Category: history

culture

Consensus Delusion

Reading and listening to the jeremiads of impending doom and catastrophe electing Hillary Clinton will bring, it becomes clear that a significant part of her opposition is flat out delusional.  It’s not just her, it’s this whole “lib’ral agenda” thing, wrapped up with the gay agenda and the persecution of christians and on and on.  Some people obviously believe she descends into a secret temple every night to eat the livers of virgin meerkats and praise Cthulhu while demoniacally laughing in anticipation of the power about to come into her hands by which she can trample on our freedoms with the abandon of a Godzilla.

How many times does the senate have to haul her into hearings on Benghazi and end up finding nothing—NOTHING—that she did which was illegal or even immoral before people begin to realize that she didn’t murder four Americans for reasons which no one has made very clear anyway.  And how many times do these same people have to be reminded that the problem there was a viciously slashed budget for embassy security, done by the very people in congress who are trying to tag her with the blame before they start to realize they’re being snowed?

Apparently always one more time than this one.

Same with the emails. Not that Hillary’s handling of them is without problems, but how many times do her detractors have to be told that the last three Secretarys of State did the same thing before they realize this is a common practice and hardly grounds for the kinds of accusations of treason being made?

Apparently always one more time than this one.

It beggars reason.  Why this level of denial?  Why this depth of entrenched delusion?

We have a model for it. Has to do with repeated insistence on a parallel reality.  We watched it happen to children, en masse,  during the McMartin PreSchool debacle.

Recall that this was a national item in the news for months.  It began in 1983 with false accusations by a mentally disturbed woman claiming the preschool was involved in the sexual abuse of children.  The detectives initially investigating thought it was absurd, but a very aggressive prosecutor with career ambitions got hold of it and rode it through seven years and the most expensive criminal trial in American history to that date.  It ended with all charges dropped, lives ruined, and the psychés of the children involved scarred.  It was part of a hysteria and the allegations made kept getting stranger and weirder, beggaring imagination,about networks of tunnels, secret airfields, black masses.  Lovecraft would have proudly claimed it as a masterpiece of fiction.

Yet people believed it.  Especially, after seven years of being told again and again that these things had happened to them, the children, who were a lamentable spectacle in the courtroom the day it ended and they were betrayed again.  First they had been made to embrace the charges, even though none of them initially validated any of it, and now, after seven years of living in a delusional bubble, many if not all had come to actually believe these things had happened—and the court told them none of it had.

It didn’t matter that to any rational person on the outside looking at all this it was clearly nonsense.  To those inside that bubble, this had become reality.  What is amazing is the ability of the human imagination to come to the defense of such delusions when they have become so personal that one’s very identity depends on them.  The capacity to invent seemingly plausible explanations to counter fact and logic is remarkable.  And frightening.

We see something like this in the byzantine conspiracy fears of the hardcore Hillary Haters.  Not the ones cynically manipulating that hate in order to gain power, but the ones willingly handing over that power because they truly believe she is evil and has a trail of bodies in her wake and that she was somehow, though the details get murky here, plans to sell us all down the River Iss.  (When I ask what it is they think she’s going to do, usually the response is either “You’ll see” or “Go ahead and vote for her if you love her so much!” In other words, they have no idea what it is they fear.)  They’ve been living in that bubble for so long that the larger reality has small chance of breaking through.

There is a whole roster of related delusions that go along with this.  That Obama was not born in the United States, that both he and Hillary will send out secret police to confiscate guns and overturn the Second Amendment (a president can’t do that), that 911 was an inside job, that death panels are part of the Affordable Care Act, that—

It goes on.  This makes the people still clinging to the grassy knoll in Dallas seem reasonable.

The screeling insanity of the allegations sets up a false dialogue in which those of us who simply prefer her to her opponent for reason short of embracing her as the next Lincoln can’t profitably discuss the issues.  For us it comes down to competence and policy positions which do not lend themselves to soundbyte “debate” tactics which depend on superlatives.  Do I believe Hillary Clinton is the best choice for president?  Given the present circumstances, yes.  But it’s conditional.  Do I think she’s the best possible choice?  No.  But that choice is not on the field.  I don’t even know who it would be.  Bernie Sanders might have been a better choice, but he’s not on the ballot.

Which points to another delusional bubble on the opposite side, which is that the election was stolen from him.  He’s not claiming that and insists on his supporters supporting Hillary.  Because he understands how politics works in this country.  There will always be another chance to do better or just differently in four years.  Do not tear everything apart because the party didn’t hire the right DJ.

Since the end of the Cold War, what we have needed—badly—is a manager who will step us back from the brink of world war and start returning us to the kind of republic and economy best suited to caretaking the country.  Instead, both parties have found themselves lashed to the masthead of demanding war leaders.  We are constantly preparing for war.  Like a traumatized child who can no longer trust that other realities might be possible, after World War II we have been unable to trust in our own principles.  That and the fact that war is very, very profitable for certain people, and money drives elections.  Bill Clinton was close.  All other things aside, he was a capable manager.  I believe George H.W. Bush was of a similar cut.  But even they were unable to withstand the pressures of constant war preparation.

