Category: history

Art

Give Up Expectations

As I previously noted, the reading group (study group, really) to which we belong just completed Dante Alighieri’s Commedia.  After seven years of more or less twice-monthly sessions, canto by canto, poring over etymologies, dictionaries, lexicons, and tossing ideas around in a whirlwind of interpretation, we came to the end, with more stars, and one may hope a better understanding of a text that has been at the center of Western Literature for centuries.

Hope, I think, is the key.  Which is to say, the meaning of that word in the famous line everyone seems to know even if they don’t always know from where it comes.  Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

From Canto III of Inferno.  The full quote is:

“Through me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me among the people lost for aye.
Justice the founder of my fabric moved:
To rear me was the task of Power divine,
Supremest Wisdom, and primeval Love.
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I endure.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

The line became a common one in religious pageants, engraved over the orifices of Hellmouths, and used in countless bad horror dramas.

One thing emerged very clearly in our study—Dante was a master etymologist.  His use of the vernacular is often seen as both a radical departure and as a dismissal of possibly troublesome secondary and tertiary intentions.  But often we followed the trail of some word back through archaic Italian to Latin (and sometimes Greek, though famously “Dante knew no Greek”) to produce some rather fascinating alternate takes on what are otherwise common understandings of his lines.

Take the word Hope, for instance.  In Dante’s Italian, this is speranza.  it does mean “hope” but it also means “prospect,” which has a different connotation.  Follow the word back through Latin, from its primary source sperantia to the root spes and among the several meanings you find “anticipation” and “expectation.”

If we swap the traditional meaning from “hope” to “expectation” we not only get a somewhat different meaning to the phrase but a that difference that ripples throughout the rest of the work.  “Abandon all expectation, you who enter here” possesses all sorts of other context intentions that can, unexpectedly, alter our apprehension of what follows.

Because what follows is indeed unexpected.

Most commentators seem stuck on the basic idea that Dante was writing about the afterlife.  Use of “hope” in the opening scenes, on the verge of hell, tends to support such a reading.  Certainly there’s nothing essentially wrong with this, as the Commedia was part of a healthy popular literary form of the day, Vision Literature.  (We have more than 60 surviving manuscripts of these stories, guided tours through the realms of the afterlife.  The first we know of was recorded by Pope Gregory the Great around 590 C.E.)  The framework Dante used was well-established and by no means radical.

But like any great artist, he put it to other uses.

Most Visions of this sort wallow in the novelty of infernal tortures and the ultimate relief of heaven.  They are almost wholly sensual, an odd thing for works that ostensibly describe a decidedly noncorporeal experience.

Dante was exploring morality, ethics, and the theater of the mind.  By reading the famous admonition as “expectation” being left behind, it may be easier to see this.  There is no “hope” in the usual sense, mainly a fervent trust in an ultimate validation, reward, completion.  (By the time you work your way through Paradise you cannot possibly see this as any kind of promised reward.)  But in order to derive meaning—the meaning Dante intended—you have to leave preconceptions behind.  You must abandon your expectations and come to the work with an open mind, willing to see things as presented and as suggested.

Dante is throughout concerned with the human capacity to think and understand.  He states it clearly in Canto III of Inferno, just after the encounter with the epigram, where Virgil tells Dante:

“We have come to the place I spoke about, where you would see the souls who dwell in pain, for they have lost the good of the intellect.”

The Italian word used is dolorose, which does mean “pain”—but more, it means woe and regret.  In this phrasing the meaning of “intellect” can be taken in a Hegelian sense, basically that intellect is that which allows context—which is a fundamental differentiation between intelligent people and those who are merely clever, a distinction that goes back at least to Socrates.

Why would intellect be tied one-to-one with the regret of hell?  A simple answer would be that an abandonment of the intellect leads to an inability to make “right” choices and thence to a life of sin.  But Purgatory is filled with people suffering an inability to make choices.  Besides, salvation even then was believed to be a benefice of God’s grace, not anything to do with your own ability to think and understand.

Before that, Virgil tells Dante he must “leave distrust and doubt behind…put all cowardice to death”—namely, give up both expectation (hope) and prejudice (fear) in order to see things differently.  In order to see what is really there.

The course Dante takes after crossing over in Charon’s boat is one where the denial of intellect, the inability to use it, and the final embrace of all its powers defines the framework of life.

To underscore this, those Dante learns of who inhabit Limbo are all poets and writers.  Virgil of course, but also Homer, Lucan, Ovid, Horace.  At this stage they are the only ones with the light of intellect, but they live in light surrounded by darkness, the threshold of Oblivion.  They look but see nothing.  In a sense, this condition is recapitulated in Paradise where the inhabitants seeing nothing else but what is at their center.

(Dante plays a curious game with Limbo, which did not become “official” until 1254 C.E.  Limbo:  limits, a threshold, from the sanskrit Lambaté, a suspension.  Suspended animation.  Indo European s’lamba, to hand down.  A latent capacity, untapped until someone accepts it and puts it to use?  As Dante uses Virgil?  Limbo, perhaps, merely lacks a cultural basis for moving on.  It is a place held in reserve, with no telos (which the Limboites do not believe in anyway—and why would they?  It is not for them to find a direction), no concept of “paradise” toward which to move.)

At Canto V we come to the first thing in hell which, perhaps unsurprisingly, is carnality.  But Dante is not a simplistic moralist.  He was ever concerned with context and seemed to suggest that things in themselves were not immutable in the sense of being categorically right or wrong.  Carnality is the first thing in hell, the last thing in Purgatory, and again the first in Paradise, transformed into eroticism.

Much has been written about Francesca and Paolo, hell’s first victims, and one may legitimately wonder why they are here.  After all, they only wanted love.

Again, it is a question of intellect, and this first example sets the stage for what follows.  Paolo and Francesca’s “principle” seems to be unbounded sexual passion, romanticized by models they have taken from fictions and poets, being “in the moment.”  But moment follows moment.  It is telling that Paolo never speaks and here is the problem.  The distinction is between self-awareness and self-involvement.  Self-awareness is necessary to recognize the affect you have on others, and neither Francesca (it’s all about her) nor Paolo display the least degree of awareness and end up blaming their unfortunate state on everything and everyone else.  They reject context, refuse to acknowledge responsibility, act out of absolute sensual impulse ungoverned by any consideration beyond their own gratification.  Consequently, they enter upon level after level of betrayal, beginning with self-betrayal.  (Francesca completely depersonalizes Paolo, never even naming him, but referring to him as “this one.”)  The eros is not what they’re in it for, but the denial of everything but the capture of a momentary impulse which they do not even try to understand.  (The idea that this canto is based on “the autonomy of passion and the heteronymy of sin” would make more sense if the terms were reversed.)

It is here where we can see what Dante was playing at.  On the surface, Francesca and Paolo are “innocent”—young lovers only wanting each other—but they indulge their pursuit by rejecting forethought, understanding, any kind of self-awareness, and accept only appetite as a justification for…anything.  It is not so much the act but the lack of any recognition that has put them here.

We completed the entire work this year, so I’m adding this post to my end-of-year reading assessments.  I’ll be returning from time to time to mull over more of the work.

Along with this, though, I read the Barbara Reynolds’ biography Dante: the Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man.  Ms. Reynolds was Dorothy Sayers’ personal assistant and aided Sayers in her translation of Dante (and finished it when Sayers died before completing it).  Reynolds also wrote a biography of Sayers.

