Ken Kesey

As more and more of our relationships play out over social media, with political squabbles passing for conversation and emojis standing in for genuine expressions of affection…

Meghan Daum, LA Times February 18 2016 on how Justices Scalia and Ginsberg could share common joys despite their political differences

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-daum-bader-ginsberg-scalia-friendship-20160218-15-column.html

People yearn to elevate the “national” conversation. When a culture like ours lacks decent political dialogue, comedians act as our philosophers and guides. We turn to Samantha Bee and John Oliver.

I do, for guidance.

Meanwhile, do you think texting has helped the national conversation?

I don’t. When you don’t have to face a convo-correspondent, you can grind them down and out by turning a give-and-take into a rugby grunt. It’s so easy to push and shove aint it? But screaming angry and lost is not a conversation.

Political conversation can be enlightening. Despite what you may take from current debates. And the best way to join a national convo? Start one. Locally. Here’s an example:

In August of 1968, I was sitting on the floor of our “family room” in Detroit watching the Democratic convention being broadcast on NBC. (My parents liked Cronkite, but Huntley-Brinkley were great covering conventions.) Suddenly there on our 19-inch Magnavox were policemen in Chicago swinging billy clubs at protestors, knocking them into dark streets.

I turned to my father sitting behind me. My father always watched TV shows from the sofa with the evening’s Detroit News on his lap.

“Dad?”

“Yes?”

“Why are the cops beating up those students?”

My father folded the newspaper on his lap. The continuing mayhem kept flowing right there in front of us in uncut black-and-white news footage, and he seemed at a loss.

“I don’t know, son,” he said.

“I don’t get it,” said the 13 year-old son.

“I don’t understand that, either,” said the dad.

And this is when I first learned to – the phrase was already popular on protest buttons —“question authority.”

Because guess what? Authority did not have all the answers. Sometimes authority didn’t know what was going on. It was time for me to join the national conversation. (Ask your grandparents for more details.)

Back Pocket Banter

Perhaps some folk journalism seeds were planted during that 1968 Democratic convention. I remember seeing NBC News reporter Sander Vanocur brandishing his microphone like a weapon, flashing past competing convention floor reporters from ABC and CBS, adjusting the antenna on his portable headset—made him look like My Favorite Martian — and shouting: “Buzz off guys, this is my interview!”

Questions

What do you think of our current discourse?

Do you ever write letters to a newspaper or call a radio talk show? What about?

A popular button worn during the revolutionary days of the 1960s said: “Question Authority.”* Do you ever question authority? What kind of response did you get?

Cultural Convo

Write a short thank you letter to a public figure who has had a positive influence on you.

Shoot an email to a local, statewide or national politician about something they said. See what kind of response you get and tell others about it.

Join “the national conversation” online or on a street corner. Annotate, annoy, amuse and inform others. With verses of your own devising, drive eyeballs open 24/7. “Write your ream or only dream.” Go ahead and pull a leg pull a face pull a prank. Kesey and the Merry Pranksters of the 1960s defined a prank as, “Something never been seen before: You bomb them, but you do it at night, with poetry.”

America is talkin’. It is this conversation that I find fascinating and vital. It is who we are – a highly opinionated, multimillion-voiced choir with Internet access. I think the anonymity allows people to honestly state what’s on their mind. The ugly Americans and all the rest come out to play.

Henry Rollins in The LA Weekly February 2014

In the mixed-up scrum of politics and media that our so-called national conversation has become….[it’s] a roiling cauldron of outside observers, all bent on ‘bearing witness’ to the situation.

Mark Leibovich, “Let Us All Bear Witness To The Conversation!” NY Times Sunday Magazine September 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/magazine/bearing-witness-in-ferguson.html

* John Mellencamp’s “Authority Song”

http://www.lyricsfreak.com/j/john+mellencamp/authority+song_20074552.html

The goal: to get to where the words fall, from a muse-filled sky, down through your mind, and off the end of your quilled tongue. Author Ken Kesey

Comedy loves heart. Paul Sills, founding guru at Second City

At the feet of the great satirist Paul Krassner *

Ready for a few folk journalistically-tested quick openers?