The problems of the world are based on resource allocation.  This is a tractable problem, given the political will.  But not if everyone insists that they can’t be solved.  They can be.  But it requires that we change certain other basic practices and admit that some of the ways we’ve been doing things no longer (if they ever did) work.

But that’s a conversation that can only happen when there are no bubbles separating us into different realities. Delusion is the biggest barrier between people, which in this case is the reason we can’t see each other.

Either that or it’s Toxoplasma gondii.

My own bubble—yes, we all have one, to greater or lesser degrees, with lighter or denser membranes—suggests that the constant undermining of education since the Sixties has had a net effect on lowering people’s resistance to nonsense.  That given the fact that education has been roped to the requirements of the job market almost since its beginnings, this is no surprise.  We claim we want educated people but I believe what industry wants is, rather, well-trained people, which is not the same thing.  The assault on unions, the undoing of economic rules that once allowed for a robust middle class, and the apparently successful propaganda campaign by the Right to convince people to vote against their own best interests for nigh unto 40 years goes hand in hand with lowered standards in education and a neglect of what once we called the Liberal Arts.  But I don’t believe you need an organized conspiracy to do this.  Just inattention and the situational shrug of shoulders that allows something to become normal that once was not.

For instance, look at the terms.  Liberal and Conservative.  They don’t seem to mean what they once did.  In the long view of history, neither Barrack Obama nor Hillary Clinton would be considered liberals.  Centrists at best.  But those bubbles have enabled a shift in viewpoint that has pushed us to the right so much that a full-blown liberal is no longer recognizable as such.  It’s been said that in a more traditional (or sane) world, Hillary would be the Republican candidate and Sanders would have been the Democratic.

But that view bounces off the bubbles.

We have, in my opinion, a traumatized country full of children who have been told for decades that they’ve been abused and they can no longer recognize the reality outside that conviction.  Some have, but they aren’t the ones defining the inside of the bubble.

Anyone have a pin?

culture

Why We Need To Teach Civics

Listening to the debates, not between the candidates but among the potential voters, it becomes clear that for many the workings of our government are a thing of deep mystery and frustratingly obscure. Donald hammered on Hillary repeatedly that in 30 plus years in office she had an opportunity to “do something” about certain issues and she did nothing.

She was a senator and then she was secretary of state.

Neither position affords anyone the power to just “do something” about any damn thing they want.

While morality may not be relative, politics is entirely so.  The problem is this:  you have a hundred people in a room who have been given a problem to solve.  There’s perhaps a right way to solve it, there are certainly wrong ways, and then there’s what each individual wants.

How do you simply “do something” in that situation?

Let’s compound it. Each of those hundred people is working with another set of probable conflicts. There is what he or she believes ought to be done, then there is what the people they represent want done, and then there is what she or he feels can be done.  Each one brings this bag of writhing conflict to the room and the task is to work with the other ninety-nine, each of whom has the same set of problems, to find a solution to the problem.

This is the fundamental nature of representative democracy.

In a word, it is impossible.  It is the human equivalent of asking the centipede how it manages to walk.

And yet.

Add to this the frustration of the constituency, each individual and group of individuals has a different set of desires.  They harangue their representatives to “do something” and get angry when nothing or, worse, the “wrong” thing gets done. Now yet another concern is heaped on top of all the others for the people in that room—keeping their job.

It’s amazing anything happens at all.

And despite what they may tell you, this happens in business, too.  All those moving parts have to be coordinated and, often—because they’re attached to people—assuaged.  So no, a Ross Perrot, a Mitt Romney, or a Donald Trump cannot magically step into this with their “business experience” and suddenly end the deadlocks and solve the problems.  Their “experience” ought to tell them this.  For one, they can’t actually fire the people they have to work with in congress.

If Trump’s accusations that Hillary “did nothing” when she had the chance have any resonance with voters it is because, I suspect, too many voters don’t understand the nature of the country in which we live.  Hillary tried to explain that she worked on several of those things, but if she can’t get people—many of whom in the last several years have publicly committed themselves to blocking any proposal that comes out of either the Obama White House or the Democratic side of the aisle—to go along with her proposals, just what do people think she could do?

That she has accomplished what she has is a minor miracle.

I received civics in grade school. We had to sit through it.  It was boring.  It used to be what was called social studies, which later seemed to morph into some kind of social psychology joined to history tracks instead of a study of how government is organized.  Probably it is taught in some schools still, but it seems not to be as a matter of course.

It’s why so many people are afraid a sitting president can take guns away from people or remove the Second Amendment.  A president can’t do that.  Just can’t.

But worse, it’s why so many people seem to not understand why their personal prejudice can’t be made law.

Frustration can be a driving force for a solution, though.  It seems that public frustration with the intractability we’ve endured in our politics is reaching a zenith and we may be about to witness an historic turn-over.

Ever since Reagan named government as the biggest problem we have there has been a tumor growing in the belly of our civil systems.  He was flat wrong.  Perhaps he was speaking in metaphor—he was an actor, after all, psychodrama depends on metaphor—but if so he delivered it with a straight face that appealed to the impatience everyone feels from time to time at the squabble in that room. With the benefit of the doubt, I believe he would be appalled at the consequences of his rhetoric.  We built the strongest nation in history through government, for good or ill, so just how much of a problem was it?  Depends on where you stand when you ask that question.

