From "In ‘Small Fry,’ Steve Jobs Comes Across as a Jerk. His Daughter Forgives Him. Should We?/Lisa Brennan-Jobs has written a memoir about her famous father. The details are damning, but she doesn’t want them to be" (NYT).
A fact that's easy to get confused about: Did Lisa inherit nothing from her father? Apparently, he threatened that, but (according to the NYT), Lisa got "millions — the same amount as his other children."
I'm interested in that phrase, "she will be erased again." It's Lisa's own book. She's choosing to tell the story her way, but that can't stop the people she's writing about from talking back and presenting their version of the events they too lived through. Otherwise, they are "erased."
"Erased" has been a vogue word for many years. Keep an eye on it. It's the visual equivalent of "silenced." These are sleight-of-hand words that are often used to get other people to disappear/shut up. It's the opposite of the old free-speech notion that the remedy for speech you don't like is "more speech." Those who deploy "erased" (and "silenced") this way are saying in order for me to be properly heard and respected, other people need to refrain from contradicting or challenging me.
ALSO: I need to question that headline: "In ‘Small Fry,’ Steve Jobs Comes Across as a Jerk. His Daughter Forgives Him. Should We?/Lisa Brennan-Jobs has written a memoir about her famous father. The details are damning, but she doesn’t want them to be." Brennan-Jobs wrote what she wrote. Why shouldn't we infer what she wants from what she did, which is write a memoir with "damning details" that cause he father to come across as "a jerk"?
My rule of thumb is that people do what they want to do. If they say they want something else, I'm skeptical. So I'd never write, "The details are damning, but she doesn’t want them to be." It would have to be, The details are damning, but she says she doesn’t want us to see them that way.
To take my rule of thumb further, I would assume that she's talking to the NYT and using it to get out the message that the forthcoming book doesn't mean what she's afraid it will be understood to mean, and she's proclaiming forgiveness because she wants her book to be well-received, not undercut by her siblings and by Laurene Powell Jobs and Mona Simpson. Simpson (Jobs's sister) is a highly respected writer, and Brennan-Jobs's expression of fear that her memoir will be regarded as not "nuanced" but just "a tell-all exposé" suggests literary aspirations that Simpson has the power to easily crush.
According to Wikipedia:
While a student at Harvard, [Brennan-Jobs] wrote for The Harvard Crimson. She graduated in 2000 and subsequently moved to Manhattan to work as a writer. She has written for The Southwest Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Harvard Advocate, Spiked, Vogue, and O, The Oprah Magazine.That's 18 years since graduation, without much of a literary career (even with "millions" to spare her the grind of day jobs that make life hard for so many writers and with the leg-up she has always had because of her name). The book title is "Small Fry," but "small fry" are "Young or unimportant persons (collectively or in a body); a crowd of such persons" (the original metaphor being little fish appearing in large numbers) (OED).
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89 comments:
What has Lisa done do deserve a memoir except be the daughter of Steve Jobs?
I can recall reading an article back in the day about the pioneers of Silicon Valley. The article claimed that everyone describes Jobs using a “seven letter word that starts and ends with a vowel.”
Steve Jobs was a total jerk.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone say aything different who knew him.
Why is this book a surprise?
And ditto rejahm
John Henry
This should be a statement on how compassionate and ego-free yoga makes NewAgers - when the result is the opposite - but our many yogis won't allow that dialogue to get started. How super-arrogant yogi, Steve Jobs, was a cruel abuser, just like the inventor of Hot Yoga was an exploiter and rapist, and the first people to bring yoga to America were Nazis and white supremacists from Germany, like Carl Jung, etc. (All NewAge heroes today.):
The Appropriation of Jung's Ideas Within the American Psychotherapeutic Counter-Culture - Eugene Taylor
Abraham Maslow and Anthony Sutich, editors of The Journal of Humanistic Psychology, declared the launching of a new era in psychology in 1961. This new psychology would emphasize self-actualization, interpersonal knowing, transcendence, the study of the whole being. It would draw on varied sources in Eastern and Western traditions and would appropriate "parts of Jung." Since then, Jung -- often represented only as an acolyte of Freud and largely ignored in mainstream academic psychology -- has been enthusiastically embraced by the psychotherapeutic counter-culture. What this appropriation was all about, and its consequences for practice and credentialing analysts in Jungian psychology today and in future will be examined.
