From the Blog

Jul
29

I believe that love alone might do these things for you

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Liz Caradonna responded to my post about self-promotion for amateur performers. Her response is great; go read.

Liz’s point is that the “asshole strategy” is rarely a conscious strategy per se.

If someone can explain to me “this is our marketing strategy because ______,” and reference some insight, some rationale and preferably some demonstrated results from the strategy they chose, I will gladly excuse them from this public outing, and would give serious consideration to their argument that in certain situations you have to be an insufferable douche to get fans.

My guess is that the typical improv group on Facebook cannot actually make that argument and back it up. They are not doing this because they’ve made a serious inquiry into a variety of marketing strategies, considered the cost and ROI, and settled on spamming their friends because they concluded that this would be the most efficient or effective thing to do, instead of or in addition to any of the other possible approaches to marketing (both assholey and otherwise).

This is likely true. I have a habit of ascribing good intentions to just about everyone. But it’s plausible that most people who spam Facebook haven’t given the costs and merits the same thought Liz or I do.

I maintain that the message-blast or invite-all has merit in certain circumstances (and I think Liz ultimately agrees). Here are some examples:


  • A brand new group forming. No one knows you exist yet. Announcing your presence to the world is reasonable.


  • A sea change in an established group. If the format of your weekly show undergoes some transformation that merits a fresh look, this is worth reaching for a new audience.


  • A big opportunity. You’re performing in a special venue, or with a famous act. It’s such a big deal that people who wouldn’t normally be interested might have their curiosity peaked.

Liz lists some questions that a group should ask themselves before they engage in any marketing plan, message-blast or no:

1. Aside from this Facebook event, what else are you doing to market your show in order to ensure that the seats are filled with paying customers who will likely continue to come back and see more of your shows? What else have you considered doing? Why did you choose to do this?

2. So far, how has this Facebook event contributed to ensuring that the seats are filled with paying customers who will likely continue to come back and see more of your shows? How does this contribution stack up against alternative marketing strategies – or no marketing at all?

To these I’d add the following:

3. Why do you want an audience? Why should someone see your show, as opposed to watching reruns of 30 Rock? Do you have a unique viewpoint to share? Has your group undergone a recent change in theme or style that deserves attention? Are you testing out different formats and looking for feedback? Or do you just want asses in seats? (I don’t mean the “just” in that last one as dismissively as it might read)

Answering question #3 should make a difference in not only who you target (large groups vs. select performers), but in how you target them. “Hey, come see my new improv troupe” tends to get overlooked. “Hey, we’re trying this new format that got huge buzz in New York last summer” is more compelling – to a recipient who cares about improv formats. If you know why you want an audience, you’ll know which audience to target.

Liz closes with addressing my point on the dilemma between art and friendship, “the last refuge of the natural misanthrope who finds himself also doing some type of art.” I don’t know that art justifies my misanthropy – gin does most of the heavy lifting there – but I’ll concede I drew the point a little broad.

The fact is, tension between being good to others and being successful in personal pursuits is universal – whether you’re an artist, a politician, a scientist or the world’s best garbage collector. Some people are good at managing this tension; some are not.

While this is true, art is unique, or at least an edge case, in that it’s not very rewarding. There’s no money in it and the fame, if any comes, is fleeting. You have to take pleasure in art for its own sake, which is a self-centered thing to do.

I’ve discussed this before, when Overthinking Season 1 of Treme.

Why is art such a struggle? Remember, art values the aesthetic over the utilitarian. Art deliberately avoids the utilitarian – the useful, the profitable, the merchandisable. You can make money off of art, but that’s largely out of your hands. If you want to make money, there are easier ways to do it.

Devoting yourself to improving your craft as a parent, a mechanic, a copywriter or a basketball player not only yields social dividends, but it comes with an extensive support structure. People love art, but they don’t understand the process. So indulging in the process takes a little more dedication. “I have to leave early because coach has me running two-a-days” gets more sympathy than “I have to leave early to go paint a sunset.”

Working hard at becoming an artist is fundamentally different* from working hard at any other task. The privacy required for composition, the conceit required for performance, guarantee that.

That said, Liz and I know people who prove that it’s possible to be both a dedicated performer and a great friend. I’ve even been known to pay for a round on occasion. So it can be done. But it’s not easy.

