Category: current affairs

Art

The Persistence of Civilization

I wanted to get this down before the thoughts and feelings of yesterday fade and I start to over-intellectualize everything.

Civilization did not end yesterday. Just in case anyone failed to notice. Nibiru did not slam into the Earth as some predicted. We did not throw down to North Korea (yet). And there remains football.

And though here in my hometown, the local politics have of late been strained, to say the least, we are not descending into mindless brutality.

Let me offer the picture of two throngs of people gathered to make cultural statements.

Yesterday the first of what we all hope will be an annual event occurred in the Central West End of St. Louis.  Bookfest.  A section of one street was closed off, there were vendors on the street, a stage where live music was performed all day, and author events held in a number of local establishments. The whole thing got started Friday night with a presentation by Sherman Alexie at the Sheldon Theater in our theater district. It continued then with events for kids, teens, and adults of all ages, featuring over forty of the best writers currently working. Poets, novelists, essayists, we had them all.

And people came.

Hundreds. Venues were filled to listen, to partake, to soak in the rarefied and uplifting gestalt of written arts, performance, and conversation.

We unveiled a new commemorative statue in front of Left Bank Books to William S. Burroughs, completing the four-star authors corner which already included Kate Chopin, Tennessee Williams, and T.S. Eliot.

People came to hear writers talk about craft and content, tell stories, read from their work, engage in the carpentry of culture.

In other words, Making Civilization.

It was amazing.

In other parts of the metropolitan area, others gathered, as they have been gathering since last week, to protest injustice. The response has been considerably different, and some people see this as evidence of the end of our civilization. Maybe not totally, but protest to them is viewed as cracks in the dam, as if civilization is a pool that must be contained by thick walls and held in place, immobile. Immaculate.

I humbly suggest that the protests and our gathering to celebrate the literary arts are manifestations of the same work—making civilization.

Gathering decorously to listen to speakers and then sagely nod, basking in the gloaming of nuanced cultural expression is fundamentally part of angry protest condemning abuse of power and a demand for justice. You cannot, ultimately, have one without the other—that is, Civilization without Justice—and you can have neither of those if people will not show up to build them.

I participated in yesterday’s festivities, I was on the agenda as a writer, but I also work for Left Bank Books and spent a good part of the day doing the business of facilitating the events.  I am now adding what I can to the holism that must be felt and recognized in order for our civilization to grow and become better and richer.

It is easy to watch the news and perhaps think maybe fleeing to the country, stockpiling for the coming Dark Age, fearing the people two blocks over who we’ve never met are all rational responses to a process of inevitable decay.  It’s a very myopic response.  Because while the one goes on, the other things continue and grow and make us better. We are not one thing, even if  we are all in this together, and when someone says we have a right to assemble to buy books, listen to music, and enjoy the arts but not to condemn injustice, then a major truth is being overlooked.

Or never recognized in the first place.

I was part of the discussion on science fiction.  My copanelists—Charlies Jane Anders, Ann Leckie, Annalee Newitz—all spoke to the life-affirming, onward-building, ever-optimistic nature of science fiction, which says tomorrow Will Be and more often than not Will Be Better.  But it’s not just SF—it’s the fact that people came to drink from the font of art all day long. That people showed up who not only knew who Sherman Alexie is but also who William S. Burroughs was and who responded to the resonance we all create by the work we do.

The world is not going to end.  We’re in an awkward, in many ways ugly and incomprehensible period right now, but in the mix we have light and joy and deep connection.

Celebrate.

culture

What Happened?

Hillary Clinton has a new book coming out. It discusses what went wrong in the 2016 election.  Already it’s stirring the ashes, raising ires, resparking blame-laden conversations.

One thing I recall. It was a vague disquiet during one of the debates. I had a sudden sense of foreboding, watching the match.  For a couple of minutes I kept thinking “She’s going to lose.”

Why? Because she was talking policy.

As I watched, listening, I saw one candidate fully prepared to step into the office ready to do the job and explaining that fact in clear, lucid, surprisingly informative terms. I have rarely seen a candidate hold forth in one of these at this level.  The other candidate had no plan, didn’t care, and wasn’t about to engage in a policy discussion on any level.

I had a creeping sense of doom, watching that.  Because I knew then that the only way Hillary was going to win would be if voter turnout was high. Very high.  Otherwise he was going to win. (Later, I erased that impression, because it was unbearable, and I found myself reassuring people who apparently had experienced the same sense of dread, but what is it they say about initial impressions?)

In retrospect this seems absurd.  She was dealing with the realities of the office, laying out her programs, displaying an astute grasp of the issues, the problems, and showing that she understood how all this works and could do the job.  All he did was hammer on “We’re gonna do things” and “She’s a nasty woman.”

He appealed directly do people who (a) were never going to vote for Hillary to begin with, (b) had no fucking idea what she was talking about because, frankly, they neither care nor have taken any time to educate themselves about such things, and therefore (c) saw her as an elitist snob talking down to them.  All this plays well in a traditional political theater.  It’s not the first time.  In modern history, pretty much the same thing happened to Adlai Stevenson.

Who?  He ran against Eisenhower in 1952.  He was a technocrat, a highly educated man, a career public servant, and he had more brains than the next five people in any room.

But he lost because he refused to play the game according to the demands of the audience.  Truman kept telling him to stop sounding so high and mighty and educated, but Stevenson maintained a persistent faith in the savvy and comprehension of the average American.  He refused to “dumb down” his message because he thought it would be insulting to voters.

He didn’t stand a chance against “I Like Ike.”

So while most people probably agreed with Stevenson, they voted for Eisenhower.

Now, as far as I’m concerned, this is not the fault of the candidates.  This is symptomatic of people who have been taught to want a cheerleader instead of an administrator.  This is the fault of people who don’t really give much of a damn about the details of policy or the intransigence of global politics or the intricacies of an  ever-shifting landscape.  This is the fault of people who have been raised, by various means, to mistrust intellectuals.

They are not in the majority, but there are enough of them that, in the hurly-burly and tumble of national elections, they have an impact all out of proportion to what is really true of the general population.

We have gerrymandering, we have niche news sourcing, and we have an economic environment that keeps people off-balance.  Added to that we now seem to have had a huge influx of foreign “fake” news that lit a fire under a near-boiling pot.

When Bill Clinton ran, the motto of his campaign was “It’s the economy, stupid!” And he spoke to that.  His people spoke to that.  Perversely, given everything that’s happened since then, George H.W. Bush looked like the elitist intellectual by comparison.