Sound familiar? These cultists don't care what happens to those under NewAge's spell. As the late NewAge Senator Tom Harkin famously said, their job is to PROMOTE this stuff - not expose it.
So truth is not a history they want known....
It would be awful if my whinging hatchet job came across as a tell-all exposé.
Two movies on one screen.
I’m more interested in the current management at Apple. They owe a company I own stock in over one billion dollars after two jury verdicts.
Ann,
Your "fact that's easy to get confused about" is the least concerning thing about the article - I don't care if Jobs left her anything. I care about his malignant influence on our society, and the barriers erected to keep that hidden, and get us to discuss nonsense like Lisa Jobs' financial worth - which has had no effect on the rest us whatsoever - when I know - 100% positive - there's some poor asshole out there, right now, desperately trying to hold his/her life together while someone they care about is insisting following Jobs' cruel example is a must for success in life.
And that person - the one desperately trying to hold it together in this sea of nonsense - is getting nowhere, and no help from anyone. Anywhere.
THAT's what we need to learn more about.
With her background, she still wrote for "O"?
I really don't care if she got anything now.
From the article: as a memoirist, even a reluctant one, she gets the final word.
I suspect despite her protestations to the contrary, this is the reason for the memoir. Revenge, best served cold. She’s going to have to live with the estrangement from the rest of the family, but it doesn’t sound like they consider her one of them, anyway. Good grief, the neighbors took her in when she was a teenager and even sent her to college! Harvard! Jobs didn’t pay for her Harvard education, the neighbors did. (Though the article says he eventually paid them back. He must have had some little conscience after all.)
Now that is a serious dressing down, invited as it may be by the book title.
Man fails to be mothering enough.
"The Reluctant Memoirist" is a title begging for a story.
"desperately trying to hold his/her life together while someone they care about is insisting following Jobs' cruel example is a must for success in life."
Word. My personal heroes - some of whom were very famous in their time - were people who were not completely ruthless. Driven, but good people nonetheless. Or even better, driven to be good, caring people.
I don't see so many people like that in the public American scene today. The President that I voted for and still support would give Steve Jobs a run for his money. Mitt Romney seemed like a really nice person, but he lost. That's just how it works now.
Erased has an overt totalitarian political connotatoin, in that Stalin literally erased people from photographs after ending their lives.
Those who deploy "erased" (and "silenced") this way are saying in order for me to be properly heard and respected, other people need to refrain from contradicting or challenging me.
Glad you're on to that scam. But this is just the "shut up because my experience" form. The "shut up because your experience" variant of the scam, while it can be slightly more subtle, is a lot more common.
Boo fucking hoo! Lots of people have jerks for fathers and don’t inherit millions. But SHE needs HER validation.
But no one would read her memoir except for who her dad was.
After reading the big biography of him (which I enjoyed more than I anticipated), it came across that he was a big jerk, along with his many positive attributes.
Needs a Trump is like Jobs tag.
Or Jobs is like Trump?
I've been helping my parents downsize. Among their effects are boxes and boxes of family journals, letters, and photographs going back more than 100 years. In the end, we are not going to save it all. The past will erase.
In the movie The Book of Life, the dead are erased only when the living forget them.
But outside of a movie the dead are gone. It is their last abandonment of the living.
If she wanted to be distinct, she'd have dropped the -Jobs from her name. Like Mona Simpson did. Or, she could have used a different name professionally.
Steve Jobs was an asshole, but, like our current President, that was neither the beginning nor end of what he was. People are complex creatures, and you have to be pretty simple minded not to be able to distinguish their profound strengths and accomplishments from their ample weaknesses and failures.
