Ace Frehley: Finding the Holy Grail in San Miguel

Stephen H. Provost is the author of Pop Goes the Metal: Hard Rock, Hairspray, Hooks & Hits, chronicling the evolution of pop metal from its roots in the 1960s through its heyday as “hair metal” in the 1980s and beyond. It’s available on Amazon.

I sit on the edge of my parents’ bed, frantically pressing redial on their push-button phone. It’s a very cool piece of new technology in 1978, and I’m sure it will give me an advantage in my quest for the Holy Grail of my teenage years: Tickets to see KISS in concert.

This isn’t just any concert, mind you. It’s at Magic Mountain, the amusement park about half an hour up the freeway (minus traffic) from our San Fernando Valley home, which is where the band is filming its forthcoming TV movie, “KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park.”

I’m 15 years old and grateful that my parents tolerate, even if they don’t understand, my preoccupation with KISS. I dress up as Peter Criss for Halloween, I (of course) own all their records and some of their releases on 8-track – which I can listen to as much as I want as long as I stay in my room with the door closed to muffle the sound.

My mom kind of likes Beth, so I guess that’s something.

I dial and redial and redial until it seems my fingers will become as calloused as guitar virtuoso Ace Frehley’s, but to no avail. KISS is so popular that even my modern secret-weapon phone is of about as much use in this pursuit as Anthony Zerbe’s warped malevolence is against our heroes in the TV movie.

That movie, for the record, turns out to be bad. Really bad. But neither this inconvenient truth nor my failure to obtain the tickets sours me on my allegiance to KISS, which remains strong enough nearly 20 years later when I finally do get to see the band in concert, on their reunion tour at the tail end of the 1990s.

The Revelation

And it remains strong in 2016 when, on my way from the Central Coast to Fresno for a book signing event (my book “Fresno Growing Up” came out last year), I happen to see a poster in the front window of a convenience store in Paso Robles. On it is the face of founding guitarist Ace Frehley, sans makeup, promoting a concert he’ll be playing March 4 just up the road from where my wife and I now live.

It’s in less than a week.

My wife, Samaire, is even more understanding about my affection for KISS than my parents were. Before she met me, she’d never heard of the KISS Army and wouldn’t have known the Starchild from the Spaceman. But she knew I still had a connection to my childhood idols, so as a gift, she bought us tickets to the KISS-Motley Crue show in Irvine a couple of years back. There, KISS put on a great show minus Frehley and original drummer Peter Criss, who haven’t been in the band for more than a decade, but the band still rocked, even if Crue was a disappointment.

Now, when I mention that poster in the convenience store window, she urges me to get tickets. I put it off, but when she sends me a Facebook message the day before the show, that reads, in all capital letters, “WE CAN DO THIS!” I decide to see whether any are available. They are, so I pick up a pair: $45 each for general admission (no VIP tickets were left) to a place called The Ranch.

The drunk

We arrive at the venue a little before the doors are supposed to open at 7 p.m., then wait around 45 minutes past that as the crew inside tries to resolve some unnamed technical problem.

We finally enter, and find ourselves with a clear path to the front row, front and center, about three feet away from where Ace himself will be standing. I’ve been to dozens of rock shows in my 53 years, but the only time I’d been anywhere near the front was at a Sammy Hagar concert where I sat in the fourth row: close enough for him to splash me with some of his trademark blue tequila.

Speaking of booze, plenty of concertgoers at The Ranch have had their fill and more. What do you expect from a rock concert, right? I indulge a little – but only a little – myself.

But it goes too far when this clearly inebriated, annoying little varmint (about 5-foot-3 with thick-rimmed glasses and a goofy looking hat) keeps trying to muscle his way into the front row between me and another guy. We stand our ground and don’t let him in.

Still, he refuses to go away. Instead, he starts pushing up against my wife, who’s standing just behind me.

I turn and give him a couple of angry looks, hoping my 6-foot-5 frame will scare him off, and when that doesn’t work, I finally shout at him to get the hell away from my wife. He just sticks out his tongue at me in about the palest imitation of Gene Simmons you can imagine. What do I do now? Pop him one and get thrown out of the concert – and maybe in jail? Alert security? Just about then, Samaire – who, at 5-foot-10, is a fairly imposing figure in her own right – grabs him by both shoulders and pushes him forcefully back into the crowd. Security gives the guy some stern words and he disappears.

Good riddance.