A telling lesson.

I do not believe the majority of American voters are in the camp that responds to the kind of simplistic breast-beating Trump voters did.  But many of those Americans did not vote.

But there in the debates we saw one of the chief problems:  Hillary mopped the stage with him, won all three debates hands down…and lost the election.

Yes, she garnered more popular votes, but in the electoral races it was the other camp that dictated where those votes would go.  And they don’t like smart people.  It was too close a race for nuance and intellect to overcome carnival showmanship.

I’d like to be wrong.  I put this out there purely as one idea.  But during those debates I saw it—the power of dumb trumping brains.

Absurdity

Basic Mismanagement

One of the few lessons I learned in all the years I held even minor management positions is basic to human psychology. People are inconsistent, emotionally. Not that most circumstances will reveal that, but when you push something it comes out. This is fundamental and in order to navigate life beneficently you need to understand this. You also need to understand the process of what I call Issue Transition.  That is, you begin with a situation that constitutes an Issue. Depending on how you respond, the next step often becomes a completely separate issue.  But because it stems from the initial issue, it can appear to be the same issue. If you don’t recognize that it is not, the next several steps will carry you so far from any possibility of resolving that initial issue as to define Sisyphean.

Why is this important?

Trump just dressed down his chief of staff. In front of an audience.

The one thing I learned, as mentioned above, is that you never, ever do that.  If you’re going to chew someone out, take them to task over something, or otherwise express your displeasure with something they have done,  you do it in private!  You take them to a space where you can close the door and be alone. This is vital in human relations.

Why? Because if you do in front of others, you have just created a whole new issue, supplanting whatever problem you thought you were addressing in the first place. Because now you have humiliated that person in front of others, some who may be his or her subordinates who will have to work now with a damaged relationship.  By upbraiding that person in public you have fractured their ability to retain respect.  Either with their subordinates, certainly with you, and probably between you and their subordinates.  By keeping it private, you have the best chance of keeping the issue on topic and resolving it.  Sure, things could still go wrong, but you have not embarrassed them—or yourself—in front of others.

That embarrassment is a whole new issue.

And if you blithely go on as if it isn’t, the problems will compound.

Disciplinary action must be kept to a minimum.  No audience.

This is basic, unless your intention to begin with is not discipline but to undermine that person’s ability to function effectively, thereby setting them up for further such moments in the future, leading to eventually dismissal.

It’s a good way to make people quit.

But it’s also a good way to cause people to retaliate.

If there is one thing that tells us this man is unsuited to being in the position he holds, this is it.  He’s a lousy manager. This has been out there to be known all along, but in the private sector, while it can cause considerable collateral damage, we don’t usually see the entire country suffer as a result. That is no longer the case.

This is simple.  You have an issue with someone, anyone, you take it up behind closed doors.  Otherwise you will create worse problems which people will mistake for aspects of the same issue.

As for Issue Transition, we see examples of that all the time.  Depending on our biases we may not acknowledge them as such, but there it is. It can be a very expensive blindness.

culture

I’m Sorry, But Your Friend Is An Asshole

One of the problems with bullies is all the people around them who claim to be their “friend” who won’t call them on their bullying. The bully therefore has support, tacit or otherwise, and can then pretend that what they do meets with approval. The victims not only then have to deal with the bully but with the social problem of the bully support network.

When adulthood is reached, something like this continues on in certain arenas, and we’ve just seen another example of it, leaving many people, both victims and victim advocates and people who are just repelled by bullying dismayed and feeling as if their actions to deal effectively with bullies are thankless, sometimes hopeless, causes.

The president pardoned Sheriff Joe.

I’m not using his last name, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, well, I hope you enjoyed the extended vacation on Mars from which you have just returned.  Catch up.

The Toughest Sheriff in America was a bully.  You can dress it up any way you like, that’s what he was.  And that “toughest” appellation? That’s the kind of cinema-myth crap we need to get over if we’re ever going to deal effectively with the job of building an actual civilization. “Being tough” is one of those things which we claim, as a culture, to admire, but seldom recognize as the excuse for behavior we wouldn’t tolerate in our own neighborhood or from a family member for a minute.  It is characterized by a reduction of everyone to an algorithm of Sameness that says “You have no special cause to complain and if you do you’re just trying to get something you don’t deserve.”  It then proceeds to mete out stringent behavioral modification as if people were cattle and fear and physical coercion must be applied to keep them “in line.”  We claim to admire tough guys.  But what really is it we’re admiring?

An inability to listen, an unwillingness to rethink stereotypes, and an assumption that the way you think things should be is based in some kind of moral absolute.  It then comes with a ready willingness to beat people up to make them conform to your standards. Because the people you mistreat have no real voice, all the rest of us see is a surface quiet and a false dignity and a jovial facade that says “I’m keeping you safe! Thank me!”

We’re admiring a bully.

Tough is not the same as disciplined.  We mistake them all the time.  We used phrases like “hard-nosed” “tough-minded” or “no-nonsense” to describe what we assume we’re seeing, but when you go behind the facade and look at what is actually going on we are often appalled.

Sheriff Joe was a repository for all the fears of his constituents who were terrified they would be robbed, raped, or murdered in their beds unless someone was willing to truncheon the faceless hordes of brown people just itching to run riot in their communities.  The same people who cut their grass, fixed their roofs, ran their errands, and generally did many of the jobs their young adult to college-aged children think beneath them. The same people who make a great deal of farming possible and keep the prices of produce low.  People who, once we see them as people, we would never fear or distrust, at least not most of us, but when lumped into the generic threat that enables the Sheriff Joes to act as they do just frightens us unmanageably.  America’s toughest sheriff maintained a prison system little better than a gulag.  That the only thing that lost him his job and got him a jail sentence was his vocal refusal to obey a judge is a sad commentary on the fact that his constituents liked what they thought he was doing and didn’t mind being his friend.

When we’re kids it’s hard to parse responsibilities with presumed friendship.  The desire to be liked, to be accepted, to be part of some in crowd is so strong that we learn to overlook the obvious in order to keep from being cast out.  Consequently we often make “friends” with assholes.

Most of us grow out of that.  But the lessons don’t come in neat packages with guidelines, so from time to time we find ourselves doing it again as adults.

The president pardoned his asshole friend.

If you think that makes the president your friend, what does that say about you?

culture

Observations On The Collapse of a Deal

I’m going to go out on a limb here and make some statements which may not be dependable. You are warned. I’m speculating.