Anyway, if Brennan-Jobs didn’t want this “memoir” to be seen as an exposé, perhaps she should have waited till she had actually lived something of a life and had a story to tell that wasn’t primarily a “tell-all” of the sins of the father. Well, she’s following in the footsteps of our previous President, who, before he had lived his own life or done anything interesting or significant, saw fit to regale us with not one but two memoirs. Sins of the father, dreams of the father, flip sides of the same coin.
I’d suggest to the poor, damaged Lisa Brennan-Jobs, it’s never pleasant to live in the past. Find the life you want to live, and live it. You have resources that few have. Your father, however hurtful he may have been, is gone. Find the good, and hang on to it. You don’t have to forget the bad, but it helps no one to dwell on it. And there is a world of fathers, and mothers, who have been shittier parents than your Mr. Jobs, but sane adults learn to move on.
Family members always try to control the narrative. It's understandable. It's also why there's a book about biographers dealing with families called "First Shoot the Widow."
In this case, the author is trying to control what readers are going to take away from it. Or, more accurately, what anyone reading about the book are going to take away from it. Because more people are going to hear about the book than read it.
And fewer people who buy the book or check it out from the library are going to read it.
Yes, Jobs oversaw innovations at Apple. There's a long line of people who are going to praise him for it. I'd rather join the short line that points out that there's more to life than that, that people matter. How you treat the people around you should matter as much to your legacy as your accomplishments, and it will be talked about.
Makes you wonder if the apple didn't fall too far from the apple.
I'ma be cremated, but, if I had a tombstone, it would read ”He tried.” as Don McLean's "Vincent ( Starry, Starry Night)" played lightly in the background.
Everybody agrees - Steve Jobs was an asshole - but no one blames all the yoga, meditation, eating of weird foods, and odd behaviors he got from NewAge as a culprit.
He was *just an asshole*
And Bikram was *just a rapist*
OSHO *just poisoned a town*
Jim Jones *just poisoned 900 blacks*...
My rule of thumb is that people do what they want to do. If they say that want something else, I'm skeptical. So I'd never write, "The details are damning, but she doesn’t want them to be." It would have to be, The details are damning, but she says she doesn’t want us to see them that way.
And you say you didn't screw (or otherwise exploit your/others' sexuality to advantage) your way through law school. I feel sure we are desired to believe you.
When her mother found a beautiful house and asked Mr. Jobs to buy it for her and Lisa, he agreed it was nice — but bought it for himself and moved in with his wife,
Did anyone else laugh at that line? Yes, I know, that was a shitty thing to do, but still...the comedian John Mulaney describes one of the funniest moments in his life as being a child in the back seat of the car on a family trip when his father unexpectedly pulls into the McDonalds drive trough. The kids are all going nuts in the backseat thinking they're going to have McDonalds for lunch, "we're going to McDonalds! We're going to McDonalds!" His father orders a black coffee, gets it, and pulls back on the road...
That's what this line made me think of. And I'm still laughing.
The Crack Emcee said...
Everybody agrees - Steve Jobs was an asshole - but no one blames all the yoga, meditation, eating of weird foods, and odd behaviors he got from NewAge as a culprit.
No, that would be stupid. We blame that stuff for him being dead.
I thought the common understanding was that Jobs *was* a jerk, who mellowed somewhat as he aged and under the influence of Powell. Same with Bill Gates. Of course, stories and rumors about hard driving, famous, and successful men and women are standard fare and I have no idea how accurate they are. And no doubt individual experience varies with time, place, and circumstance. If I look back in my own life, there are things I did that would be classed as "jerky", although my deeds had effect on a far smaller scale.
The worst thing Jobs did is leave a lot of money to his lefty wife. Think Teresa "Heinz" on steroids.
Think Teresa "Heinz" on steroids.
We can hope she'll use it to fight the Crack epidemic.
Lisa’s childhood is one of the most written about childhoods on the planet and is featured in several movies. The essay Lisa wrote for The Harvard Advocate is pretty good writing about her aunt Mona Simpson borrowing her childhood for the novel “A Regular Guy.”
