Peter Birkenhead

The answer: with a very thick skin.

I am not one of those “old friend” actors. I’m not a star — I’m not even a “name.” But I’m not an extra either. Actors like me occupy the space in people’s minds reserved for utility infielders, station wagons and pizza places. For most people, actors are divided into two groups: Martin Sheen and furniture. You’re part of the pantheon or part of the scenery.

When I was young I studied with Uta Hagen, who wrote the seminal actor’s handbook “Respect for Acting.” And that’s what my friends and I wanted back then: respect, for acting. That and girls. We very much wanted our work to be well thought of, admired, but we also wanted to be famous. Not too famous. Just enough to get sex, but not stalked. Theater famous.

Mostly we just wanted to act. I know that may be hard to believe, but when you do it semi-right, acting is actually about getting away from your ego. It’s like riding a rocket away from your ego and becoming weightless. And the two things you’re incapable of when you’re floating up there are thinking and caring what other people think. Any actor who has ever taken even a few baby steps in the direction of that stupid delight knows how close to perfection it feels — and also how much sex and respect it gets you afterward.

When I left New York eight years ago, I’d been doing pretty well — a couple of yearlong runs in the Broadway shows “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and “Broadway Bound,” a few national tours, a bunch of regional theater. I had a decent if hardly spectacular career going — I usually got good reviews, and casting directors were sometimes flattering — but after I had been in Los Angeles for a couple of weeks, I was pretty sure I would eventually have a theater named after me. That’s because, on more than one occasion, casting directors had pulled their glasses off very dramatically and said to me, “You are a great actor.” Exactly like that. Not “You’re a great actor,” with the contraction, but “You are a great actor.” All five words, spoken slowly. I was shocked. I was used to auditioning in big rehearsal studios in New York, where I had to project to be heard by the people at the other end of the room, but in L.A. I was suddenly auditioning in tiny, little well-appointed offices, with upholstered furniture, and I was still giving theater-size performances, full of life-and-death intensity and semaphore-like body language. Yet I was getting this very dramatic praise.

So I started to believe it. I am a great actor. I stared at the ceiling at night and rehearsed the avuncular speeches I would make to students accepting the Peter Birkenhead Scholarship at Juilliard. And then, after a third week passed and I hadn’t signed an actual contract, I started to realize that, in Hollywood-speak, “You are a great actor” loosely translates to “You’re an actor.”

The thing you want to hear at an audition is silence — the sound of people quietly smiling. This means, Hey, we’re gonna see you next week; no need to blow smoke in case you become famous; you’re getting the job and that’s flattery enough. Over the next few months, I learned how to stop playing to the balcony and start playing to the couch — and I started to hear a lot more encouraging silence. I was getting the hang of Hollywood.

I finally landed my first television job, playing a fast-talking schmuck of an agent on a Steven Bochco show called “Murder One.” Even I was struck dumb by how good I was in the audition. I don’t think I even said “thank you” as I left the room, because I was too busy thinking, “I am a great actor.”

Now, there is almost no describing how terrible I was on “Murder One,” but here’s my best shot: You know that famous “deer in the headlights” look? Well, imagine the same deer about two weeks later. You know, after the stuffing and mounting. That’s the kind of taxidermic look of fear that you will see on my face if you ever see this scene, which you will only if they create a show called “TV’s Funniest Bloopers and Apparent Brain Hemorrhages.”

Here’s what you won’t see if you ever catch this episode: Bochco, I swear, sitting five feet away from me, with his head in his hands. Seriously. Like, “How did my life come to this?” Like, “How is it possible that all the safeguards we have in place to prevent this kind of disaster from happening could all fail on the same day?”

But I got better. I did some recurring roles on a few shows, and I was a guest star on a bunch of others. I even did another Steven Bochco show, “NYPD Blue,” playing a fast-talking schmuck of a stockbroker (hey, wait a minute ), whom Dennis Franz “liked” for a murder, and I started settling into the Los Angeles version of the working actor’s life.

Here’s what that life is like: Only 5 percent of people who call themselves actors earn enough each year from acting to support themselves. So the number of actors who drive to work in a Porsche, or home through ornate electronic gates, is microscopic. I drive a Honda Hybrid, and I park it on the street in front of my apartment building. I did own a house once, with my ex-wife, but home ownership and marriage are pretty fragile things for people who sometimes wonder if they’ll ever work again.

So I learned early that when I’m on a set I should do my best to enjoy myself, which isn’t always easy. A Hollywood set is basically a boredom factory; I can’t think of a single day job I’ve had that wasn’t more pleasant, in a material sense, than working in television. At least when I waited tables I was in a decorated, well-lit place. There was the smell of fresh food cooking, and sometimes music was playing. It’s not like that on a soundstage. A soundstage smells like plywood, heated rubber and Teamsters. It sounds like the inside of a police van on a stakeout, except when it sounds like a house being renovated. So I usually find myself spending a lot of time visiting the “crafts services table” — the place where all the doughnuts and Twizzlers are kept. Working in television can be as boring as watching television, and it’s best dealt with exactly the same way: by taking breaks to go stare at food, and sometimes eat it.

Series regulars, the stars of the shows, all have time killing down to an art. Tyne Daly knits like crazy. George Clooney shoots hoops. On the best days, there’s a real foxhole-buddies kind of feeling on the set, and it’s pretty easy for me to be seduced into believing I’m on a kind of egalitarian, socialist TV kibbutz, where everyone comes to work in jeans and eats breakfast together. There’s a lot more getting along than you might think, and everyone is busy pitching in. The Steadicam guy is trying to walk backward around the actors as they do emergency rhinoplasty, and the props guy is trying to find a scalpel that has suddenly been added to the scene. It’s Mickey and Judy with $10 million.