I can recommend the Dante biography as a biography, but I found her analysis of the Commedia conservative and traditional, despite her claim to have a “new and radical” take on it.  Like most commentators, she accepts unquestioned that Dante was talking about the afterlife.  In my view (decided amateur, to be sure, and unacademic, but it is mine) Dante was not at all concerned with the afterlife in his great work.  As an exile, a nearly perpetual outsider, Dante had a view of the secular and temporal whole as a network of political, philosophical, and intellectual systems and codified that view here.  He cast it in the framework of a Vision and thereby wrote what might otherwise have been condemned outright as heresy.  But by the end I found it difficult if not impossible to see this as anything other than a precursor to later examinations of Reason and the human condition.  (There’s even some interesting physics thrown in here and there, especially concerning optics, but also concerning time, which on some levels are related.)  He was very much writing about the here and now, the there and then, and problems of right action in a corrupt world.  His opening charge, to give up expectations—prejudice, preconceptions, hopes, fears—is intended to clear the mind for the work of seeing fresh.  He ties intellection to salvation, but it is not the kind of salvation one’s expectation may anticipate.

Art

The Scroll At Year’s End

I read around 80 books, cover to cover, this year.  Currently I’m in the middle of Gore Vidal’s Lincoln and odds are I won’t quite manage to finish it by the 31st (annoying life-type stuff keeps getting in the way and I do not want to zip through it; too many delicious bits to risk zipping past) but I will say a couple things about it at the end of this.

Of the historical nonfiction I read this year, a chunk of it went into the second volume of the trilogy I’ve been working on for a while (which, before you ask, still has not found a publisher, but I’m going to start the third volume next year anyway).  In that vein, I read The Red Prince by Timothy Snyder, a biography of Wilhelm von Habsburg, one of the last archdukes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Pleasurably readable, this chronicles the familial ins and outs of a complicated imperial family during the period in which empires collapsed all over the world and the scions of such dynasties found other things to do with both their time and their pedigree.  While it may seem odd today, Wilhelm was one of those who “adopted” a nation to champion—Ukraine—which more or less had to be created from whole cloth out of certain ethnic minorites other states claimed.  I read this mostly for the background, which informs the second volume of my own book, but I was so taken by Wilhelm that I inserted him in one scene.

Along those lines—since this is the character I put Wilhelm in the scene with, and because I’ve used him as the bad guy throughout the trilogy, albeit in a somewhat distorted form (we are talking alternate history after all)—I read The Panther’s Feast by Robert Asprey.  I’d read this back in high school—in fact still have the Bantam paperback copy of it—but remembered only that Alfred Redl, who ended up the most powerful intelligence officer in the Austrian Empire, was a traitor, selling secrets to maintain his exorbitant lifestyle as well as his secret life as a homosexual, and set the stage subsequently for the rout of Austria in the First World War.  I chose him for the antagonist and did some fiddling with history to make him a count.  Asprey’s book read like a novel, but he backs up his portrayal with an impressive amount of research.  Again, the full flavor of the Austrian Empire is on display.

Much as it is in Frederic Morton’s A Nervous Splendor, which is largely about Vienna in 1888 and ’89 and the last days of Crown Prince Rudolph.  The cast of characters running through this short but meticulous work brings the period to life—Klimt, Mahler, Freud, Herzl, and Schnitzler.  (I have Morton’s Thunder At Twilight on my TBR pile, which is about Vienna on the eve of WWI.)

In preparation for volume three, which will be set during the Napoleonic Era, I read a decent biography of Fouché, who was minister of police under Napoleon—but also involved in the Directory and worked also for Louis XVIII and the restoration.  His legacy plays a part in the series as the namesake of the state police in my story—the Fouchendarme.  A most fascinating player in that whole period, the man who literally had the goods on everybody and thus not only escaped the guillotine but maintained considerable power.  According to Hubert Cole, whose biography of him I chose, he was a more or less consistent republican throughout that period, but he was also a pragmatist.  He should be remembered for the tremendous number of people he did not arrest as for those he did.

I needed background on Paris as well.  I found one book that purported to be a street by street history which was so difficult to keep straight, I gave up.  (I may try again.)  But I found Graham Robb’s Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris, which is not only very readable, but contains stories that delight (for instance, the tale of how Marie Antoinette delayed the royal escape by turning the wrong way coming out of the Tuileries and ending up doing a long nocturnal circuit of the city, eating up hours while the king and court waited).

Tangential to these—using the writing of a novel as an excuse, really, to range over some histories I wanted to read anyway—I read America’s Constitution by Akhil Reed Amar.  Amar has done a book on the bill of rights as well and more recently published a more speculative work on our “unwritten” constitution.  In this one, he breaks the constitution down by section and analyzes it both historically and legally and sometimes philosophically.  His command of minutiae and understanding of shifting context make this a pretty good work on which to base a deeper understanding of our Founding documents.

I’m becoming more and more interested in early American history.  The last several years have seen major distortions in public by prominent politicians who seem to feel that the general ignorance of the American populace of their own history is sufficient for them to think they can get away with blatant misrepresentations.  But it is a complex history and even people reasonably conversant with the broader outlines of our history can be forgiven for not knowing—well, a lot.  So I have a growing pile of books, one of which this past year was Nancy Isenberg’s Fallen Founder, which is a thorough re-examination of the life and impact of Aaron Burr.  She details in the introduction the unfortunately shoddy history of biographies about this man, of whom most people only know that he shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel and was later tried for treason.  (That he was tried seems enough to convince most people that he was guilty, even though he was thoroughly acquitted and the real traitors in the affair were never indicted.)  Hard upon that, I read Gore Vidal’s novel, Burr, which obviously predates Isenberg’s biography but also seems to anticipate it.  Vidal evidently didn’t think much of Jefferson and his portrayal of some of the key figures in the Revolution may make some people’s back teeth ache, but it is an excellent novel and succeeds in bringing the period to life.  (As noted above, I’m now reading his Lincoln, which thus far feels equally well grounded and evocative of time and place.  Novels and biographies such as these play a very important role in public life, insofar as I think it essential that we do all we can to lance the boil of deification which enshrouds our famous forebears in cauls of inhuman adulatory buffer.  One need not shortchange someone’s reputation for significant achievement by also pointing out that he or she was in many ways just like anyone else, and could be just as much an asshole or an incompetent.)

Among the other nonfiction books I read this year, I can recommend four in particular.  In no kind of order, they are: Thinking, Fast & Slow by Daniel Kahnman, Blue Highways by William Least-Heat Moon, Nom De Plume by Carmela Ciuraru, and Sleepwalking Through History by Haines Johnson.

The Kahneman is a detailed study of how people make decisions, how, in fact, the brain and mind process information and come to conclusions.  While this may sound like a dry tome, it is anything but, as he uses illustrations from his own life as a researcher and tells the story in a lively style.

I have come to the conclusion that one should read at least one Heat Moon book just for the sheer elegance of his sentences.  More, his has a gift for evoking place and mood.  Blue Highways is his first book, a chronicle of a circumnavigation of America by way of the “blue roads on the maps”, the lesser used state roads. In this instance, it is also an evocation of time—the late 70s—before America began to change with the Reagan “revolution.”

Which segues nicely into the Haines Johnson book.  Johnson chronicles the actual workings of the Reagan Administration and the cultural context and tears away the curtain to reveal the man at the levers.  Reagan’s reputation as a “great” president is one of the best pieces of spin control we have ever seen and this books shows why.  It is easy to point to Reagan’s presidency as the time when everything started to go sideways for so much of what America wished to be and become, but it can be tricky making the argument among certain people who venerate the man—a veneration born of image rather than substance—and having a source of details is very useful.