But I want some optimism, so…

With the dismissal of Bannon, it is obvious—or should be—that there is no center to this administration. The Donald had no plans, no principles to defend, no competencies to bring to bear. From the beginning he was indulging in pure deal-making showmanship, and now that he has to deliver we see that the fine cloak of carnival hucksterism is draped over nothing. He is entirely about Making A Deal.  He thought that’s all he had to do, come into Washington and start wheeling and dealing as if the business of the nation was no more than a complex set of real estate negotiations that required someone who could sit down and negotiate a Deal. In his conception of that, though, you base your negotiating principles on bluff and managing to get one over on the other guy. As long as you come out ahead—however you conceive of that—you’re successful. The one thing that is de rigeur, though, is that nothing is to be allowed to get in the way of the Deal.

Not even your own biases.

So we see exactly how that works in practice with the dismal display over Charlottesville. Don’t take a side, you might have to make a Deal with those guys later.  If possible, make all positions roughly equal so that you somehow hold the upper hand.

This doesn’t work so well with people on the street and it works even worse with countries.  You try to make China look bad so you can deal on trade imbalances, but the rhetoric you choose makes it difficult to then ask for help when North Korea acts up.  And threatening North Korea as part of a bluff to get them to open up to deal doesn’t work with a leadership that thinks it has already won.

On a practical, domestic level, you make promises that require a lot of other people to sign on for without any kind of guidance on where to go with these promises, because, as a “master” dealmaker you know you can bait-and-switch.  You can get them into that turkey you’ve been wanting to unload if you can just get them to the table and pliant.  They either walk away with nothing or take your offer, and no one wants to walk away with nothing.  They do business with you now so they can do a better deal later.

It’s vacuous.

But an even deeper problem lies with the people who helped him into office.  We know them now, we can see what they are, and recognize the disregard and empty polemic and the class bias and the sheer disrespect they carry with them in lieu of an actual conscience.  They think everyone is just like them and when it turns out that they’re wrong they have nothing to fall back on.

Now, I suspect that had this bunch come into power in 2008 we would be in even worse trouble.  The country was on the ropes then, people were terrified, insecure, the economy was in a tailspin, and everyone was out to blame someone. We might have had a deeply serious  problem had this bunch gotten into power then.  They would be just as inept but we would have less confidence in our ability to challenge the obscenities.  The comparisons to Germany in 1932 are apt but they go only so far.  These folks are eight years and an economic recovery too late.

Oh, they can still do damage—they are doing damage.  But they’re doing more damage to themselves.

Bannon was dismissed because, somehow, he threatened the Deal.  Whatever the Deal might be.  The Deal is amorphous, unformed.  You throw things out there until something coalesces, then you recognize what it’s going to be, and you start arranging the furniture to make it happen.  But Bannon wasn’t interested in that.  He wanted to assert a position, he had a clear agenda.  Can’t have that and keep the Deal fluid. He was an unreliable negotiator.  His strategy, whatever it was, would have required his boss to give up options.  Can’t do that, the Deal isn’t shaped yet.  When he said the presidency he and the others fought for is over, that’s what he meant.  The goals he thought they were all going after are being traded for advantage, used as negotiating chips in some Deal.

It all has no center.  No substance.  It’s collapsing.  The scramble to make appearances count for reality is failing.

So my bit of optimism.  We’re going through a long-overdue purge.  It will be better.  All we have to do is vomit out the residue of old beliefs that, in most instances, only served to distract us from our darker selves.

It’s going to be all right.

culture

Nazis In Our Midst

The events in Charlottesville  evoke for me the desolation that marred the American landscape in the late Sixties. Cities burned. Riots obliterated property, took lives, attempted by sheer physical exertion to assert a condition of identity too unformed and inarticulate in aggregate to mollify the majority of Americans. It burned itself out, exhausted, and with the end of the Vietnam War some years later and the appearance of normalization in relations between the races, it seemed the “long national nightmare” was over.

The complacency which followed has brought us to a condition of absurd desperation. Once more it is all too vast and amorphous to address as a whole, but I wish here to talk about one aspect that has fueled the present explosion of what too many of us believed smothered in our national psyché.

White Supremacy. Nazism.

The ignorant and frustrated attempting to turn back the ocean of maturity that has threatened their self-defining illusions have come out to protest the removal of a statue honoring Robert E. Lee, hero of the Confederacy. Heritage is used as an excuse, tradition as justification for the continued veneration of symbols which have little to recommend them other than the growing pains of a national moral conscience. The condemnation and dissolution of slavery in the United States was at the time long overdue and the defense of the institution on economic, biblical, even “scientific” grounds was a stain on the very founding principles of the country. How anyone could feel righteous defending on the one hand the liberty assumed by the words “all men are created equal” and then on the other chattel bondage enforced by the cruelest methods imaginable is testament to the unreliability of human intelligence poisoned by greed and fear. To look at it on its face, clearly the slaveholders of that time were the most dedicated Me Generation in modern history.

The attempts by latterday apologists to try to rewrite history to say that the South did what it did for other reasons than slavery is precisely the same as Holocaust Deniers attempting to mitigate the appalling behavior the the Nazi regime. To say that “It wasn’t so bad” is not much different than believing “those people had it coming.” To then go on and say they “had it coming” and then mitigate that by saying it wasn’t actually about that anyway is the sign of a mind in moral crisis that has given up on facing truth and reality.

To be clear: the South seceded in order to preserve slavery. Period. There were four formal declarations of secession outlining causes and each one of them privileges the right to maintain slavery as justification for leaving the Union. (Jefferson Davis, in a speech before congress in 1856, made it clear that he saw the preservation of “African slavery” as little less than a moral absolute.) Other articles of secession refer to these and give support and affirmation. But some of the language might be a bit complex for the obdurate revisionist to parse, so let’s look at something a bit sharper and to the point.

Vice President of the Confederacy Alexander Stephens gave what is known as The Cornerstone Speech in Savannah, Georgia, on March 21, 1861. In it he laid out the principles of the new government. He said:

Our new government is founded upon exactly [this] idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

It seems strange to read “slavery subordination” in the same paragraph with “moral truth.” But there it is. It cannot be swept away in a bit of philosophical or political legerdemain. Those people did what they did so they could hold millions of human beings in bondage. They wanted to keep slaves, to force human beings to give up or never have lives of their own.

More? He was laying out the foundation of the Confederacy and its political and philosophical bases. To whit:

The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away… Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it—when the “storm came and the wind blew, it fell.”