The Ranch

A little bit about the venue: The Ranch is a roadhouse-type joint in San Miguel, an unincorporated town of about 2,500 people along U.S. 101 in northern San Luis Obispo County.

It's about as far, figuratively speaking, from Magic Mountain as you can get.

In fact, it’s so far off the concert circuit map that the road crew tapes a piece of paper to the stage that reads “San Miguel TX,” then hurriedly realizes its mistake and crosses out the TX, scrawling in CA underneath.

Even Ace, who points out during the concert that he’ll be playing in Beverly Hills the next day, notes the contrast. And when, at the end of the show, he says goodnight, I can swear I hear him say “San Ramon.”

Not that I can blame him. I wouldn’t have known where San Miguel was, either, if I hadn’t lived in the county and worked as an editor/columnist at the local newspaper for four years.

The Opening Act

Backing up a couple of hours, it does take Frehley and his band a seemingly interminable amount of time to actually get on stage.

The music itself doesn’t start until 8:45 or so, and then it’s the opening act, a local cover band called Soundhouse. The lead singer, an imposing character with a shaved head ala Chris Daughtry or Disturbed’s David Draiman, spent some time reassuring antsy concertgoers outside the bar as they waited for it to open. Samaire and I had both mistakenly assumed he was the bouncer.

The bad news: Soundhouse plays a lengthy set of, if I remember right, nine tunes, further delaying Frehley’s arrival. The good news: They’re a surprisingly kick-ass outfit. The vocalist, Erik McCornack, churns his way through tunes from Ozzy, Guns ’n’ Roses, Bryan Adams, AC/DC and Stone Temple Pilots, among others, as though he’d recorded them himself.

Unlike most concerts, where opening acts tend to range from nuisance to awful, Soundhouse’s set is actually a lot of fun.

The Main Event

Even after Soundhouse concludes its set, the stage stays empty for a good half-hour, and Frehley’s band doesn’t appear until nearly 10 p.m. Some in the crowd joke that he’s fallen asleep or is boozing it up in his tour bus – an unfair accusation considering that Ace, a onetime prolific imbiber, has been sober for quite a few years now.

When Paul Daniel Frehley finally does appear, it’s more than worth the wait. He might be on the verge of turning 65 years old, but he’s in top form throughout the 16-song set, which he performs along what he calls “the best band I’ve ever assembled.”

Not the best band he’s ever been in, of course, but this band lives up to its leader’s billing. It consists of guitarist Richie Scarlet, a member of Ace’s first post-KISS band, Frehley’s Comet; bassist Chris Wyse (The Cult, Owl) and drummer Scot Coogan, who's toured with Lita Ford and Lynch Mob.

Ace doesn’t have a problem sharing the limelight, stepping aside as Wyse performs an impressive bass solo segueing into his lead vocals on “Strange Ways,” an Ace classic off KISS’s second release, “Hotter Than Hell.”

Coogan’s vocal chops are even better. He takes Paul Stanley’s lead on the KISS classics “Love Gun” and “Detroit Rock City,” and nails them to the wall.

The Set

I wonder if Ace is going to allow us to take photos (some artists don’t even allow the media to do so), and I’m pleasantly surprised to find that no one’s objecting when I whip out my cellphone and start clicking away.

Frehley opens his set with “Toys,” off his 2014 studio album, “Space Invader,” and hits a couple of KISS highlights early in the set when he launches into (pun intended) “Rocket Ride” and “Parasite.” He omits a couple of tunes from the set list taped to the stage floor – “2 Young 2 Die” and “Rip It Out” – perhaps because of the lateness of the hour, although he does return to the stage for a two-song encore of “Detroit Rock City” and the Simmons-penned “Deuce.”

Other highlights: The classic KISS debut album cut “Cold Gin,” which has the audience singing along with gusto, and “Rock Soldiers,” in which the audience repeatedly shouts out the lyrics “Ace is back and he told you so” and “He’s going to play without an ACE in his DECK.”

Frehley also debuts the battle anthem“Emerald,” off his forthcoming album of cover tunes, “Origins, Vol. 1.” Originally performed by Thin Lizzy on its “Jailbreak” album, it came out in 1976, the same year KISS released its classic “Destroyer” and “Rock and Roll Over” LPs.

The takeaway

Before Frehley hits the stage, I think back on my vain attempt to secure tickets to that Magic Mountain show back in 1978 and tell Samaire, “If someone had told me then that I’d be in the front row for an Ace Frehley show in San Miguel nearly 40 years later, I would have said they were crazy.”