The first thing I do when I get to work is make friends with the director of photography. He’s the one responsible for the way every shot is framed and lit. At my most well rested I have dark circles under my eyes, and the D.P. is the one who decides whether I get to look like a really tired Jerry Seinfeld or a dead Steve Buscemi. This is the kind of thing I never cared about in New York, but need to care about now.

I finally became a series regular on a very bad Ted Danson sitcom called “Becker,” playing his only mildly schmucky cousin/accountant. Now, I’d be lying if I said my first thought wasn’t “I’m gonna get to take my new girlfriend to Ted Danson’s house for lunch, and she’s gonna think I’m the shit.” But my second thought was about getting back to New York, and what a two-bedroom apartment might be going for in, oh, about five years. I got tons of laughs during rehearsals for the pilot; Ted Danson even told me I was “great” (uh oh), and the night we shot the pilot, his wife, Mary Steenburgen, grabbed me by the arm and said “I love your character most of all.” Just before the show, I took a walk around the place to soak in the feeling of my new home, and for the first time since I’d worked on Broadway, I let myself imagine a life that included enough health insurance to have children. But I was fully fluent in Hollywood-speak by then, so I knew that when, at the party on the set afterward, the president of Paramount Television gave me a big hug and said, “You are going to be at Paramount for a very long time,” it meant I was going to be at Paramount for about 11 more minutes. My character was cut from the show a month later.

The executive producer called me to deliver the news and said he had just gotten off the phone with Les Moonves, the president of CBS, and that Les had said, among other things, “I’m a big Peter Birkenhead fan.” As my grandfather might have said, “With fans like that, who needs hot air?”

I thought I would be devastated — I wanted to be devastated. But the truth is, when I saw an episode of “Becker” a few months later, I could hear the distinct and comforting sound of a bullet whizzing by my head. And you know what was most comforting of all? That it happened again, right away. The first job I got after “Becker” was on “Frasier,” and that character was cut, too. I realized that losing jobs was just part of the job. My metamorphosis into an L.A. actor was complete.

I’ve worked a lot since then, on shows like “Ally McBeal,” “The West Wing,” “Six Feet Under” and “Grey’s Anatomy” — mostly in parts that were interesting enough to keep me chasing the next job and well paying enough to cover the rent. None of that would have happened if I hadn’t gotten hugged at Paramount, so I’m grateful things went the way they did. And now they’re going a new way.

The guiding principle in television is “get the shot,” which means keep shooting, and talking, no matter what happens, because it might be good enough to move on and finish the episode on time and keep your job. So actors keep plugging away, trying to get the shot — get their shot at making it — even when the odds are staggeringly against them. But the definition of “making it” keeps changing as you hit your 40s and people like Donald Trump become stars.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still an actor — I’m still available for the calls when they come — but mostly I’m busy with other things. I’ve written the word “actor” in the “occupation” space on my tax return for 20 years, but this year I’ll probably put “writer.”

My old dogmas about doing only the noble work of theater became obsolete as soon as I discovered the nobility to be had in punching a studio clock and getting paid for an honest day’s work. But I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be doing that. Being an actor requires a belief in limitless possibilities, and these days I actually prefer limits. When you suspect a star-making, life-changing gig is around every corner it becomes difficult to believe in anything else. But I still watch television, and I love seeing my friends when they’re in something. It’s always like watching a small triumph: Someone’s working again after a dry spell, or got their dental insurance back.

A little happy ending, at least for now.

“I guess the white people in antebellum drag getting misty about ‘the Golden Age of the South’ might have been our first clue,” Gabbie observed.

We did hear the word “servant” on the tour, two or three times, in the telling of what were meant to be amusing anecdotes about the idiosyncrasies of the servants’ owners. Our guide was dressed in an elaborate, sky-blue ball gown, and chirped about what fun it was for her to “go back in time and live like Scarlett O’Hara for a day.”

As Gabbie read from the menu in her best Vivien Leigh, her eyes began to widen. She dropped the drawl and informed me that the Cabin had been serving busloads of visitors to Louisiana’s plantation country for more than 30 years on the strength of its reputation for authenticity, which the menu explained thusly: “Our goal is to preserve some of the local farming history, serve meals typical of the River Road tradition, and make your visit a relaxed and memorable one. The Cabin Restaurant began as one of the 10 original slave dwellings of the Monroe Plantation. Through the efforts, ideas, the love, sweat and patience of friends and family, you are able to enjoy a small sampling of Southern Louisiana history.”

The love, sweat and patience of actual participants in the “local farming history,” the original builders and tenants of the Cabin, were not dwelt upon or mentioned in the menu’s text, but their contribution to the restaurant’s ambience was subtly alluded to. As the waiter brought our food I read: “In the grand dining room, the roof is supported by four massive beams … placed so that the room resembles a Garconnier (the visiting bachelor’s quarters on a river road plantation.)”

And we put our menus down. I’ve enjoyed almost every spoonful of gumbo I’ve had over the years, whether in expensive restaurants, coffee shops or train stations, but I might have had my last one contemplating the events witnessed by the roof beams of a “visiting bachelor’s quarters” on a 19th-century sugar plantation.

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When the Civil War ended, there were no truth and reconciliation commissions formed to process memories, no Nuremberg Trials to enable reflection, no Great Emancipator to free the future from the past — only ghosts and the ravenous politics of memory. The need for national reckoning was quickly subordinated to the political imperative of reunification, and on both sides of the Mason Dixon line, forgetting became more valuable than remembering.

Southern apologists earned sudden fortunes in a gold rush of nostalgic forgetting. Within a year of the war’s end, a Virginia journalist named Edward Pollard published a novel called ”The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates,” a breathless, self-pitying fantasy, and the first of many to recast the conflict as a tragedy of fraternal strife and regional repression, to blame the Confederate defeat on the overwhelming resources and underhanded tactics of the North, exalt the Confederacy’s most ruthless generals as paragons of honor, revel in stories of freed people run amok, wallow in tearful, postwar family reunions, and pine for the “Golden Age” of hoop- skirts and happy-go-lucky chattel. It depicted slavery as a benign if not beneficial institution, and relegated further discussion on the topic to the offstage realm of “touchy” subjects, where, for perpetual Northern fear of offending delicate Southern sensibilities, it has languished ever since.