Stephens was a full-throated, hoary racist to his core. He was terrified of black people, of what they represented, what they might do, and the threat they posed to the white civilization he thought so highly of.

You can try if will to get around that, but it’s absolutely clear. It is as clear as Hitler’s statements about Jews. It is the product of a culturally-molded view that has been repudiated time and again and here we see, in our midst, these very views driving people to actions that border on the actions of the Secessionists, which were then and remain treasonous.

It might be argued that the context within which these men did what they did differed from ours and that would be fair. Lee refused Lincoln’s offer of overall command of the Union army because he did not see the United States as his country but Virginia. That was how he spoke of it, that is how many people of the day saw it. Which is why much of the nonslaveholding population of the South, even those who had some problems with slavery in principle, fought against the North, because they saw it as an invasion.

We don’t have that excuse. We have not thought of our individual states as separate countries since the Civil War ended, not in any concrete way. We know it’s not like that. (It wasn’t legally like that then, but disingenuousness goes hand in hand with self-justifications.)

So these rioting, frothing-at-the-mouth haters clamoring for the preservation of some safe space wherein they can maintain the small-minded, deformed illusions of a master race that will profit them by rewarding their inability to cope with reality or comprehend moral reasoning want us all to accept the revised view of a Lost Cause narrative that never existed. Something that will overlook their intrinsic inferiority as rational beings and privilege the things they never had to earn as qualifications to rule. “I’m white, I should be better than you!”

We are not obliged as a nation to help you maintain your delusions. We are not obliged as a people to stand by while you try to stand apart in order to throw stones at the things you don’t like. We as moral beings owe nothing to a past that aggrandized inhumanity in the name of tradition or heritage or states’ rights or—

Or White Superiority.

Which, we are beginning to learn, was never a real thing.

The South worked overtime to cover its existence in a patina of false chivalry as antidote to the poison in its own belly. The lie at the heart of every movie or book that romanticized Dixie is that gentility was ever its raîson detré. The captivity in which it held its slaves was echoed in the straitjacket in which it dressed its “society” with its balls and belles and rituals of modern-day cavaliers. And later the stranglehold it maintained on the working class, with sharecropping the most visible form, in an attempt to revive the aristocratic presumptions of the plantation system, so that some mock nobility could exist on the backs of people with no viable way out of their bondage was no more than the refusal of former slaveholders and sons of slaveholders to hold on to the shards of an imagined life of leisure and grace that only ever existed by virtue of the spilled blood and broken bones of human beings who never had any say in their lives.

Robert E. Lee in the end was granted pardon by the expedient wisdom of victors who sought only to end the bloodshed and knew if they dealt with him and the others as they deserved under the law there would have been years more of senseless fighting. The man owned human beings. You may try to dress that up any way you wish, but that is a horrible thing. He and the others who fomented rebellion in order to maintain a system steeped in a depravity that required the worst aspects of human brutality to persist.

And the excuse they used was the argument of Negro Inferiority.

Now today we see people who have been raised with a painfully redacted version of the Lost Cause and are also incapable of dealing with those who do not look like them taking to the streets and the voting booth to try to force their intolerance on the rest of us. They themselves lack the integrity, the intellectual weight, and the moral substance to be equal to the challenges of their own shortcomings and deal with the world around them with any constructive resolve. They perceive opportunities being handed to people they cannot accept as equals and rather than look at themselves and try to come to terms with what they do not possess, they seek advantage by intimidation, by violence, by brute assertions of privilege mistaken as rights. They have raised the specter of Naziism in our midst because they sense if not recognize their obsolescence. If this is all the support that will come to defense of a statue, then it is perhaps right that the statue be removed.

But this deserves no defense. Yes, they have a right to express their opinion, but that right does not extend to forcing the rest of us to tolerate their demands on how that opinion is expressed.

Human beings must not be held in bondage. This is a truth.

The South committed treason when those states seceded and took up arms against the Union. That is also a truth.

They did so not out of some rarefied position on states’ rights and misunderstanding over the nature of the union they had all agreed to join and ratified in the constitution. They did so to maintain their labor pool and property values, no matter how hideous the conditions or immoral the institution. That deserves no respect on any level.

There is no valid argument for any present-day defense of those times, that philosophy, or the so-called traditions descended from them. The mob that showed up to protest the removal of a statue glorifying an era of horrific pain and suffering based on the indignity of human subjugation may know something of that history. Or they may not. In either case, that history is knowable.

The foundations of Southern thinking were then desperately elitist, terrified of losing the throne of superiority not only to those they considered their racial inferiors but to any and all that did not meet their standards. This quote from the Muscogee Herald, an Alabama newspaper, in 1856:

Free Society! we sicken at the name. What is it but a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moon-struck theorists? All the Northern men and especially the New England States are devoid of society fitted for well-bred gentlemen. The prevailing class one meet with is that of mechanics struggling to be genteel, and small farmers who do their own drudgery, and yet are hardly fit for association with a Southern gentleman’s body servant. This is your free society which Northern hordes are trying to extend into Kansas.

There is in the stunted soul of a Nazi and inability to cope with equality of any sort. The Nazis of Germany in the 1930s till the end of the war were, to their core, thieves, moral cowards, and perpetually incapable of recognizing the humanity in anything. They erected a state based on pillage and called it great. They sought a conformism of mind impossible to achieve not only because they lacked any grasp of human nature but because their standards were paper-thin, devoid of substance, and necessitated the virtual lobotimization of imagination.

We must confront and reject this intractable belief that anyone is intrinsically better than anyone else that lies at the center of the White Supremacist movement. At the end of the day, no one can be allowed freedom in the face of the amalgamated mediocrity of a mind that demands an inferiority in others in order to feel that it is safe to get out of bed in the morning and face a day everyone has the same right to enjoy. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that a civilization cannot survive the successful expression of the politics that inevitably emerge from such unadmitted terror as that harbored by those who ascribe to such movements and accept as “natural” such inhuman beliefs.

Enough.

Absurdity

The Absurdity of Unexamined Positions

Recently I had an exchange with someone over climate change. It was short and frustrating. The basis of the exchange was a report—recycled from 2007 and given a new lease on life because of the recent book and film—on Al Gore’s presumably exorbitant energy use in his home.  Depending on which non-news site you chose, he either uses 34 times more than the average American or 21 times.   The intent of the articles was to show Mr. Gore as a hypocrite, someone preaching the sermon but then balking at the walk.