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* Different, not nobler. Art is no nobler than any other craft, unless you mean the Versailles sense of “noble,” i.e. “indulgent; requiring luxury to patronize.”

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Jul
27

I got so many that I can’t close my safe at night

Posted by Perich at 7:45 am

Fellow marketroid Liz Caradonna wrote a blog post on how to be an improviser on Facebook, a post itself inspired by another excellent article on why your friends are not (or shouldn’t be) your fans. The advice therein doesn’t just apply to improvisers. It’s useful to any performer, or any form of creative business, or anything where self-promotion through social media is SOP.

Spamming your friends is not only poor life etiquette; it’s also one of the least effective ways to promote your work and your shows. Because you know who’s receiving all of these notifications? ME. THE BUSY IMPROVISER WITH 500 OTHER IMPROVISER FRIENDS. You are tagging, inviting and notifying all of the people who are being tagged, invited and notified by every other improviser they know. They are currently invited to 22 improv shows taking place in the next week, and they don’t even live in the same city where half of those shows are happening. They are not RSVPing to these invites; I’d be amazed if they’re even reading them. Everybody’s over-spammed and nobody cares.

You should take 15 minutes to read both of them. But if you only have time for one, read Liz’s. It’s full of practical advice in clear language. It spells out the ways that self-promotion can make you an asshole. It’s good stuff.

I agree with every single word of it except for the conclusion.

Liz’s point is that promoting your work by messaging all of your friends, creating events that everyone gets invited to, and asking everyone to “Like” your fan page, is kind of an asshole move. That is beyond dispute. Doing this doesn’t make you an asshole, but it’s asshole behavior.

And yet.

Our Next EP, “The Object Lesson”
I know a guy named Mark plays keyboard and guitar for a band called The Brother Kite. They’re based out of Providence, about ninety minutes south of where I live. That’s sixty minutes farther than my private mental window of how far I’ll go to see a friend’s band. It’s not that I don’t like Mark. He’s great! We always have fun when he comes up to visit. But I have a lot of friends in bands, or in plays, or in improv shows, and if I go ninety minutes out of my way to see all of them my body will disintegrate.

Last Friday, TBK was playing downstairs at the Middle East, one of Cambridge’s better rock clubs. The Middle East is about a fifteen minute ride on the T from where I live. I had a free evening. And the Middle East is a prestigious enough venue that it’d be worth supporting a friend there. So, for the first time ever, I went to see The Brother Kite.

And it turns out they’re good! Good enough that I hit up the merch table afterward and picked up their latest album, which I almost never do.

Here’s the point: Mark has been messaging me about his band across various media for at least four years. I have ignored every invitation he’s sent until this most recent one. And then it finally paid off, because I’m now a fan. A legitimate fan. I am not a fan of all of my performer friends, but I’m a fan of The Brother Kite. And it took four persistent years of unapologetic messaging to get me here.

I pick Mark as an example because of recency, but there are others I could use. As a friend and supporter of ImprovBoston, I’m swamped in regular invites to come see someone’s improv, sketch or stand-up performances. What determines the ones I go to see? The ones that I’m thinking about when I have a free evening. What determines which show I’m thinking about? A lot of things, but the frequency with which I hear about it definitely helps.

Liz’s point is that spamming your friends is asshole behavior. My point is that, if you want to get word out there, you have to be an asshole.

Famous Assholes of History
I’ve made this point before, in talking about Tim Ferriss’s Four-Hour Work Week and how Tim Ferriss is an asshole:

All great motivators are assholes. They have to be. A great motivator cannot let you sit where you are. You have a thousand excuses to keep doing things the way you’re doing them; he has to tell you they’re all bullshit. He has to get you uncomfortable. Change requires change; it’s not something you can do from your armchair.

Gandhi was an asshole (“stop buying British-made clothes? sure, Bupu”). Dr. Martin Luther King was an asshole (“I already gave $10 to the NAACP; you want me to take a fire hose to the face too?”). Anthony Robbins is an asshole – he tells an anecdote in Awaken The Giant Within about encouraging a chocolate addict at one of his seminars to go ahead! stuff your face! eat as much chocolate as you like! And he did for two days’ straight, got miserable and never touched the stuff again.

Tim Ferriss is no different.