I have a friend who worked for Jobs at NeXT (people forget about that debacle, not everything Jobs did was successful). He said Jobs was incredibly difficult to work for and was probably seriously bipolar. He mood would go from jubilant to extreme anger at the drop of a hat.
Has anyone asked her whether she would have written the same book if he were still living?
I stopped reading when I got to the part where she offered to show a stranger "her little coal hole" for a shilling.
I have a friend who worked for Jobs at NeXT (people forget about that debacle, not everything Jobs did was successful). He said Jobs was incredibly difficult to work for and was probably seriously bipolar. He mood would go from jubilant to extreme anger at the drop of a hat.
Perfectionism on the order that Jobs displayed tends to travel alongside psychological diagnoses that exceed mere quirkiness. Besides his fatal attraction to holistic health, it does seem he got control of his demons in later life.
tim maguire said...
No, that would be "stupid. We blame that stuff for him being dead."
But if all the studies say that stuff IS what made him an asshole, why not blame it?
Don't you see YOU'RE PART OF THE PROBLEM by focussing on the wrong thing? You're CREATING MORE ASSHOLES by not attacking the source but a memory of it's symptoms.
I've always understood that Jobs was a sonofabitch. It's not shocking to hear of these stories at all. Sure, he was a very smart man, a true visionary. But that same man is also probably roasting in Hell.
Also, NeXT failed in its initial objectives, but it was the type of failure we'd all like to be a part of. It got him back to Apple's helm, for one thing, and blazed the path for several technologies that followed, including web development frameworks.
Did he name a computer after any of his other kids?
Lisa Simpson is constantly being erased and then redrawn as someone else desires her to be.
That girl has a valid claim to erasure.
> not attacking the source but a memory of it's symptoms.
The sixties were a breeding ground for assholes and asshole philosophies, but there have always been plenty of assholes out there. LBJ and JFK, for instance, were assholes who came of age in a different time.
Everybody agrees - Steve Jobs was an asshole - but no one blames all the yoga, meditation, eating of weird foods, and odd behaviors he got from NewAge as a culprit.
@Crack, you have written something worth pondering — was Jobs an asshole before he got into Zen Bhuddism and thence New Age and strange diets, or was he mostly normal before he got into Zen Bhuddism? My own view — and I never worked for the guy so this is second-hand— is that he was pretty weird to start with, and Zen plus New Age got a feedback loop going. (For the non-technical reader, that loud screech when a microphone is turned on, that’s an audio feedback loop.)
Trivia buffs: What is Steve Jobs' very significant connection to Wisconsin?
Trivia buffs: What is Steve Jobs' very significant connection to Wisconsin?
Mac n’ cheese?
When my brother and I (rarely) speak our childhood memories are almost never the same. I don't find it surprising based on conversations with friends.
She's rich, so the book can't be (only) for money. That leaves jump starting her (very) limited career as a writer and a form of therapy.
I find public bashing of others as a therapy disgusting. So, being generous, I'll presume she's trying to jump start a nearly dead career.
What do you have to work with?
Let's see, I'm Job's daughter....
OK, I know that. It's the only reason we're having a meeting. What do you have to say there.
Well, he wasn't a perfect dad.
Sure, how many of those are there? You have to do better than that.
Well I have some stories that I can use to make him seem like an ogre.
Now we're getting somewhere. It plays to what we already know about him. Turn it up to eleventy and we have a book deal!
Book published.
Oh, but I don't want it to seem mean.
The world will little note nor long remember Steve Jobs' parental skills. That's not what made him Steve Jobs, nor his daughter wealthy........ ....Still, it should be part of the record. I suppose the inheritance left the daughter with an extra layer of ambivalence towards her father. I don't know if that ambivalence is conducive to producing great literature........When you stop to think about it, it was the sculptor and not Ozymandias whose work endured. If it's a really, really good book, perhaps that's the part of Steve Jobs that will survive in a hundred years. Tyrone O'Neill would be a forgotten actor if his son, Eugene, had not immortalized his failings as a parent in Long Day's Journey into Night.