It’s true, he lives large.  He has a ten thousand square foot home, which is more than five times the size of the average American home, and that doesn’t include the grounds.  But there was also no mention made of the carbon offsets he buys or the investments he makes in green energy or the money he spent upgrading a century old house to more modern energy efficiencies or the way he has specified the source of much of his energy so that a lot if not most comes from alternate sources.  This was a standard-issue bit of simple-minded criticism that says if you do not live in a hovel when preaching about certain things, you’re automatically a hypocrite.  It is not, I should point, about forcing Al Gore to reduce his lifestyle but to force him to shut up.  None of these people would care if he moved into a double-wide with solar panels and a hydrogen cell to live off the grid.  Their purpose is to get him to stop talking.

As I said, the exchange was short. This was with a climate change denier fully invested in the belief that it is all a hoax.  I was reminded of the mindset of occultists and alchemists, who at their base believed fervently that answers were unobtainable, that if you thought you had found the truth you were automatically wrong.  No, few if any ever stated it so baldly, but it’s obvious from the way they would avoid genuine experiment, deny all arguments that might contradict received wisdom, and generally evaded any conclusion that suggested they were in pursuit of the unattainable.  Science had to rid itself of this obdurate self-imposed blindness before it could flourish and it seems clear that we are burdened with some variation of it still.

But I wondered, just what drives this kind of selective self-censorship?

Well, obviously a lack of understanding.  The science is complex and people often have difficulty grasping causal concepts that seem to contradict personal experience. When your city is frozen in the grip of a record-breaking snow storm it’s difficult to reconcile the assertion that global temperatures are rising.  Difficult but not impossible, especially if the following summer comes with record-breaking heat, for perhaps the fourth or fifth consecutive year.  (Climate has changed in St. Louis.  When I was a kid, three feet of snow in December was not unusual, snow that lasted through February sometimes. Now?  People are stunned when we have a foot that lasts a week, if that. Summers are hotter. Certain insect patterns have shifted. Things have changed and when I look for explanations the only model that conforms to experience is global climate change.)  Lack of understanding can be corrected, though.  People can learn.  They may not want to but they can.

Sometimes, though, they go down a cul-d-sac and get stuck in a plausible dead-end. Staying there, though, depends on things having little to do with evidence or logic.

Consider: the rejection of climate change makes no sense. Addressing the problem of where we get our energy is a technical issue, a matter of engineering. There are several reasons, perfectly sound ones, to change the way we do this.  Pollution is the simplest one.  What kind of a world do you want to live in?  One with soot, particulates,  toxicity? The expense of defending against such things is high, depending where you live. Environmental degradation is another. Tearing up mountains to extract coal, leaving ugly holes, spilling the effluent into waterways, drilling—and fracking is worse.  Look at satellite images of fracking-intense areas and the clouds of waste gas.  And of course earthquakes where few if any had occurred before.  And the damage to water tables.

Jobs is the cry.  Displacing workers.  Well, building a whole new industry would seem to be a jobs-positive thing. The technology and industries to not only build solar and wind would expand the jobs market, but also the construction of the networks, distribution, and upgrading and maintaining the grid (which needs it anyway, regardless of the energy source), all these things mean jobs.

The expense!  The expense we currently shoulder in artificially maintaining obsolete systems should by now be common knowledge.  The expense on taxpayers subsidizing industries that are collapsing not to mention the downstream expense of cleaning up after the pollution.  The expense of people made sick.  The asthma rates in coal country are rising.  We pay an exorbitant amount to maintain the illusion that coal and oil are the only means to accomplish what we want to.

Someone like Al Gore comes along and starts pointing this out.  You might quibble with some of his details, but in essence he has a sound argument.  Instead of attacking the argument—which might lead to some edifying consequence, like all of us learning something useful—his character is attacked.  This is not an uncommon tactic.  Some people seem to feel a person has to be virtually a saint in order to hold and disseminate an opinion.  But if what he says is supported by the science, what difference does it make how he lives?  What is it about his lifestyle that invalidates the message?

He’s asking other people to change but, presumably, he won’t.

What exactly is he asking most people to change?  If tomorrow your electricity came from wind turbines instead of a coal-fired plant, what has changed for you?  Electricity is electricity. The costs? Costs aren’t rising anyway?  Your taxes aren’t going to subsidize the industry?  Or is this more akin to the fear of “death panels” presumably inevitable with universal health care?  We go along with this and next year someone from the government will take away your car or truck? Transportation is already changing, it will continue to do so, and in ten years you may find you don’t even want your car, but that’s beside the point.  Such a fear is a boogeyman used to keep us from addressing the problem.  My question stands: what exactly is he asking you to change?

The question of costs is not irrelevant, but as I say, they’re going up anyway.  Maybe in the long run there might be some relief if part of the cost is not in cleaning up so much detritus.  But that requires long term thinking outside your immediate sphere.  You have to consider the community, the country, the planet.  Most people find that difficult, if not to achieve then to sustain.

Lifestyle.  Your lifestyle will change.

That is almost unanswerable because it’s so nebulous.  As I suggest above, change is coming anyway, but probably not what you expect.  On the simple question of how you get your energy, what changes?  Still, not an irrelevant point.

There will, perhaps, be less available energy. To do what?  We’ve been undergoing a small (perhaps not so small) revolution in energy efficiency for lo these last few decades.  Our houses are full of devices that operate on far less electricity than their ancestors required.  That’s not likely to stop.  But we can look at Europe to see the numbers and discover that the very thing which will provide jobs will also suffice to power your lifestyle.

But I suspect the thing feared in terms of change has nothing to do with actual resource. What will change is some aspect of identity.

From what to what?

Basically, the changes in policy required to address climate change would be a net positive whether the science is flawed or not.  Breathing cleaner air, securing the potability of our water, lightening our touch on the ecologies are all desirable and come with economic benefits regardless.  If it turned out by some odd oversight that we got the climate change model wrong, so what?  We would have built a new energy grid based on cleaner models and generally improved the well-being of the commonwealth.  If we aren’t wrong about climate change, we can add saving the world for humanity as a bonus.

But like someone who doesn’t want to give up steak for dinner, we treat climate change like vegetarianism.  It doesn’t matter that the science may be correct about the health benefits, we still want our meat.  It’s a question of identity.

We burn oil and coal!  It’s American!  All this wind and solar is somehow…somehow…feeble.

Perhaps the deniers can’t imagine building with such tools.  Perhaps they can’t accept joining in a global cooperative effort not being invented or run by America.