Because politics is relative.  Compromise is essential.

But I suspect a lot of people don’t actually know what compromise is.  You can’t tear down the bridge and then blame the other guy for not crossing the divide.

It might be useful to remember that the work in question is never “done” but is an ongoing, daily struggle.  Out of it we find a way.  But you can’t circumvent the process just because you think you’re right.  If you are, that will become evident over time.

We might want to remember that.  Civics.  The earlier the better.

blog

Crossing Eyes and Dotting Teas

In my previous post I talked about the use—misuse—of a term: Snowflake. It was brought to my attention that I myself may be misusing it or at least misunderstanding it.

It derives from Fight Club, as a negative.  “You are not special snowflakes…you are not unique…”  More or less.  Tyler Durden exhorting the new members of a club no one is supposed to speak about.  Which kind of automatically makes them special.  Exclusive club, deeply hidden, secret, and very radical.  How much more special can you get short of joining the Masons or being recruited by the NSA?

The term then entered the language by way of gaming, applied to people claiming unique privileges—usually unearned—in the course of some rule-heavy role-playing extravaganza.  It went from there to an appellation attached to Millennials of a certain mindset who had absorbed the pseudo-Montessori-esque lessons of specialness and uniqueness and then took it to the next level as sinecure that they, being unique and special, can do no wrong and are allowed to exercise a degree of privilege and intolerance based on that assumed status.

Like all such terms, obviously, it has been handed on, re-purposed, reapplied, contorted, enlarged, expanded, and now, today, it is being used to label anyone even glancingly allied to that other wonderful term that has come to be applied as a derogation, the Social Justice Warrior.

That’s the problem with labels.  They start out one way, they inevitably become something else, and then history gets retroactively rewritten to incorporate the new meanings.

Democrats belong to the party of Jim Crow.

Republicans freed the slaves.

As if those claims describe what they are intended to today.

What I have witnessed and heard is the appropriation of the label Snowflake by people who are unfriendly to messages and arguments about social justice, equality, political correctness, diversity, and related issues so they can apply it where needed to shut down debate.  Classifying someone as a Snowflake (or a Social Justice Warrior) is little more than an attempt to categorize what they have to say as a specific kind of rhetoric which we are not obliged to listen to or credit because it only describes the presumed delicate, unique, and supposedly privileged character of the speaker.  We don’t have to listen to them because, well, it’s just the way they are.

And somehow these delicate souls manage to harass the virtuous manly men (male or female) who have right on their side to the point of silence.

I haven’t, if you’ll forgive the mixed usage here, seen the silence.  On either side, frankly.  What I have seen is a big fat fence raised between the deponents made up of labels.

Now, labels can be useful.  I like to know which aisle contains the pet food as opposed to the household drygoods as opposed to the liquor.  I like to know which building houses what services and addresses are very handy.  I even like knowing what kind of music I’m likely to find on what station and it is helpful to know where in the bookstore I can find History as opposed to Humor.

But when it comes to people, labels are useless impediments to dialogue and intercourse.  And just because those people over there insist on using labels does NOT justify labeling by anyone else.  Because it is the nature of such things—language—that usage is hijacked, meanings change, and context shifts.

Back in the Sixties, there was an event in San Fransisco.  There was a funeral for Hippy.  The label, the tag, the identity.  Because the people at the core of the counter culture saw what was happening—that what they were, how they dressed, talked, acted, was about to be appropriated as fashion.  They knew that all they intended, all they meant for themselves, all they held important was about to be changed by the normal misuse of the American dialogue.  So they declared Hippy dead and they held a funeral.  There was, after that, no authentic hippy.

It didn’t stop the entire country from assuming it knew what a Hippy was and that they were all around.

In the Fifties the label Communist was horribly misapplied.  A wide net of philosophical and political opinions caught people up and labeled them and lives were ruined.  Because it’s easy to think in labels.  Action follows thought.

I don’t care for labels like that.  Especially when deployed in such a way as to shut down meaningful dialogue.

What I am seeing is the use of a term that once described something quite different being applied by people who think they have the right to determine what is meaningful by excluding what they think is without merit.

Does this go both ways?  Of course.  Labels have universal utility.  They are shorthand.  The problem with them is they make it easy to not think.

Just in case anyone thought I meant something else.

Art

50

I was eleven when Star Trek premiered. I’d seen the previews all summer, I was salivating in anticipation. Just from those minute or so clips it looked just so cool!

We watched the first episode—Man Trap—and disaster struck.

See, I was a somewhat “sensitive” child. I hate horror. I was prone at an earlier age to nightmares.  I recall a couple of times waking up screaming. Of course, I’d been like four or five. It had been years. But my mother was adamant about keeping me away from anything that would curse my nights and ruin their sleep. She was skeptical that this—this—Star Trek Thing—wasn’t just another monster show.  I remember trying to persuade her that, no, it’s about spaceships and other planets. No monsters.

Well.  What was the thing in Man Trap other than a classic scary monster?

I missed half the first season because of that shaggy critter.

We lived downstairs from my grandparents and I took to sneaking up there to watch it.  They had an ancient ANCIENT television, in a pale maple cabinet and a very low-res gun painting the picture on an old tube, so the picture was anything but sharp.

Even so, there was something about it that just took hold.