Steve Jobs was like his Dad. I'm not a New Age enthusiast but I think in this case I would say it was in the genes. He had to change because society changed to the point where such behavior was not allowed any more so he changed with it.
As for getting the same amount as the other children, I would say that is not exactly true. The other children will inherit the money from their mother. It's like saying Julian and Sean Lennon got the exact same inheritance. It's true but the end result is not accurate.
i really find it hard to ban New Age for a couple reasons. First is that I don’t think it ever really had a solid core that anyone could deal directly with. It always struck me as an amorphous collection of crackpot theories that one could buy into or not, depending on the potency of the weed you were smoking at the time. I was exposed to New Age stuff back in the day; I had no trouble realizing it was idiotic crap designed to make someone rich without working for it. In his (first) autobiography Richard Feynman went to Esalen to see what it was all about; he seems to have had no trouble working out that it was a way to sound as though you knew something no one else was privileged to know, and to get laid.
That some people who fell for some of the New Age stuff is not surprising. The question is what else they would have fallen for if there was no New Age?
"It was a great comfort to Steve to have Lisa home with all of us during the last days of his life, and we are all grateful for the years we spent together as a family."
There is us and there is Lisa.
The Apple Lisa was a failure though many features in it were interesting and used later in successful machines. I wonder how I would feel if an unsuccessful digital invention was named after me by a father who also tried to repudiate me and then later inventions by my father following a different pattern were successful, as successful as the Macintosh was and is. It could be like and unlike everyone's struggle to grow-up. If the book showed how she managed to wrench her attention from her grievances to the pursuit of happiness it might be interesting but a book about a struggle not to be "erased" as if she were a floppy disk sounds sort of sad and to be avoided. Why write it? It isn't even as if she needed the money.
I'm fascinated by the character of Lisa's mother Chrisann Brennan. She seems like she's so damaged by her relationship with Jobs. She was a free spirit in the 70s and without Steve should probably would have grown out of it and gotten a job. But due to Steve's success she sort of coasted along thinking that he could provide the lifestyle she wanted.
The children of famous people sometimes decide to try to cash in with angry memoirs. The Reagan kids are examples. Not Maureen but she died early.
Patty even took her mother's maiden name to show how she hated her father.
I'm not a huge fan of Steve Jobs, but I'm also not a critic. He's too big. He is, without exaggeration, one of the few men who actually changed the world. Probably, for the better, too, although I can't stand how my kids are so completely tethered to their IPhones.
In short, he was an innovator and a fucking capitalist.
Funny! Steve Jobs shunned his father as well.
It's been a real eye-opener to have kids, and to suddenly realize......sunnafabitch, you're just like me!!
I'm interested in that phrase, "she will be erased again." It's Lisa's own book. She's choosing to tell the story her way, but that can't stop the people she's writing about from talking back and presenting their version of the events they too lived through. Otherwise, they are "erased."
Hi Althouse, I think you're missing the point here.
She is, presumably, attempting to write a story about herself, and her experiences.
If all the reporting on the book is about "Steve Jobs did this, Steve Jobs did that", then she has effectively been "erased" from her own story.
I'm not saying the complaint is legitimate (she presumably wants people to buy her book. A lot more people are going to buy a book about Steve jobs, than one about Lisa Brennan-Jobs). But I do think you should address her actual complaint.
Steve Jobs shunned his father as well.
His biological father, yes. He had a warm and loving relationship with his adoptive parents. Indeed one of the reasons he shunned his bio father was out of respect for his adoptive parents. Since he considered his adoptive parents his real parents, he felt it would hurtful to them for him to acknowledge his bio parents.
The strangest story in all this is Steve's father owned or managed a restaurant in Silicon Valley and he used to brag that Steve was one of his customers. Not until much later did he learn that Steve was also his son. So while they met they never met as father and son.