I’m not going to win any points comparing your improv show to the quest for black civil rights in the U.S. (unless it’s a really good Armando). But getting people off the couch and into your audience takes persistence. You need to impress yourself upon them enough to be front of mind when they turn to their significant others and ask, “Hey, what should we do on Thursday?”

If you want people to choose your art, you have to be a bit of an asshole about it.

Don’t Mind Me
I stress this not because I want to be bombarded by more invites to shows I won’t see (though if I didn’t, would it stop you?). I stress this because I’m a tremendous introvert. Many of the artists I know are, if not introverts, very insecure. They harbor a lot of doubts about how they appear to others. They want to be liked and they spend a lot of time thinking about how to be more liked.

I believe that promotion is one of the most crucial variables in determining whether an artist succeeds or fails. And I think telling insecure people, “Don’t use these means to promote yourself,” is the worst thing they could hear. They don’t need another reason not to talk about their passion. They already have a hundred.

Cost vs. Yield
On the grand scale of promotion, spamming your friends is low cost and low yield. You message 500 of your Facebook friends about your open-mic night at P.A.’s Lounge. Maybe five of them show up. Of those five, one is impressed enough to become a genuine fan. Not a “fan” as Facebook calls it, but a fan in the conventional sense: an enthusiast, advocate and patron. This is low cost (Create Event, Invite Guests, Select All) and low performance (0.2% “fandom” rate).

(There’s also the added noise pollution of one more invite in your inbox, but that’s a negative externality which the performer doesn’t bear the brunt of)

At the other end of the scale, you have more restrained efforts. You create a mailing list that’s opt-in, rather than opt-out. You notify friends but don’t pester them. And you only target friends who’ve expressed a clear connection to your style. You reach a dozen people in this way, but their level of commitment is much higher. This is high cost and high yield.

There’s a whole conversation that could spawn off from this about whether low cost / low yield strategies are worse than high cost / high yield. I’m not going to have that talk here. There are more informed writers on the subject (Liz being one) who can discuss it in depth. I bring up the cost/yield analysis to point out that the asshole strategy is a strategy. It’s a way of getting fans. It’s not something improvisers brainstormed to make our lives miserable, along with Being The Loudest at Parties, or Arguing With Director’s Notes.

Throwing Friends in the Boiler
Liz’s point (and the point of the Grindstone article she linked to) is that you shouldn’t cannibalize your friends to look for fans. My point is that you have to.

Granting that what Liz says is true – spamming your friends is annoying; it clutters the promotional space with noise; it has little chance of paying off – sacrificing the goodwill of your friends in order to get a few more seats in your audience sounds like a great way to lose friends. If this bothers you, that’s normal. It means you’re a human being.

But that’s a decision you have to confront regardless.

If you’re truly committed to art, you have to sacrifice a certain amount of friendship. This doesn’t always come in the form of annoying Facebook invites. But Louis C.K. has made a career out of calling his kids morons and his (now ex-) wife frigid. Picasso, the archetypal starving artist, must have bummed hundreds of meals off his friends during his “Blue Period.” Part-time performers with full-time jobs need to duck out of work early to get to rehearsal, leaving their coworkers to pick up the slack. And any writer knows that finishing a novel means turning down a lot of chances to drink with friends.

Every artist who’s passionate about their art has to reach the Art vs. Friendship crossroads. Most art is private in its composition, and all art is self-indulgent. Especially performance. To get up on a stage and not only demand everyone’s attention, but insist that you’re worth paying for, is so conceited. And friendship can’t long survive conceit.

At some point, you will grapple with your friends lying about whether they thought you were funny, or making up excuses not to come see your show, or talking behind your back about whether or not they think you’re any good. This does not mean they’re bad friends. All human beings do this. These are people who would help move your couch up three flights of stairs but who don’t want to see you fumble through another Harold variant. And they’ll be the best friends you ever had if you quit ditching their parties for your stupid rehearsals.

You will have to decide which you want more: your art or their friendship. If you stick with it, sweating out the open mics that no one comes to and the off-night shows that no one laughs at, you might one day find your voice on stage. If you abandon it, you get to have all your friends back. But the path to art is paved through your friends. You have to choose between friends and fans.

