at what they do, can read your body language and be like, “no, you're holding something back. I can tell that you’re holding something back.” And what becomes increasingly clear is that the people from the outside are more fucked up than the people on the inside and if they didn't have the session, they would probably end up inside.
The other thing that becomes increasingly clearest in literally every single situation, there's something fucked up going on with the relationship with their father and that's why they're here. No-holds-barred, but I think to your question, it's variations on a theme because again, the premise is we have this circle because we believe you are worth saving – saving isn't even the right word. It's the only language we have for it. But we believe that you have simply moved away from a path and we think you can be back on a path.
All of this language is inadequate, but it's this idea of you at your core have value and you have not diminished that value by your behavior. You've caused harm, and we need to work together to minimize that harm and to lessen the odds of it happening again, but you yourself are not suddenly toxic. You yourself are not suddenly dirty or sinful. It's not this sort of puritanical binary that we're kind of used to thinking about. It's more circumstantial, it's more about the community.
So again, it's the community's job to sit down with you, let you know you're loved, let you know what is expected of you. Let you know what you can expect of us. The circle I watched is less confrontational than that, but the object and the basic energy even, is kind of the same.
The other reason I want to recommend, and I think this is tied in too, ‘The Work’ gives you a different lens on masculinity, it gives you a different way to be a man. A lot of what they're doing there is unlearning toxic versions of masculinity and replacing them with no less kind of, I guess testosterone-driven is a word, versions of masculinity, but that are directed work towards love.
There is a very testosterone-t way to love just as there was a very testosterone-y way to destroy. Witnessing that, just being able to bear witness to that, because it is so rare to see depicted in cinema, is a powerful thing.
So, we’ve got: ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’, we've got ‘The Half Has Never Been Told’, we’ve got ‘The Work’ and that one video I found with the restorative reentry circle and maybe some cat videos, smooth it all out, watch some Ted Lasso, smooth that all out!
Kevin Smokler
Maybe just watch a webcam of grass growing in the sun or something like that! Don't forget ‘The Sum of Us’, Heather McGee's book about how racism…and then grass blowing in the breeze!
David Dylan Thomas
You're going to make me have to have a little page for this podcast so that I can have resources, thanks!
Kevin Smokler
I apologize, I’m sorry!
David Dylan Thomas
No, it's fine. It's fine. I'll do it!
So, I think that's a good place to stop. The other thing with the show is I suspect if I don’t stop there'll be eight-hour episodes, because I'm picking people I’d like to have eight hour conversations with.
So, we're going to leave it there, as they say on cable news. Kevin, thank you so much for participating and for kicking off this brand-new podcast adventure!
Kevin Smokler
Dave, you're welcome and thank you for asking. You and I have been friends – and this kind of stuff is the meat and fiber of why you and I have been friends for 30 years, so I really appreciate the opportunity.
David Dylan Thomas
Oh my god, it hasn’t been 30 years! Alright man, I will talk to you later.
And for Lately, I've Been Thinking About… I'm David Dylan Thomas with Kevin Smokler.
Thanks so much and we will see you on episode two!