The Ciararu is a delightful history of famous pseudonyms.  Mark Twain, George Sand, George Eliot, Simenon (a lot of Georges!) and others.  Concise biographies open the door on the how and why of these authors and their pen names.  Fun.

I also read Ellen Chesler’s admirable biography of Margaret Sanger, Woman of Valor, which also chronicles the history of the birth control movement in America and the contiguous struggle for equality of women.  Historical amnesia can have serious consequences, especially in a time when gains made decades ago are now in danger of being lost because so many people simply don’t know what it was like and what it took to achieve what now can be taken for granted.  This a good place to start to find the social and political grounding of some of our current absurd culture wars.

These were the significant nonfiction books I read this past year. I’ll do the fiction in a separate post.

I wholehearted recommend everything I discussed here—in case there was any doubt.

culture

Insanity

Doubtless whatever I say, someone will find fault, take offense, withdraw into positions, place guard dogs at the gates and lookouts in the towers.

We are a people enamored of the idea of violence.  We like the idea that when it gets down to the proverbial nitty gritty we can and will kick ass and take names.  Americans are tough, not to be messed with, ready to exact justice by knuckles or 9.mm.

Until something like this happens and then we recoil from our own defining myths with a collective “but that’s not what we meant!”

Adam Lanza murdered 26 people in a grade school, 20 of them 1st graders.  Children.  Reports indicate he shot some of them multiple times at close range.

Someone, somewhere, by now has made the argument that had any of those kids been armed, Lanza would have been stopped.  Maybe not in the media (but I could be wrong) but in living rooms and over dinner tables.

Because we are almost as obsessed with Finding Reasons as we are of retaining an image of personal power born of a romanticized version of a Frontier that for the most part never existed.

Back in the metaphorically rich Sixties, at one of the last “above ground” meetings of the Underground, there was a session dedicated to the proposition that it was encumbent upon good revolutionaries to set about killing all newborn whites.  Because, the argument ran, through no fault of their own they were destined to grow up to be part of an oppressive ruling elite and it was necessary to nip this in the bud before the conditions of oppression found new blood to enforce the status quo.

Now, this was not acted upon.  I bring it up to make the point that people adopt narratives and take positions that in their extremity produce bizarre ideas.  The vast majority never come to fruition—they are ideas, discussions, bandied about by people who, in their own way, are trying to find explanations for and impose order upon a world that seems chaotic and malign.  To some extent, we all do this.  There is even an upside to it—fiction writers produce cathartic works that thrill and entertain.

And, in a sane world, go no farther.

But there are always those who internalize the narrative extremes and find cause to act.

We’ve had a string of these recently.  Just this morning there was another report of a shooting, in Newport RI I believe, some loon snapped off fifty shots in a mall or on a beach.  No one was injured this time.  All we have is the lone gunman shooting at the demons around him.

Demons?*

Listen to some of the rhetoric of the past couple of decades, rhetoric that once had a limited audience, but since the age of Cable and the Internet has blossomed with a concomitant ease of isolating narrow bands of data, enabling people to create bubbles and live in them in ways never before possible, seems today more concentrated, vitriolic.

Back in the early days of the Moral Majority I heard Falwell preaching blood in the streets.  End Times Nonsense.  The Apolcalypse is upon us.  Final Days.

Insanity.

But that does not mean these people—preachers and preached—are themselves insane.

No doubt there will be an attempt to characterize this young man as mentally ill.  How else could he have done this?

I believe this misses a crucial point.

In Eichmann in Jerusalem: the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt made the case that Eichmann—and by extension most of his colleagues in the Third Reich—was not evil, not in any classical sense of being demon-possessed or mentally deformed.  He was a functionary, a bureaucrat, doing a job.  The most you could say is that he had bought into a paradigm that was at base evil, but it came from many factors.  Key among them was the narrative he had accepted that allowed him to think along certain lines that led to Holocaust.

It’s frightening because it tells us that any one of us could be just like him.

If you live inside a bubble, your view of the world is distorted, the solutions you may find will be at odds with the common, but you do not need to be clinically insane for this to take hold.

Which brings me to one of those gnawing, irritating factors in the second half of this issue.  The guns.

Lanza did not do this with an assault rifle, which has become the icon of mass killings.  He had a pair of pistols.  Automatics, to be sure, but that only makes what he was able to do faster, not any more terrible. And here is the frustrating point that so many of us of a certain generation wrestle with.

I grew up in a house full of guns.  My father was a gunsmith at one point.  We had the equivalent of a small armory in the house.  Several of them were antiques, but a number were quite modern.

It never occurred to me once to use one to settle a problem.  And trust me when I say that if anyone would have fit the profile of one of these killers, it would have been me.  Bullied, ignore, frustrated, introverted, socially inept, and very, very stressed from a feeling of injustice in the way I was treated.

It never crossed my mind to kill anyone.

In terms of the weapons themselves, I treated them with the utmost respect, fully aware of their power and potential (we hunted).

Now.  What the hell has changed?

I do not here side with the NRA.  They have taken it upon themselves to advocate a position which crosses the line into inanity, but which is based on the self-perceived rights of a constituency which for a very long time was perfectly mainstream.  But like other such issues, a worm of right-wing paranoia has crept in.  They do not come right out an say it, but they represent people who believe in their bones that the 2nd Amendment gives them their sole guarantee that the United States will not become a tyranny.

What I will say is that this position makes it very difficult to even discuss rational limits on firearm possession.

Something which once was entirely at the determination of local authorities.

(I find it ironic that people who reject “federalism” out of hand for any number of other matters—schools, healthcare, poverty relief, etc—depend more and more on a federal solution to even state attempts to control firearms.)

An insistence that people like Lanza are mentally ill in some way combined with this absurd stance on a presumed right to not only own but potentially use lethal force for political purposes and a marrow-deep suspicion of government has created an unconscionable situation.  We can all of us not only imagine but I suspect name people who should not own guns.  Neighbors, even.  They are not insane.  They may be irresponsible.  It’s likely some of them—many of them—side with the no-limits attitude of the NRA.  They may simply espouse a worldview born out of narrative completely at odds with reality.

The scary thing here is how close this issue brushes up against 1st Amendment rights.  If, as I seem to be suggesting, we need to look at the kinds of stories we’re telling ourselves about ourselves, doesn’t that border on advocating censorship of some kind?

No, I do not.  But it should be recognized how closely entwined the two things can become.

What I do advocate is some kind of program that punctures all these bubbles people have been living in.

When the Republic was founded, the fact of the matter is the “armed forces” was The People.  We didn’t have much of a regular army—in fact, rejected having one—and our various police forces were not very good.  The fact is, a substantial portion of the population lived in isolated, frontier regions where owning a firearm was not only desirable but essential.  We live upon that founding narrative, even though the frontier is long gone and the fact is that the police and the armed forces are so far and away better equipped than any citizen soldiers might be that the idea of resisting them is almost laughable.  But the fact is, we likely wouldn’t resist them.