“Have you ever dreamed of waking up to an antebellum room that would be the envy of Scarlett O’Hara? The fulfillment of just such a dream is the essence of the Edgewood experience. Hosts Dot and Julian Boulware offer eight luxurious and charming guest rooms; six in the main house and two in the former slave’s quarters.” — Country Collections Magazine.

The scores of histories and plantation novels that followed Pollard’s, many produced by members of what came to be known as the Dunning School (after its founder, Columbia history professor William Archer Dunning), an influential movement of celebrity, revisionist scholars — a sort of mutton-chopped Heritage Foundation — helped concoct a broad, new Southern culture of perpetual grievance and nostalgia for a reimagined, antebellum idyll. The primary focus of most Dunning School stories was not the war itself, but Reconstruction, a period that Claude Bowers, an early-20th-century successor to Pollard (and given to similarly Glenn Beck-ian flights of tearful, dissociative rage) called “The Tragic Era.” It was a decade, as he saw it, marked by unrestrained Yankee corruption and sadism, which punished the South for secession and forced black suffrage on an already politically neutered white population. Bowers’ books demonized “fanatic” abolitionists and Ulysses S. Grant, exalted the Ku Klux Klan and Andrew Johnson, and sold hundreds of of thousands of copies.

“When a nigger died they let his folks come out the fields to see him afore he died. They buried him the same day, take a big plank and bust it with a ax in the middle enough to bend it back, and put the dead nigger in betwixt it. They’d cart them down to the graveyard on the place and not bury them deep enough that buzzards wouldn’t come circlin’ round. Niggers mourns now, but in them days they wasn’t no time for mournin’. — Mary Reynolds, former slave, 1936

By 1932, and the publication of “Gone With the Wind” — the ultimate Lost Cause novel and still the most popular book in America, after the Bible — Lost Cause literature succeeded in sacrificing the very meaning of the Civil War to the demands of myth-making. (The 1939 movie sealed the deal.) The culture of forgetting had become a national religion.

Seventy years later, movies like “The Help” — the latest in a long line of tributes to the unsung white heroes of black history, and a gauzy rendering of the civil rights era as a triumph of the human spirit over mean people — have taken up where ”Gone With the Wind” left off.  A direct descendant of Lost Cause culture, modern nostalgia is souvenir nostalgia, a taxidermical, preservation-fetish that isolates parts from wholes, pulls symbols out of context, and shrinks cultural memories to the size of a 9/11 commemorative coin. (Never Forget!) It’s woven into every corner of the culture, high and low, North and South, as pervasive as sleep. And it is a black hole of memory, the place where memory goes to die.

“One woman thought all the slave houses (now guest rooms) should be torn down, because it was an insult and exploiting slavery and so forth. And I replied, very nicely, that I think she would be destroying history.” — Mary Hill Caperton, manager of the Quarters, a bed and breakfast in Charlottesville, Va.

The Cabin is only one of dozens of former slave quarters around the country that have been gussied-up into hotel rooms or restaurants. It was exceedingly pleasant and brightly lit, full of cheerful, laughing patrons. Astonishingly tall, wholesome-looking children in middle-school basketball jerseys pointed ketchup-dipped fries at their dad’s brows and made gentle jokes about their hairlines. The Doobie Brothers’ “China Grove” bubbled down from speakers in the rafters.

A man with a wide smile appeared next to our table, seemingly out of nowhere, and introduced himself as the restaurant’s manager. We chatted about the proper pronunciation of “crawfish,” and the differences between the gumbos made on the bayou and in New Orleans, and when the subject turned to the Cabin, I asked him how it felt to run a place that used to house slaves. “It’s history, and that’s all there is to it,” he said. “It’s not something we dwell on, or push out there for people to see. It is a touchy subject. We just want people to have a nice time when they come here, and to enjoy the food and the history. This is a place where everybody feels welcome.”

He had a point. Gabbie and I seemed to be the only ones in the room not smiling, and for a moment the queasiness of chronic self-doubt, the familiar nausea of the self-ostracized, the vegetarian in the steakhouse, made me wonder if it was us. Were we the ones not seeing straight, arching our eyebrows through a life on the wrong side of the looking glass? And then I wondered why I was flattering myself.

Dead-eyed nostalgia, whether practiced by Tea Partyers, advertising directors or me, in my “heritage” running shoes, typing away on a computer built by indentured servants, can be invisible to us. As invisible as the whip — the very old, well-used buggy whip — hanging on the Cabin’s wall must have been to whoever decided it was a good idea to hang it there.

Back then, black and white lived apart, went to different schools and churches, played on different playgrounds, and went to different restaurants, bars, theaters, and soda fountains. But we shared a country and a culture. We were one nation. We were Americans.” –Pat Buchanan

Don’t get me wrong — I like nostalgia, I miss nostalgia. The kind that involves remembering, anyway: mostly private, typically accidental, not always rosy. When my great-uncle told stories about flying bomber missions over Germany, he didn’t merely recall events — experiences that he had a complicated affection for — he wondered about them. His eyes grew pained and befuddled; his chest rose and fell with a fullness no amount of time could diminish. He wasn’t running from himself to an imagined past, he was finding himself in his story, sorting it out, trying to see it clearly.

House (now Speaker) John Boehner recently complained that Barack Obama and congressional Democrats “are snuffing out the America that I grew up in.” –Think Progress, July 1, 2010

Of course childhood nostalgia — the kind of remembering you do when remembering is new, when memories are full and dramatic because they’re few, and weightless — is different. Mourning hamsters. Idealizing grandparents. Chronicling summers like they’re centuries. When I had 12 years to look back on, they were eons. When I had 20 I said, “my whole life” and meant it.

