Category: Politics

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Freedom and Its Contingencies, Part One

Many words get thrown around with too little regard for their actual meaning and intent. Love, friend, truth…a long list. There are two languages, it seems, operating most of the time. One we could call Colloquial Usage, which basically is the common application of a blanket term to cover all possible manifestations of a subject. Friend is a case in point. we blithely label everyone with whom we have more than casual acquaintance of a positive nature a friend. We do this without thought, mainly because it’s easier than teasing apart the various components of what A Friend may really be. A friend is more than someone you might be glad to attend a barbecue with. A friend is someone with whom a complex lattice of support, sufferance, and deep connection makes them vital to one’s sense of self and well-being. You would go to the mat for a friend, walk (metaphorically or otherwise) over broken glass to help. Most people we label “friend” do not rise to that level, nor should we expect them to. A friend is special.

But language is what we make of it. It’s handy to have one word for a convenience when the nature of something might require a chapter in book to really explain—or even a whole book.

Such a word, it seems to me, is Freedom.

I grew up during a time when that word ramified in its applicable meanings in too many ways to codify. The cry of Freedom during the Sixties covered everything from the Civil Rights movements to the Sexual Revolution to the Cold War to Intellectual Revisionism to rejections of community expectation and onward. What it meant to Be Free for one group was occasionally anathema to another, yet the demand seemed the same across all forms. A prominent, if not necessarily widespread, meaning was to be completely without constraint of any kind. As a rejection of social conformism, one could see the source of this demand, but it reached a point where the very means by which such a condition was sought imposed different sets of constraints which resulted in a loss of viable action.

One of the more useful definitions I heard back then was the “responsible use of form.” This is a useful axiom. Unpacking it yields a myriad of conditions and leads to configurations of what we might mean by freedom that apply across diverse expectations.

We have first to understand those instances when a parochial expectation is at work that displaces a more universal application, and in this we must be concerned with the tension between Expectation and Application. It is in this where we find the failures of manifestation that plague history.

I recall seeing an interview with a Mujahideen fighter during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. He was talking about his reasons for fighting and he said “We fight because we love freedom so much.” I was puzzled. Any cursory look at the society from which he came at once shows that what he meant by freedom was certainly not what I understand as freedom. For himself, it may have meant what he claimed, but as a country? What about the women? (And I don’t even mean the tragic malaise that descended on them once the Taliban took over.) And even in the aftermath, I’m sure you could ask those now in charge if they believe they are free and they would likely say yes. The apparent contradiction brings you to the assertion that freedom is a constrained thing that rejects acts regarded as outside the reasonable expectations of what freedom means.

But that’s there. What about here? It does not require much observation to see that different definitions are at play. What is freedom for one is anarchy for another.

How to square this circle?

Immediately we must accept, from example, that the concept is highly individualized. Freedom is a subjective concept. 

Or is it? Clearly, many species exhibit an innate urge to be free of constraint. Escape is a common response to captivity. Perhaps we can attribute this impulse to some Darwinian imperative to maximize opportunity to reproduce (which captivity would severely hamper), but it’s impossible to know what other factors feed into this response.

So if it is based on a freedom from constraint, then the next question is, why do we then seek to constrain others? If it is a shared impulse, why do we in so many instances fail to recognize it as such? Is it a failure to recognize alternative expressions?

Or is it more a question of adaptation? These are the circumstances we have come to maturity within and because we are comfortable with these delineations we define living in those conditions with freedom. Change in those parameters increases a level of discomfort and if the changes are significant enough we begin to chafe and the talk of loss of freedom begins.

The question then is, are these changes actually oppressive or are they more unsettling? It makes a big difference, I think. Take for instance the current assertion among certain evangelicals that they are being oppressed. It is legitimate to expect an explanation as to how. Are there new laws in place that bar them from practicing their religion? Or is it just that they find the shifts in common practice unsettling? If their next door neighbor stops going to church and then puts a political sign on their lawn supporting someone who is seen as a secularist, how is that oppressive? 

Within their own conception of freedom, living in a community that privileges their faith, which allows an expectation that they are part of a culturally dominant ideology, it may well appear that the scaffolding of those expectations is being dismantled and leaving them without a previously unexamined support. In other words, more and more it appears that, in this particular instance, they’re on their own.

Again, is this oppression?

Assuming the support you have till now enjoyed was built in by fiat—a community declared privilege which required support from all members of that community, regardless of personal disposition—and now that support is being withdrawn, then perhaps an argument can be made. If, on the other hand, what support there had been was simply assumed, without any codified commitment to back it up, then its loss is less a matter of conscious oppression than it is evidence of a shift in common priority. Naturally, this will upset many people who based their conceptions of living within that community on the erroneous assumption that their perspective was a fundamental right. 

Let’s move this example to a different (though in many ways related) area. Women living independently of so-called traditional family structures.

In this we have competing claims of oppression and demands for freedom. 

If we accept that “freedom” is based on an assumed right and ability for action within a given form, then it becomes clear that when a group, for whatever reason, is denied an opportunity for said action by another group, we may plausible label such denial oppression. If such denial of action is done for the presumed benefit of the dominant group, then we can see how oppression can edge into a deeper form, even slavery, especially if the benefit claimed is the justification for the continued oppression. 

Now we have a basis on which to evaluate claims of oppression. Range of available action combined with the comfort of assumed privileges constitute the rough parameters of a particular claim of freedom.  The constraint of said actions for the maintenance of said privileges for a dominant group constitutes oppression. We have a term that usefully sums up the net result.

Denial of agency.

What do we mean by “agent”? I will refer to a definition, from the Oxford Guide to Philosophy.

Agent: a person (or other being) who is the subject when there is action. …the property of an agent is (i) possessing a capacity to choose between options and (ii) being able to do what one chooses. Agency is then treated as a causal power. 

This is fairly neutral. When applied, the question is who can act and who cannot. It follows then to ask why one who cannot act cannot do so.

A further question relevant to this discussion then is: does one agent’s freedom to act require the curtailment of another’s equal freedom? If it does, then it must be asked if the former is asserting a legitimate claim for freedom.

Being inconvenienced is not oppression.

People who are not used to being inconvenienced unsettle easily.