Whatever the reason, short-term vested interests love you.  Because they are able to count on you as foot soldiers in the fight to forestall the imposition of regulations on them.  They do not want to be told what they can or cannot do and this is just another species of limitation on their personal vision of Who Counts.

But that’s understandable.  That’s greed and avarice.  What’s the denier’s excuse?  Being somehow joined with the mighty by association with the self-styled giants of industry?

I accept the science involved.  A cold snap here and there isn’t enough to convince me all the rest is a phantom.  But it doesn’t matter.  Accepting the need to change the way we use this planet means so many other things, including eventually taking the power to dictate from people who have no business having it in the first place.  Climate Change Denial costs so much more and fails to address everything else that goes to the need to change.

When Reagan ripped the solar panels off the White House in a fit of thoughtless national pomposity, he empowered a mindset that we’re still having to put up with.  A mindset that won’t debate, won’t consider, won’t yield, and won’t change. not because the thing it rails against is wrong but because it cannot stand not being right.

culture

Going To Mexico

The great conundrum at the heart of the movie Thelma and Louise is the problem the pair face in fleeing the law. They have to go to Mexico. They know that, they agree.  But Louise refuses to enter Texas. Thelma tries to reason with her, but to no avail. Louise will not go to Texas. They’ll have to find another way. Thelma lets it drop, recognizing the complete irrationality of the position, not knowing what to do about it, but thinking perhaps eventually reason will prevail and they’ll get to Mexico.

The Republican Party is playing the part of Louise over the Affordable Care Act. They have now found themselves face to face with the need to go to Mexico.  But they refuse to go through Texas.  (I know, the ironies multiply.)

(Now, mind you, there are problems with the ACA.  It is not what we should be doing, but it’s what we have, and we have examples to go by as to what to do, which is to work on it and make it better.  Medicaid and Medicare were horrible when they were first enacted,  but over time they have been made into something pretty good.)

Basically, they are beginning to realize that they can’t fulfill what has been their unspoken (though sometimes admitted) philosophical position for decades, which is that government is the enemy. They have campaigned on the presumption that their main task is to undo as much government structure as possible.  Repeal, defund, tear apart.  They have embraced the idea that their mandate (from who, when, and for what reason?) is to strip America of its government.

Starting with taxes. And of course they’ve been tilting at entitlements since Johnson. Their stance on the environment shows a consistent commitment to the idea that government, especially the federal government, should do nothing.  Deregulate, roll back taxes, do less, do nothing, let corporate entities step it, remain aloof, privatize. The drumbeat of group-march has driven them into a position wherein the very idea of a successful or even improvable government program is oxymoronic.

Now they are faced with the fact that people—the very ones they have been presuming to serve by gutting all these programs—actually don’t want them to do that.  And in order to improve anything, they will have to work across the aisle to actually make the ACA work better.

They have to go to Mexico and they have to go through Texas to get there.

As for their constituency, well, it’s not like they haven’t been getting mixed signals all along. In general there has been a constant background demand of “FIX IT! But don’t change anything.” They have fed back the disinformation and disconnect and reinforced the idea that government can’t do anything, in spite of evidence to the contrary.  People—their people—have believed for decades that government spends far too much and delivers too little, all to the wrong people. (And, most importantly, that it can do nothing else, that it is impossible for it to function to the benefit of the people.)  Combined with local, regional, and class attitudes, nurtured by the hyper aggressive distortions of talk radio and Fox News and the attendant priesthood of conspiracy-driven paranoia, this basic belief has been the chief barrier to reasonable discourse, the mustard gas in the air.

But even fantasy must eventually yield to reality and when thousands of solid Tea Party supporters and Trump voters understood that they were about to lose the health care provided under the much maligned and hated “Obamacare” the message changed.  “Fix it but don’t take my healthcare away!”  “Repeal this thing but leave it in place!”  “Take us to Mexico but don’t go to Texas!”

Now some senate Republicans are suggesting that the geography requires them to go where they swore they would never go.

In its most generalized form, the GOP has taken it as given that government should not step in where they believe markets should do a job.  But if those markets fail to function in accordance with public benefit, what then?

The more rabid among them seem to believe that it doesn’t matter, that only those who can thrive in that environment deserve any regard, that if you need what you cannot yourself provide, too bad, you don’t merit aid because “obviously” you fall into some category of freeloader, goldbricker, slacker, or political outlaw.

As Al Franken said in an interview (paraphrased) they believe you should pull yourself up by your boot straps. But what if you don’t have any boots?

Underlying this is some sort of apprehension that economies are somehow natural phenomena and that those who can’t survive and thrive in them should be weeded out in a bad application of Darwinian survival (based inanely on a theory they otherwise don’t accept—Texas again).  They can’t quite come out and say that because it might be in poor taste or the Left might use it against them, but clearly it’s there.  If you have no property, if you don’t make money, if you do not conform to an ideal image of American Self Sufficiency, you should die.  You do not, by virtue of simply existing, deserve any consideration from the rest of society.

Unless you’re a fetus.

The contradictions of their positions are becoming manifest and even among themselves they seem to be coming to the conclusion that, for incomprehensible reasons, reasons that should not be, what they see as the only true template for America simply will not work. They may not understand why but at least the cracks in the casing around their ideologies, at least in some cases, are beginning to let light in.

Or they really are just worried about their jobs.

It will be interesting to see how they manage this.  They’re actually going to have to, at some point, come to terms with how many of their policies over the last few decades have led to a state of the nation wherein people have been made surplus in service to a pillage of wealth that while it may look great on paper has actually eroded our general welfare.  I seem to recall that being one of their jobs, to see to the health of the commonwealth…

So what exactly will Louise do?  Go through Texas?  Or do we continue driving toward the edge of that cliff?

Stay tuned.

Absurdity

How Doctor Who’s Sex Change Explains Everything

Heavy sigh.

Seriously? People are getting exercised over this? I suppose these will be some of the same people who will come out in angry revilement if the next James Bond really is a black man.

There’s a certain space wherein this kind of angst is perfectly acceptable.  Private conversations with people who share the same interests and have Opinions about the condition of a favorite bit of entertainment and how it would be if certain changes were made.  Three or four of you get together over beers (or floats, depending) and pizza and spend an hour or two reconstructing the whole æsthetic as you would have it.  This is good, healthy use of imagination and the application of ratiocination over something that is fun and has no real impact on anything else. The relative merits of various incarnations of the Doctor (or Bond) is a legitimate question within the confines of a small subject relating to art and storytelling and critical appreciation.  Same kinds of questions apply when a reboot of an old film or tv show is in the works or when a dead author’s work is licensed out for new books.  We flex our gray cells and participate in a way in the creative process.  We can draw lessons from such interactions.