That's also the story of Jeff Bezos. His bio father drifted away and lost track of his son. Eventually Jeff changed his last name to that of his step father. Many years later a reporter tracked down his bio father who was running a bicycle shop and asked him if he knew Jeff Bezos. He said he knew of him. The reported then told him that Jeff Bezos was his son.
Larry Ellison also has a similar story.
The theory is the were driven to great success to prove that they bio parents were wrong to have abandoned them.
Yet another 'abused' child of a celebrity wreaks vengeance by publication.
Jerry Ford, B Clinton, and Gingrich all took their step=fathers' surnames.
Wonder who paid for her Harvard education? Not that jerk of a father who wouldn't give her a thing, I presume.
It sounds to me that Jobs liked his second family more than the first one, which isn't surprising- he did leave the first one, didn't he? If the story about the house is true, and I haven't seen anyone deny this, then he really was a jerk.
Big Mike said...
"@Crack, you have written something worth pondering — was Jobs an asshole before he got into Zen Bhuddism and thence New Age and strange diets, or was he mostly normal before he got into Zen Bhuddism?"
According to everything I've read, he got along with Woz and others before he went zen. The point is he stuck with it.
I read a bit of the Vanity Fair excerpt, which begins, "Three months before he died, I began to steal things from my father's house." That told me everything about how she wanted to present herself.
Big Mike said...
"i really find it hard to ban New Age for a couple reasons."
Not me. Make a list of their BS and let's get to BANNING.
"First is that I don’t think it ever really had a solid core that anyone could deal directly with."
Sure there is. For instance, Astrology is easy to debunk, and we ought to get to it - on a massive scale. Just wipe it off the map as the ancient relic it is.
"It always struck me as an amorphous collection of crackpot theories that one could buy into or not, depending on the potency of the weed you were smoking at the time."
Yes, plus it's flakey and harmless - can't you see how, if you buy that, it's a *perfect cover* for mayhem?
"I was exposed to New Age stuff back in the day; I had no trouble realizing it was idiotic crap designed to make someone rich without working for it."
So was I, but how many others DIDN'T see through it? Come on - it's a MOVEMENT now - and do you see them making their whereabouts known? Of course not. They're mostly in the shadows. The Occult. Fucking with everybody. With complete freedom of movement.
"In his (first) autobiography Richard Feynman went to Esalen to see what it was all about; he seems to have had no trouble working out that it was a way to sound as though you knew something no one else was privileged to know, and to get laid."
Esalen is described in "Fantasyland" as the church all this nonsense rose out of. Think of Mordor in "Lord Of The Rings". Big difference.
"That some people who fell for some of the New Age stuff is not surprising."
That so few care what that means is scary.
"The question is what else they would have fallen for if there was no New Age?"
No, the question is - after we educate American citizens - why do we act like what we learned is worthless after we graduate?
"Trivia buffs: What is Steve Jobs' very significant connection to Wisconsin?"
His biological father met his biological mother at the University of Wisconsin.
Freeman Hunt said...
"There is us and there is Lisa."
Sure is. I met my mother when I was 40. She and all my brothers and sisters got huffy because I wasn't all "Oh, I love you so much!" and more "Why did you all abandon me?!?"
I imagine Lisa's "family" is as full of shit as mine is, thinking I'm going to be grateful, after 40 years of getting socks for Christmas, if anything.
Not me. Not anymore. I prefer being alone. There is them, and there is Crack - and I abandoned no one.
Jobs was an asshole. But it’s wrong for his daughter to try and hurt Jobs’ wife and other kids through this book. If you can’t let it go and move on, then just piss on Jobs’ grave. You can’t get back at a dead person.
Wonder who paid for her Harvard education?
You think she even gets into Harvard if she’s not Jobs’ daughter?
If we were to get into honest, open dialogs with billionaires we would probably discover that they were very ordinary, other than their interest and skill in building and keeping a fortune. Imagine any person you know. Now imagine them as a multi-billionaire. Okay, no problem so far. Now imagine them as a multi-billionaire who is convinced that it is his or her moral obligation to direct the public policy of your state, America, and the world. That's where it gets scary. They are ordinary people, most of them came from upper middle class families & have bourgeois prejudices (discounting tribal identity while elevating educational & social status markers, for example).