When confronted with a claim that “my freedom is being taken away” it is always necessary to ask how? Basically, what can’t you do now that you could before [fill in the changes being challenged] occurred. If the response is that one’s assumption of dominance is being constrained, then perhaps it’s not “freedom” being taken away but privilege.

Still, freedom is in this sense a very personal thing, a feeling perhaps more than a set of objective conditions. To say one is free when that sense of being encumbered unfairly occludes clear assessment is difficult to get past. To this extent, we construct (or yield to) our own internal metrics.

But this is a problem of preference. Choosing the metrics by which you claim freedom or lack of freedom would suggest, since they are your own and you can choose them, you are, to that extent, free. The question then is, why doesn’t this contribute to your sense of freedom?

It may seem that this is playing games with the idea, that deconstructing the parameters in order to change a perspective which may or may not be valid is insincere. But I refer back to that statement by the Mujahideen fighter, who was clearly self-defining, on some level, his own metrics of what freedom meant. The consequences for his view prevailing may well have validated his sense of freedom, but by broader standards it did nothing for those bound to his view who did not meet his criteria.

There are two elements involved, one metaphysical, the other political. They are entangled, of course, but for many people the differences present no distinction. Metaphysically, though, we are dealing with determinism. Questions of Free Will stem from questions of what aspects of our apparent will to choose are in fact matters of unfettered choice and which are defined by all the other factors which constitute lived reality. In other words, what does it mean to Be Free when we are not able to choose actions closed to us by virtue of being both inconceivable and undoable. We might wish to choose to fly without artificial assistance, but we have neither the biology or the environment to do so. It becomes a matter of wishful thinking. A question of whether we are free to fly on our own is meaningless outside the imagination. Further, we may wish to transcend our mental limitations, but without knowing what that might look like, how that might manifest, it is a choice without a conceivable goal. Again, in the realm of imagination, we might come up with a variety of scenarios in which the consequences of such transcendence might be imagined, but the core transcendence itself is too incoherent to “see.” Likewise “interdimensional” travel. We have the term and popularly might imagine it much like moving from one room to another, but we have no basis for knowing what it would look like to actually do so.

We can spin scenarios endlessly, but I think the point is made. (Note though that conceiving the ideas can result eventually in some manifestation that conforms to our expectations—hence airplanes, subatomic physics, AI…)

Setting that aside for now, we come back to the question of what it means to be free to do what we want in a world where what we want is not doable. Are we not free, then?

While this kind of thing can be fun as a game, it is a good way to lose the point of the question. Besides, we are here more interested in the political aspect of the question. They are, however, conjoined. In that sense it comes down to a question of what criteria does one use to define freedom and are such criteria legitimate?

To an extent, this can become an inversion of the previous state of being unable to do what is inconceivable, wherein one establishes what cannot be done (or, in many instances, what is not allowed to be done) and then using that as justification for claiming a loss of freedom. The question slips back and forth between legitimate restrictions and imagined constraints. And of course the paradox arises when we ask whether or not we are free to imagine whatever we like. 

To a great extent, it’s a silly question. How can anyone stop us? But at some point the freedom to do so bleeds over into actions. Are we free to act on anything we conceive?

It is within those two states—conception and action—that all political questions of freedom reside. (Perhaps, as an amusement, it might be fun to compare this to the above notion of interdimensional travel.) 

Clearly, we are not free to act on just anything we might conceive. There are many reasons, both metaphysical and concrete, but the chief one is that we must be mindful of how such actions impact and impede others.

Which brings us back to the question of form. The responsible use of form. This goes to the question of determinism in key ways, but basically it is the ground upon which a social contingency to enable the optimum manifestation of freedom may be constructed. Insofar as it impinges on Agency, the question is one of compromise before all else based on a recognition of Other Minds. In other words, room must be made to accommodate others who have the same interest in finding a field of action consistent with a sense of freedom.

I’ll leave this for now and come back later. For now, some things for consideration.

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Note The Date

May 30th, Donald Jay Trump is found guilty of 34 counts of felony fraud for covering up moneys spent to affect the election. People (some) will think this was for sleeping with a porn star, but it was not. It was for the crime of defrauding an election by way of illegal payments to muzzle someone.

Conspiracy is very difficult to prove because one must demonstrate intent. New York state prosecutors managed to do just that and 12 jurors came back after 9 and 1/2 hours with unanimous guilty verdicts.

This is historic, certainly. The first time a former president has been so convicted.

The concern now is manifold. Big picture, will this make a martyr of him? That could redound to his benefit. Secondly, will the other trials now move forward with more alacrity? It seems to me that certain courts have been dragging their feet, waiting to see how this would play out, especially in Florida. Now that the first one has gone down, perhaps the others will decide to act and proceed. Thirdly, while there is no Constitutional bar to his running, how will this affect more state ballots?

On another level, the question must be asked, how safe are those jurors? Or the judge? Trump has a cadre of zealots who (clearly) think nothing of employing intimidation to serve their idol. I hope steps have been taken to protect these people till after the election at least. Maybe longer. Trump made a show of eye-balling them after conviction, the method of gangsters and bullies. That he is a bully has been apparent for a long time. We’re learning more about that from his time on The Apprentice, but anyone not swayed by his “charms” has seen it for decades.

Why this does not matter to those who buy into his messianic p.r. will baffle many of us forever. Just as a matter of taste, his cult is repulsive. But it is what it is, so we must act on other metrics.

Those who are claiming this has been a sham and despicable are pleading on his behalf. It must be said, no convicted felon ever has accepted that the trial was fair. But it was done by the numbers, according to the law, professionally and in detail. It transpires that Michael Cohen, who has been a problematic element in all this because of his track record as a proven liar, was not key to the outcome. Too much evidence merely corroborated his testimony. He was icing on the cake, so to speak. To be found guilty on 34 counts required far more than simple word-of-mouth.

Trump has played this game since he appeared on the scene as a “tycoon” and it has caught up with him. This has been a pattern. He thought, probably, that he could treat the presidency as if it were just another real estate deal. (This is one reason the assertion that “a businessman would make a better president” is bullshit. The office requires a statesman, which is a whole other set of skills most business people lack, not because they couldn’t be but because the job of running a business doesn’t require it in the same way nor does it allow time to learn it. For one, you have to be somewhat selfless. Anyway.) He was all about making deals. He thought he could play international politics the same way and he not only lost the respect of the majority of allied leaders but our enemies took advantage and played him.