But the past I remembered then wasn’t even my own. I sported a ridiculous ’50s trench coat and well-thumbed copies of “On the Road” in the ’80s the way 20-year-olds in ancient Rome probably carried Euripides in their vintage Greek togas. When you’re young, nostalgia isn’t about the past, but the future. It’s a train in the distance, a sound from the old days hinting at the new. When your own past is too frightening to look at, and the future is terrifyingly unknown, you fake your way through the present. I spent my days wanting something I couldn’t name, and because I didn’t have memories to attach to that yearning, I yearned for a time before me. I conjured a past and missed it and bought an overcoat I prayed I’d grow into.

Lincoln’s famous “house divided” analogy was a perfect one for a country in crisis, acknowledging as it did the psychic architecture of the nation, a collection of rooms under one roof. But his deep commitment to an authentic, family-like, postwar reconciliation was not matched by his successors. The North’s implementation of Reconstruction, in its moderate and radical forms, amounted to first coddling, then humiliating, a wayward sibling.

After Lincoln’s assassination, Republicans struck an implicit deal with the South, a sort of economic/cultural tradeoff, in which the South was allowed to construct the edifice of the Lost Cause culture in return for letting Northern investors exploit the South’s resources. For decades after the war, at cemetery and monument dedications, Blue-Gray reunions and Veterans Day parades, Northern politicians and former generals made a point of describing the conflict in the language of the Lost Cause, praising the chivalry of once-estranged brothers, lauding their former enemy’s fierce dedication to their mission, and rarely acknowledging what that mission had been. The relative postwar silence of the North on the issue of slavery, and the flagrant corruption of newly established Union military governments, helped stoke already flourishing Southern resentment and denial. Instead of beginning a period of reflection, the South spent the late 19th century dressing up in old uniforms and comforting itself with revisionist stories.

The Reconstruction-era South didn’t invent dishonesty, but its response to America’s defining trauma has become a foundational lie, supporting an ever-growing edifice of false history. It’s a lie so big no one will forcefully challenge it, a lie that’s too big to fail. In the sesquicentennial year of the Civil War, the “stars and bars” fly over state capitals, proclamations are issued that honor the Confederacy without mentioning slavery, and commuters drive to work on highways named after white supremacists. And appeals to wounded pride and the lost values of imagined pasts are an everyday part of our political culture.

Just like Pollard and Bowers before them, modern-day, Lost Cause-ers like Pat Buchanan reversed the tide of postwar popular opinion about a conflict, this time in Vietnam, by pining loudly for a law-and-order Eden that had been despoiled by protesters. And now the wholly invented fiction of hippies spitting on soldiers returning from Southeast Asia is believed by more Americans than remember what My Lai was.

The same pattern has repeated itself many times, from Morning in America to WMD, from the Swift Boaters to the Tea Party. The decade following the Civil War amounted to a tragic, missed opportunity for the South to engage in a different kind of remembering. Even a little grown-up nostalgia could have gone a good, long way. The illness implied in its suffix, the sickness of the heart that a powerful longing produces, can be as necessary and cleansing as a storm. But of course that’s what the Lost Causers were afraid of, are afraid of still, and have always been quick to nip in the bud.

WASHINGTON — President Reagan said Thursday that he has decided not to visit the site of a Nazi concentration camp during his trip to Europe next month because he wants to focus on peace rather than the past. He added that he believes West Germany’s present sense of collective guilt for the Holocaust of World War II, in which millions of Jews were killed, is “unnecessary.” — The Los Angeles Times, March 2, 1985

During a tour of Houmas House, another Louisiana River Road plantation, as our guide told a story about the acquisition of a particularly expensive set of silver by the proprietors of the estate, we wandered to a window, and noticed a ramshackle structure in the distance, maybe 70 yards away. Unmarked, unrenovated, unattended, a dilapidated cottage with a small front porch, half reclaimed by grass. A former slave cabin? Our guide said yes, and that plans to renovate the structure were in the works. She added that we were free to go out and take a look, once the tour was over.

Later that day, at Destrehan, a former sugar plantation a few miles down, the guide neglected to mention that it was the site of the largest slave revolt in American history.

When I asked Angela da Silva, a professor of black history at Lindenwood University, and owner of the St. Louis-based National Black Tourism Network, for her thoughts, she said, “Jesus coming down off the cross couldn’t get me to stay in some gentrified slave cabin with a jacuzzi in it. The misery and pain that happened in those cabins … This is about shame. People who own these places want the history to go away. But it won’t go away. And until we as black people insist on the story being told, no one has any incentive to change their business model.”

Da Silva grew up just a few miles from the Baker plantation in Missouri, where her family worked as slaves from 1837 until the end of the war. She learned almost nothing in school about slavery, she says, but her grandmother told her stories that she remembers to this day. As she spoke about sleeping in the same bed with her grandmother until she was 10, and waking up in the middle of the night to ask questions about her ancestors and life on the plantation, her voice softened, and she cleared her throat. I could hear her slow, full breathing over the phone.

“Once you got here, we were all the same. Isn’t that remarkable? But we also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.”  –U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann

Slavery is rarely mentioned on any private plantation tour. Proprietors typically insist that innovative architecture and interesting design justify their focus on the “Big Houses,” but that argument can be awfully hard to fathom. Leaving aside obvious exceptions like Monticello, surely the most notable thing about most plantations is not who lived there, who designed them or what they look like. A beautiful home made beautiful by slaves is not important for its beauty. To elevate aesthetic elements over history in the public presentation of slave estates is to demote people once inventoried like candlesticks to a status even lower than that of things. It’s an obscenity.

