Kesey's Letter: Thoughts on Truth and Empathy

Note: This is a repost of something I wrote over a year ago. I'm posting it again now because my last post was about symbolic logic, of all things, and it doesn't get much more dry and analytical than that. I feel like I should restore some balance by posting something a little less cold and mechanical. In fact, I wrote this in part to remind myself not to be too cold and mechanical. But it didn't work. I slipped back into a bit of emotional tone-deafness. It's a failing I have--I get so caught up in thinking that I forget to feel. That's really quite stupid, for reasons I explore below. So I'm going to remind myself again--hanging on to past insights is one of the major purposes of this blog, after all. I thought about tackling this topic all over again, and then I realized I probably won't be able to say it better than I said it here. Or maybe I'm just feeling lazy. Anyway, here it is again:

.............................................................

I just read a letter by Ken Kesey, the '60's wildman famous for writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and for leading a band of pioneer hippies known as the Merry Pranksters on a cross-country trip in a psychedelic school bus--a trip immortalized in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Kesey's life was, oddly, defined by school buses.  In 1984, after Kesey had long since settled down, his son Jed was on another school bus, on his way to a wrestling meet.  The bus started sliding, and went over a cliff.  Jed was comatose when he was pulled from the bus, and died a few days later. Kesey wrote the letter afterward to some of his closest friends, describing his son's last minutes in the hospital, and his touching funeral. It's a heartbreaking, honest, beautiful letter, written by a man bent with grief but still overwhelmed by his love for his friends and family, and for the relentless beauty of a world where birds keep right on singing, no matter who was just buried.

But don't rely on my second-hand account.  By all means, read it yourself (unless now is not a convenient time to shed a tear). I'm going to wait, though, and put the link at the bottom of this post. If you read the letter now, you're not going to want to come back to my anemic, overly-analytical scribblings which it inspired.  At least, I wouldn't if I were you.

My friend who recommended the letter to me said it made her “cry noisily.” It didn't quite do that to me, and that's probably my loss. But it did make me think. Well, that's not quite right. It made me feel, and then think. I'm usually more of a thinker than a feeler.  I'm one of those withdrawn ponderers who is as attracted to ideas as to people (unless they're people who have a lot of interesting things to say).  For years, I've imagined that I prefer facts to feelings, not realizing until today just how silly that statement is. Why it is so silly will take some explaining.

Rumble on Sesame Street

It was ugly. And it all started with Big Bird. As everybody knows by now, in the first debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, Romney declared that, if elected, he was going to stop the federal subsidy to PBS...even though he loves Big Bird. This was a tiny part of a long debate, but it got folks pretty heated up. A lot of people love PBS, and apparently a lot of people really hate it, or at least hate the fact that any of their taxes help support it. As I write, this debate is causing big arguments and bulging blood vessels. If you happen to read this years from now, that may seem strange, but it's true. I know, because Big Bird got me into the biggest, nastiest online fight I've ever been in. I don't mean a heated debate. I'm talking about a scathing, name-calling rumble. If it had happened face to face, I think punches might have been thrown.

This bothered me, because I don't normally get into arguments that nasty. Before it was all over, I had been called unpatriotic, a weakling, and a budding Nazi. But it what really got my dander up was being called irrational. I may not always be rational, but I try hard to be, and spend a downright unhealthy amount of time thinking about what rationality is...and what it isn't. That's what the argument made me think about, and what I want to think about in my next few posts. But first, a little more about the Rumble on Sesame Street. I won't get too detailed, because there's nothing more boring than hearing someone tell you, “So then I just said to him, I said....blah, blah, blah...” But I spend a lot of time on this blog talking about civility and rationality, and this argument was a spectacular breakdown of both, so it's worth looking at what went wrong. (Just to be clear, I'm not saying everyone who doesn't support government subsidies for PBS is like the guy I'm describing here.  Some of them are very smart and nice, and I can disagree with them without getting into a fight). 

Here's how it started. I'm one of the PBS lovers, so as soon as the debate was over, I started thinking up ways to show people that federal spending on PBS is actually quite minuscule compared to the entire federal budget. I had soon worked out that if you imagined federal spending this year in terms of height—the height of the Empire State Building, which is 1445 feet tall—then federal spending on PBS would amount to a little more than a tenth of an inch. I was rather proud of this image, so, when I saw a comment thread about PBS, I threw it in there.