But when someone, like a John C. Wright, weighs in to tell us how this is all part of the feminization of civilization at the expense of masculine role models and that civilization itself is at risk because after 12 incarnations of a fictional character who is also an alien being several centuries old the people in charge decided to give a female version a try, and a cadre of spoiled, semi-privileged misanthropes go on a tantrum in agreement, condemning the change and anyone who might like it to the nether regions of Hell…

Get a life.

If you don’t like it, you don’t have to watch it.  You can go back and rewatch the umpteen seasons already available (you will anyway, probably). You have several options here.  You can even discuss—discuss, as in have conversation, engage discourse, exchange opinions—the merits of it among yourselves or others. What you don’t get to do is tell other people how they’re about to bring on the end of the universe because they like something you don’t.

Really, that’s going just a bit far, don’t you think?

This is the flip side of insisting that everyone must have an opinion about something, even if it’s something of zero interest to them.

We’re talking about art now.

The fact is, there’s room for all opinions, as long as we remember they are just that—opinions.

This is one of the places wherein we learn to play nice with people who disagree with us.

But a lot of people don’t know how to do that anymore.  Maybe they never did.  But they also never had access to such incredible amplification systems before.

At it’s base, though, this is what a certain kind of privilege looks like.  It’s taking a position that what I believe is the absolute Norm and anything that deviates from it is unacceptable.  We can’t have a female Doctor Who because it runs counter to the way I want the universe to work, and what is it with these girls anyway, trying to shove their way into something they don’t fit? They have perfectly good heroes of their own that are just as good as mine, so they should leave mine alone!

Sound familiar?  If it doesn’t, that may be symptomatic of the problem.

We see this time and again when a group previously thrown a bone by society asks for more respect and society, or the arbiters thereof, look at them like they’re being selfish and demanding something undeserved.  In reality, the most vocal opponents have been skirting by on the earned privilege of others for ages, and when according something like equality to a group that has never had it before is presented to them they realize, in their bones, that they just might not be able to compete on a level playing field and everything must be done to convince the world that everything as it has been is meant to be.  Because, damn, what if that group turns out to be better than us?

Well, tough. The fact is, fanboy, sitting there on your couch feeling one with the Superbowl Star because you bought the jersey and cheer the team and you are, somehow, the same as that quarterback because you both have testicles, you can’t compete with the standard model you already feel you own.  You don’t get to claim superiority because someone else can do all that shit that presumably only males can do.

Or white people.

This is instructive, really.  The response to the change came before the first episode aired.  Among those screeling anthrophobes so unhinged at the idea that the Doctor no longer has a penis (if “he” ever did, which is an interesting question in itself from a purely science-fictional standpoint, since the Doctor is Gallifreyan and may well have a completely different sexual arrangement) and now has, gasp, a vagina (again a presumption), it is not so much that they ever identified with the Doctor but that, on some level, they possessed identity because of the Doctor.

Here’s where I start to have problems with this whole process. Are you drawing inspiration from the idea of the role model—brains, ability, character traits—or are you hitching a ride on all that by hitching your ego to the one thing you don’t have to do anything to achieve to be “like” the role model?  To say “I want to be like that character” is to make a commitment, however small or temporary, to doing some work toward.  To say “I am like that character” because you happen to share certain physical similarities is to borrow a sense of self-worth that you haven’t earned.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with that as long as you keep it in perspective.  As long as you know that, really, you aren’t anything like that character but might occasionally pretend to be, in your own head, your dreams, or in a bit of cosplay, and you only pay homage because you think that character is cool.  Some of the cool might rub off.  But that fact is these things change.

How important is it that what may be the least important aspect of a character remain constant and unchangeable just so your shortcomings stay neatly hidden away behind an act of mental pretense?

None of this would rise to a level requiring a response had it not become evident that as role model, The Doctor has failed for these poor, disheartened misogynists.  Failed in that the essential message of the Doctor didn’t get through, didn’t translate, didn’t manifest.  The whole point of the regeneration, aside from need to explain all the new actors, is that what you are on the inside matters infinitely more than the plumbing. And no gender has exclusive rights to the interior. The Doctor moves from one incarnation to the next, changing, becoming different, yet always bringing along the most important things, which have nothing to do with anatomy.  In that way, inadvertently or not, the Doctor has been a role model for people, not boys.

Discussing narrative consistency, the needs of logical drama, the pros and cons of story and character arc choices, all that is one thing, and legitimate.  But that’s to do with the interior, because you already have a character who transforms from one person into another as an essential element of the interior.  Having already established that and had it accepted as part of the way this thing works, to go off on a tear when the transformation doesn’t conform to your limits is small-minded and disingenuous, especially when you couch your complaints in some variation of requiring a role model for gender identity when that was never an essential aspect of the character in the first place, mainly because it’s an alien.

In other words, the shock is all about you, not the character.  Quite possibly there’s always been an attendant fantasy about the Doctor getting it on with the Companions, which now becomes incommensurable with certain neuroses when it might be a female Doctor taking her pick of male companions—or, for the sake of consistency, still doing so with the females.  That opens a whole other door of unmanageable unfathomables, I suppose.  What, the Doctor not only a woman but a lesbian?  Or just bi?

But according to canon, the Doctor never did do that, and we have the fey thread with River Song to even suggest a sexual attachment, and she wasn’t a Companion, and—

Rabbit holes can be fun, certainly, but be careful that they don’t start in your own fundament.

Civilization will not end.  The Doctor will survive.  As for role models, the Doctor has been serving as one for People since the beginning.  This will be just more of the same.

And that is about all I have to say about that.

I’ve got some timey-whimey shit to think about now.

(Oh, the title?  How does all this explain everything?  Well, think about it.  Taking issue with things just to have a snit because you’re uncomfortable…well, look around.)

Absurdity

A Chronic State of Nostaligic Disconnect

In the past few weeks, things have not gone well for political philosophies based in traditional formulations.  Right or Left (but more so on the self-identified Right) there is a kind of flailing, a death throe undulation that looks like grasping for anchors in something that feels historically relevant but in fact turns out to be sunk in air or sand and simply gets torn loose the moment any real strain is put on it. At its most discernable, there are a lot “I know what you mean” moments, but even these are more “I think I know what you mean, maybe” moments that later turn out to be coincidental brushes with familiar syntax and not much in the way of substantive connection.

