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I’ve determined journal notes are important for two reasons. First, it lets the person I’m meeting with feel respected because their startup is worthy of notation by what they typically perceive as a wise, old check-writing angel. When Jeff Bezos took notes in his meeting with me and my Weblogs, Inc., partner, Brian Alvey, I felt pretty darn special, I can tell you that. Second, when I write in a journal, I notice my focus and memory increase, as does my metacognition, which is a fancy way to say “my thinking about my thinking.” When I write, I’m Zeus on Mount Olympus, looking down on myself acting out the play of my life, with a massive distance causing a unique perspective that simply listening doesn’t provide.
“ ‘Guitar Town’ was doing okay as the second single,” Earle said. “Then, around that same time, Bruce Springsteen walked into Tower Records in L.A. and bought a couple of things. He got Willy DeVille’s first solo record, and he bought Guitar Town. A kid who worked there at Tower reported it, and it ended up in a column in Billboard. I sold fifty thousand records the next week and got booked all over the place. So that was it: I had a career largely because Bruce bought my record and it got into print.” But it all mattered to Steve Earle for reasons beyond that. Had Sylvester Stallone picked up Guitar Town that day and talked about it on Johnny Carson, it wouldn’t have meant the same thing. “I’m a singer-songwriter, and I knew how good he was,” Earle told me. “When Bruce’s first and second records came out, I was in Houston still. There’s a really famous bootleg from ’74 in Houston, Liberty Hall. I was at that show. This is just to say, I was a fan from the beginning. I knew he was the guy. I knew what he was doing. I knew he was trying to be a singer-songwriter post-disco, and that required having a rock band. I was paying attention. I was a folkie, but I knew that he was a songwriter, that we had the same job.” Nebraska, though, allowed Earle to watch Springsteen doing the job, in just the way Earle was accustomed to seeing it done by Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt.
Deliver Me From Nowhere
Warren Zanes
Such a preference for demonstrative over electoral politics was often reinforced by a badly flawed reading of the careers of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. They did rely on marches, sit-ins, and other forms of physical protest to put moral pressure on their opponents, who claimed to believe in the democratic principles Gandhi and King were invoking against them. And they sought to disturb the status quo so that it would be less socially disruptive for officials to accommodate them than to continue to repress them. But neither of these great leaders chose this route in preference to using the votes of their millions of followers to gain their ends. They engaged in direct action precisely because this was the only method available to them—Indians in the British Empire had no right to vote on their situation, and African Americans in the American South had that right in theory but hardly in practice. Once they gained full access to the ballot box, they sensibly made that their main focus. When LGBT leaders cited Gandhi and King, I offered my own counterexample—the National Rifle Association’s great success in dominating the policy debates about gun control, despite being in a minority on the issue in every national poll I have ever seen. As I enjoyed pointing out, especially to those LGBT activists who decried my lack of “militancy,” I have never seen an NRA public demonstration. They do not have marches. There have been no NRA mock shoot-ins to rival the die-ins staged by AIDS activists. And those liberals who try to comfort themselves with the notion that the NRA wins legislative battles because of their vast campaign contributions are engaged in self-deceptive self-justification. The NRA wins at the ballot box, not in the streets and not by checkbook. The NRA does what I have long begged my LGBT allies to do, at first with mixed results, and more recently with much greater success. They urge all of their adherents to get on the voting rolls. They are diligent to the point of obsession in making sure that elected officials hear from everyone in their constituencies who opposes any limits on guns, especially when a relevant measure is being considered, and they then do an extraordinary job of informing their supporters of how those officials cast their votes.
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