But this nonsense over the intent of the 2nd Amendment is silly.  The phrase is “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” not “the right of persons (or the right of people)” to do so.  The Framers understood language, sometimes clearly far better than we do.  By not saying simply “persons” or “people” but instead “the people” they made it clear they intended a political entity, not individuals under any circumstances.  They meant that the militia was the local community, that used to muster to drill from time to time in the town square, and as things became more and more settled, fewer and fewer individuals owned firearms of their own.  They would get them from the local armory if need be (which is exactly what the British were on their way to seize at Lexington and Concord).  What they meant was the right to exercise military force belonged to the citizens.

Let me finish by pointing out that the one thing we seem reluctant to talk about, on either side, is precisely that lost element of responsibility I mentioned earlier.  What the hell happened to us?  We have gone from, presumably, a nation of responsible adults to a nation of emerging armed camps with no ability to teach the next generation anything of value.

I do not know why Adam Lanza did what he did.  I would very much like to know why he thought what he did was not only acceptable but his only option to redress whatever ingrown, isolated, paranoid wrong he thought needed redressing.  I want to know why he thought that was okay.

That is just as important, if not more so, than rationalizing this asinine debate over the proliferation and possession of firearms.

_______________________________________________________________

* No, I do not believe in demons as in “Satan’s minions” or spawn or what have you.  But some folks do believe in them and act accordingly.

Absurdity

12-12-12

Because I can’t resist the date.

Urban Abstract 2, 2012
Circles and Levels and Clocklike Movement

This particular confluence of numerical coincidence won’t happen again this century.  Proper appreciation must be shown.

Or, as Stephen Jay Gould once said, “I have always and dearly loved calendrical questions because they display all our foibles in revealing miniature.  Where else can we note, so vividly revealed, such an intimate combination of all the tricks that recalcitrant nature plays upon us, linked with all the fallacies of reason, and all the impediments of habit and emotion, that make the fulfillment of our urge to understand even more more difficult…”

It is in our nature to reject coincidence as simply what it is, especially when it comes to cosmic events.  Long ago human beings decided the devices we invented to keep track of time actually meant something to Time itself, as if the universe was somehow required to acknowledge our conceits.

Still, even as a purely invented coincidence, 12-12-12 is kind of cool.  How many babies will be born today and be considered extra special just because?  If someone happens to win a lottery today, the efficacy of numerically based sympathetic magic will be reinforced, even though it will still have exactly the same relationship as the odds of a coin face coming up with each of a hundred tosses as if the collective numbers of heads or tails somehow imposes necessity on each one (namely, zero).

On the other hand, any day you wake up with something to marvel on is a win, so I’ll take my small pleasures where I can.

I’ll be writing up a year-end assessment in a couple of weeks.  Soon it will be 2013—a numerical change about as meaningful as today’s date in the greater scheme of anything.  For instance, it is 2012 in our calendar system (Gregorian—the older Julian is similar, lacking but 13 days, which would make today the last day of November, with today’s numerically alliterative advent still to come) but 5773 in the Hebrew calendar. (A more concurrent calendar is the Holocene, which starts at the beginning of the Holocene Era—ours—by adding ten thousand years.  So it’s 12012 H.E.  I like that.)

It’s 1434 in the Islamic calendar.  Sometimes I ponder the significance of time lapsed in cultural evolution to try to understand where a given institution is along the line.  In this case, I remember where christianity was in 1400 when seeking to comprehend current attitudes and events.  They were on the verge of the Reformation, with seething splinter groups roiling under the surface about to explode into a family feud they’re still trying to settle.  Hm.

One of the youngest calendars is the so-called “Minguo” which is from the Republic of China (Taiwan) and dates from the founding of the Republic in 1912.  Their centenary was just celebrated.  It’s 101 in the ROC Minguo calendar.

We’re fortunate not be stuck using the Unix calendar, which is expressed in seconds.

The true measure of time is change.  Change in the environment, certainly, but for our purposes, changes in ourselves.  There is no calendar for such things.  Some changes are temporary, some seasonal, others permanent.  They may be profound or just occurrences that seem to have little import.  It’s a question of where we’ve been and where we’re going.

Passagway
Passageway

It’s a common fallacy that our lives are telec, that they have a narrative structure, a beginning and an end in terms of purposes and goals.  If they do, it is a fact that we impose such things, but we’re not born with them.  (Born into them, perhaps, in the case of those who arrive swaddled in family expectations actively imposed.)  We have a start and a finish, which is not quite the same thing.  In between, it’s up to us to find meaning and purpose, make it out of whole cloth if we must, but waiting around for cosmic enlightenment to tell us what we’re here for invites a wasted life.  In an attempt to impose structure and suggest meaning, humans have invented numerous things—like calendars, with attendant rituals and anniversaries.  Out of the matrix of such things many of us find relevance among ourselves and that is not a bad thing at all.

In truth, each of us brings to such things what we have and are, whether we accept others’ definitions or not.  I wish people Merry Christmas despite the fact that I impute no validity in the defining mythology, because Christmas is what we make it.  I don’t have a lot of patience for people bent on souring everyone else’s holiday by indulging a political or theological hissy-fit—on either side of the Belief Divide.  I have my own resonances with it and take pleasure from the memory and æstethic significance on which I accrued that meaning.  I watch A Christmas Carol every year, drink egg nog, embrace my friends, and nurture a hearth-glow of fellowship.  I do not have to accept the fables to experience a “holiday spirit” every bit as real as those who do—nor do I appreciate those who insist on dumping cynicism and political scatalogy onto the season in an attempt to ruin it for everyone else in a misguided pursuit of some adherence to reason.  Truth and fact are often only coincidentally related, and the truth of the season is something greater than what is contained in the details of a given story.

The Gift of the Magi is my guiding narrative…for what it may be worth.

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Season’s Wishes, etc etc etc.

Whatever calendar you use, have a good day.

culture

Games, Women, Growing Up, Remembrance

I want to talk a little bit about women.

I like to count myself as a feminist. Unapologetically. I would like to believe that I’ve been one more or less forever, and maybe on some level that’s true (and if so I credit early exposure to science fiction, which I’ll talk about later**), but really what I could point to as early feminism was more a matter of an idealized attitude about fair play, not any kind of studied assessment concerning women’s rights and so forth. My progress toward self-conscious feminism took a while.

First, a video:

Okay, it is that negative reaction she experienced which (a) I don’t “get” in any visceral way and (b) I find continually, almost universally shrugged off as “harmless” by people who otherwise would never dream of behaving that way. Which sets the stage for this:

Really, Tiedemann?  You really get that from a bunch of mouth breathers in basements playing online games?

It has been my experience that one of the components of “gaming” has always been a self-defensive insularity, an in-group “bunker mentality” that defaults to mindless rejection whenever anyone suggests that maybe the game in question is, you know, stupid or dangerous or fosters questionable attitudes.  Balance goes out the window when the game is threatened, even its accoutrements.  Online games or field sports, I don’t care which, there is a mindset that some adherents embrace which reduces reason to the buzzing of a fly when the game itself is threatened.  (You may not quite grasp this unless you have been threatened with bodily harm by members of a varsity football team for the mere suggestion that something else is more important for the school than new uniforms for them, that maybe it would be a bad idea to cut Band because there isn’t enough money in the budget for both.)

Combine that with the nature of in-groups and you have a perfect recipe for this kind of nonsense.

And yes, I think teaching people that just because they belong to a group gives them unquestioned privileges vis-à-vis The Rest Of The World is a formula for creating objectionable behaviors in certain members of that group.

In this case, the members of the He Man Woman Haters Club.