There is a small museum on the site of the I.G. Farben Building in Germany (a building that, it should be noted, is considered an architectural masterpiece), the former headquarters of the company responsible for enslaving hundreds of thousands of prisoners at its notorious “factories.” It’s dedicated to the memory of a former prisoner, and exhibits photos and documents from Farben’s disgraceful past. Tour guides at Auschwitz itself do not include the commandant’s extravagant house on their schedule. The point isn’t that American slavery is the exact moral or material equivalent of the Holocaust, but that our country’s “original sin” has not been fully, culturally processed.

If America is a family, it’s a family that has tacitly agreed to never speak again — not with much honesty, anyway — about the terrible things that went on in its divided house. Slavery has been taught, it has been written about. There can’t be many subjects that rival it as an academic ink-guzzler. But the culture has not digested slavery in a meaningful way, hasn’t absorbed it the way it has World War II or the Kennedy assassination. We don’t feel the connections to it in our bones. It’s hard enough these days to connect with what happened 15 minutes ago, let alone 15 decades, given the endless layers of “classic,” “heirloom,” “traditional” “collectible,” “old school” comfort we’re swaddled in. But isn’t it the least we could do? What is the willful forgetting of slavery if not the coverup of a crime, an abdication of responsibility to its victims and to ourselves?

If it’s true that we’re all breathing Caesar’s breath — that because of the finite amount of perpetually moving molecules on Earth, one or two that he breathed are in each of our exhalations — then we don’t need to dress up in his clothes to connect ourselves to the past, we’re already wearing them. The past is with us always, but we need to live with it, open our eyes and poke around in it, take it all in: the good, the bad and the mythic, if we want to stay connected to the ever-changing present.

The Cribs, as you probably know, believe in “crying it out,” “walking it off,” and midcentury modern furniture. The Beds, of course, believe in co-sleeping, home birthing and placenta soup. Both groups believe that I, as a new parent, am a dangerous idiot, and they are not at all shy about letting me know that.

So I’m writing this to take a stand, to ask for your help in taking our village back, and in not getting the stink-eye at parties.

After only eight months of fatherhood I’ve learned a lot about the gangs. I’ve learned to recognize the Cribs’ distinctive attire (if I see a pair of orange Crocs coming my way, I just cross the street). I’ve come to know the Beds’ brutal hazing rituals (which they refer to as “Bikram yoga”). I’ve learned each gang’s colorful parenting patois.

But the main thing that distinguishes the gangs from each other is their philosophies. Fundamentally, the Cribs and Beds disagree about how kids should sleep. The first member of the Cribs I ever met explained to me, over a steamy quadruple espresso, that they believe a child will grow up to be calm, secure and independent as long as — over the sound of his own terrified howling and the screech of a white-noise machine turned up to 11 — he can’t hear his parents grinding their teeth with worry over following the same sleep-training regimen all their friends do.

The Beds, on the other hand, believe that independence is something a family does, together, in bed. According to a conversation I overheard at this year’s Topanga Canyon Soy Cheese and Hemp Festival, the Beds feel that nothing can match the sense of security a child feels when she cuddles with her mom, dad, sister, brother, stepsister and ferret, safe in the knowledge that they’ll all be with her through the night. Every minute. Of every night. While her brother farts on her knee. Family Bed parents feel that co-sleeping will engender a sense for the child, later in life, that she can face anything, as long as a much older man with gray back hair and bad breath holds her tight while she does.

The gangs speak their own languages when it comes to things like sleep training, and it’s important to learn to decipher them. For instance, our friend Marsha recently asked me whether our daughter was “sleeping through the night yet,” which in gang-speak means, “How are things on the Island of Misfit Parents?” I tried but failed to change the subject, and when I described the ambivalent, improvised approach Jenny and I take, I was met with the inevitable phrase, “Whatever works for you!” which means, “Have fun visiting her in juvie!”

The Cribs and Beds are mostly in agreement, however, about the notorious peanut dilemma. My wife and I love peanut butter. The first thing I did when she told me it was time to go to the hospital to have the baby was make two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for her to have later. I put them in our special “Go Bag” with the earplugs, lip balm, Rebozo support slings and thought, “Did I just release evil peanut dust into the air? Is this the last PB&J we’ll eat for 18 years?” Many children, of course, have an allergy to peanuts, which doctors now believe is probably caused by an early exposure to peanut butter, and which can be prevented … by an early exposure to peanut butter. I understand this might be confusing, but don’t worry — it’s not your fault — it’s peanut butter’s fault for being mind-alteringly scrumptious. Both the Cribs and the Beds believe in the current scientific consensus that we must stay vigilant against peanut butter, by feeding it to our children early, but never. It’s a fairly safe subject to bring up, and good for fooling the gang-bangers into thinking you might be one of them.

And some Cribs and Beds are finding common ground on other issues. For instance, when Jenny was pregnant, and before we knew the sex of the baby, I, as a Jewish soon-to-be father, started to feel the pull of a 2,000-year tradition and considered circumcising my possible son. I mentioned this fact at a rumble (“baby shower”), where I learned that I was just as likely to be called a barbarian by a mom with seven holes punched in her ear and a line of credit at the pediatric homeopath’s as I was by the father of a 6-year-old figure skater. I also learned that the idea of not circumcising my son could get me accused of breaking a sacred covenant … by a twice-divorced Hollywood agent. I have to admit that, at that moment, it felt very tempting to join one of the gangs. To at least know where I stood, even if I had no idea what I thought. Maybe effective child rearing was really all about navigating life’s daily obstacles with the comforting, quiet sense of smugness that only parent-gang membership could provide. But I fought that impulse. I reminded myself that I have my own brand of arrogance, thank you very much. If there’s one thing a lifelong, fence-sitting commitment-phobe is good at, it’s not choosing sides.