Take healthcare.  Whatever your personal feelings about what we should do, nothing being done is what anyone seems to want.  Trump said “We’re gonna fix it!” the GOP nodded sagely, then wrote a bill that would not fix it, but would return the state of American healthcare to some rough semblance of how it was back in 2007, but isn’t, because now no one, not even the insurance industry, wants that.  They have redrafted the bill to do less damage, but that’s not what they want to do, nor is it what Trump promised, although he keeps cheering congress on as long as there is some kind of repudiation of the ACA, which is not what the voters want, either.  In their case, they never really knew what they wanted other than for things to not cost so much, but as to how to “fix” that, those who voted for the current administration have no idea and distrust every single attempt to do so.  In the meantime, the professionals who might have some insight into this are being ignored, congress is pretending it’s serving the People by doing something which can only drive up costs, and Trump is offering zero sense of direction other than “Change something!”

Meanwhile, he has modified his requirements of the propose border wall by asking that it be transparent “so no one on this side will be hit in the head by the packages of drugs being thrown over it.”  Which has so many layers of problematic misapprehension of the problems it’s intended to address as to qualify as some form of mystic pabulum handed down from an airless mountaintop.

(He also bragged in an interview how great the G20 meeting was because there were, like, 20 countries represented.  Ahem.  Two things about that–either he is ignorant enough to think that is useful information or his supporters didn’t know that was what the G20 is.  Or, well, he thinks his supporters wouldn’t know this, so….never mind.)

Meanwhile (again) at the state level, the Illinois legislature finally found the spine to tell the governor that they’ve had enough of his party fundamentalism, the state needs a budget, and for it to have even a prayer of being relevant, the state needs revenue, so yes, we’re raising taxes.  The fact that this is significant is reflective of the dissociation across the entire political spectrum with regard to taxes.  In Missouri we have a strong cadre of very wealthy people who do whatever they can to eliminate any tax that dares raise its head, like some manic game of economic whack-a-mole that serves none of the purposes it is purported to serve.  Along this line, our state legislature has decided to repudiate attempts at the city and county level to address minimum wage issues and bar St. Louis—or any other municipality—from raising local minimum wages above the state level, which is a joke.  Why? None of the excuses make any sense.  Basically there seems to be some attitude at work that poor people need the incentive to become middle class and if we pay them enough that they might be able to feed their families and possibly attend classes to try to better themselves, then they will have been handed an unfair advantage and not properly appreciate it.  If there were not evidence at hand that this is a bullshit argument it would still be laughable because it ignores the current economic realities and instead seems to assume the situation is no different than it was in 1964.

And again meanwhile the people who are supposed to understand such things are scratching their heads at the puzzling data that while productivity has been rising steadily for the last seven years, along with job growth, wages have stagnated.  The increased profitability of all these companies has not resulted in an increase share of the wealth with workers, as it would have (again) back in 1964, and they don’t understand what’s happening.  What’s not to understand?  Two things have changed since then that explain it quite well—one is that technology has become significantly more effective, which results in the need for fewer and fewer actual employees (I saw a resent example from, I believe, Kentucky about a steel mill that produces wire, which thirty years ago would have employed a thousand people, but which has been replaced by one which produces the same amount of product but employs fourteen, none of them on the shop floor) and we have seen a gutting of unions, which were always the most effective way to force management to pay an equitable share of profits.  But people at the top, charged with analyzing and interpreting this kind of data, are “confused.”

Everyone is confused when no one is willing to face the realities of our new present.

The normally natural affinity for a comforting past has been distorted by the manipulations of identity politics and the toxic overuse of pointless nitpicking combined with an endemic ignorance of context to create a situation in which constructive change is becoming less and less possible, at least on a national level.  If every suggestion for change is met with swords drawn and blood oaths taken to resist, all possibilities fail. (A sensible approach to healthcare would be a single payer system, but it requires people to back up, give it some breathing space, and a chance.  Instead the immediate response among too many is “No!  That will lead to—!” Fill in the blank.  Death panels? Rationing? A complete destruction of a healthcare system which is, at the level of public service, is already dysfunctional? None of this is rational, but we have frightened ourselves enough that unless it is something we are completely familiar with we see it as threat.  But in the case of health care, no one is familiar with its workings, only its results, and not even then do most people know why the results are as they are.)

In the meantime—once more—we have a widening disparity between rich and poor which has opened a chasm.  Such chasms have happened before and they always precede revolutions.  The question for us will be, how bloody this time?

All because those who might ordinarily be trusted to supply meaningful context and useful direction are either ignored or just as helplessly clinging to a nostalgic hope of “returning things to the way they used to be”—on both sides.

Which leaves the vast majority of people in an awkward kind of stasis.  Waiting.  Struggling.  Clinging.

Into this moves the impulse to control absolutely.  Travel bans, surveillance, behavioral rule-making that does nothing but hobble, identification requirements that do nothing but isolate and segregate, public events that end up defining in-groups and shutting others out, calls for a kind of public piety that serves only to make some people targets while reassuring no one.  These are the components of tyranny, the necessary elements of fascism.  Both those terms have of late been used too freely and consequently are losing some of their prognostic power.  When you have a combination of too much fear and too little sense of sanity, that’s when the power mongers—who never, ever have solutions—have the best chance of seizing power.

As we move forward, it might be a useful habit to start asking of every proposal, “Who does this serve?”  If it does not serve you and yet you are inclined to support it, ask why?  And if the answer is, “It makes me feel safe from Those People” then it’s a good bet it’s a bad proposal, especially if “those people” are your neighbors.  Get in the habit of seeing things this way. Like any rule, it won’t track a hundred percent every time, but we have gotten into the opposite habit of thinking that any proposal that seems to benefit someone we either don’t like at the expense of people we like to pretend are “our people” (the rich, the powerful, the right skin color) or we believe will limit our “rights” in some vague way (and usually rights we either don’t have to begin with or are not really rights but privileges) are automatically bad.  Again, sometimes this might be true, but it’s a horribly limiting, fearful way to see the world and will lead ultimately to exactly what we think we’re trying to prevent.

Habits of thought anchored to the sand of a past that no longer pertains. Praising a history more hagiographic and mythic than factual. Preserving symbols that don’t mean what we think they do and believing that by protecting all this we will solve the problems of tomorrow.  We’ve been indulging this kind of nostalgic political nonsense for decades now.

Do you like where it’s brought us?