He was a bad president.

He would be a classic dictator.

But for now, we can breathe a little easier knowing that he will not always get his way.

For a little while. This is just the first one. We have an election coming up,

And what do we see, once again? The one doing the work, which is not reducible to soundbites, is not “sexy”, is longterm on a road filled with potholes and obstruction, is being derided for not being a “savior” and the one in the clown car is getting all the press and making claims that have no substance but play well on television. The test here is how gullible the electorate is.

If we want to put this to rest, Trump must lose unequivocally. No narrow margins. We the People must make it clear as can be that he is rejected. It is not just Trunp. It is his backers, and by that I mean the moneyed interests and the fascist wannabes  behind him. This includes his enablers in Congress. Trump is a fool, but if we give him the precedent, the next will not be and we can kiss our institutions good-bye.

Yes, this is a very partisan statement on my part, but it is not party partisan. I am concerned about my country.

But for now, celebrate if you’re so inclined. Then next week get back into it and see the task through. Thank you for your time.

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The Unrealized Dream

I’ve gotten to the point where I nearly tune out when someone in the public eye starts going on about the Founders and what they intended. Pro or con, it’s a surmise, and cherrypicking is rampant, though some pick bigger cherries than others. A few don’t even bother, they just make up whatever feels right and layer it over a 10th grade understanding of history. They can do this because we Americans in general couldn’t care less about history. That has always been the case, just as we, who have freedom to do so, read very little on average.

Some things have emerged from what I’ve read over the years pertaining to what the good folks in 1787 intended, not so much what they wrote down (though many of them did) as to what a reasonable assessment of the history of the times tells us.

The first thing I conclude is that the vast majority of Americans, once the ties were severed from England and the nation established, went on to pay precious little attention to the Constitution or the intent of the Founders. They were too busy doing what they then felt at liberty to do, which was carve out a bit of something for themselves and their descendants, legally if they could, by whatever means they had at hand. To live their lives as they chose. Adhering to the vaunted principles set forth by the framers of the Constitution was not top of their agenda. Not that they paid no attention to what was going on in Philadelphia, seeing that whatever emerged from that august body was bound to affect them directly. But I believe their interest was largely self-directed. They had just gotten one pest off their back, it would be annoying if another took its place.

And I’m sure they were fine with the results as far as it went, probably proud of it, since the majority voted for it, but it was not about to change how they saw or made their way in the world. For one thing, it did not seem to require that they change. Those few passages in the Bill of Rights which later in our history caused some upheaval just didn’t seem all that big a deal then. As far as the self-defined audience for the new Constitution was concerned, it was for their benefit and any restrictions applied to someone else. From all appearances, especially the Bill of Rights, it was designed to interfere as little as possible with the aspirations of the average citizen.

That average citizen/settler came here or migrated west in order to succeed at some form of self-sufficiency. The “dream” here that attracted so many from Europe and other places was that you, whatever your origins, could actually own something, and the law was there to see that no one could take it away arbitrarily. This was not unprecedented—English common law offered something similar, and the 13 colonies were overwhelmingly English—but the opportunity to actualize that goal seemed far more possible here. Enough folks managed a degree of it to give real force to the idea. And the new Constitution was by and large a set of restrictions on government, to keep it from acting arbitrarily.

This goes to one of the questions about the American revolution that teases people from time to time, which is out of all the revolutions that followed, why did this one work and the vast majority of the rest did not?

Simple. Our revolution—the war, the severance from England—was done in order for the people living here to continue doing what they had been doing all along. With relatively minor modifications (initially) the institutions already established had been up and running for over a century and in the aftermath very little changed. They had been doing fine and wanted England to butt out. Likewise, the Constitution seemed designed to guarantee the same continuity. The ones that followed, almost all of them sought to completely change the institutions and machinery of their countries. They were trying to do things differently, from top to bottom. We, by contrast, had it easy in the aftermath. (Plus, it there was something you didn’t like that the new establishment was doing, you could pick up and head west, out of reach, at least for a while.)

The idealism of a freedom of the press, the separation of church and state, the guarantee of due process, all could be regarded not as radical instantiations of a new communal ethic, but merely as a promise that the government—specifically the federal government—would not intrude upon local custom. 

The big problem left on the table, of course, was slavery. Every high-minded phrase from the Declaration of Independence on talked about individual liberty, and yet the necessary changes to guarantee that were not made. Things, as I said, went on much as they had always gone on.

Aside from slavery, other problems continued. Newspapers were burned down, the presses smashed, when they disturbed local sensibilities. No one prosecuted the perpetrators on the basis of the first amendment, but on property destruction and, in some instances, assault and murder. The “Constitutionality” of the acts were not taken into account (naturally, since such actions were rarely if ever instigated by the government). The people doing the smashing and burning likely never considered the higher ideal involved. They only knew they were offended by the newspapers in question and felt they had a right to shut the down. Vigilantism overrode juris prudence and due process. And, per the early supreme court, contracts were held to be more important than individual circumstance and rights.

And of course the “rights” of indigenous peoples were almost never considered, even though the founding ideas of the country aimed at All Men. (Of course, that left women out as well.) There were several “oversights.”

It has been pointed out that the Founders didn’t think much of democracy, which is why they established a republic. Aside from educational assessments, I suspect they knew fairly well that for too many of their fellow citizens, the ideals they had managed to enshrine in the Constitution mattered very little. They knew, though, that they could not just mandate the new structures, because that would have caused many of the same problems they had just finished fighting a war with Great Britain over. So the ratification was an open vote, universal, one man one vote. The first time and for a very long time the only instance of allowing an open plebiscite. The population voted for it, en mass. It was a fairly literate population and the campaign to get it all approved resulted in the Federalist Papers. (There were also opposing viewpoints, the Antifederalist Papers, which I suspect most people today know nothing about, but it was a debate, a very public one.) People had a chance to vote no.

So did they not approve of all the highmindedness? I mean, they voted yes, they had to know.