But sometimes conflict is unavoidable, and it’s not pretty. The home-birthing wars could flare up again any minute now, and this time Ricki “On the Business of Being Born” Lake could make a full-fledged comeback. So, if you’re not in a gang, it’s very important to keep your wits about you. Soon after our daughter was born, we met a person who taught us the word “lactivist” is a real thing that exists. She said it in public, and she wasn’t laughing, so I guess she was more likely to be a member of the Beds than the Cribs. But she lacked any of the usual identifying accessories, such as the Bolivian slings that many members of the Beds use to carry their babies, or the actual Bolivians that the Cribs prefer, so I couldn’t be sure. Jenny had had a tough time getting our daughter to nurse properly for the first few weeks after she was born. After a very frustrating talk with the lactivist, Jenny asked her if it would ruin everything if she supplemented the baby’s feeding with a bottle once in a while, and through an ice-cold smile, without hesitation, the lactivist said, “It would.” As far as I’m concerned, the tears that popped out of Jenny’s eyes at that moment were a consequence of our first brush with gang violence.

Passions run very high on these subjects. The Beds feel that in defending something like home birth, they’re defending something primal and sacred, that they’re on the side of Mother Nature herself. The Cribs feel they’re on the side of modernity, of rational thinking, science and safety. When I hear them talk about it, I actually think both sides make a good case. But then, when I think about it a little more, I wonder about their sanity. Did I mention that I’m an ambivalent type? I wonder if maybe investing so much emotion in these issues isn’t misplacing it a little. Couldn’t they use all that righteous indignation for fixing the education system?

But see now, as I write that, I wonder why I’m being so hard on the gangs. Having a kid was an overwhelming experience. All of a sudden I was confronted with this fragile, chaotic, mortal life that I was responsible for. And then there was the baby! Seeing my own humanity clearly was one thing, but seeing my daughter’s was all things, all at once, forever. Living, breathing, surprising chaos right there in my mortal hands. It was enough to make me fear that chaos a little bit. To want to hang on, maybe a bit too tight.

When Jenny and I were in the hospital, we never ate one of those PB&J sandwiches. Her contractions never once settled in to the regular pattern we were told would mark the onset of labor. We never used anything in the “Go Bag,” or any of the special labor positions we’d learned and practiced in birthing class. But I’m glad we learned them. I’m glad we planned and made promises and came up with lots of rules for ourselves, because it helped focus our minds. It eased our worries, made us feel like this was doable. Made us feel like a family. Real gang members say that’s how they think of their gangs — as surrogate families. Not many of us live in the same house with our uncles or grandmothers anymore. These days our friends are our families. So maybe what the home birthers and crib lovers are defending isn’t merely about practices but about love and companionship. How these things help us find the sweet spot between chaos and order. Maybe people are just trying to find their footing on ever-shifting sands. Maybe we should all cut each a little slack.

Except for the people wearing orange Crocs, of course. You guys need to buy some real shoes.

Peter Birkenhead is the author of the memoir “Gonville.”

“There’s no doubt in my mind that Afghanistan will remain a democracy and serve as an incredible example.” — GWB, Jan. 5, 2006

“There’s no doubt in my mind [warrantless surveillance] is legal.” — GWB, Jan. 26, 2006

Remember good old doubt? When a capacity for self-doubt was a prerequisite for self-knowledge and a hallmark of maturity? To put it another way, can you imagine John F. Kennedy walking with the swagger of George W. Bush? Kennedy walked like what he was — a man in pain from injuries he suffered in an actual war, and he allowed himself to be photographed hunched over with worry during the Cuban missile crisis. That picture, now an iconic image of heroic doubt, is sadly anachronistic.

Forty-five years ago today, JFK, speaking to the graduating class at Yale, said, “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived, and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic … Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” He urged the students to “move on from the reassuring repetition of stale phrases to a new, difficult, but essential confrontation with reality.” Kennedy was urging the students not to let the establishment, which he represented, get away with anything. Submit its rhetoric to the fiercest scrutiny. Think for yourself. It was an invitation that reflected his own education, two years earlier, in the wisdom of doubt.

By June 11, 1962, the president had learned the lessons of the Bay of Pigs disaster well. His Yale speech seemed infused with regret at not having treated the CIA’s intelligence with more skepticism before the invasion. (The agency had promised that the exiles could “melt into the mountains” if the plan failed — mountains that it failed to notice were 80 miles away.) The speech also foreshadowed his own fierce scrutiny of the rhetoric of Gen. Curtis LeMay and other administration hawks, who urged an attack during the missile crisis.

Six years after the speech, George W. Bush graduated from Yale and went on to confront reality with a vengeance, or, more accurately, ignore it all together, as Ron Suskind noted in “The One Percent Solution,” when he famously quoted a White House aide dismissing journalists and historians as “the reality-based community.” But it would be lazy and wrong to think of George Bush as the source from which the modern disdain for doubt flows. The truth is, we, as a culture, don’t value self-doubt the way we did in the time of Kennedy or of other famous doubters, like Lincoln or Jefferson. We have created the political culture of mythology JFK warned us about. We have the president and, as the recent presidential debates have shown, the potential presidents we deserve.

Let’s face it, George Bush doesn’t have to doubt himself, any more than Donald Trump or Tom Cruise or Mitt Romney do. We live in a culture where they will never be forced to examine their prejudices or flaws. Of course, they have been denied the true confidence of people who are brave enough to face their doubts and who know there are worse things than feeling insecure. Like, say, feeling too secure. Pumped up by steroidic pseudo-confidence and anesthetized by doubt-free sentimentality, they are incapable of feeling anything authentic and experiencing the world. But that hasn’t stopped them, and won’t stop others, from succeeding in a society that is more enamored of a non-reality-based conception of leadership than previous generations were.

JFK’s generation had been warned by FDR about the corrosive peril of fear, and they took the admonishment to heart. But imagine if they had approached their moment in history with the grandiose self-image with which we’ve approached ours. Without the wisdom of doubt, without the grace of humility and the simple ability to learn from mistakes, would anyone have called them the Greatest Generation? (And by the way, don’t we do them a disservice with that moniker — didn’t they fight against all things “greatest” and on the side of splendid imperfection?) Imagine what the world would look like if they’d had the disdain for humility we do, if they’d relied on a conception of themselves as innately good, if they’d allowed themselves to think they knew everything and therefore learned nothing.