Why? Because Frehley was still playing? Because KISS had gone on without him? Because he was playing in San-flippin’-Miguel? Because I was there in the front row?

All of the above.

Sometimes, you do, eventually find your teenage Holy Grail; it just takes a few decades to reach it.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Dysfunction

Have you ever heard a child ask, “Why are things this way?” and found yourself unable to come up with an answer?

Why do we continue to rely on a dysfunctional process? An inefficient and unfair system? For transportation. For employment. For health care. You name it.

This question of “settling” for dysfunction always seems to come up at election time, and for good reason. The staggered primary system effectively disenfranchises massive numbers of Americans eager to vote on the presidency – a problem is magnified by media outlets salivating to declare “winners” and “inevitable nominees” before the votes are even counted.

If you live on the wrong side of Super Tuesday, it’s likely you won’t even get a chance to vote before two-thirds or more of the candidates have dropped out of the race. 

The solution is simple: A national primary. We all vote at the same time in the general election, so there’s no reason it can’t be done when we’re picking the nominees. 

But even if we were to change the primary system, when we get to the general election, we’d still be stuck with the Electoral College, an antiquated monstrosity that skews the popular vote by awarding electors (for nearly all states) on a winner-take-all basis. If you live in California, which has favored Democrats by 10 to 24 percentage points in each of the past five presidential elections, the result is all but a foregone conclusion.

I won’t even get into the problem with unelected “superdelegates” on the Democratic nominating process or the problem with voting on a weekday rather than a weekend or – as has been repeatedly proposed – a national voting holiday.

These mechanisms have all been in place for years, decades or even centuries. We complain about them, despair at them, and yet nothing gets done to change them.

Why?

For the same reasons we resist alternative energy sources, higher wages and guaranteed health care. I call them the seven deadly sins of dysfunction, and they apply to families, communities and organizations just as surely as they do to nations.

The sins

Fear. No matter how much we might moan about the current situation, we’re scared that any alternative will be worse. So we settle. We call ourselves "pragmatic: for failing to pursue options that promise to enhance our lives because we fear they have the potential to screw things up even more. This isn’t pragmatism, it’s fear. As long as we tell ourselves we’re “just being practical,” what we're really doing is reinforcing the status quo.

Pride. “America is the greatest nation on Earth, and we do it this way, so it must be correct!” When we make statements like this, we forget that America’s greatness is largely a product of its willingness to innovate. From Henry Ford and the Wright Brothers to Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, we’ve forged greatness through change, not through blind allegiance to past practices. Pride is the great antidote to ambition. It says, “We’ve made it” and basks in the glow of self-adulation. Meanwhile, situations are changing that require us to adapt or perish. In this instance, the great spiritual teachers are correct: Pride is a killer.

Greed. Once we’ve established a predictable flow of dollars based on a given system, those who are on the receiving end of those dollars have a powerful incentive to keep it in place. And those dollars give them the power to perpetuate systems, even as they become damaging to the public at large. This is true whether the recipients are political Super PACs, banks, lobbyists, oil companies, health insurers or lawyers.

Power. Those with the money typically wield the power, but money isn’t the only problem. Those empowered by the status quo routinely use shame, threat, peer pressure, manipulation and intimidation to bully and goad those without power into accepting things as they are. And it works.

Resignation. “It’s always been this way” and “It can never change” are the mantras of those who might wish for things to change but have seen attempts at reform and innovation stymied repeatedly by those whose self-interest lies in preserving the status quo. If your experience tells you that change is impossible, you tend to accept the way things are as the way they should be. You learn to accept the unacceptable and rationalize it as “good” in order to avoid the cognitive dissonance that exists between hope and reality. Welcome to Stockholm, my dear Syndrome.

Laziness. Sometimes, the necessary change seems to require so much effort it just doesn’t seem worth it. Switch to alternative fuels? How many oil workers will lose their jobs? How many gas stations will have to be torn down? It just doesn’t seem worth it. What’s forgotten is that we’ve done this before: Remember when the transportation economy consisted of railroads and horse-drawn carriages? Building the nation’s road and highway system was a far more mammoth undertaking than any conversion to alternative fuels would be. And the effort created far more jobs than were lost in the transition. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again. Sometimes, it just seems like too big a pain in the ass.