I grew up watching The Little Rascals on tv, and one of the repeated tropes was Alfalfa’s inability to “man up” and tell Darla to stay in her place.  Spanky and the others had their club and Darla and her friends attempted again and again to break into it.  Barring that, divide and conquer.  It was an early lesson in sexual politics, and I wonder sometimes if the writers and producers knew what it was they were portraying.  The subtext was the immasculation of Alfalfa, who continually embarrassed himself—and by extension The Gang—with his romantic goofball behavior when Darla winked at him, bent her finger, and drew him off for a tryst.*

The message was clear: girls are not to be trusted, not to be tolerated, unless you want to be a doofus like Alfalfa.

Then puberty hits.

Personally, boys who don’t know how to talk to girls well into adulthood I think don’t know how to talk to other boys, either, but the games template of childhood provides a format for pretense.  Don’t discuss feelings, don’t share anxieties, talk about the Game.  The Game substitutes for genuine sharing.

Who am I talking about?  Not a majority, certainly, or we would be unable to have this conversation on any level.  But a large enough slice of the male population to cause trouble.

Wait a minute, Tiedemann, you’re not blaming the games, are you?

Tempting as that is for me, no.  While I do believe the games reflect the attitudes of those who are involved in them, blaming the games is like blaming Jack Daniels for drunk driving.

(I don’t like most games, I admit.  I’m not competitive that way and most games are zero sum endeavors.  I like chess, but I don’t play it to win, and for some reason that seems to be okay in chess, there’s no chest beating of any kind.  But I was once nearly beaten up in a bar by a pissed off foosball player who invited himself into our game and got angry because I didn’t play to win.  I don’t like that attitude and I avoid it when I can and I find it wired into most games.)

Men who beat women, who killed them, who are outraged by feminism, who think in terms of “women’s proper place” are alien to me and rather pathetic—instead of working on themselves and their own shortcomings, they blame failure on everybody else, and the women in their lives are close and available for them to exercise what they conceive as their “manhood” in the most bestial way.  I would pity them but for the very real damage they do.

I wrote about that damage and one of my defining moments here.

I’m thinking about these things today because it happens to be an anniversary.  Twenty-three years ago today the Montreal Massacre occurred.  A frustrated, pathetic excuse of a human being decided (assuming such actions can be derived from a process of decision making) to vent his anger at failure by—wait for it—blaming women for his inability to fulfill himself.

But remembering that, I’m also thinking about the new women in my life.  I’m working for Left Bank Books now and in the past weeks of learning my way around I’ve been working with some of the coolest women around.  What a shame it would be if they couldn’t do what they do and be who they are because some bipeds with external genitals and low I.Q. held sway in our society and decided—because they lack the imagination or perception to see past surfaces and their own limbic reactions—women “shouldn’t be doin’ that kinda stuff.”

(As I’ve written before, I do credit my lifelong love of books and an early exposure to science fiction for preparing the ground for the feminism of my adulthood.  I’m hard pressed to think of a better antidote for what is, at base, a profoundly anti-intellectual cultural ill.  The inability to reason, to understand, to empathize, all this feeds the kind of insularity and self-limitation that can result in these deeply irrational—indeed, anti-rational—behaviors.  Do I think reading alone is a cure?  Of course not.  But, for cripessake, guys, read a book once in a while!  Get out of your own heads!)

I’m grateful to the women in my life: friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and I can say without reservation that I’d rather be in their club than in Spanky’s.

Better yet, let’s stop all this nonsense about clubs.  I never got my membership card in the He Man Woman Haters Club—I was too much a wimp to qualify—but then, I never applied.

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*Tryst?  Why, yes.  What else is it?  She gets him off alone, there’s a lot of goofy grinning, sharing of a meal, coy conversation.  No, of course there’s no sex, but Darla has segregated Alfalfa away from the other boys and…it’s all done in such childish innocence, but really look at those interludes and analyze them, then imagine Darla and Alfalfa about ten years older.

And of course the proto-stereotyping of gender roles is right there.  Darla is the seductress—ostensibly she’s trying to break down the group cohesion among The Gang, but that’s secondary—and Alfalfa is the male naif, completely taken by Darla’s attention and unable to control himself—or even speak intelligently.  And of course when it’s over he’s the one who’s been embarrassed—been “had” by the female and made to look foolish.

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** Science fiction was where I first and continually encountered strong, self-possessed female characters and models for what I came to believe women were, both potentially and preferably.  Sure, there were plenty of the standard models in SF, but there were also powerful, independent women who early on showed me that any assumptions about female inability, weakness, or ideas of “proper place” were all just noise.

culture

American Epochs

I’m just noodling over an idea, perhaps not even an original one, but I’ve been acquiring and reading a number of books this last few years on American history, and given the tenor of this past year of national politics, I’ve been toying with the idea of “periods” of American history.  That is, definable epochs fundamentally different from that which went before.

What triggered this particular thread is on the desk in front of my now. Kevin Phillips’ new book, 1775: A Good Year For Revolution, recently published by Viking.

In his preface, Why 1775, he writes:

Seventeen Seventy-Five…stands for the somewhat forgotten and widely misunderstood first year of the American Revolution.  If 1775 hadn’t been a year of successful nation building, 1776 might have been a year of lost opportunity, quiet disappointment, and continued colonial status.

Basically, the book is about all the pesky networking, infrastructure, planning, and groundwork that preceded the Declaration of Independence and without which the actual rebellion, not to mention, the Revolution, would have been stillborn.

We tend not to think this way.  Not just Americans, but we exemplify it through an ongoing process of semi-deification of Significant Men.  We like to believe that without “these people” and their character, all these wonderful things would not have happened, and while there is certainly some truth to that—it’s hard to argue with the fact that if George Washington had been a different kind of person then the outcome would have been very different—it is by no means either the whole story or even sufficient to explain how things transpired.  But it’s easier to put a face on a period and blithely assume that it was all because of That One.

We don’t like the idea that without thoroughly, clever, and industrial stagecraft, the performance might never go on.

(Consider war.  While it might be somewhat true that battles are won by generals, at least in some instances, wars are won by logistics.  The people and, more importantly, the system responsible for getting the bullets to the front are more important to the overall effort than the guys with the guns, who after all can do nothing without those bullets.)

But this component of history is not sexy, so we tend to focus on heroes and gestures and sometimes even credit divine intervention rather than take note of all the nameless, faceless people who did the hard day-in day-out labor of building the systems that allowed for success.

That said, we still have the results to consider, and it occurred to me to toss a dime into the debate by suggesting that American history is demarcated into three epochs that are clearly definable.  By this I mean periods begun by events that fundamentally changed who we were as a nation.  Things which caused shifts in the common apprehension of our identity significantly different from what went before and led to long periods of more or less stable assumptions of what it meant to be an American.

The first of these is of course the Revolutionary period, which I contend spans the period from 1763 to 1801.  The end of the French and Indian War (in many ways the first world war) set colonial thinkers inexorably on the path to independence.  Without the treaties and the subsequent actions in the aftermath of that war, the components of the Revolution would not have coalesced.  American colonists during this period reconceived their identity away from British subjects to Americans.  The entire period is capped by the election of Thomas Jefferson where we see the political and cultural landscape “set” for the next 50 years, an end to revolutionary evolution and a settling into adjustment to a new order.

The second epoch, obviously, is the Civil War period, which I suggest lasted from 1850 till the end of Reconstruction, 1876, at which point again we see a stabilizing of the landscape, which endured in its major features until the Great Depression.