It is difficult sometimes to explain what Star Trek meant to someone like me that year. It was amazing. It was miraculous.  It was where we wanted to go.

Somehow, Roddenberry and his writers had constructed a thing that had life beyond the edge of the television tube.  We knew the Federation had length, breadth, and depth.  It had substance.  It was a place.  Not like anything else on tv at the time that could even begin to call itself science fiction, this was a universe and we knew it would welcome us in if we could just–just—kind of—maybe—slip in there, past the electrons, and sort of step through.

Of course, it did what written SF had been doing for a long time.  The difference was the medium.  I never knew anyone else growing up who was remotely interested in reading the books and magazines I did. Everyone watched television and more than a few watched Star Trek.

It embedded and evoked an idea of the world and life that extended beyond the ordinary in a way that far exceeded its primitive SFX and pasteboard sets and often mediocre scripting.  It wasn’t the individual episodes that mattered, it was the proposed future portrayed.

We didn’t have any of that stuff. Today we have a lot of it.

I saw the entire first run eventually, all in brilliant black-n-white.  We didn’t have a color tv till the latter part of the Seventies.

It didn’t matter.  I could close my eyes and see all the colors.

My dad, who had a problem with obsession, didn’t like my growing dedication to the show.  “Split your head open with an axe and a bunch of starships would fly out of it,” he would say, as if that were a bad thing.

Well, it wasn’t school work.

But today I’m a published science fiction writer, and I didn’t learn how to do that in school.

More, though, in some way the optimism and vision of Star Trek became part of my general make-up.  I think I’m a better human being because of it.

It was just so fucking wonderful.

Happy Anniversary.

culture

The Iconography of the Myopic

I debated whether or not to say anything about Phyllis Schlalfy’s passing. I have never held her in high regard and certainly anyone who has paid the slightest attention to my writings over the past three decades should know where I stand on the issues on which she and I disagreed. Violently disagreed at times.

But as her death follows upon the heels of the canonization of Mother Theresa, I find a certain symmetry which prompts comment.

These two women shared one attribute in common that has come to define them for the ages: an obdurate dedication to a special kind of ignorance. They have become icons for people who prefer their views of how the world should be and see them as in some ways martyrs to the cause of defending beliefs that require the most tortured of logics to maintain as viable.

Both apparently took as models their own examples as standards and arguments against those they opposed. Schlafly never (she claimed) understood the feminist argument about the oppression of the patriarchy and Bojaxhiu never understood the utility of situational beneficence.  Consequently both could proceed with programmatic movements that blocked progress and flew in the face of realities neither could accept as valid.

Schlafly was instrumental in blocking the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. Her rhetoric before and after was stridently right wing, as if the very notion of women wanting opportunities as human beings was somehow a threat to civilization.  She herself apparently never suffered resistance to anything she wanted to do.  She essentially told women less privileged than herself to be satisfied with their stations in life and give up ambitions of being more than wives and mothers, even as she lived a life that was anything but an acceptance of such limitations.  Her inability—or refusal—to come to terms with the fact that human beings deserve to be treated by each other as individuals cost her, but she has never once publicly acknowledged that she might be wrong.

Bojaxhiu set up shop in one of the poorest areas in the world to, ostensibly, minister to those poor.  Normally we hear that and believe some form of relief of suffering is involved, but apparently not.  She elevated the suffering of the dying to some form of divine gift, gave them aspirin, and prayed while they died in misery. It wasn’t lack of money, either. Her order has received many millions—which she used to open convents and wage a campaign in opposition to the one thing that might make a difference in those poor districts she held in such high esteem: birth control.  Of all the things she might have chosen to name as the most significant enemy of our times, providing women, especially poor women, the means to control their fertility, reduce family size so what resources they had might go further and do more, is a perverse choice. Catholic, yes, but it’s not like other Catholics haven’t seen reality for what it is and did something—anything—that might constructively alleviate suffering.  From the evidence, all she did was put a noble gloss on it and exacerbate it.

It could be argued that both were “of their times” and therefore exception should be made before too harshly assessing their legacies, but I don’t accept that.  In Schlafly’s case, she was educated, moved among the best minds when she wanted to, had more than ample opportunity to understand what she was doing.  It didn’t matter.  She had picked a side and stuck with it, reality be damned.  In Bojaxhiu’s case, the daily exposure to those she supposedly ministered to should have served to snap her out of whatever quasi-Freudian obsession she had with sex and start acting like a human being.  (Unless you wish to argue that she was indeed “out of her time” and would have been right at home in the Middle Ages as a flagellant.) She was not stupid, she was the head of an international organization.  She put on the sackcloth of the humble village girl with simple values, but she was anything but.

That the Church has canonized her is no surprise.  In Dante’s Paradiso we meet many saints and upon reading about them and their character we begin to wonder why these people are where they are.  Dante makes the case—among others—that the price of admission to this paradise is a lifetime of obsessive devotion to a view of divine truth that is essentially selfless.  In other words, in the consequences of their lives, the Paradisiacs are not much different than the Infernals, other than they are selfless rather than selfish.  Both share a conviction that their view of the world is right, but for very different reasons.

Of course, Dante’s Paradise is not really a place anyone rational would care to spend eternity.