Well, yes and no. We’ll never know for sure, we can’t, but I have a feeling that many if not most looked at what was being proposed, saw it as a set of restrictions on the federal government, and believed none of it would apply to them. It was a legal framework that gave them freedom to live the way they wanted.

No matter at whose expense. 

And it’s not that they had ambitions to do bad things, but exclusivity was seen as natural. The idea that the privileges and rights held by a white male in 1790 should be shared with everyone else…well, perhaps the theory may have sounded fine, but to actually establish that in his own neighborhood? 

By the the time the Civil War came around, a lot of people were probably thinking what a nuisance this whole All Men thing was. That perhaps the Founders had pulled a fast one on them. It had never occurred to too many of them that there was a slow bomb in the thing they had agreed to.

That slow bomb was an idea let loose from the beginning, which is at the heart of all the Constitutional controversy down through to today. Equality. Perhaps they thought it wouldn’t matter—after all, they had said that All Men were created equal, which by implication left women and children out. But Native Americans are men (those who are not women) and so are African Americans, Latinos, and so forth. Once the claim was made, it was only a matter of time before all those groups who were denied equal regard would begin pointing out the disconnect and others would agree. But it likely never occurred to those who in subsequent generations grew angrier and angrier by the assertions of rights from groups they never themselves considered equal on any grounds that what the Constitution said would actually mean things would have to change. 

(Perhaps if they had written All Humans, it would have been clearer. But as we know from history, people here and there have no problem designated Others as Not Human.)

Now, on the other side, no doubt many people knew very well what they had just voted for and liked it. Which is why they were so angry about the degree to which their country had failed to live up to its stated ideals. These populations were not monoliths. And they fought with each other. The Founders—some of them—had, in the old aphorism, put the cat among the chickens, quite intentionally.

The fight over equality has been about an assumed right to acquire the power to dictate to people with less power. Not overseas, although one can hear that being argued among certain people, but right here. The unquestioned right to accrue wealth and power which can then be used to control those with no money and no power. The argument? That this is not a right, but a privilege that has the drawback of impacting actual rights. 

That one is still being argued. Of course, there’s nothing in the Constitution about that, other than that implied mandate for equality in several sections and in a good deal of the Bill of Rights, that these freedoms and protections are meant to be applied equally. We’re having a difficult time with that. The first successful skirmish after slavery over that was back during the Trustbusting days, which was an ethical fight using the commerce clause of article V to base the federal government’s legal right to interfere in financial systems. FDR nearly finished that job, not quite, and here we are again.

(Consider how often an obvious argument about equality has been side-stepped judicially in order to avoid certain ramifications. Reproductive rights, for instance, has been mainly argued as a right to privacy rather than an obvious matter of equality. When gay rights came before the courts, attempts were made to put them in the same category, but the decision was made to argue them as matters of equality. It should be noted that in the subsequent decades, reproductive rights ended up more and more vulnerable while LGBTQ rights have only gained valence. When arguments that are best made based on equality are set aside it is almost always because someone is afraid of losing a perceived privilege.)

Because that was the aim, to find a system wherein everyone had a share, a say, and no one could take away their voice. Wherein everyone had an equal right to the possibilities of community.

The American Dream has for too long been characterized as a materialist fantasy—money, property, etc. True, much of the dream requires a material component, but only in service to the larger dream, which is for each of us to be able to live in the world as who we are without arbitrary limits imposed for reasons that have nothing to do with the principles upon which we were ostensibly founded. 

But living that way requires we respect everyone else’s right to live their way. The unimagined (but perhaps not unanticipated) varieties of tolerance necessary did not have so many challenges to the people then who felt it was simply and exclusively all about them. They probably knew that at some point there would be a reckoning, between principle and reality, certainly over slavery—in fact, they did know since the argument was built in to the Constitution (the 20 year delay in allowing the issue to be addressed in congress), so some of them might well have had an inkling that there would be more and for them stranger examples of the meanings they had set to emerge.

My point? Well, the obvious one with regards to the nonsense foisted on us about Originalism. Even if philosophically there were some validity to the idea of Originalism, it’s an impossible argument to make, because we continually refuse to address the obvious, that people then were not much different in key respects than they are now. They did not go forth to conquer and settle this country spurred by the vaunted ideals of the Founders, but to make as much money and guarantee as much security as they could, and were quite happy to have a legal structure—they thought—that approved of their personal ambitions. The Founders knew that and some of them managed to create a guiding document intended to open up and emerge with more and more force as circumstances arose to trigger those inherent meanings. This would be the very definition of a Living Document.

But for the sake of argument, let’s suppose Justice Scalia was right when he dismissed the idea of the Constitution as a living document. It doesn’t matter. Because it is a document based on an idea and ideas are useless without a living mind to embrace them. Assume then that the Founders, some of them at least, knew what they were doing when they put all those bits about equality into these various instruments, that in the future the living minds that accessed the underlying principles of those documents, the ideas, would have to unpack them and interpret them. (Alexander Hamilton said there was no need for a Bill of Rights because the structure of the Constitution would force people to oppose each other over ideas, issues, and rights.) There are only so many ways to interpret Equality. The document may not be alive but the ideas cannot be otherwise. Many of the Founders likely had a constrained idea what equality meant. Or maybe not, maybe they just had a limited notion of who they intended it for. But they likely knew their understanding of it would not be the only one through time. And they put it in there anyway.

Meantime, we’re having the same fight. Between people who wish to live in a better, more equitable society, and those who wish to be free of any interference so they can get what they can, preferably without having to be brutal, but certainly prepared to be if they can’t manage any other way. The latter group are the ones complaining today about Wokism and frankly terrified of education. Born of the previous generation who hated Political Correctness, something they misunderstood and/or mischaracterized then. And they came from those who hated Civil Rights, because they thought they’d lose power if actual equality were established. They’re the same sorts who back in the day thought nothing of wiping out native tribes and stealing their land because of some nonsense called Manifest Destiny. The idea of actual equality would have sounded…foreign…to them. Certainly frightening.

Imagine what it would be like if we actually did embrace equality…

From 1789 on we have had two Americas. The one we like to brag about, but which too many people really don’t want. And the one we live in, which is still stuck in an anti-idealistic struggle engineered by people who have a stake in keeping us frightened of each other. It’s troubling to me how eagerly we seem to embrace our fear, even while we often sing praises to the unrealized dream.