Conclusion
“Don’t” is not as useful a conversation as “should.” The self-promotion space will become more rewarding if performers evaluate competing strategies, not if everybody settles on one. Social media has slashed the cost of reaching everyone you’ve ever heard of. Liz might deplore the loud, lossy noise that fills our inboxes as a result (I certainly don’t love it). But while cheap is not a substitute for good, there’s still value to it. Especially if you’re an amateur performer, as most of our mutual friends are.

But more importantly, performers should not be afraid to reach out to me. Yes, yours is the sixth invite to an improv show I’ve received this week, and it’s only Wednesday. No, I’m probably not going. But keep telling me. Because one of these days I’ll have a free evening, and I’ll come see your show, and I’ll laugh and tell all my friends. If you don’t tell me, out of some concern for my bandwidth, I’ll never know. I don’t know whether your radio silence means you’re not spamming me or that you don’t have a show going on. In either case the result is the same: one less body in the audience.

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Jul
26

wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Some day, thirty or more years from now, you’ll come visit me in my dingy home. I’ll bustle around and play host, offering you a drink or pulling down old yearbooks to show you. You’ll see me bump into coffee tables or misplaced chairs. “I worry about the Professor,” you’ll whisper to your friends. “He seems so clumsy.”

Don’t worry. That happens to me all the time.

At least once a day, on average, I will careen into a stationary object like a drunk in a Buick. I’ll bump my hips into the corner of a desk or smack a banister with the back of my hand. When vacuuming my apartment three weeks ago, I dragged a coffee table onto my bare left toe, creating a nasty scrape that just recently healed.

I am a clumsy giant. I can’t keep track of all parts of my body at once. I have as much say over what happens to my extremities as Marcus Aurelius did over the far corners of the Empire. Part of it comes from my height, doubtless, but part also comes from my tendency to focus more on my thoughts than my surroundings. I play with sentence structure and random ideas on the drafting table of my head, all while kicking over trash cans and elbowing vases.

Save this note for my future caretakers. If I’m bad in my old age, I’m no worse than I ever was.

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Jul
25

what I do, I do at will

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

A Dance With Dragons: It’s good.

Martin’s strength, more than anything else, lies in creating believable characters and putting us inside their heads. Even the most treacherous bastards in the world – Jaime, Cersei, Theon, Melisandre – earn an ounce of sympathy when we see the world as they see it. You may still hate these characters or think they’re ignorant, but you won’t find them hollow.

It’s that strength that keeps us following those characters, even as Martin leads them down some very winding paths. Most of the action takes place in the Free Cities and the East, with several different threads converging on Daenerys Targaryen, now ruler of Meereen. These threads take a lot of frustrating turns before they get there – those that get there at all – which would derail a lesser story. But, unlike other fantasy epics I might name, these stories do converge. Our protagonists are not scattering to the far corners of the planet. Any new characters introduced – and there are a few – slot right into the existing story.

SPOILERS follow:
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Jul
22

I could deal with trying to process pigeons acting like they’re doves

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Student #1: I can’t go to your party. We’re going to an anti-war rally.
Student #2: I have a question. What does it mean to be anti-war?
Student #1: It means you’re anti-war.
Student #2: I know, but… What does it do? I could be anti-cancer, but shit’s still gonna happen.

- Overheard in New York

In that vein, I’m taking a break from inaccessible political rants for a few months. Let me know if the U.S. starts a seventh war or something.

Reviews of plays you didn’t go to, books you haven’t read and observations about Cambridge, MA will continue apace.

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Jul
18

if I was Santa Claus, I’d cook up a feast

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Breaking Bad: Without question, the best show on television. It’s a close fight with Mad Men, but Breaking Bad beats it. The S4 premiere makes that clear. No other show unifies plot, theme and cinematographic vision with as much fidelity as Breaking Bad. No other show tells a grander story with more picayune subject matter. Brilliant.

SPOILERS for S4 follow.
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Jul
12

is there an app for that?

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

I’m sure the following exists, but I can’t find it. And I can’t describe it well enough to Google it*, a maddening feeling in its own right. I throw myself at your feet, Internet, a supplicant for better productivity.

Picture a corkboard with index cards full of notes tacked up. I can rearrange the cards on the board in any order I like. I can group them together in any categories I want. In these categories, I can put them in different order. But the cards themselves remain distinct. I can separate them out and scatter them around.

What I want: an application that’ll let me do that for text files.

