We are down childcare for a couple weeks, so Anisa and Toya are on the East Coast visiting her family. Which means two things: the thermostat has not gone above 63 degrees and this week’s issue of Cranky Dad is more disjointed than usual. These things are not related.
I asked the ChatGPT overlords to write about golf in the “style of Ali Noorani.” Which led me to realize that if ChatGPT is me, I use way too many commas. Which is interesting because I have no idea what an Oxford comma is, pause longer than I should when asked the difference between a noun and a verb, and genuinely have zero idea what an adverb is. More on this – the golf, not the grammar – below.
Rosita’s
My mom had an appointment in Salinas the other day. So, being the perfect son that I am, I agreed to make the drive.
It is always interesting going back to Salinas. Driving past my grandparent’s apartment building. Seeing the windows of their front facing unit; through which we spent so much of our childhood. The Winchell’s Donut House down the street. Where, if we were good, we celebrated the weekend.
Or, the shopping center/parking lot across the street, where my parent’s physical therapy practice was located. Peering around the corner at the garbage area that was my job to keep clean. Appreciating the simple genius of a roof over the enclosure to stop the disgusting toss-overs that were the bane of my early work life existence.
What I most appreciated was the drive along Salinas Street, passing Rosita’s Armory Café. This was familiar Salinas. The place where we got big plates of enchiladas, alongside a dark bar with a juke box. This was not the mainstream anodyne Sizzler’s, Chevy’s or Wendy’s. This was Rosita’s. And it was fantastic.
I look forward to taking Anisa to Salinas. Maybe we will go to the rodeo – for a while the largest rodeo west of the Rockies. (May still be. I am not up to date on my rodeo trivia.) I will show her where I grew up. Her Dada and Dadima’s contributions to the community. The best bagels in the country (yes, in Salinas).
And, if they are still around, we will definitely go to Rosita’s Armory Café.
Uncivil
The day job has me thinking a lot about polarization. And, more specifically, how it has changed over the last decade. I haven’t quite settled on a theory of the case quite yet. My instinct is that the factors driving polarization have changed; but our strategies to address polarization have not.
So, this weekend I began to make my way through Lilliana Mason’s Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity. Mason, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins, lays out the case that our divisions are driven by three factors: polarization, sorting and ideology. Each of these factors has, “both a social meaning and an issue-based meaning.”
Unsurprisingly, the political and geographic sorting of the electorate traces back to the civil rights laws of the 1960s which set the political parties on fundamentally different racial, economic and religious trajectories. In addition to this “racial-policy divide,” Mason outlines three other developments that exacerbated social sorting.
First, as Robert Putnam chronicled in Bowling Alone, membership in civic organizations declined during the 1970s and 1980s. Mason references Bill Bishop to offer that this built on “a large decline in trust in government among both Democrats and Republicans.” This detachment allowed for the geographic sorting that created homogenous communities and civic organizations.
Which meant that in order to gain power, political parties tapped into the homogeneity. Leaders emphasized the differences between parties in order to organize and motivate voters. All of which was easier because the third factor, an increasingly fractured media, simplified communications.
In fact, we don’t even watch the same thing on television. Mason cites a 2012 study that matched television viewing data with voter registration information from 186,000 American households. After sorting the top twenty shows for Democratic and Republican viewers, “Not a single show appeared on both lists.”
Keeping in mind that Americans, on average, watch about 2.5 hours of television a day and we talk a lot about media polarization, I traveled down the Nielsen rabbit hole: During the week of March 27, on the major networks, over 12 million people watched the NCAA men’s basketball championship game, 7.1 million watched “Young Sheldon,” 6.9 million took in “60 Minutes,” and at number nine on the list, 5.6 million viewed the “CMT Music Awards.” Over on the cable networks that week, 5.1 million watched the NCAA women’s championship on ESPN, with seven out of the top ten slots being taken by various Fox News shows (ranging from 3.1 million to 4.1 million viewers).
Streaming services release minutes watched, not total viewers. Falon Fatemi writes that while over 50% of streaming viewers are under 35, viewers ages 60 and up said they spend only 14% of their entertainment time with streaming services.
All to say, the layers of our uncivil onion of 330+ million people are complicated. More to this story in the weeks ahead.
Screens
The other day, Toya FaceTimed me from the East Coast as Anisa was crying in her grandmother’s arms. “Baby Girl!” I said as loudly as I could. “What are you squawking about?”
Anisa’s curly hair turned towards the phone, and her teary-tired eyes stared in my direction. As I talked, her face focused on the sound of my voice and whatever image she could make out on the screen. She quieted down and I was suddenly the FaceTime baby whisperer. (Of course, she started crying again 45 seconds later.)
I would agree kids’ relationships with screens – and the communities that come with those screens – is deeply problematic. On the other hand, I have to say, it is nice to see Baby Girl via FaceTime. Not sure she sees, or really hears, me. But it is good for my parenting self-esteem.
ChatGPT Me
Let’s compare ChatGPT Me’s take on golf with the reality of me on the golf course this weekend. (Because, you know, I was a bachelor of sorts this weekend.)
“As an AI language model,” ChatGPT Me began, “I don't have personal opinions or styles.”
Well, ChatGPT Me, I have a crappy golf swing. So, we’re even.
ChatGPT Me clearly did not see the second hole when it started with, “Golf, the elegant game of skill and precision…” It (what is the correct ChatGPT pronoun?) continued, “From the rolling hills of Scotland to the lush greens of Augusta, golf courses have become the playgrounds of the elite and the common man alike.”
Little did ChatGPT Me know that the foursome ahead of us on the windswept, unlush, course I played this weekend were awful. In fact, one of those players must have read ChatGPT Me when it wrote, “The perfect alignment, the ideal stance, the correct grip, and the fluid motion of the swing all come together to create a moment of pure magic as the ball soars through the air towards its destination.”
Because home chicken stood over the ball for five minutes every shot, taking every form of practice swing -- before shanking balls into innocent bystanders.
“But golf is more than just a game of technique,” ChatGPT Me
wrote. “It's a mental challenge, a battle of focus and determination. Every shot, every putt, every decision on the course can make or break a player's performance, and it takes a special kind of mindset to stay calm and collected under pressure.”
Which reminded me of a time I was playing with a couple friends in Florida. He sliced ball after ball after ball into a lake. As we swallowed our laughter, he turned to us, stalking off to the golf cart, “I have an entire f***ing box of balls and I will hit them all.” Calm and collected he was not.
“And yet,” ChatGPT Me said, “despite the challenges, golfers keep coming back to the course.”
Because we are idiots.
What I’m Reading
A couple of Substacks to recommend:
Robert Leonard’s “Deep Midwest: Politics and Culture” is a clear eyed take on all things Iowa.
Shikha Dalmia’s “The UnPopulist” offers an incredibly informative range of political opinions.
“Some Other Dad” has a fantastic assortment of parenting advice for parents of the less intelligent gender.
David Sasaki’s “Dear Friends” covers topics far and wide as he travels the world.
I’m glad that your discovered the antidote to too many commas. Which is to start new sentences with which.
I’m not sure if this counts as part of polarization’s evolution, but Shadi Hamid has a great line about how Muslims were Republicans’ enemy #1 from 2001-2020 until the wokes and how every Muslim in the US is grateful to the wokes for giving them cover. 😂
Thanks for the recommendation. Also, if you’re gonna claim “best bagels in the country,” you gotta name the location!