Which leads to the third epoch, the Depression/World War period, lasting from 1929 until the Cuban Missile Crisis, when we once more see a broad “settling in” and acceptance of the new vision of who and what we are that persists to this day.

In each instance, the significant consequence is that, as a nation, we changed our view of who we are and conducted ourselves as Americans differently than we did before.

I have no idea what the fulcrum of the next epoch will be, or whether it has already happened.  These things take time to recognize.  (It’s possible that 9/11 represents such an event, but in too many ways it resulted in essentially a continuation of Cold War thinking.  The mindset of the average American today might not be that different from what it was in 1957, at least in regards to our global relationship.  I don’t know.)

It might be argued that the civil rights movement represents a significant sign of a new epoch, but I don’t think so.  Much as I might feel ill at ease over this, I see that as a consequences of the third period rather than as its own event.  The massive social “leveling” of the Great Depression combined with the revelations of abuses in Nazi Germany eroded long-held attitudes about race and opened the door to the successful campaigns of the various equality movements that have still not ended.  Even so, “civil rights” claims and assertions have never been absent from our political landscape and seem to have been immune, as ideas, from the specifics of massive epochal change.

Anyway, I thought this might be interesting to ponder, so I’m putting it out there.  As I say, nothing perhaps new, but certainly unresolved.  Thinking about it this way, we might want to consider more constructively just what it is we want to be next.

Art

Where Is Found A Soulful Mind?

Roger Ebert, the film critic, recently wrote a piece about the possible death of the Liberal Arts.  It’s disturbing, not so much for the dire forecast of a nation of business majors and software geeks who know nothing of Montaigne, Sontag, or Charlie Chaplin, but because of what it implies about those who keep track of Culture.

We are university-centric in our appraisal of where the Culture lies, where it is going, and what value we produce of what may be called a national geist.  Ebert talks about the days in which writers were celebrities and the universities, if not the actual mothers of such luminaries, were at least their midwives.  If there is one thing we have all learned in the last half century, though, it is that such institutions—and their products—are expensive.

Blame for the death of the Liberal Arts is lain at the feet of conservatives, but here is where I would like to start teasing these definitions apart.  Genuine conservatives, those with whom I grew up and became most familiar, were the champions of the Liberal Arts.  This was before the term “Liberal” became inextricably tangled with the concepts of “permissiveness” and “socialism.”  Because of the constant hammering both liberalism and conservatism have taken in recent years from a class of philistine whose twin deities are money and conformity, we have lost sight of what both of those labels originally meant and, worse yet, the kind of country they informed.

William F. Buckley jr. may have been many things, but poorly-read was never one of them, nor was he an advocate for the kind of close-minded censoriousness that has poisoned the Right today.  Presently, George Will carries the torch of a conservatism fast vanishing in the flood of a reactionary myopia that passes for conservative but is nothing but avaricious opportunism dressed up in an ill-fitting suit of Victorianesque disapproval.

But then Ebert goes on to remark on his comment log and how refreshingly well-read, educated, and enthusiastic his readers seem to be.  The Liberal Arts is not dead or even dying.

But it may no longer have a comfortable place in universities, which charge a small fortune for an education with which the buyer not only wants but needs to cash in.  Degrees in philosophy, except for a rare few, pay poorly in a job market grown increasingly cutthroat by dint of the exclusion of the kind of broad outlook once supplied by a Liberal Arts education.  Why bother with Thomas Paine when he died poor, a loser?  Or Herman Melville, who had to quit writing because it didn’t pay well enough to support him?  One could go down the list.

And yet.

People read.  Widely.  Minds rove over as broad a range of interests as at any time in the past—more, as there is more to learn, to see, to experience.  It would seem the Liberal Arts is far from dying.  It has only moved out on its own.

I’ve encountered students who refuse to read.  They want to know only those things that will garner them good salaries and all that this implies.  Success.  Goodies.  “Why read F. Scott Fitzgerald?  Hell, I read Ayn Rand in high school.  That’s my kinda culture. ”

I have no time for them.  Were I a teacher in a college, I’d flunk them and send them from the hall.  They are as clueless and feckless as they think others are who pay attention to the contents of the mind.

Tell me this—once you have the six-figure salary and the 2200 square foot condo and the BMW, what are you going to do with yourself in those moments when you’re the only one to keep you company?  Other than winning a footrace, what have you done?  When you look around for something to Do, how will you recognize what is of value, of worth, of substance?

I know, most people like this could care less.  If they don’t have any culture now, they think, if they think about it at all, that they can always buy some later, when they’re “secure” or ready to retire.

Unfortunately, by then they may only be able to recognize “value” as the price tag on the frame rather than the world that’s on the canvas.

culture

War On Women

My previous post, over-the-top as it was in some ways (yet heartfelt and, I think, not misdirected) spurred a few remarks about the so-called War On Women.  There are people who claim this is a myth, a straw man argument, a distraction, that there is no war on women, only the mouthings of a few extremists with no real authority and, really, nothing has or will change.

I can agree to an extent that maybe War On Women is perhaps an overstatement, because—and it’s a fine distinction—I don’t really believe most of the politicians engaged in it care one way or the other.  It has become a useful polemic for them to stir the ire of their base and garner votes for the things they do care about.  It’s like race-baiting, which I think few of those who indulge it actually believe in but will nevertheless employ the language because they collect a constituency around it.  It’s bait, in other words, to attract a following which they can then use for other things.

In this sense, claiming that it’s a “war” is perhaps inaccurate, an overstatement. It was, perhaps, more a war with women, a loud pyrotechnic show that kept our attention over here when it should have been over there. If true, then the hammering on contraceptive access and abortion and the blocking of various anti-rape and violence-against-women bills really meant something else. Battlefield tactics in a cause of a different nature. One might take some comfort in that.

Except for those who feel themselves being used as human shields and missiles in a cause disingenuous at its core and fraught with unintended consequences.  It would not be the first time in history that the cynical use of a rhetorical position (to defeat an opponent, rally a populace, misdirect attention from other things) took on a life of its own and produced results no one wanted.

I think the Right has seen some of those unintended consequences in the last election.

How hard is this?  Equality means we should not limit people based on their biological characteristics, which include race and gender, as well as physical capacity, health, mobility challenges, and so forth.

As for the rhetoric, I will leave you with this, which cuts to the chase rather better than anything I might say:

culture

A Final Thought (Maybe)

I’m listening to Bartok.  The Miraculous Mandarin, a recording by the St. Louis Symphony, Leonard Slatkin conducting.

Earlier I was listening to Morning Edition on NPR.  A report caught my attention about—you guessed it—why Mitt Romney lost.  Or, more to the point, why he almost won.  It had to do with something I find utterly baffling about the American political consciousness.  I don’t know, maybe it’s true everywhere.

Basically, that during most of the campaign Romney ran on issues and did little to “let people know him personally.”  This, according to the report, was the cause of his low approval numbers.  People didn’t “like” him because he seemed cold and distant.  In August, his campaign turned that around by presenting a more “homey” Mitt, highlighting his “personality” and his “likeableness.”

It worked.  Suddenly people warmed to him, his approval rating rose, and, as we saw, he took 48% of the popular vote, something six months earlier seemed unlikely in the extreme.

Because people liked him.

It reminded me of George W. Bush’s first campaign, when we kept hearing this “he seems like a guy I could sit down and have a beer with.”

As it turned out, that quality did not translate into good policy.  Honestly, there are many people I like but I wouldn’t even let them watch my dog.  Like does not translate to ability.