But our generation has erected a culture that confuses happiness with a lack of discomfort, and leadership with an almost psychotic form of false optimism. We have ingeniously insulated ourselves from self-scrutiny and fear. We tuck ourselves away in gated communities, hibernate in food courts, or sleep in front of televisions, swathed in layer upon layer of soft and soporific comfort to protect ourselves from the bracing draft of doubt. We can barely feel our own culture anymore.

Our pretend fearlessness has made us timid. Some of our filmmakers, the Michael Bays and Brett Ratners, make movies as if they’re embarrassed by stories, and some of our singers, especially those of the emo variety, sing as if they’re embarrassed by melody. Most of us are getting our information from only a few sources, and it’s infused with narcotic banality: pillow-embroidery sentiment and locker room aphorisms that induce the waking sleep of consumerism. We’ve been convinced that good things go to people who “want it more than the other guy,” that wealth is a reward, and poverty a penalty. That the highest compliment we can pay each other is, we know what we want and how to get it, which makes us sound brave. But by banishing doubt we have cultivated fear. We’ve stopped looking under the bed for monsters. The good books and songs and movies, like last year’s harrowing “Little Children,” have to fight through layer upon layer of swaddling to get to us.

We’ve forgotten how valuable, even vital, it is to be bravely unsure of ourselves. We’ve forgotten that doubt is the hill that hope climbs, that without it our spirits atrophy.

You’d think that after the past six years we’d want some of JFK’s brand of genuine bravery and capacity for doubt in our leaders, but most of the current candidates for president, with a few exceptions, like Barack Obama, John McCain and John Edwards, again sound like scared little children playing soldier. They puff up their chests and bray in the absolutist style of the guy who got us into the biggest mess of our lifetime. They clumsily and desperately make up facts, conflate enemies, and endorse the worst kinds of behavior, all to seem more certain than the next guy that evil is all around us. They present themselves as even less troubled by reality than our freedom-frying, deaf, dumb and blind dauphin. And at the same time they seem excruciatingly un-free, as if they’re straining against the straitjackets of political convention.

Our current presidential candidates could do us all a favor and read the words of a president who had to wear a confining back brace every day and who would often wince in pain, slump with doubt, and exhibit all sorts of human flaws — but also gave the impression that he could swim three miles in the South Pacific if he had to, even in his suit and tie. Someone who stood up to the fear-mongers of his day with courageous doubt, who knew firsthand that the closest thing there is to absolute evil is absolutism itself.

You seem to have trapped yourself in a system of theater creation in this country that is positively Soviet in its unwieldy, self-satisfied stuck-ness. A system that, for the last 50 years, has reacted to television not by learning from it but by “distinguishing” itself from it — and thereby neutering and bleeding itself into desiccated, rarefied irrelevance. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Tell me something: How come the go-to insult for theater critics and theater makers is still the word “television”? And how come none of you who use it seem to have any idea how much you sound like grumpy old coots, sneering at the printing press, or the electric light? I say this as a friend, as someone who has acted in, directed and written for the theater: You have just got to get out more. I mean, the same elements that are considered avant-garde in the theater today were considered avant-garde in 1918. The theater still thinks dissonance is a daring musical gesture, and that nonlinear storytelling is new. It’s embarrassing how proudly it seems possessed by not only the aesthetic, but the ethos and issues of another era.

You know that people who write for film and television aren’t just doing it for the money anymore, right? They do it because their work won’t be developed to death by an endless supply of places with “mission statements,” because they know they will have more artistic freedom, more fun and more opportunities to do the kind of interesting work the theater once provided, about, you know, recognizable people in dramatic situations, struggling with the human condition.

If the theater is going to return to anything like its former position in our culture, it has to change. Why are some of you so resistant to the idea of marketing to young tastemakers, the 20- to 40-year-olds who enjoy sophisticated art and music, who are the potential defibrillators of the American theater? When you start producing more plays for and about the people in Nicole Holofcener’s movies, or David Chase’s television shows, you’ll be on the right track.

Some of you already are. There have been some good plays produced in the last 30 years — “Angels in America” sure was great — but there haven’t been enough of them. “Spring Awakening” and the upcoming “10 Million Miles” appeal to people who might not have been to the theater in a while, and that’s a very good thing. If you keep doing shows like that, keep producing plays that sound like they were written by people who might read Michael Chabon, or listen to the Decemberists, or watch “Weeds,” I promise you, more of those people will come to the theater.

But right now they’re more likely to see plays that sound as if they were written by the light of a candle in a Chianti bottle. Plays filled with cringingly unconfident writing that muddies the waters in order to make it all appear deep; writing full of insufferable name dropping and artless declaiming of Big Ideas, with a campy, brittle sense of humor right out of 1959, performed in a teeth-gratingly earnest, over-enunciated style that has become a parody of itself. Richard Greenberg’s insistent assertion of his bona fides as a collector of intellectual arcana in “Three Days of Rain,” the late August Wilson’s dogged refusal to trim his character’s verbal output to a level that would articulate their inner lives rather than the playwright’s high regard for his own ideas in plays like “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” and Jon Robin Baitz’ determined obtuseness in plays like “A Fair Country” are symptoms of a theater community that has been too cloistered for too long.

Hasn’t our culture moved on a bit since, say, William Inge, and don’t we all kind of take it for granted, for instance, that sexual repression is bad? Why do we need to see yet another sexual awakening story, even if it’s by Terrence McNally (“Some Men”) or Jon Robin Baitz (“The Paris Letter”)? A lot of the better television shows, even back in 2003 or 2004, were weaving what was happening in the world into their stories in subtle, surprising, even funny ways, like it is in life, but the theater gave us two David Hare plays solemnly breaking the news that war is bad and George Bush is an idiot.