To save you some trouble: MS Word isn’t what I want. Sure, I can write each of my segments out as separate Word files, and visually move them around within folders to categorize them. But I can’t merge and separate them with ease. If I marry two Word files together – ctrl+A, ctrl+C, ctrl+V – I can’t untangle them again. And I can’t put the same file in two different categories without making copies, and then each copy will be its own animal.

I want an application that will let me create pages of text as a single “note.” I then want to be able to take these notes and visually arrange them in categories. I don’t want these notes to have a character limit of anything less than a few hundred thousand. I want to be able to combine the notes easily, yet leave each note distinct if I want to separate them out again later.

This seems so screamingly obvious that I’m confident something with this functionality already exists, and is well known, and within the first three comments someone will point it out. But I’ve been staring at Word so long that I can’t think of it, and I’ve outsourced so many of my mental cycles to Google that I can’t think of what to call it. A project management organizer? A productivity visualization aid? A mind map? Please help me, or I will go mad and kill everyone I see. Thank you.

__________________
* A problem unique to this century. And they say there’s nothing new under the sun!

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Jul
11

hideous progeny

Posted by Perich at 6:43 am

Hideous Progeny: the weekend that produced Frankenstein has so much drama in its premise, you’d swear it’s as much of a fable as the novel that came out of it. You have Lord Byron, a scandal-ridden celebrity; Percy Bysshe Shelley, a rising star in the world of poetry; and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, daughter of two of Britain’s most famous philosophers. Count also Mary’s step-sister Claire Clairmont and Byron’s attendant, Dr. John Polidori. From that Alpine summer came the third canto of Byron’s Childe Harold; Polidori’s The Vampyre, which gave birth to Western vampire fiction; and Mary Shelley’s own Frankenstein, which dwarfed them both by orders of magnitude.

In light of the creative output of that summer, it’s easy to overlook the sticky web of romance and scandal that bound the participants together, although perhaps it’s the proximate cause. Mary and Percy were sleeping together but weren’t married, partly due to Percy’s theories on free love and partly because he wasn’t yet divorced from his first wife, Harriet. They traveled with Claire, who may have been in love with Percy but was definitely infatuated with Byron and already pregnant with his child. Byron himself was fleeing scandal in Britain, eager for separation from his wife Isabella yet still wanting custody of their daughter. And Dr. Polidori’s literary aspirations were clear but were not much humored by his companions.

Emily Dendinger’s Hideous Progeny takes that source material and casts it into a weekend of gossip and high drama. When Byron challenges the company to come up with an original ghost story over the next three days, it touches off a chain of intrigue and recrimination. Everyone gets their old grudges out, accusing each other of slights and hiding behind ideals or intoxication. It’s sordid, biting, passionate and petty – a story of relationship breakdown in the tradition of The Lion in Winter or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

Dendinger wrote one of the tightest, cleverest scripts I’ve seen in contemporary theater. There’s more drama crammed into the first act than you’d find in most modern plays: Mary confronting Byron; Byron teasing and avoiding Clare by turns; Percy and Mary saying plenty and leaving more unsaid. A subplot between Dr. Polidori and Elise, the hired maid, adds a touch of uplift to what could otherwise be a dark and bitter story. But even the feuds have their levity, when the author – or the characters, themselves authors – take a moment to comment on the absurdity of their situation.

Nathaniel Gundy (Shelley) does an excellent job with a tricky role. He ignores Mary’s needs for affection, acknowledgment and legitimacy not because he’s an asshole, but because he’s consumed by his own beliefs. He’s a hyper-rational ideologue who doesn’t understand why everyone is so mad at him, a character type that’s rarely explored in literature and is tough to make sympathetic. Maggie Erwin (Claire) and Julia Specht (Mary) bring gravity and passion to their very young characters, particularly when Claire reveals that she has a brain in her head and ambitions of her own. Or when Mary sits, jaw agape in disgust, as Victor Shopov’s Byron teases her for failing to live up to the expectations of her literary heritage, or having killed her mother in childbirth. Alex Simoes (Polidori) has particularly excellent comic timing, a master of several small gestures and expressions that had the audience howling.