Negligence. We just don’t want to think about it. Election reform is a prime example. Every four years, we complain about how badly dysfunctional our election system is. But then, once the campaign cycle is over, we forget about it. It’s just not a priority anymore, so nothing gets done. Then, before we know it, four more years have passed and it’s too late to fix things, so we just accept – and validate – the broken system once again.

There’s a broad array of dysfunction arrayed against any hope for change. But the good news is that we humans are, despite our stubbornness, highly adaptable. What we have to realize is that, while there may be no perfect time to embrace change, every moment that passes is a bad time to perpetuate dysfunction.

Strict dress codes send our kids a message: We care about your appearance, but we don't believe in you

We’ve got it backwards.

Somewhere along the line, some of us decided to trade personal responsibility and freedom of expression for “the devil made me do it”-style passing the buck. We decided that accountability wasn’t important – that it’s better to judge the proverbial book by its cover than to bother reading a single word inside.

Here’s what got me going today: A school district in Clovis, California, right next to my hometown, tried to keep a student from enrolling in classes because he wears his hair in a short ponytail. He wasn’t just any student, but an honors student with a 5.0 grade-point average who said he wanted to honor his cultural heritage.

But his motivation shouldn’t matter. Cultural. Religious. Artistic. I couldn’t care less about his motivation it, as long as he’s not a terrorist or gang banger. What I do care about is that the school is abdicating its core mission: Teaching young people how to forge an adult identity – something they’ll never learn if they don’t have a chance to express themselves.

Pride.

Responsibly.

Without excuses.

"DISTRACTIONS"

It’s easy to make excuses, to say that a student isn’t learning because he or she is “distracted” by a peer’s appearance. Excuse me for saying so, but that’s an insult. Kids are smart enough to know they can study just fine, thank you, when someone’s wearing a colorful shirt, a beard, a pair of earrings or long hair. And they’re disciplined enough to do it, too – especially when adults expect it of them.

But we don’t. Instead, we expect them to fail just because someone else has a few hairs “out of place” (by our standards) or has the audacity to wear a T-shirt that might just prompt someone to think outside the tight constraints of the administration’s imaginary box. “You’ll be too distracted,” we tell them, “to be able to learn.”

Guess what: If kids can’t learn because they're 'distracted' by some guy’s wearing facial hair, they won’t be able to function in a professional world that places a premium on broad skill sets and the ability to adapt. Distracting? You bet. They’d be better off getting used to that kind of distraction and, wouldn’t you know it, they can handle it – better than many of us imagine.

CONFIDENCE

It’s only when we stop having confidence in our youth that they dumb themselves down and stop listening to us. Why should they listen to people who expect them to fail in the face of some perceived external obstacle – even something so minor as the way a person dresses.

Instead of encouraging them to focus on their goals and take pride in their achievements, here’s what we’re teaching them: to stop trying and scapegoat others for their failures. Do we really want to be complicit in this? Do we want to be the ones who teach them that a book’s cover is all that matters? That style is more important than substance?

If we tell them that a classmate’s clothing can “make” them fail academically, how different is that than telling them a woman’s clothing can “make” a man rape her?

The fallacy here is that we’re faced with an either-or situation, that we must either raise a bunch of irresponsible hippies who never contribute anything to society or a generation of imperial storm troopers in identical white armor.

That’s a false choice based on a lack of confidence in our kids – based, for some of us, on the assumption that their creativity is a threat to everything we’ve achieved. We accuse them of being undisciplined, of having no taste in music, of wasting their lives. For all our talk about making the world a better place for our children, we sometimes fail to realize that the best way – ultimately, perhaps, the only way – to do that is to empower them to make it a better place for themselves ... and we do the exact opposite.

SCAPEGOATS

We teach them to scapegoat others, which is the antithesis of empowerment.

But it's easy because what we all too often do ourselves.

We stop living our own lives, and two things happen: We make others (minorities and immigrants; those “others” who don’t look like us, practice our religion or speak our language) into fall guys for our failures. Meanwhile, we live vicariously through the clones we place on cardboard pedestals – celebrities, athletes and politicians, but most of all, our kids. Objects all of our own wish fulfillment.

Our kids, of course, aren’t clones or “mini-mes,” and we’re no better than those obnoxious parents who shout obscenities at Little League games. We teach them to play the game our way, then express disappointment when they ultimately decide to be writers or artists instead. In the meantime, we occupy ourselves by screaming at the poor scapegoated umpire to “go find a pair of glasses!” when that last strikeout’s our fault for forcing our kids into a mold that never fit them.