Some of you seem to think the problem is with the audience, and that the only prescription for what ails the theater is to redouble your commitment to doing work that is “important” and “ambitious.” I’ve got news for you: People aren’t staying away from the theater because it isn’t ambitious enough. They’re staying away because it’s relentlessly “ambitious,” because it keeps insisting on its own unique and righteous importance, despite all sad evidence to the contrary.

To be sure, when theater is great, it’s really great, and it can be transcendent. Of course, so can sculpture, and folk music, and animated movies. But the theater hasn’t been great for a long time now, and during that time, other storytelling forms, especially television, have seriously outpaced it. Do any of you think that there have been enough theater productions of note in the last 10 years that achieve the creative unity, the complexity, the appreciation of moral ambiguity, the timely insight, humor and, most important, entertainment value, of “The Sopranos”? Or “Six Feet Under” or “Arrested Development” or “The Simpsons” or “The Wire,” “The Larry Sanders Show” or “30 Rock” or “Deadwood” or “South Park” or “Prime Suspect” or “Curb Your Enthusiasm” or “ER” or “The Office”?

This is not accidental. It’s because the theater has been hijacked. It’s been commandeered by grant-proposal writers and dramaturges, by panel-discussion moderators and chin-in-hand bureaucrats, many of whom brook no more dissent than the Bush administration. To even suggest, at any of the endless symposiums that the theater community can’t get enough of these days, that the problems facing the theater might be solved by respecting the audience more instead of less, that perhaps, instead of designing condescending “outreach” programs, the theater might try educating itself, and listening to the people it’s been reaching out to, is to tempt the derisive wrath of a community whose motto might as well be “You’re with us or against us.”

This is why the theater many of us grew up with, that was so often moving, funny and fun, has been replaced by a bloodless, sexless, outdated facsimile. There are still exceptions, of course, like John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt,” a play confident enough in its own ideas and emotional honesty to speak in a voice that’s lucid and thrilling instead of opaque and soporific. But most of the time when I see a play these days, I feel like I’m being read to from the journal of a bored, entitled graduate student. I often feel like I’d rather have watched a good episode of “Scrubs.”

The great artists of the theater’s Golden Era — many of whom would have scoffed at that characterization of themselves and insisted instead that they were craftsmen — great heroes like Abe Burrows, Noel Coward, Mary Martin, Bert Lahr, Frank Loesser and the rest, applied themselves to the modest and deeply difficult goal of creating work that was entertaining, and so, they invariably, and often inadvertently, created work that was profound. But now profundity is the unembarrassed goal. These days it seems like every other interview with one of you guys includes two or three unabashed pronouncements about your work’s importance. Way too many of you plead the case that theater people are great artists, unfairly ignored by a television-watching world that is too ignorant to appreciate you.

Which makes me wonder: Why are you asking for attention from people you look down on? It seems to me you should stop the us vs. them, and join the party. Because, and I say this only as someone who cares, you would do yourselves and everyone who loves you a big favor if you just broke down and got cable.

I can’t imagine having to go through that experience again without the privacy that made it a productive one. But as Lynn Harris detailed in her Broadsheet post a few days ago, a group of parents of children with Down syndrome have started a campaign to “educate” couples who have been given a prenatal diagnosis by having them meet children with the syndrome. They’re convinced that a significant portion of the women who did would choose to not terminate their pregnancies. I’m sure the people behind this campaign have the best intentions, but the premise behind it is a condescending and dangerous one, guilty of the very thing it purports to oppose: helping to create a nightmarish future where our population will be engineered, rather than born of individuals respected enough to make their own decisions.

This group of parents is intruding into a usually private decision by directly pressuring doctors to send their patients to the homes of Down syndrome children (!), in hopes of assuaging the trepidations of those prospective parents. They say they’re motivated by a fear that the wide availability of amniocentesis and other new genetic tests will allow people to screen Down syndrome children out of existence, to essentially engage in eugenics, and I’m sure that fear is genuine. But aren’t they misdirecting it?

Pregnant women who have already decided to have amniocentesis are probably not, in general, lacking information about issues related to their pregnancy. I’m sure that, again in general, the people who are lacking information, who are uneducated about Down syndrome, are also not well informed about the tests for it or the options available to them after they get the results. They are the people we need to help, and we can help them best by creating a culture that actually values life, not one that sacrifices the quality of the lives of thousands of (mostly poor) young women in the name of “morality.”

Is a woman who decides to abort a fetus that would be born into poverty, or addicted to crack, practicing “eugenics”? I don’t happen to think so — I would also exempt screening for genetic diseases and syndromes that significantly impair a person’s quality of life from that term, which I think should be reserved for the clearly malign use of genetic testing to screen out undesirable attributes, like gender or hair color or sexual identity — but my opinion is irrelevant. The only opinion that counts is the opinion of the women making the decision. And if we think leaving it up to those women puts us on a “slippery slope” we need to take a look around us, because we are already on the slope. We always have been. The trick is to keep our feet, and that’s what personal ethics are for. The slope toward a dystopian future where life is devalued has unquestionably been greased, but not by mostly poor women making wrenching decisions about what to do with their own bodies and their own lives. It has been greased by a ruling class that, in countless ways, circumscribes the lives of those women while seeking to remove all restraints on their own depravity.

Some of the people who want to educate others about children with Down syndrome freely admit that it’s because they don’t want resources to be taken away from programs that help their kids. I don’t want that either. But couples struggling with the decision to abort a pregnancy are not the enemy in that fight. The enemy is the folks who have been radically defunding health, education and social programs since 1981, when their patron saint started the ball rolling. The fact that Ronald Reagan later suffered from a disease that might be cured by using stem cells garnered from human embryos is an irony that has, thankfully, not been lost on all of them. Maybe that’s a reason to hope things will change.