Going Kerouac on Everybody's Ass

I watched "Step Brothers" the other day. Funny movie. Made me laugh.

There is a job interview scene in the movie where Dale, the character played by John C. Reilly, explains twenty some years of unemployment by saying that he had "gone Kerouac on everybody's ass." Yeah, I thought that was pretty funny.

So, you know, I've been wrestling with the idea of responsibility recently. Especially after Obama talked about "a new era of responsibility" being required of us. Big important questions like, you know, what does responsibility even mean? Or: did Sal Paradise live responsibly?

Because, don't you see, maybe Sal was living more responsibly than any of us. Maybe he was just being responsible to the gift of life, and that's why he gripped life so hard and then ripped it again so hard.

This column about institutional thinking helps me understand what I think is an important piece of the puzzle. So often we frame questions about important decisions in terms of ourselves. This is the way we are trained to think. What am I passionate about? What will make me happiest? Thus, the archetypal journey of self-discovery makes intuitive sense to us. Kerouac occupies a prominent place in our collective conscious. We aspire to live passionately, to dig life right alongside Dean Moriarty.

I guess Kennedy's famous exhortation to "ask not" hinges upon the distinction between individual and institutional thinking. When thinking about responsibility, the important question is, What are we responsible to? Ourselves? Or to the various groups to which we belong? Nation? Family? Or here are a couple of old possibilities that might appear extremely novel: History? Our forebears? What responsibility do I have towards George Washington and his men on that bleak winter night?

Optimal Trajectory

I was in Ecuador sitting at Mister Bagel with my sister, who was on vacation and visiting me at the time. We engaged in desultory conversation. The kind that picks up effortlessly on old themes but also wanders to new places, the kind that includes long unsolicited pauses but is also punctuated by random bursts of energy.

My sister mentioned a script that she had recently read, a forgettable, mediocre piece with a single phrase that had caught her attention. Optimal Trajectory. The idea is that for every person, given his/her beginning circumstances and innate ability, there exists an ideal path for that person's life. Divergence from this ideal path could be caused either exogenously or endogenously, but the idea is that the path exists.

An acquaintance of mine from the school I taught at walked into Mister Bagel, said hi to me, ordered a coffee to go and promptly left. I explained to my sister that he worked in the copy room at school, had been educated in Ecuador but spoke very good English. "Take that guy for example," my sister mused, "what do you think his optimal trajectory is?"

I did not respond kindly to the question, or for that matter, to the idea of "optimal trajectory," which so captivated my sister's imagination. The question, in my mind, presumed limitations on the poor guy's life. That the infinite possibilities of his life could be succinctly captured in as crude a concept as optimal trajectory...the whole idea really rubbed me the wrong way. In my mind, I recoiled at the terminology, denounced it as dehumanizing and reductive. I told my sister as much. Surprised at this reaction, she prodded me to further explain.

When I hear the word "optimal," I think of calculus and optimization. When I hear the word "trajectory," I think of projectile motion and mechanical physics. Put together, the phrase "optimal trajectory," borrows from mathematical and physical models to describe human life. Human life! The irreducible beauty, the most precious of all things...human life! Reduced! Abstracted! Poor guy! (Needless to say, I received a liberal arts education.)

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Thuon, our Vietnamese guide from Hanoi on this family trip of ours, is 26 years old. By my calculation, that puts his birth in the year 1982, only six years after the conclusion of Vietnam's prolonged civil war. Only three years after the brief Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979. Thuon is college-educated and therefore among the elite in his country. By his estimate, about ten to twenty percent of all high school graduates continue onto higher education. At University, he studied tourism and English, but his English, while respectable, is rudimentary at best. I have to strain to understand his tour guide explanations, nodding only to be polite.

Occasionally, though, I ask him some questions in hopes of gaining the Vietnamese perspective on things. "What stereotypes do the Vietnamese have of Americans?" "Yaas," he replies. "No, no. I mean...hmm. Do the Vietnamese have bad feelings towards American tourists?" "Yaas."

I give up. Thuon is among the elite in his country, and yet in the frustrations of our communication, it dawns on me just how different my world of opportunities is from his. Here he is, with a university degree, catering to the whims of a Taiwanese family on vacation, making about $300 a month. Even were he transplanted to the United States and given citizenship, he would see such a different country from the one that I have called my own.

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Optimal trajectory? While I see in the phrase the unforgivable crime of dehumanization, my sister explains to me, she sees the world through the lens of policy, and the idea of optimal trajectory serves as a tool for thinking about policymaking. While the terminology might be imperfect, the unfortunate truth is that there are real limitations on the potential of individual lives.

Traveling over the last few weeks across the development gradient from the United States to Taiwan to Vietnam, I've realized just how unique and privileged my unique world of opportunities is, and I see the historical sacrifices that have been necessary to put me in this position. The feeling, more than ever, is not of guilt but of responsibility.