That Schlafly has devoted followers is also no surprise.  One of the curious similarities between her and the so-called “New Woman” of the post-liberation era is the image of someone who does it all.  Wife, mother, lawyer, political organizer, mover, shaker. Whatever roadblocks might have been thrown in her way, she went around, over, or through them.  If she could do it, by gum, so can anyone, and we don’t need no damn ERA to do it!

Except for the privilege. No, she wasn’t born to money. But she got the advantages of a college education at a time women weren’t going to college much.  She also married money.  Draw your own conclusions, but without that her later ability to do all the things she chose to do would have been absurdly more difficult.  However, she has the background to appeal to the self-made, the education to talk constitutional law with the best, and the security to assert herself in ways women traditionally do not. However you want to spin it, she was privileged.

Both women offered ideologies that overlooked or flatly denied certain inconvenient realities.  But they had their lives, their callings, their successes.  What is this reality that makes any kind of claim on the conscience of the visionary that either was obliged to respect?

culture

Make America…Again

Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican candidate.  One may wonder how things have gotten to this, but it’s not that hard to understand, just hard to accept.

There is a good side to this.  Ted Cruz will not be the next president.  We may see him try again, but not this time.  All the rest of the slate that began last year has fallen by the wayside and rarely have we seen a scarier bunch of potentials.  It’s not even so much their policies as that they seemed so incredibly unintelligent and uninformed.

But this is America and if it’s one thing we have plenty of it is unintelligent and uniformed people.  Someone has to represent them, I suppose.

Not that Trump is any better.  In fact, he’s become representative of the fact that for some people the less substantive content you put out there, the more you’re liked.

His tag line has been Make America Great Again.

I hate that line.  We’ve seen it before, it’s not like Trump is doing anything original here, but it doesn’t matter who uses it, I find it offensive.

Not, for anyone who might challenge me, because I wish my country not be great, but because that line is a fraud.

First, it assumes we’re not.  Great, that is.  In order to make that claim you have to define what you mean by Great. Right there we run into a problem.  Great by what metric?  According to who?  In what way?  Define your terms.  What do you mean when you suggest that we are not great?

And you then run into the million-issue problem.  What I might mean by the term is not what you mean.  And what you mean might be cause for me to reject that definition.

But set that aside for the moment.  Assume your terms.  Next, you have to explain why we are no longer that.  Why aren’t we great, even according to your values?

Then look around and see how true it is, what you believe.  Don’t rely on that guy behind the podium to tell you what’s wrong, go see for yourself.  If you know how to google at all, do some research.  Or go to some community center meetings.  Or, for the love of the future, read something other than the usual feel-good screed.  Stop watching Fox news.

And get some perspective.  History, oft-neglected and painfully necessary, goes a long way to bleeding off the panic of current-affair myopia.

But I suspect the people really supporting Trump will not do that.  If it was in them to do so, they would not be supporting him.  They would recognize the jingoism, the empty emotionalism, the patriotic deceptiveness.  But it also means they have no idea what he’s actually saying that is getting them so pumped.

Replace one word in his tagline and it makes perfect sense.  He’s not challenging his base to Make America Great Again, he’s challenging them to Make America White Again.

Several years ago I wrote an essay about the blowback on the part of the extreme Right against social change.  I asked what it is these people are so frightened of and I suggested that what really bothers them is that they don’t like the way their country looks anymore.  It’s pretty much that simple.  They don’t like gay people living right out in the open, they don’t like women holding certain jobs and having their own lives, they don’t like the fashions, the food, and they certainly don’t like the banners raised protesting what they never thought were such bad things—like big banks, segregation, and constant war.

They certainly don’t like the complexion of the country these last few decades.  It’s why they often can’t tell the difference between a citizen and a terrorist when their skin color or choice of attire is at odds with what they think America ought to look like.

I’m simplifying, of course, but only in the details.  As individuals, everyone has their own trigger for intolerance.  But when you look at Trump’s rhetoric and the things he gets cheered about and the reactions of his fans, it’s fairly clear that, however one might dress that pig up in pseudo-intellectual drag, it comes down to white people scared of colored people, be they Mexicans, Syrians, Asians, Africans, or Native Americans.

So Making America Great Again seems to be code for making things so we don’t have to pay any attention to Other People—their rights, their cultures, their privileges, their needs, or how they might have reasonable grievances against Business-As-Usual Americanism.  It’s code for trying to make the country resemble what we think it was like just after World War II, with Frederick March coming home to the wife and the picket fence.

You may think I’m being facetious, but I’m not.  As Tom Brokaw showed us, there is a Greatest Generation aspect to that entire period.  It was one time in our whole history when we seemed to be all on the same page and everyone pulled together and things were simple and when the War was over we were “blessed” with an explosive economy and just gushing oodles of righteous purpose.  WWII and the Fifties are this monumental epoch that we worship, idolize, and compare ourselves to constantly.  If only we could return to those days, when everything was so simple and we knew who we were.

That is the image, I believe, intended by all the politicians who use that line and accepted by all the people who swallow it and follow along.

There was something special about that era.

But we can’t have it anymore.  We aren’t those people, the world is not that place anymore, and things aren’t like they used to be.

In short, we have to find a new standard for Great.  That one was used and belongs to another time.  And forcing the country into some kind of mold so it kinda sorta resembles that just because the future frightens you is, well, infantile.