LESSONS

I’m thankful my parents never did that. They encouraged me to play basketball in junior high, but they never objected when I decided not to pursue it further.

And my high school never told me I couldn’t attend classes because I grew a full beard during my senior year (when it looked very much the same as it does in the photo accompanying this article, taken at my college commencement ceremony). No one ever complained that it was a distraction, and as for me, I blasted through my final semester with straight A’s.

If I’d been in Clovis, I might have been barred from enrolling in class.

We have two choices. We can empower our children to surpass our achievements, or we can enslave them to our ultimate obsolescence.

My own hope is that we equip our kids to go in search of lands yet undiscovered on roads less – or not yet – traveled.

On the trek that is our shared human journey, that will make all the difference.

What if we could vote "no" on candidates?

I want to vote "no" this election.

Not “none of the above.” This is different: I want to be able to actually vote against candidates I don’t like.

The cold, hard truth is there are a lot more politicians I don’t want elected than candidates I can get excited about, and I’m guessing you might feel the same way.

Sure, we can put photos of them dartboards and engage in some friendly target practice, and we can squawk about them on social media. But what if we had an actual, tangible way to express our displeasure — not by voting for some other candidate we might consider the lesser of two or more evils, but by casting a vote directly against that vile carpetbagger, commie or corporate crony we so despise?

Think of the satisfaction! We bemoan the lack of voter participation, yet just imagine how many more people might come to the polls to bury Caesar (under a mountain of “you suck!” chads) than to praise him.

ONE PERSON, TWO VOTES?

Pollsters routinely measure both favorable and unfavorable ratings for candidates. Why shouldn’t we be allowed to express those opinions at the ballot box?

What if voters got to vote twice: Once for the candidate they like, and once for the candidate they wouldn’t want to see in office before hell freezes over or a Led Zeppelin reunion tour — whichever comes second. (If I were a betting man, I’d put money on permafrost in hell over “Stairway to Heaven.”) Each vote would count equally, so you’d subtract the nays from the ayes to arrive at a net score. Imagine if the winner got 3 net votes instead of 3,000 or 3 million. We wouldn’t hear much talk of a mandate then!

Well, maybe we would. These are politicians we’re talking about.

If we wanted things to get even crazier, we could treat candidates like ballot propositions and vote "yes" or "no" on every one of them!

One complication: We’d have to change “one man, one vote” to “one man, two votes.”

So, as an alternative, we could retain the single vote — but give voters the choice of whether to vote for one candidate or against another?

RELEVANT AGAIN

Either way, the system would likely be a boon to two kinds of politician: moderates (aka centrists) and third-party candidates.

With radicals and true believers on both sides voting against their opposite numbers, the vast American center that’s often drowned out by all the shouting from the extremes might be able to gain a little clout by staying quiet. Third-party candidates would benefit, too, from flying under the radar (which they’re often very good at, despite their aspirations to the contrary.) A modest number of positive votes coupled with almost no negatives might just be enough to win it.

Would such a system result in more positive campaigning, because fewer candidates would want to risk getting too many “no” votes? Or would it give rise to even more vicious smear campaigns against the candidate viewed as the greatest threat?

Those are interesting questions.

CONSEQUENCES

Either way, candidates would have to think even more strategically than they do now, which could be even more fun to watch for political rubberneckers than it is now. We might as well post a traffic sign that reads “Warning: political pileup ahead.” For those who view politics as blood sport, this would be more fun than a trip to the Roman Colosseum in its heyday.

We voters would have to cogitate a little more, too. Do we vote for the candidate we like most or against the candidate we fear most? Or do we vote against someone else because that would be the biggest help to our favored candidate or party?

Delicious, isn’t it? There are all sorts of permutations and possible scenarios to consider.

I’ll leave you to consider the possibilities … and to wonder if this is a serious proposal or whether it’s all just tongue in cheek.

Sorry, but I’m not going to tell you. Instead, I’ll leave you with the same piece of advice that’s given to voters every time they enter the voting booth: You decide.

Why Hillary Clinton's in trouble. Again.

People don’t like being told what to do. Americans in particular. We don’t like “presumptive” candidates and inevitability. Yet that’s what both major political parties have tried to hand us in the current presidential race: candidates who are heirs apparent to political dynasties.

At the start of this election cycle, the powers that be were telling us about the near inevitability of a fall campaign between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. They had the money, they had the name recognition. It was all over but the shouting.