I am an autonomous human being, I don't want Steve Jobs or Bill Gates to decide where I should live, what I should consume, or what I should learn in school.
Of course, maybe Jobs’ wife and other kids are assholes. In which case, she can get back at them through the book.
Actually, Jobs lawyer paid some of her tuition. Jobs got mad at her and cut her off. His lawyer, knowing his client was a deadbeat asshole, stepped in and paid the Harvard tuition.
Jobs was an asshole. It’s goid he’s dead. One less asshole.
FTFA 'Early copies of the memoir have circulated among family and friends. [Laurene] Powell Jobs, her children and Mr. Jobs’s sister, Mona Simpson, gave this statement to The Times: 'Lisa is part of our family, so it was with sadness that we read her book, which differs dramatically from our memories of those times. The portrayal of Steve is not the husband and father we knew. Steve loved Lisa, and he regretted that he was not the father he should have been during her early childhood. It was a great comfort to Steve to have Lisa home with all of us during the last days of his life, and we are all grateful for the years we spent together as a family.'"'
This quote from Mona Simpson is self-serving crap.
And Althouse? Your Rule of Thumb is mine, too, and besides Jobs comes across as a jerk in Walter Isaacson's biography, too. From he did to Woz, screwing him out of money, left and right, to treating his employees like garbage to being one of the worse CEOs I've ever read about it sure seems like Jobs IS a jerk.
Most of us have imagined what it would be like to have billions of dollars. We think that we would buy a big house where the climate and culture is pleasant, take care of our relations, do something charitable, maybe indulge an expensive hobby like yachting.
But those are all bourgeois pursuits. The joke in The Beverly Hillbillies was that they kept their hillbilly values. Remember the giant shack Jeb built for Granny?
Suppose instead a new and unexpectedly rich billionaire quite rationally concluded that the working class or middle class values he was raised with were no longer applicable? They were designed, after all, to make him or her a functional member of an economic class which they no longer belong to. You would have been taught to treat others as your social equals, now not one of your relatives or friends is your social equal.
You might end up being a complete ass, like Jobs.
I don't want Steve Jobs or Bill Gates to decide where I should live, what I should consume, or what I should learn in school.
No more than I would want a coalition of New York City, Chicago, and California to choose our President. The Electoral College was one of the Founders more brilliant ideas.
Jobs took from NEX the core of the management team that turned Apple around.
I know one of those guys from NEX, who Jobs took with him.
He is a very rich man now.
They thought he was brilliant. It did take a certain ability to deal with an extreme personality. Do not take things personally, it is something like dealing with a force of nature.
Imagine any person you know. Now imagine them as an elected official. Okay, no problem so far. Now imagine them as an elected official who is convinced that it is his or her moral obligation to direct the public policy of your state, America, and the world. That's where it gets scary.
Your moment of ZEN: Nine-year-old boy dies after beating by Buddhist monk
@Crack, banning, whether you capitalize it or not, has never worked except when extreme measures are applied. Banning didn’t stop people from drinking during Prohibition, highly restrictive gun control laws don’t stop inner city gangs from getting guns, the War on Drugs didn’t stop anyone from smoking weed or, if they could afford it, snorting coke. Hell, banning didn’t even stop Christianity back during the First Century A. D.
No, the question is - after we educate American citizens - why do we act like what we learned is worthless after we graduate?
But do we educate American kids? All too often students discover a huge gap between what they learned and the real world. Then they start questioning everything.
That’s my theory. YMMV
Ralph L: Jerry Ford, B Clinton, and Gingrich all took their step=fathers' surnames.
Hell, Gerald Ford took his step-father's surname, first name, and middle name.
the Book of Jobs.
'Woe is Me'
Blogger Kevin said...
Imagine any person you know. Now imagine them as an elected official. Okay, no problem so far. Now imagine them as an elected official who is convinced that it is his or her moral obligation to direct the public policy of your state, America, and the world. That's where it gets scary.