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Standing On Principle

Now that it’s clear who the contenders are, I thought I’d make a few statements about the upcoming election. I doubt anyone who has read these pieces over the years will be surprised at who I’ll be voting for. But I want to address a problem that plagues us in aggregate and I see it raising its problematic head again. Let me start though with something that may strike you as curious.

My mother is frightened.

My 89-year-old mother is terrified that Trump will win. She was mightily disturbed back in 2016 when he did. Today she has reached a point of near-despair.

To put this in perspective, she was born 1934. She remembers World War II. She remembers fascism and how the country came together to oppose it. She has never not seen Trump as a homegrown embodiment of everything this country fought against back then. Now, you might quibble with me, a so-called Child of the Sixties, and question my sentiments, but her feelings are different, formed in a different time, a time I hear too many of the die-hard adherents of Trumpism claiming they want to take the country back to. (They seem to have their geography wrong, though.) From her youthful experiences, it seems that this is something few then would have supported.

Some would have, that’s true. But then as now it was the same kind of pathology. People wanting to seal off an idea of America and keep anyone that didn’t measure up to the vague and rage-inspired metrics of the self-selected arbiters of what “America” is out. When you break it down, that’s all this is—hatred of the Other. Any other, which is what makes it so frightening.

During the four years of his presidency, I watched and listened, often in dismay, as those who began as supporters and those on the inside spoke up about the dysfunction, the corruption, the low-down meanness of his administration. People from his inner circle, who had been counted among the elect, changed their assessment and yet when they did they were not listened to but were summarily cast out and defined as pariahs, traitors. Those who had been reliable ideologues up till that point suddenly, once they suggested that maybe things were not as they seemed, were wrong, were out of control, lost in a heartbeat the confidence they had enjoyed from supporters not a day before. That was a set of tea leaves we all should have been able to read, that no matter how much one approved of this policy or that, this was a broken administration that would leave ruin in its wake because it was not about the good of the country but the ego of a leader.

My mother hears the echoes. She saw what people like this did to the world. We’ve seen this before and she is dismayed and disillusioned that a country with so much possibility and success in being human would even contemplate choosing that.

Those who would return this man to office rely on the principles of those opposed to them.

I’m already hearing people grumbling that they will not vote because Biden has not lived up to their expectations. They will stand on principle rather than support a man who hasn’t delivered on all his promises. In spite of some understanding of how politics work, knowing that no single leader can simply wave a hand and accomplish what he may want, seeing evidence that the failures are the result of the in-fighting in Washington, they blame Biden. Alone. As if.

It is not possible for a president to simply do what he intends. No president ever has. Not even FDR, which is probably the model on which these wishful assessments are based.

But it is possible for a president to wreck a great deal, especially if he has a loyal congress to rubberstamp his acts. We saw too much of that between 2016 and 2020.

It astounds me that the choice is not obvious. Guaranteed ruin or the chance at moving the ball forward. To say “you didn’t move it forward enough, so we’re going to let the other guy win” is the epitome of political childishness.

That this matters nothing to Trump’s supporters surprises me not at all. They have bought into the whole Government Is The Problem nonsense and any argument that what Biden has done has been working means exactly the opposite of what it means to us who support him. What Biden’s success means to them is the failure of government to be nothing. Until we understand that, until we internalize the bizarre mirror-think of the current Right, we will continue to argue with them without effect. What we want and what they want are so apposite as to constitute separate and mutually incomprehensible languages.

But stand on principle, stay at home. Give the demagogues another shot. Maybe this time the mob will manage to kill some congressmen.

Because what should be crystal clear after January 6th is that Trump has all the makings of one of those dictators who win a democratic election and then never leave. Because they think they only had to get into office and then it would be forever. Per the Constitution, if he wins this time he can’t have another four years. I have no doubt he will try his best to change the rules so that he can stay there. He has all but said it and what he has stated clearly (which too many people, then as now, believe was nothing but campaign rhetoric) should trouble us to our core.

I do not for a moment believe he is smart enough to engineer all this himself. The gray eminences, the moneyed interests, those unelected directors who have enabled him and who whisper in his ear, they’re smart enough. But of course that kind of thinking borders on conspiracy theory and it’s not that. We’ve seen them, we know mostly who they are, and somehow we have been unable to say no to what they do. If it all ends with this election, it will not be that we didn’t see it coming or understand how.

But by all means, stand on principle and refuse to vote or write in some third-party ghost you know will never get elected and enable Trump to seize the throne. Be pure, clear of conscience.

Say what you will about his handling of the office, Biden is a traditional American who believes in our institutions and a basic idea of democracy.  I believe it’s possible he may be the last of his model we will ever see. He will leave it all intact for the next generation. The other guy will not. By word and deed he has shown us that he won’t.

So there’s my position. Just in case anyone wondered.

I’ll leave you to ponder your choices ahead of November.

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Between Who and Who

Nikki Haley stumbled when addressing the Alabama Supreme Court decision about in vitro fertilization. In an interview with NPR, she said that people do not need government getting in the way when it comes to this difficult decision and “that’s between the patients and their doctor.” I heard echoes. Everyone should hear echoes. That is exactly the stance prochoice advocates have been taking for decades. The phrasing is half a step removed from support for personal choice across the board.

In one way, this is a perfect example of tone deafness. Because it is something of which Haley approves—IVF, which she herself used—then the rules are one way, to the benefit of wanna-be mothers who have difficulty conceiving. But when it goes the other way? “Embryos are babies.”

No. And this is why this issue is biting them in the ass, because it’s an ethical shell game. She has made it, along with every other Republican who has scrambled to deny the implications of the Alabama Supreme Court ruling, clear that the issue, while in part about abortion, is really a much larger agenda, which can loosely be described as pro-pregnancy. Again, it comes down to trying to fix a social definition of what is allowable and desirable in one direction that has nothing to do with an individual’s rights of personal autonomy. Mixed in is all the usual hypocrisy of having one’s cake and eating it, too, because it has been understood for some time that certain people who would deny a broad access to reproductive choice would want those choices for themselves.