Now here we are at the start of 2016, and Clinton’s lead over a self-described socialist independent (Bernie Sanders) for the Democratic nomination is shrinking dramatically. Bush is struggling to even maintain a viable candidacy, far behind Donald Trump – who’s anything but a lockstep Republican dogmatist. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find two people who have behaved less like party loyalists over the past couple of decades than Sanders and Trump.

Meanwhile, former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg is weighing an independent run.

It’s amazing that political operatives haven’t caught on to what’s happening and, more importantly, why it’s happening. This isn’t your typical election cycle, in which populist candidates emerge, gain brief traction, then are cowed into submission by party machines spinning retread propaganda. Here’s why this is happening.

Lesson No. 1: You don’t win by running out the clock. Any sports fan knows this. How often have you watched your team try to sit on a lead or switch to a “prevent defense,” only to see hungrier opponents seize the opportunity to steal the game. They sense your team’s fear. They smell blood. And they pounce.

This is what happened to Hillary Clinton when she willingly donned the mantle of “presumptive” nominee back in 2008. She tried to sit on her lead, milk her “aura of inevitability” for all it was worth … and watched a hungrier Barack Obama sprint past her like the Roadrunner to claim the nomination.

The pragmatic Clinton wants to continue Obama’s policies; the revolutionary Sanders wants to build on them. Guess which sounds more exciting to the Democratic voter?

Lesson No. 2: You don’t win if you can’t learn from history. If the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results,” Clinton’s halfway there (while, ironically, seeking to present herself as the most rational of candidates). She’s following the same kind of strategy that lost her the nomination in 2008 and expecting it to work better against Sanders than it did against Obama. Perhaps she assumes Sanders to be a weaker candidate than Obama was. But it’s helpful to remember that she didn’t view Obama as a major threat early in 2007, either.

As Lao Tzu said, “There is no greater danger than underestimating your opponent.” She appears to have done it again.

Lesson No. 3: Like it or not, it’s a game. Some might take offense at my use of sports analogies, but the candidate who loses sight of the fact that politics is blood sport does so at his or her own peril.

Regardless of what you think of him or his policies, Trump seems to understand this perhaps better than any other candidate in the race today: “Money was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score,” he once said. “The biggest excitement is playing the game.”

Many of us complain, in high-minded fashion, about negative campaigns and the horserace aspect of politics, but we still watch – just as we still gravitate toward negative headlines in print and online. There are times we say one thing because we’re embarrassed to admit the truth in polite company. If everyone else is high-minded, we want to appear that way, too.

But not if someone is telling us we need to appear that way. The same people who give in to peer pressure on a regular basis will balk at “going along to get along” the minute someone comes right out and tells them what to do. Once the pressure shifts from subtle to overt, from suggestion to expectation, we do an about-face and tell the self-proclaimed authorities and experts where to stick their presumptions.

Yes, elections are more than Monday Night Football on a debate stage. Policies are at stake that can change the course and quality of lives across the nation and beyond. But whether it be the NFL or the stock market, Americans have been brought up to believe that competition weeds out the less fit and creates the kind of success that benefits us all.

We declared our independence from a monarchy, and we don’t want to go back. Sure, we like all the pomp and circumstance surrounding our idols and icons, but we want to be the ones holding the crown at their coronation. We don’t like arriving late to the show and finding someone else has made the decision for us.

If people try telling us who we’re supposed to support, we’re likely to flip them the bird and vote the other way. That’s one reason Obama won in 2008, and it’s the same reason Trump and Sanders are seeing such strong support as we enter 2016.

People are telling us, “You can’t support him,” at which point we tune them out and refuse to hear them tell us why. Their reasons might be valid or not, but we don’t care. What we care about is that someone has presumed to try to tell us what to do.

Lesson No. 4: The familiar may be comforting, but if we perceive our lives to be less than what they should be, we’ll look elsewhere for answers. Fresh faces will trump (pun intended) staid guardians of the status quo when the deep flaws in that status quo are on display.

In the past, the status quo usually carried the day. But two things have changed that have upended the conventional wisdom behind running traditional “safe” campaigns.