Besides, it wasn’t all that great then, either.  It was just that certain issues were so big as to dwarf the other things that needed fixing.  We were segregated, civil rights were not equally distributed or accepted, many women lacked the opportunity to be their own selves, and poverty still clung to vast areas,mainly in the South.  We had problems, some of them the same ones we have now.

Things aren’t like they were in the “good ol’ days”—and they never were.

But myth has momentum (and creates inertia) and we take from the past what we need to dream a new future.  That future, no matter what, will be different and many people will be afraid of it, no matter how shiny it looks.

You can’t maintain a civilization based on fear of change.  Change happens whether we want it to or not.  We have one choice—be part of it or try to stop it.  If we’re part of it, we can help shape it.  If we try to stop it, we will be run over and forgotten.

As far as I’m concerned, what’s great about this country is that we can, if we want, make a wonderful and wonder-filled future.  We’re not bereft of talent and imagination or resources.  We have everything we need to build a really cool tomorrow.  What makes America Great is what has always made it great—the potential of its people.  I get up in the morning and I can live and work with great people.  I can find and enjoy great art, music, I can eat well, I can think crazy thoughts and sometimes do something amazing because that’s the heritage I choose to recognize.  In that sense, we don’t need to be made Great Again—we are, have been, and will be.

But some people seem to believe that greatness is measured by military strength, social conformism, high-minded bigotry, and constant paeons to nationalistic bombast.  They believe it’s us bullying the rest of the world and telling poor people to just get a job.  It’s size and influence and the ability to order other countries around.  It’s a willingness to reach for a gun at the first hiccup in diplomacy.  And it’s inculcated in nurturing a wealthy class that has no regard for anyone else anywhere else as long as the GDP keeps going up, in spite of the consequences to the environment and working people.

That’s not greatness.  That’s just size.  And arrogance.

So I’m not inclined to accept Mr. Trump’s challenge, because on the one hand it’s without meaning to me.  On the other, I’m not sure we could survive being that great.

 

Absurdity

Common Sense vs Common Crap

This will be brief.  I just saw another of those worthless “memes” comparing capitalism to socialism, this time with regards to military chest-pounding.  Why do “socialist” countries feel it necessary to “parade” their missiles down major avenues* if socialism is such a warm, cuddly, wonderful thing, while capitalism is supposed to be such a brutal, anti-human thing?

And of course, once the comments fly, the “socialist” country held up as example of this is…The Soviet Union.  Which for one thing doesn’t exist anymore, but for another is an example of how labels seem to hold sway over reason too much of the time.

The problem here is that with an avowed socialist in the presidential race, people who oppose him are reaching for any comparison that will make his proposals look horrific.  It’s a failure on the part of those who believe such memes to stop acting like rabbits and use their brains.  So we keep getting treated to these absurd talking points that suggest that under socialism we would come to be just like the former Soviet Union.

How stupid are we?

You find yourself, however, in order to refute the comparison, having to go back and reinvent fire, do the job that ought to have been done in grade school and high school in history and civics classes (oh, wait, we don’t teach civics anymore, do we?) to bring the purveyor of such nonsense up to speed with reality.

I’m not going to do that.  What I’m going to say here is that labels, for either side, explain nothing, but because they are so easy to apply and seem to explain things by association, a lot of people feel they don’t actually have to know anything about the subjects being poorly covered by them.

The former Soviet Union was first and foremost a dictatorship, or, to be a bit more precise, a totalitarian regime.  It used certain socialist ideas as tools internally, but any real analysis shows that it could not be described as a socialist state.  It was not, for one thing, a democracy, and a major aspect of socialism is based on democratic institutions, of which they had none.  Citizens were ruled, they were accountable to a small cadre of functionaries who were not conversely accountable to them.  Law was by decree and the security state held all the power.

This is not socialism.  Just as what Hitler wrought was not—functionally—socialism.  Fascism and Socialism are very different.  But of course, even back then, they understood the power of labels, so they called themselves something they were not and pushed that image and suppressed anyone who said “Wait, that’s not right.”

But even more than that, these things are systems.  They are constructs.  Capitalism is a construct.  It was a made thing, it is an artifice now.  Which means that it is a tool and ought to do as we wish.  So is socialism.  Tools.  We can set limits on both, use them, even combine them into forms that serve our purpose.

That we fail repeatedly to understand that is the largest single problem in our political reality.  And we are kept from understanding that by a crippled educational system and the repeated and deceptive use of labels that even as they purport to inform us and give us some power merely make us less likely to look past them and figure out what the reality is.

Here is the conundrum of our current age.

The benefactor of the current system, known euphemistically as The 1%, are invested in keeping that system in  place.  They do this by distorting government.  The distortion is that they have made it so the government sees them as their primary constituency.

Government therefore fails to serve the rest of us.  We consequently blame it.  Some of us correctly identify the problem and accuse government of being a tool of the 1%.

The solution is shown to be to strip government of its powers to facilitate the desires of the 1%.+

The 1% see this and by other avenues feed us the idea that government alone is the problem and in order to set things right we must take away its ability to function.

In reality, the only tool we the people have to correct the distortion is through government.  Instead of stripping of power, we should be using it in order to correct the systemic distortion.