I agree, Kevin.
What would our politicians be if they weren't successful politicians?
Ron Reagan -- retired movie star, Republican booster
GHW Bush -- oil executive, community booster
Bill Clinton -- bigshot shady business man in Arkansas
GW Bush -- executive in one of daddy's companies
Barack Obama -- community organizer or clinical law prof
Donald Trump -- shady real estate billionaire, reality TV star
That's interesting how Jobs, Bezos, Ellison, Clinton, Ford, Gingrich all had some variant of a stepfather or adopted father raising them
Myself, I had a step-father for nearly 40 years. Total asshole, but extremely successful.
We parted ways when I was about 42 - it got too hard to deal with a rich asshole who sometimes acted as your "de facto" father, but often ran away from that role.
But.
If I were given a lie detector test, and asked,"On the whole, did this rich asshole stepfather make your life better or worse?", gosh darnit, I would probably have to say yes.
OMG1 its so effing hard to be the idle, undersving rich
Big Mike said...
"@Crack, banning, whether you capitalize it or not, has never worked except when extreme measures are applied. Banning didn’t stop people from drinking during Prohibition,..."
Stop it. All the things you list are real. Banning homeopathy is banning water, being sold as medicine, at $30.00 a pop. Come on.
"Do we educate American kids? All too often students discover a huge gap between what they learned and the real world. Then they start questioning everything."
That's not as big a problem as the adults in the "real world" relinquishing the parameters of reality. THAT'S what makes kids question everything. "So, here's to you, Mrs. Robinson,..."
Bay Area Guy said...
"Steve Jobs,...He's too big. He is, without exaggeration, one of the few men who actually changed the world."
I was positive Bill Burr put the kibosh to that delusion, right after Jobs slowly offed himself, but I guess I was wrong. Some are too easily awed, my friend.
Having spent a few years in landscaping, I identify with white guys like Bill Burr a lot, and wonder why more white guys don't. He's cool, got black friends, and doesn't sell out being a white guy. I got friends like him. I don't get it. America needs them.
I was once doing a job in Utah that, out of the blue and with no discussion of any kind beforehand, resulted in a Mormon couple saying they'd rescue me from slavery, if I'm nabbed off the street - assuming I could get to a phone. They'd done some "research" after hiring me and wanted me to know they "were going to be PISSED" if I disappeared because they liked me.
I was touched by this. My black friends, when I told them, weren't. They loathed these obviously delusional, and to them racist, white people. And then I've got white friends like Bill Burr, who can see, at least, the conflict I'm trapped in - none of which I have been prepared for in any way because I'm not a psychiatrist or Stokely Carmichael or trained in conflict resolution by Human Resources or anything - they see I'm in need of a beer, maybe, and to check this shit out for real. I mean, I still had to work for them.
I could never do that with Michael K, FullMoon, Drago, etc. They'd just make a racially weird situation really suck.
"To be fair to Mona Simpson, it was well known - and often the first thing stated -- in the reviews of "Off Keck Road" that she was Steve Jobs' sister. I read that book -- not too impressive...
"I doubt she'd be anyone as a writer if she didn't have the wealthy brother either."
I believe she was a well-considered published novelist before her relation to Jobs was discovered, even by herself and Jobs.
"Most of us have imagined what it would be like to have billions of dollars. We think that we would buy a big house where the climate and culture is pleasant, take care of our relations, do something charitable, maybe indulge an expensive hobby like yachting.
But those are all bourgeois pursuits. The joke in The Beverly Hillbillies was that they kept their hillbilly values. Remember the giant shack Jeb built for Granny?
Suppose instead a new and unexpectedly rich billionaire quite rationally concluded that the working class or middle class values he was raised with were no longer applicable? They were designed, after all, to make him or her a functional member of an economic class which they no longer belong to. You would have been taught to treat others as your social equals, now not one of your relatives or friends is your social equal."
"You might end up being a complete ass, like Jobs."
Jobs was always who he was; he did not become difficult only after his success.
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