1. The Great Recession. Many Americans still feel as though they’re caught in it, either because they have yet to recover financially or because things have gotten better so gradually it’s hard to notice an improvement. The status quo hasn’t been nearly as attractive as it used to be since 2007. That’s almost a decade now, and the longer the situation persists, the more deeply an aversion to “good enough” becomes in our psyche. Running a safe campaign won’t work the way it once did until/unless the middle class is firing on all cylinders and prosperity touches a broad swath of economic sectors.
2. Social media. Our immediate, online connections to one another have empowered us like never before. We don’t get our news exclusively from “authoritative” sources anymore, but from each other. The more effective social media are at providing an alternative voice for the voter, the more attractive alternative voices will be among candidates for public office. We vote for people who reflect our values, and those values are shifting right along with our level of connectivity. We’re realizing that, more than ever before, we can circumvent the “system” and call the shots ourselves now. People spouting rehearsed lines sound less and less authentic because we’re talking more to people who “go from the gut” and “tell it like it is” – each other.

Old-school politicians are still playing by the old rules. But once the game start to change, those rules matter less than they used to. Eventually, it becomes a whole new ballgame.

At this point, traditional candidates like Hillary Clinton still have a lot of tools at their disposal: party backing, deep-pocketed backers, ballot access, etc. Clinton may well win the Democratic nomination, but if she continues to "sit on her lead," she may find herself without a lead to sit on. On the other side, Trump has maintained his top-dog standing in the polls far longer than any of the "experts" predicted he would.

Whoever the nominees are and wherever we are in the course of our political evolution, it will be fascinating to see how it all plays out - both this year and long-term.

Let the games begin.

Our addiction to outrage is destroying us

"I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore." - Howard Beale (Peter Finch) in Network

Outrage. Rage directed outward. As a society, we seem to have become addicted to it. But as with almost any addiction, it's sapping our strength and distracting us from living our lives together in some semblance of community.

There was a time when crime and natural disasters topped the local news. "If it bleeds, it leads." But that principle seems to be giving way, increasingly, to a new trend, with prominence being placed on stories that either 1) create new outrage or 2) pour salt on the still-open wounds of past indignities be reporting on new offenses of the same sort.

Addictions can sap our strength, demoralize us, make us feel like prisoners, and our addiction to outrage does all these things. We're demoralized because outrage takes an enormous amount of emotional energy to sustain. We tell ourselves this is necessary because of the magnitude of the offense, and sometimes it is. If we weren't outraged at things like the Japanese internment, racism, sexism, the Holocaust, it would call into question our sense of compassion - and open the door for similar abuses in the future.

But an addiction to outrage is different. It demands that, when one issue is dealt with, we find a new object on which to focus our indignation. For most of us, this can be draining and produce a sense of despair if we don't get our way. As drug addictions progress, the highs fade and the level of dependence rises. The same thing happens with an addiction to outrage: "Victories" are often difficult to achieve, and each one seems less significant as we find some new affront that demands our attention.

My way is the only way

The word "righteous" is so often paired with "indignation," and with good reason. Outrage is based on a firm conviction that the other side is wrong. And this conviction can lead to the kind of arrogance that cuts off dialogue and ends any possibility for peaceful resolution. The outrage itself, rather than the reasoning that inspired it, becomes the motivation for pursuing first one cause and then another. "Because I believe it strongly" becomes "because it's right," which becomes "because I said so" and sometimes, ultimately, "because God says so." 

Those who are addicted to outrage adopt a sense of tunnel vision, just like any other addict. The high becomes the only goal; nothing else matters. This is why addicts break laws, trample on others' freedom and strive to control others, either by manipulation, threat or force and outright tyranny. Drug addictions often lead to an increase in crime and violence; an addiction to outrage can, in the same way, lead to violations of those and other boundaries.

The ability to focus one's attention intently on a cause can be transformational. We need activists who channel outrage into a force for needed change. What we don't need is an entire nation of outrage addicts shaming and shouting at one another, fueled by such high levels of dependence and frustration that their outrage has become hatred. Contempt. Vindictiveness. And that's what we're rapidly becoming, on both sides of an increasingly daunting ideological chasm.

Used properly, outrage can be a prescription for change. But like any prescription drug, it can cause severe damage if used without any kind of prudence or restraint. Channeling outrage into fighting for a cause is one thing. It's quite another to go out looking for something to feel outraged about in the hope that we can "change the world" and thereby soothe our damaged egos.

I'll be honest. I've done that. And judging from the behavior of more and more Americans, I'm far from the only one.

Can we put the outrage genie back in the prescription bottle where it belongs? I can't answer that, but I believe our future as a nation may depend on it.