Government is caught in the middle.  It’s a tool and can only do what it is tasked to do.  If we 99% believe it is at fault and tear it down, the 1% will have no barrier to their continued misuse of capitalist systems.  But we’ve been fed the canard that the government is entirely on their side and is the sole reason for the dysfunction.

Certain corrections to the distortion are based on socialist concepts.  But we’ve been told for decades how awful that would be.  Meanwhile, the situation continues to worsen because there is no viable solution offered, and the only avenue that appears to be viable is to weaken the one thing that might do us good. Our voice, clearly expressed through our government.

So enough with the idiotic comparison and the bullshit that we can’t use systems rather than be victim to them.

All it requires is a little common sense, less common crap, and participation.  Once again, vote. But for the sake of the country, learn something useful about things as they are and how they work.  Right now, we are very much like Thelma and Louise.  “We have to get to Mexico, but I ain’t going through Texas!”

__________________________________________________________________

  • I can’t recall the last time such a parade took place in Stockholm.  Hmm…
  • + One of the ways they do this is by funding candidates and buying elections, sending people to congress who tell us they’ll work for us then turn around and work for them.
blog

Competency As Test For Civil Discourse

President Obama gave his last State of the Union address this week.  I did not watch it, but I read the transcript.  To my eye, to my mind, it was as fine a way to cap his presidency as one could hope.  He spoke to the future.  Make of that what you will.  Those who do not now or never have liked him, it was all hot air, empty rhetoric, posing for posterity.  For those who believe he has been the best president since the last great one, it was inspirational, an arrow aimed at the next horizon.  For anyone with the slightest grasp of history, how politics works, of even a grasp of the last 40 years, it was a gracious and generous invitation to Do Better.

In contrast, Governor Haley’s official Republican rebuttal was a tortured exercise in finding a way to be right in the cracks of a broken legacy, made nearly irrelevant by an evident lack of understanding and, apparently, knowledge of our country’s history.

Nikki Haley, Governor of South Carolina, said in an interview after her rebuttal “we’ve never in the history of this country passed any laws or done anything based on race or religion.”

Let me pause for a breath while I ponder the utter feckless ignorance in that statement.  This is the flip side of the Right’s insistence that this country was founded on Christianity, I suppose.  More to the point, if that’s your belief, and you did not notice how stupidly wrong that statement from Governor Haley was, then you do have to ask yourself how you square the contradiction.  If she’s right, then this country was never a “christian” nation.  If it was so founded, then she’s wrong and every single law ever passed has been based on religion.

As to race, please.  Have you never heard of the One Drop Rule?  Or Loving v. Virginia?  Or Plessy v. Ferguson?  No?  What a pristine place your mind must be, then, unsullied by the grimier legacies of this country.

Saying something like that is tantamount to saying “All that stuff we did—we never really did it, it’s only stuff in books we don’t read.”  Wishful thinking and frankly insulting, because for that to pass she has to believe her listeners are stupid and uneducated and ignorant.  She has to bet on you not knowing any better.

Nikki Haley is one of the more reasonable Republicans holding office currently, but it is this kind of tone-deaf, ahistorical, reality-denying rhetoric that makes it impossible for me to take her seriously.  Or any of them, really, so synced to their Party campaign to undo everything from the 1950s (at a minimum) till today just because their constituency will vote for them if they do.  A shrinking constituency, I think.  The louder they get, the smaller their numbers.  But, my word, they are loud.

By comparison, Obama has shown far more gracious tolerance than—well, than I could possibly have shown.

We seem not to teach civics in school anymore.  We should.  We should have a course on civics combined with American history, beginning in grade school (when I got it) and continue on until 12th grade.  No let up.  Cover this stuff in greater and greater detail, ad nauseum, until it sinks in and we no longer think someone knows what he or she is talking about just because they hold high office.

What I will miss most when Obama leaves office is not being talked to like I only have a 3rd grade education by my president.  I will miss his erudition.  Yes, I will miss his humor, his sophistication, even his syntax.

I suspect the rest of the world will, too.

culture

Bang!

We’ve had a banner year of in terms of bizarre homicides.  I could say that all homicide is bizarre, but somehow when it involves people who actually know each other it seems more…expected, I suppose.  Tragic, shocking, but after a little thought you can see how it happened.

So-called mass shootings are another matter. These are exercises in mindless spleen-venting on the part of people who are then portrayed as mentally ill, “radicalized,” or some variation of misanthropic moron, either an ideologue or a racist or sometimes just someone who has reached the end of the apparently short string by which life was hanging.  Collectively we try to make sense of them.  For most of us, this is like making bricks without straw: work the material all you want, it’s just mud in the end and nothing that holds up. We just don’t know.

Into this once more we have another round of what has since 1968 been a cyclic iteration of the Gun Control Debate. The question arose on the federal level during Prohibition when gangsters were running around with Thompson machine guns.  The police argued that the ownership and use of such weapons outside the military represented a public danger, and limitations were duly enacted, but this was by no means the first instance within the borders of the United States when possession of firearms by private citizens was an issue of law.  And to be sure after the Civil War the question had teeth in the face of Reconstruction policies and the subsequent reaction of the defeated South to the condition of free blacks.  There is ample in our history to make a case that the idea of restricting access to personal firearms is a matter of oppression.  Hence these arguments cannot be quietly put to rest.