The lack of compensating programs on offer by this cadre of social engineers underscores the reality that they really don’t care that much about the children once they are born—from childcare, schooling, poverty programs, and a whole raft of assistance programs that are consistently rejected by the political prolife movement—points to the conclusion that this has nothing to do with protecting children. It has to do with controlling women. And by extension men as well. The fact that a good deal of the prolife movement is now admitting that it wants to limit access to birth control as well makes this even more obvious.

And doubtless many of them would read that and look at you and say, “Yes, so?”

Haley went on to modify her initial support of the ruling by saying that for her, an embryo is a baby, but that is my personal belief.

Well and good. And my personal belief is that no one should be denied the benefits of living in society based on biology. The fact that I am a male means that I will never have to live restricted by my sex. I cannot become pregnant, therefore all the questions and burdens of that condition will never impede me.

A woman should have the same right to live her life in the same way. Her biology should not determine her status as a citizen and participant in the zeitgeist and the public sphere and most especially not in private.

Reproductive rights—all of them—are between a woman and her doctor. Nikki Haley pretty much said so.

This issue has clung to our political life for as long as it has simply because no one wanted it settled. It was too good an issue to give up during campaigns. The nature of politics is such that even those politicians who allied themselves to the prochoice side likely did not want to see it settled, either, because it was something they could use to strike back at their opponents. A settled issue does no one any good on the stump.

Obviously, this is not the only issue that is so treated, but it is far more personal than the others. And now that it has been pushed toward being settled by one side, the mess has now stripped away the homilies and façades of homegrown Norman Rockwell “decency” that masks all the thorny vicissitudes of trying to live ones life as one chooses.

This is a question between patient and doctor. Not between a woman and the police, the state, or the pompous moralizing busybody down the street.

Finally, as has been true for decades, this has never been about whether reproductive choice is available, but about who will have access. IVF is obscenely expensive. But if you can pay, by Nikki Haley’s thinking, you should get to play. That has always been true. No money? Well, too bad. You should get access to neither IVF or birth control.

That’s the world they’re trying to achieve.

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I Do Not Believe

It was a toss-up what this post would be. Something about upcoming books or…this.

It is said that we are more polarized than we have ever been. I do not believe that. What I think is that in the last 40 years the band-aid has been ripped off and because of the emergence of social media we are now seeing just how polarized we have always been. Look at any period of our history and ask a simple question: were people more tolerant then or was it that anything that might challenge them in their complacency was simply kept buried and they didn’t have to deal with it?

There’s nowhere to get away from it today. Which I think is all to the good, because unaddressed problems, wounds, dysfunctions, and ruptures never just go away by themselves. The rising cry against so-called Wokism is nothing but people who never had to deal with their erroneous assumptions complaining that they don’t want to own their shortcomings. During the last few decades we have seen a resurgence of Lost Cause nonsense in the form of denials that the Civil War was all about slavery. In response, a flood of actual data was presented to show that, no, in fact, it was all about slavery. All of it, at every level, and by the Secessionist’s own admission. The objectors to this historical reality have been living with the solace of muffled history all their lives. It was unpleasant for them to be confronted with the fact that they had accepted misstatements, propaganda, and lies about something they wanted to feel no connection to. Even as they continued to support, implicitly or otherwise, a civic ecology of racism that exists out of all the unaddressed inequities of that soft-focus, romanticized Gone With The Wind* mythology.

The divisions of which we hear today have always been there and we were able to largely ignore them because of the weight of sheer numbers. The oppressed were too few, too weak, and therefore too voiceless to cause discomfort. Except for those times when it became intolerable even for the majority to bear. Eruptions of social justice movements burst forth, often violently, and Things Were Done to mollify the genie. After which things settled back into an uneasy stasis of hoped-for quiet.

There have been strides, changes we can collectively be proud of, but too often it was left unfinished. Too many people have been left out of the solutions and certain people would like to go back to believing everything is fine. The entire MAGA movement is nothing more than a demand for the cosmetics of a misremembered past when people didn’t complain and we could be pleased with our place as some kind of icon of decency…and power. The dissonance of the demand—Make America Great Again—begs the question, especially at a time when we have an unprecedented capacity to do genuine good in the world. And every time we are tasked to do that, the MAGA crowd howls in discontent that we ae somehow less and the country must be rescued and remade according to Hollywood history.

At the base of this is a habit of cognition which, in proper perspective, should not be a problem, but when pushed past the limits of its utility has become a serious problem.  “What do you believe in?” In normal usage, it’s merely a question of conditional acceptance, a placeholder, if you will, until better information can either modify or replace how one understands something. But when used as a litmus test of trustworthiness, it becomes toxic and inimical to the one thing that might save us from destruction, namely our ability to see clearly.

For years I’ve had a problem with the phrasing “Do you believe in science.” I know what it’s supposed to mean and what it often does mean, but I still chafe at it. The usage carries implications that are the exact opposite of what is intended. And it is those implications that those who intend something else know very well and use to subvert the legitimacy of any casual answer. I’ve gotten to where I will not say Yes. No, I do not believe in science. I accept science as a valid and useful tool, I accept the answers it provides, I privilege its product above mere statements of belief. I trust it, yes, but as a process. The question “Do you believe in science?” reduces science to an object, one with innate qualities on par with a deity. It renders ones acceptance of it as a volitional act of surrender to those qualities and its dictates. It redefines the proper relationship and turns it, by degrees, into a faith, a religion.

No, I do not believe in science.

Go down the list. That question, about anything, is generally a shorthand, a quick way to determine the basis for further discourse, but for some people it is a statement of fidelity and admission to an exclusive club.

Long ago, in my adolescence, I became entranced by the speculations of Erich von Daniken. Along with the whole UFO craze, I thought his ideas percolated with a coolness actual archaeology could never hope to achieve. But I was raised by a father who was determined that I never be taken in. By anything. Question. Never accept that we know everything, in particular that I know everything. It is impossible to go through life constantly off-balance by doubt, but always be aware that certainty is conditional. So I did finally go looking to genuine archaeology and found out that the nonsense Van Daniken espoused was little more than the stuff of a good story. I felt betrayed. I liked the notions he put forth, the part of me that preferred a great yarn wanted very much for his implications to be true. I wanted to believe. But I couldn’t, not after I found out the facts. The same thing happened to my affection for UFOs. And Atlantis. And so many other things that turned out to be mere stories woven from a few threads of reality by what I later understood as the practice of conspiracy theory.