The black box at the Boston Playwrights Theatre, though excellently appointed, felt a bit cramped. One scene featured Percy literally wedged between a writing desk and a large metal bracket in the wall, having an argument across the room with Mary. The lighting lacked variety: while it was easy to tell a 4am confession from a 7pm argument, it was impossible to tell dinner time from breakfast. Costumes, however, were excellent, particularly Byron’s several outfits. The set decoration itself was full of perfect little details, giving the stage the feel of a lived-in summer cabin: packed to overflowing with books, and too cramped to avoid each other after a fight. Of which there are several.

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Jul
08

you never give me your money; you only give me your funny paper

Posted by Perich at 8:08 am

I was as virtuously given as a gentleman need to be; virtuous enough; swore little; diced not above seven times a week; went to a bawdy-house once in a quarter—of an hour; paid money that I borrowed, three or four times …

- Wm. Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1

A few friends shared David Brooks’s latest op-ed with some enthusiasm this week. So I gave it a read.

With Bobo it’s always a question of how far I can get without openly guffawing, spraying water out of my nose and upsetting the neighbors. In Monday’s column, it was this gem:

The members of this movement have no sense of moral decency. A nation makes a sacred pledge to pay the money back when it borrows money. But the members of this movement talk blandly of default and are willing to stain their nation’s honor.

Lawd. In the century that’s already given us the Iraq Civil War, the Military Commissions Act, the Wall Street bailout and Fergie’s solo projects, defaulting on a debt would “stain their nation’s honor.” Oh no! Failure to raise the debt ceiling! At long last, have you no sense of decency?

And whence this icky stain, Brooks? Not from the awkwardness that would result as China, Japan and the U.K. pass the debt to each other, unwilling to make the phone call that would collapse the world economy. No, this stain would come from the United States breaking its sacred pledge to pay back money it borr– ah ha ha, oh ho, ho ho ho, ha ha ha, hrrm, sorry, give me a second. Ah ha. Hooooo. All right, I’m good.

Anyhow, Brooksie’s confused because, to paraphrase Mencken Sinclair, his job requires that he stay confused. If he doesn’t believe in his heart of hearts that the Opposition Party really wants to shrink the size of government, he’s out of work. He has to keep mistaking pretext for cause. And sure, if you believe that the Opposition Party is driven by the principle of reducing the size of government, and that their only failure is extremism in the pursuit of frugality, then I’ll bet they look like they’ve been “infected by a faction” (Brooks).

But if you believe that the Opposition Party wants power not to enforce a small government agenda but for its own sake, that they’re taking advantage of a “fiscal crisis” in which any economic fallout will be blamed on the Ruling Party and that they’re refusing to compromise not out of fanaticism or dishonor but because refusal to compromise makes you look strong and voters love strength more than peace, then the present becomes less baffling.

The Opposition Party has not been infected by Tea Party madness, any more than a man with a leashed pitbull needs to check his own stool for worms, rather than the dog’s. The Opposition Party wants power. It sees inflexibility in budget negotiations as the road to power. The Ruling Party wants to keep power. It sees any crisis that can be linked to its refusal to raise the debt limit as a threat to that power.

I never thought I’d be quoting David Frum with approval, but he sums it up more tersely than I can:

[I]t looks like Obama has set up yet another lopsided bargaining table: He needs the Republicans to give him something, anything, that he can claim as a victory. This need, however, perversely puts the Republicans in the situation where if they give him something, anything, it will be represented as a defeat. The president’s own weakness has had this perverse effect on his political opponents: it has reduced the value of his own concessions (no matter how big) and hugely exaggerated the significance of any offset he achieves (no matter how small).

I agree with all of the above except Frum’s bitter sigh at Obama’s “weakness.” Obama’s not in the strongest position to help his party out, but his need for concessions doesn’t make him weak. When you’re in the top spot, you have the most to lose.

[P.S. I put this post on the spike on Wednesday, prior to Obama's announcement that sure, he'd be willing to cut some Social Security if it'd make the Opposition Party happy. Leaving the post as-is because I don't think this changes the context. Whether the Ruling Party cuts benefits by adjusting the COLA or whether this is just, as the Administration's biggest fans assert, Obama playing 11-dimensional chess, is irrelevant. Whether you would take to the streets if Social Security were touched or whether you want to dismantle the welfare state is irrelevant. What matters is that the fate of Social Security will be decided by people who, come age 65, would never notice its absence. Never forget where power is and what power wants.]

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