So my reaction was—is—what the hell?

What this tells me is that a candidate can misrepresent, lie, withhold, distort, tease, and otherwise spew nonsense, but if the voters like him, none of that matters.  (Let me remind you, Romney kept to a very casual relation to the truth in the debates; none of this is arguable, he either didn’t know what he was talking about or flat out lied.)  Furthermore, as I indicated early in the election cycle, he was an advocate for a failed policy.  People have had it demonstrated to them by everything short of utter and total economic collapse that the fiscal and tax policies of the GOP have not worked.

And yet.

People will ignore measures of competence, reasonableness, sound judgment, and policy and vote for someone because they like him?

For the record, I’ve done the reverse myself—voted for someone because I didn’t like his or her opponent.  I get that. (Heck, I did it this time.)  They did or said something that turned me off.  But frankly, how much I liked the candidate for whom I voted played little part in my decision.

This is something that beggars the imagination.  I deal with this in the arts all the time.  Basically, there is the artist…and there is the work.  It is the work that matters.  I don’t care (usually) if the artist is the reincarnation of Simon Legree, if the work he or she produces has merit, that is what counts.  (Yes, there are exceptions, but it takes a great deal to force me to abandon this principle.)  What matters if So-n-So was an alcoholic womanizer who kicked puppies, if the novel he wrote or the music he made moves and inspires us, that is the salient point.

So to—perhaps more so—with politicians.  I want someone who will do the job well, not someone I might be able to “sit down and have a beer with.”

Like that would ever happen anyway.

I didn’t respond to the nonsense about Romney putting his dog in a crate on the roof of his car, because it had nothing to do with his qualifications as a potential president.  We try to ignore the religious leanings of candidates for the same reason.  Personal foible, the vagaries of “character” are slippery, tectonic grounds on which to base such an important decision.  I don’t care how much I might “like” a candidate for the school board, if he or she doesn’t understand basic science or thinks the Earth is the center of the solar system, I will not vote for that person.  Competence trumps personality.

(Besides, how the hell are we supposed to gauge “like” or “dislike” in such a context?  No matter what the image presented may be, none of us know that person, nor will likely ever know them.  “Like” in this case is purely a projection, our own hopes and desires put on someone we may never meet in person.  We aren’t “liking” them so much as liking what we want of ourselves that we imagine reflected in the candidate.)

Back in 1952, Adlai Stevenson, possibly the most intelligent, educated, and competent politician vying for high office, lost to Eisenhower because, as it was spun at the time, he was an intellectual elitist.  I think we were fortunate that Eisenhower possessed a competence of a different sort, but the fact is people did not vote for him because of that competence, but because “We Like Ike!”  Kennedy defeated Nixon because of his “personality.”  (Famously, the debates held showed an interesting divergence—those who listened on radio said Nixon had won, those who watched on television said Kennedy had.  Depending on the medium, “personality” favored the candidate who could appeal best through the insubstantiality of “likeableness.”)  Hubert Humphrey lost to Nixon because he could not translate policy competence into the kind of popular “like” that Bobby Kennedy clearly had.  George McGovern, four years later, never overcame a certain dourness, which is something when you consider that Nixon was possibly the least likeable president since Coolidge.

And on that note, it is only in recent years that people have been acknowledging what competence Nixon did possess, digging its way out from beneath the ignominy of his ultimate paranoid ogre image.

George H.W. Bush was by far the better qualified contender in 1980, but Reagan had “like” all over everyone.  Reagan is still forgiven for the damage he did by virtue of a profound lack of grasp because people think back fondly on him as someone they liked immensely.

This is a lousy way to choose a president.

Competence should have favored John Huntsman in the primaries.

Probably, if competence had triumphed, we’d be looking at a second term for Hilary Clinton today.

But in fairness, just how are we to judge competence when we collectively know so little about what the job entails?  People vote for the candidate they think will be “on their side” and the only way to pick that is to go with gut reactions.  We “like” one or the other.

That could be partly rectified by simply paying more attention.  But that’s the other problem with us, collectively—frankly, my dear, outside whatever issue adrenalizes us at the moment, we don’t give a damn.  And that’s why we keep getting representatives who in the end don’t really represent us.

How do you like that?

culture

2016

As usual, Florida is still undecided, a mess. According to NPR, though, it is leaning heavily toward Obama, despite the shenanigans of the state GOP in suppressing the vote.

I didn’t watch last night.  Couldn’t.  We went to bed early.

But then Donna got up around midnight and woke me by a whoop of joy that I briefly mistook for anguish.

To my small surprise and relief, Obama won.

I will not miss the constant electioneering, the radio ads, the tv spots, the slick mailers.  I will not miss keeping still in mixed groups about my politics (something I am not good at, but this election cycle it feels more like holy war than an election).  I will not miss wincing everytime some politician opens his or her mouth and nonsense spills out.  (This is, of course, normal, but during presidential years it gets much, much worse.)  I will not miss…

Anyway, the election came out partially the way I expected, in those moments when I felt calm enough to think rationally.  Rationality seemed in short supply this year and mine was sorely tasked. So now, I sit here sorting through my reactions, trying to come up with something cogent to say.

I am disappointed the House is still Republican, but it seems a number of the Tea Party robots from 2010 lost their seats, so maybe the temperature in chambers will drop a degree or two and some business may get done.

Gary Johnson, running as a Libertarian, pulled 350,000 votes as of nine last night.  Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, got around 100,000.  (Randall Terry received 8700 votes, a fact that both reassures me and gives me shivers—there are people who will actually vote for him?)

Combined, the independent candidates made virtually no difference nationally.  Which is a shame, really.  I’ve read both Stein’s and Johnson’s platforms and both of them are willing to address the problems in the system.  Johnson is the least realistic of the two and I like a lot of the Green Party platform.

But the Greens are going about it bass-ackward.  Vying for the presidency when you can’t even get elected dog catcher in most states is hardly the way to go about it.  What would she do if by some weirdness she got elected?  I think it fair to say a Green presidency this morning would guarantee both major parties working together for the foreseeable future against her.  No, what they need to do is start winning local elections.  Start with city councils and school boards, work up to state legislatures, then a governor or three, and finally Congress.  Yes, that will take time, maybe far more time than anyone has the patience for, but for goodness sake, start.

Which leaves me feeling mixed about the next four years.

Here is what I would like to see happen.  Obviously, Joe Biden is not going to run for office in 2016.  Even if he did, I doubt he’d win, but I think he’s V.P. the same way Dick Cheney was.  An ace in the hole if something happens to the Pres, but not a threat in the next election.  Therefore, the House Republicans have no excuse but to work with the Democrats to get something done.  However you spin it, the last four years have been, in my view, a criminal abdication of responsibility on the part of the GOP, all to “make sure Obama is a one-term president.”  They have squandered the People’s confidence and time and treasure in a party feud that frankly has no real basis other than on the fringes.

That said, the next four years should give them permission to get something done for the country.  They don’t have to work to defeat Obama in 2016, he’s not running then.  Anything that gets done, they can take credit for.  Whoever runs for the Democratic nomination in 2016, it will be a repeat of 2008—two brand-spanking new candidates.  (Romney has said he won’t run again.  We’ll see.)  So there is no reason other than the meanest kind of pettiness to keep blocking.