How does this relate to our present divisions? When people are trying to ban books, ignoring history, asserting faith over fact, it should be obvious. Our divisions manifest in multiple ways, but are rooted in the desire by one faction to above all believe. It is, perhaps, easier than constantly reassessing. Reassessment always comes with the possibility of having to discard a favorite story as Not Fact.

In the constantly escalating heat of our divisions, one is forced, it seems, to take hard positions just to maintain equilibrium. So I will here state that I Do Not Believe In…anything. Not in the sense meant by those seeking to undermine everything I find of value.

Authority is never absolute and it seems to me that those most invested in proclamations of What Do You Believe want above all to end all questions. Aside from everything else, it is this assertion of absolute authority—in the guise of taking back our country—that I find I cannot support and which the Republican Party is now deeply invested in. Only they aren’t doing it by finding better information, clearer facts, a firmer grasp of reality, but by trying to silence the debate. I cannot accept that and heads the list of the things I do not believe in.

 

 

 

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*Which is itself a species of selective apprehension. There are two ways to watch Gone With The Wind, the most common apparently being as a love letter to a vanished utopia. But there is such a thing as subtext and below the surface throughout that film one can read all the hypocrisy and ugliness that valorized surface covers. In many ways it is a thorough condemnation of the South and the Peculiar Institution and the rose-tinted notion that there was anything beautiful about the antebellum world.

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Intellectual Parasitism

This will be brief. Sometime around 2010 a term entered common usage—Woke—which basically meant be alert and aware of racial prejudice in all its manifestations. It took hold and came to stand for general awareness of discriminatory conditions and practices across a wide range of social interactions. Being alert and aware and, a step further, choosing to speak out about a variety of all-too-commonly held beliefs that slowly, deeply poison our daily discourse, from anti-LGBTQ statements to all manner of anti-Progressive resistance from certain quarters. In the short decade since, it is being weaponized as a pejorative on behalf of the very attitudes and mouthpieces the term was intended to call out. The Right is very good at this sort of thing. Look what happened to the term Liberal. To some people it’s another word for devil-worship and pederasty.

And people who repeat the detractions and attack Wokeism (as they call it) seem blissfully unaware that what they are railing against is merely a call to vigilance. They throw the accusation of Woke as if they know what it means. Well, they know what it means to them, perhaps, but it always puzzled me that they themselves would have to be functionally Woke in order to even recognize the thing they’re opposing. I don’t believe they are. I don’t believe they understand what they’re denigrating at all.

I’m reminded of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis.  Someone, somewhere, has gifted them with the intellectual equivalent of that delightful fungus and they go forth issuing challenges and putting up barriers and challenging anything that runs afoul of their pet aphorisms and they do so at the behest of the parent organism that has infected them. The basic scenario is this: Person A makes a blanket statement about Those People. The statement is worse than useless, it parrots something they may have heard growing up, but they’re comfortable with it because most of their life it has gone unchallenged. Person B says “That’s not true. In fact________”  What follows is a string of actual data which shows the original statement to be a load of dingo berries. Person A responds “That’s a load of Woke B.S.” and triumphantly withdraws from any potential dialogue that might threaten the comfortable zone of thoughtless categorization they use in lieu of actual intellection.

I have witnessed this. Almost never is any substantive rebuttal offered and direct engagement is refused.

Someone like Ron DeSantis told them Woke is evil and, unquestioningly—because the hapless ant walks around with a host of substanceless heuristics that allows them to walk through life without doubting their own intelligence—they go forth and refuse to learn. Instead they have a new heuristic in their arsenal of defenses that prevents any possibility that they might reconsider a longheld prejudice and rethink their attitudes,

Zombies in service to ignorance. And rather than take any steps to find out if that is the case, they will simply turn it around and accuse those questioning them of being exactly what they are—zombies in service to ignorance.

Look: even if you end up reaffirming that thing you believe, doing a little work to find out if it’s true never hurt anyone. But refusing even to look in the evil telescope or open the forbidden book is the kind of behavior that leads to the collapse of civilization.

But it may not be your fault. Poor little ant, you’ve got a parasite.

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The Meander

I’m a bit tipsy as I write this. A nice bourbon, at an inappropriate time of the day. But my mind is bouncing from topic to topic, so I thought I’d let folks know what’s going on.

Is the next Granger novel going well? Well. Depends. I have a bit over forty thousand words done on the first draft. I ran into a wall, called the Osage, and have been semi-diligently researching this rather impressive tribe of Native Americans in order to say things about them that will not make me look stupid. They had an intricate if inconsistent relationship with first the French and then the Spanish, at at least two geographical points—the Arkansas River and St. Louis—that made things complicated for the Europeans at the time. While researching, I’m writing nothing. I stopped at the pivotal scene where some negotiation is required, and later in the story they will again be pivotal. So.

We’re planning a road trip down to Kaskaskia, just to get a feel for the place. Virtually nothing remains today of what was there at the time (1785) but it would still be useful to walk the ground. And then there is Fort de Chartres, which is pretty much on the same spot, but completely rebuilt.

Consequently, I have been brought face to face with one of my internal contradictions, which is bound up in the rush of writing new material but having to stop till I know more. I do not do the degree of research some writers do. I do enough to write semi-confidently. Others will learn a period or place down to its DNA. I do not, though I generally end up knowing more than I realize. Then someone asks a question and voila! there’s this font of data I didn’t even know I had. But really, I meander through the material, picking up bits here and there, searching for the threads that bind the times together. In time, I meander over quite a lot, just not in a rigidly organized way.

Since turning 69, I’ve been doing these periodic reassessments. Another meander. How much of what do I have the stuff to do? I have no concrete answer. I get tired more easily, but that may just be that I haven’t yet slowed down or taken on less.