One thread is the presumed constitutionality of the matter.  The 2nd Amendment is seen by many to guarantee unrestricted access to firearms.  Strict Constructionists line up in odd combinations with Survivalists, militant preservationists, and others to claim the Founders meant exactly this.  On the other side are those who argue they did not.  The fact is, it’s an open question.  A good deal of American law was based on English Law and Blackstone’s Commentaries served as an often unacknowledged guide to the writing of local and state ordinances as well as hovering in the back of all the conventionists’ minds while drafting the various state constitutions and the federal constitution.  This is one reason so many early state constitutions look so much alike, even in language.

What did Blackstone have to say about possession of arms?

5. The fifth and last auxiliary right of the subject, that I shall at present mention, is that of having arms for their defense, suitable to their condition and degree, and such as are allowed by law. Which is also declared by the same statute . . . and is indeed a public allowance, under due restrictions, of the natural right of resistance and self-preservation, when the sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression. Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1765

Right there we see the basis of our legal understanding and the problem with clarification.  Under due restrictions.  Blackstone—and presumably most if not all the Founders—understood that some regulation was necessary.  But by pairing it with a right both Blackstone and the Founders left the issue vague enough to result in precisely the argument we now have.  I wrote a piece about my interpretation of what the Founders were thinking here.

Recently I saw this debate once again where the minds of the Founders was being analyzed for both pro and con.  I thought to chime in, then held back.  I realized suddenly that it simply doesn’t matter what they had in mind.

People will take what they want from the Constitution, just as they do from the Bible, and use it in any way that serves their personal view of how the world ought to be.  The vagueness—assumed vagueness—of the 2nd Amendment in this regard allows for the evolution of civil construction to suit a changing situation.  The whole Constitution is like that.  “What does it mean?” is open to interpretation as long as the issue is recognized as fundamentally important.

(Scalia is simply wrong in his view that the Constitution is not a living document, that it is somehow set in stone and inviolate.  If true, that makes it all but worthless.)

The intent of the Founders, however one wishes to construe it in practice, was to guarantee that the armed power of the state came from the express consent of the people.  That the “king” was not to hold that power exclusively to the detriment of his subjects, but they would hold it to keep the king in check.

How they held it was and is open to debate and certainly open to reformulation.

In that regard, we should also remember that the United States has traditionally been a state opposed to the idea of standing armies and until WWII, when our current arrangement of maintaining a large federal armed force came into acceptance, we raised armies at need.  Consider this from Teddy Roosevelt’s Sixth State of the Union address:

“Our Regular Army is so small that in any great war we should have to trust mainly to volunteers; and in such event these volunteers should already know how to shoot; for if a soldier has the fighting edge, and ability to take care of himself in the open, his efficiency on the line of battle is almost directly Proportionate to excellence in marksmanship. We should establish shooting galleries in all the large public and military schools, should maintain national target ranges in different parts of the country, and should in every way encourage the formation of rifle clubs throughout all parts of the land. The little Republic of Switzerland offers us an excellent example in all matters connected with building up an efficient citizen soldiery.”

And by the way this was one of the primary functions of the NRA before its lobbying arm expanded to dominate the entire machinery of it.

But the fact is, the situation has changed and we are not talking about abstract political philosophy but about access to military style weapons and head’s full of junk going out and popping off at targets of opportunity because they think their world is ending.  Or they want their 15 minutes.  Or they didn’t take their meds.  Or they overdosed on paranoid social media and Fox News.  Or they think—

And we have a multi-billion dollar arms industry that thrives on this stuff, because every time it happens people run out and buy more guns.  Naturally they don’t want to see restrictions.

But to argue that restrictions are in some way a violation of the Founders  intent is not only a narrow and self-serving view but beside the point, because for the most part the people making that argument wouldn’t change their mind if they could be proved wrong.  This is religion for them and like people who insist that Leviticus supports their view of the present world and its ills they will interpret it as they want.

Just as those who find the 2nd Amendment a vestigial piece of antiquated nonsense that perhaps ought to be expunged.

The Founders certainly never intended us to be hamstrung by what they did.  The world is a different place—technologically if not politically—and refusing to sit down and try to find a solution to a problem because “the Constitution says” would likely strike them as absurd.

And childish.

I don’t believe any rational person feels the guy who shot up the Planned Parenthood clinic  is mentally or morally qualified to have had unrestricted access to weapons.  To defend his ability to have them because you think it means you can’t have the same access to the same weapons is a troubling and frankly myopic attitude.  We have a real problem in this country with firearms in the hands of people who, with just a little thought, we know shouldn’t have them.

The people who shot up San Bernardino are a different matter. Sane but definitely operating out of a different playbook than the rest of us, one built on self-justifications, paranoia, and perhaps a bit of political vulgarity that made them feel outside the scope of ordinary avenues of communication.  The fact is, anyone could do this and we have no way of knowing who might or when or why. It would be nice to think we could predict with certainty, but we can’t, so other solutions should be sought.

However, the debate must be had before we can come to any solution.  But stop using the Founders as an excuse.  Be honest—this isn’t about them.  It’s about us.