It is time we got over this artificial divide about capitalism vs. socialism.  We are supposed to be grown-ups here, labels shouldn’t scare us.  The best antidote for that kind of fear is to actually learn something about what scares you, and as far as I can see most of the people who are so terrified that Obama is some kind of socialist (or communist!) are exercising the same kind of intelligence on the subject as those who believe he’s a Muslim or is not a citizen.  (They are exemplified by the sign carrier demanding “Keep your government out of my MediCare!”)  For pity’s sake, people, read a book!

I’ve said this before, probably to little effect, but I will say it again, Capitalism is a system, not some kind of organic natural law thing.  As such, we determine its shape and how it should be used, not the other way around, and it is the same with any other system (like Socialism).  After the Great Depression this country put in place a number of socialist ideas and whether certain folks wish it to be true or not, they have worked well for us as a nation.

Here are a few things that people should consider.  One, any economic system is, at its simplest, simply a method for organizing latent wealth.  By latent wealth I mean the potential product in a given community.  (You can live on a mountain of diamonds but if some kind of organizing principle is not applied to take advantage of those diamonds, they just sit there.  The system you use organizes the work needed to exploit the resource.  But let’s be clear—the person or corporation that brings that system into that community does not by dint of that fact own the labor, the land, or the total product.  The community living there has to give permission, cooperate, and assist in implementing the organizing system, and therefore when Elizabeth Warren made her famous statement that “you didn’t build that all by yourself” that is what she meant, and anyone who claims not to understand that I think is being deliberately obtuse.)  Therefore, we should be willing to apply the methodology best suited to solve specific problems.  We are a polyglot nation, we already use a variety of methodologies depending on region and circumstance, we need to stop being knee-jerk reactionary about this subject.

Consequently, we need to understand a couple of things in slightly different ways.  Currently, we have a problem with large businesses extracting latent wealth from communities and shifting it away from those communities, in fact away from our national borders altogether.  One of the chief tools to counter that is taxes.  Tax dollars drain off a portion of that wealth and return it to the community.  Taxes fix the location of a certain proportion of generated wealth.  Bitch about government spending all you want, the fact remains that money gets spent, in the main, here and therefore helps sustain the community.

To a lesser extent, this fight over minimum wage and Right To Work is misguided.  Requiring businesses to pay a fair wage to their employees also serves to keep that wealth local.  You don’t build a business in Idaho and then, because shareholders are complaining that their dividends are too low, shift those jobs out of the country to increase bottomline.  It should be illegal for businesses to take advantage of location for fiscal purposes while utilizing outsourcing in order to extract money that then does not return to that community.  Right To Work is merely a tactic to suppress local ability to retain local wealth.  We need to start looking at these two things this way or we will see ourselves the richest Third World nation on the planet.

I want to see the military-industrial complex curtailed if not shut down.  Eisenhower warned us of this, but his warning was not based on something that hadn’t happened.  The Spanish-American War is our most famous example of a war begun by private industry for the sole purpose of increasing profits.  We are locked in a cycle of perpetual preparedness and in order to justify the expenditures, we engage in constant military conflict.  We have provided the United Nations with the backbone of its policing power for decades, and while this made sense in the aftermath of WWII when most of the world was devastated, it no longer does—the world has recovered, they can afford to pony up soldiers and materiél.  I support the idea of the United Nations, but the United States has been shouldering a disproportionate share for decades.  I suspect the main reason we have not stopped has entirely to do with the money-making of the defense contractor sector.

Along with that, we must pull back from the blatantly unConstitutional internal security and intelligence practices that have become worse since 9/11.  I was sorely upset when Obama reauthorized the defense authorization act.

But worse than the standing military, that act, along with others, has allowed us to do an end-run around Posse Commitatus by militarizing local police forces.  Our police have become more and more akin to the Stazi in make-up and outlook and this has to stop before we are so inured to it that we can’t recognize loss of civil rights until the cop is knocking on our door for a warrantless search of our home.

A large step to undoing this would be to do something about this absurd war on drugs.  I am not a fan of drugs—hell, I never even smoked a joint—but our response has been distorting of our courts and our police and our national priorities.  The only thing that keeps us from doing something rational is the huge amounts of money involved at all levels.  This has to stop.  We can’t afford to keep doing this, not so much from a fiscal point of view but from the effect it has on all of us, a coarsening of our national psyché, a desensitization to individual circumstance.

Lastly, I would like to see an effort made to address the pathetic state of our educational priorities.  We are becoming a severely divided nation, not so much along class lines (although that is true, too, and I suspect the two are linked), but along the lines of the Knows and the Know Nothings.

Todd Akin sat on the House subcommittee for science.  Need I say more?  (Yes, I probably do.)  All right.  Akin is a supporter of creationism.  I don’t have any problem with someone espousing that view—what I have a problem with is someone with that view serving on what should be a science committee, and with people being okay with that.  If that were not enough, his statements about women’s biology demonstrated that he knows little—or doesn’t care—about actual science (never mind what his views on women’s rights are), and this is a very serious problem, not so much that an elected official should be ignorant along these lines, but that he is representative of people who are even more ignorant.  That goes to education.

No Child Left Behind was one in a string of legislative actions that turned schooling into a horse race.  Getting the scores up are all that matter, so our “ranking” doesn’t fall.  This has nothing to do with what it actually taught or what kids really know when they get out of school.  We need a serious reform lest we keep producing people who, through no real fault of their own, believe the Earth is only six thousand years old and understand next to nothing about biology, never mind evolution.

And I’m sorry—just because you have decided in advance that you don’t believe something doesn’t make it either not true or give you the right to keep others from learning about it.  Nor does it let you off the hook from knowing enough about it to make an informed decision about rejecting it.

I am not by disposition an isolationist, but I do believe this country has been engaging the rest of the world in the wrong way.  We have been—always—very proactive when it comes to defending our business interests overseas, and the overwhelming amount of our foreign policy is less individual-oriented as it is corporation-oriented.  Granted, this simplifies things—but it also distorts things and leads us to make bad choices in places where we don’t know the culture.  We’re paying a heavy price for that from the Fifties.  Our priorities need to change from corporatocracy to our oft-stated and seldom-deployed belief in the individual.

There are other things on my mind, but that’s enough for now.

That’s what I would like to see happen.

What do I expect?

We have been engaged, at street level, in a battle over what it means to be an American, and the ingredients have gotten bizarre.  We have forgotten somewhere along the way that our right to have that battle is our chief defining national characteristic, that winning it is both impossible and beside the point.  Being able to disagree and still have barbecue together has always been the American miracle, and we’ve been losing that.

But I expect it to continue.  Both parties, plus the corporate backing of both parties, have been feeding that conflict because, well, it’s been good for business.  In the crossfire we have forgotten what is genuinely important and started handing over our liberties like good soldiers in an endless war.  So in truth, I expect any real progress to happen on the margins, at times and in places where national attention is elsewhere, under conditions of exhaustion, when no one is paying much notice.  The bread and circuses will continue—well, the circuses, anyway, I’m not so sure about the bread.

The world chimed in recently in polls that asked who other countries wished to see win the election.  In the run up, surveys in over 20 countries indicated a vast preference for Obama—the only two that favored Romney were Israel and Pakistan.  Hm.

But for now, what I’m looking forward to is a few weeks with considerably less politicking.  I’m a bit frazzled from concern.  I have some fiction to write and Christmas to prepare for.

The thing I’m most pleased about?  Tammy Baldwin and Elizabeth Warren.  I’ll leave you to figure out why.

Have a good day.