These convo firestarters tend to be terse, bent toward further conversage.

(For one-liners bent toward getting the heck out of a bad conversation in one quick of a hurry SEE WITCRAFT How to Extricate From Any Conversation — TK)

But hey, you take a chance, am I right? The cartoonist Mark Alan Stamaty of “Macdoodle Street” fame in the Village Voice, drew one that I kept above my typewriter for years. Its theme: “You have to risk it all every day!”

Now some folks have, as it has become known through cultural history, “the gift for gab.” (In some parts of the country: “the gift of gab.”) Usually these high-energy individuals are able to get away with lines like, “Is that a smile? Are you smiling right now?”

Or this one:

Quick Opener, “Don’t they miss you?” Semi-startled, you answer: “Who?”

Quick Opener Comeback: “Heaven. I know they must be missing an angel right about now.”

Yuck. By adding authenticity to your game, you can avoid this superficial subtext–shallower-than-spit level of a conman. Here’s how to insert yourself into another person’s space. Do what Paul Sills, guru of Second City advises. His mother Viola Spolin wrote the first handbook on improvisational theater games and Sills told us in an NYC class one day something I’ve never forgotten: “Encourage the laggards.”

He meant that in the everyday battle for existence, leaning inside with a quick jab, uttering the first sentence, is not that hard. So try to encourage those you cannot.

“You are in the safest place in the universe,” he’d tell us. “On a stage.”

Our teacher was right. What a safety in freedom we all felt about firing that first volley. We could say anything. Perhaps Sills’ approach came from Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” wherein Jacques says: “The whole world is a stage, and all the men and women merely actors.”

But how can you continue offstage, backstage, in real life, without acting out every anxiety, all your neuroses falling out all over everybody because after all, Shakespeare’s Jacques was a melancholy man after all.

Think of professional athletes who “make a play.” A folk journalist is just as serious about playmaking. (And often makes plays at being serious, too.) What do I mean by this?

Make a play for making room enough so a conversation can become as big as your subject’s world. Because when you explore, you find interesting people. People get more interesting by telling you a tale. They might reveal their dreams, or say something obscene, something simple as recalling an episode of their favorite show, or talk about where they went that time with their first love.

BACK POCKET BANTER (Other Quick Openers)

Noticing how pictures on the fronts of t-shirts are just about the same size as a small TV screen, “What is that funny thing on your shirt?”

From mall to boardwalk, it is easy to be encourageable, “Where did you buy that lovely dress? Did you make it yourself?”

“Is that good? What you’re reading. What’s it about?”

“I love the rain don’t you?” (Stolen from Woody Allen where his next line is, “It washes the memories off the sidewalks of life.” May be inapplicable in some western climes.)

“Do you hear that? What’s that song they’re playing?”

Even, “Whacha’ doin?” when gently expressed can get the ball to their side. The Beatles did a whole song with that as their title. **

“I really admire your shoes” is most always welcomed by young women.

And young men have been known to lead with one of the following three:

“Yo!” “Wazzup?” And, “Nice car! Hey!”

Or the equally played betimes: “Hey! Nice car!”

NEXT TIME: “Onward!” Author Henry Miller and radio storyteller Jean Shepherd both said this I think, although Jean (flicklives.com) was more known for “Excelsior!”

* Hear my conversation with Paul Krassner, publisher of The Realist and co-founder of the Youth International Party: The Yippies!

http://www.scpr.org/programs/offramp/2012/11/27/29428/paul-krassner-turned-on-groucho-and-told-john-yoko/

* * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpWrNS2UTgA

The American Conversation

Quick Openers: Sure Fire Ways To Clever Convo