I’m in a bit of a slump. I’ve been trying to push the book more, and I’ve tried a couple of new things, but I have no way of gaging what is or is not working. It would be nice to see a few more reviews in the various places where such things appear (and appear to matter). There is about a year and a half till my better half retires and we have some negotiations to do for the after time. It’s easy to fall into habits that may not work well when the situation changes. I’ve been fortunate in that I have a wonderful partner who has allowed me to pursue dreams that have not exactly produced the desired results. We’re still indulging our read-alouds and right now we’re reading Nicola Griffith’s Hild, which is superb, to be followed by her new one, Menewood.

Speaking of whom, last month we attended the World Fantasy Convention in Kansas City. Mainly because friends said they’d be there and it would be great to see us. It was good to be there, with them, but it led me to the conclusion that except for connecting with good friends, there really seems to be no reason to continue attending conventions. I’m not a Name. Again, I don’t know how to gage this, but in a 35 year career I’ve been a GoH only once.  Hmm.

But these people, these connections, these friends…how did this happen? I have been so lucky to have met and connected with such marvelous people from so many places! That is its own kind of success and I feel I’ve been gifted with a dream-come-true aspect to life I never thought to have,

Now, then, where was I? Oh. All future things depend on all present things. For those of you interested in the Granger story, I have ideas for several novels. (More meandering, from one book to next, with other things in between.) It could well be a long series. I’m finding considerable pleasure just now revisiting the territory, so to speak. As to whether those future stories appear, that is, of course, dependent on market forces over which I have little say. Christmas is coming up, If you know readers, then Granger’s Crossing would be a great gift. I have no budget, word of mouth is the best I can manage, so brag about me. Get those numbers up., Make my publisher happy and then the next one may appear. (I think you’ll like the next one, I really do; at least I’m having a good time writing it.)

As for the science fiction, well, soon I’ll have an announcement concerning my Secantis Sequence. I’m pretty excited about it. Stay tuned. There are more short stories in the works.

It would be helpful to have an agent, but after my last one dropped out of the field, I’ve been just a bit despairing of that. Too many places are unwilling to look at unagented work, and I can understand that, I can, but it makes it more difficult to shop work around. (Several years ago, in my new position as consignment book buyer, I had a conversation with a young writer whose novel I had rejected. He was trying to convince me to change my mind and then said the wrong, or possibly the right, thing: “You have no idea how hard it is breaking in.” In one of my rare moments of “I don’t give a shit candor” in that job, I explained who I was, what I had done, how many years I had been doing it, and what my track record was to date, ending with “So, yes, I do know how hard it is and I’m telling you, your book is not ready for prime time. Go somewhere and learn how to write.” Which to my pleasant surprise did not get an angry hang-up, but a long pause and a heartfelt, “What would you suggest?” We then had a long conversation about workshops and how long and why and so forth and I hung up feeling that he just might pursue my advice to good result. No, I do not remember his name, nor would I tell you if I did. Point being, this is not an endeavor for those unwilling to stay the course and put up with a lot of obstruction.)

Changing the subject, I am still working out, trying to stave off the erosion of age as best I can, and fortunately the only negative effect has been a need for more sleep. But I am trying to assemble a regular discussion group again. We had belonged to one that last many years, sometimes based on a pure philosophical discussion, then at others times around a book (Dante, Joyce, Melville), but always in as deep a dive as possible, with sharp people among whom I always felt like the dullard. Some died, some moved away. I’d like to start that again, but there’s an organic aspect to that which cannot be planned for. I do feel a bit slower, mentally. Until I get involved in a deep conversation and then al the cylinders seem still to fire as they should.

2024 is coming up. I’m more than a little concerned for next November. I’m actually a bit anxious about my fellow citizens. It is difficult to feel confident in a community that once sent a berserker into office and may have the potential to do so again. I fear for my friends, some of whom would be sorely put upon under more of that kind of dysfunction. For the first time in my life, I really do not know what will happen.

But I’ll comment on that in more detail later.

In my own little pocket of life, things are not bad. I have great friends, a wonderful partner, health, a bit of optimism, and the ability to appreciate it all. So, onward.

This update has been brought to you by my optimism. I’m going to meander off now.

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Imperial Theology

I made an off-hand reply last week on FaceBook to a question that has become so common as to almost be meaningless. How can so many people who claim to be christian follow an exemplar who is the exact antithesis of everything Jesus stood for? The usual response—well, they aren’t really christians—will not serve. Because it overlooks too much of what is going on and what has preceded it. My response was that they are Imperial Christians, adhering to what the religion became after 313 C.E. Prior to that date, it was pretty much just one of dozens of religions, having no better claim to relevance than any other. After that, it became the state religion of Rome, thanks to Emperor Constantine’s mandate.

That changed everything. What Jesus said (may have said, the other inconvenient fact being that we really do not know, even if he existed*) played less and less a part of what then unfolded, because it became then an arm of the government, and governments are never pacific. At best, governments are pragmatic. In this case—and it can be argued—Constantine was a pragmatist with an eye toward posterity. (Also there was this little thing called the Battle of  Milvian Bridge, which Constantine won and took the throne under the sign of the cross, which he then parlayed in his justification for being emperor; right there Christianity was inextricably tied to military victory and an imperial mandate) The constant tumult that had emerged with the advent of a faith that had the temerity to declare that it was the One True religion and had an obligation to convert (Judaism had a similar claim, but it was never an evangelical doctrine and kept pretty much out of politics, except in the question of a homeland, so they actually caused little trouble for Rome) had created a degree of civil unrest that made governing difficult. Time to settle things. Constantine’s mother may have had something to do with it. In either instance, Constantine decided it would be best for there to be a single state religion and decree that the others should get in line.

The details comprise several bookshelves of historical research. We can try to analyze the whys and wherefores, what was he thinking, and so forth, but the fact is christianity ceased being what it had been and became an imperial tool, which meant conversion with the backing of the Law. Not Yahweh’s law, but Roman law. That aspect—that character—of what has come down to us has pretty much corrupted the whole thing. When people refer to the New Testamant and the red letter sections to try to point out the hypocrisy of certain people, they unfortunately overlook the real world aspect of christianity, which is that is a colonial movement, an occupier, a set of principles designed to privilege a single worldview even to the destruction of all others. It is a Roman artifact. So when a Leader steps forth who holds up the sceptor of that movement and declares that it will triumph, whatever Jesus might have said is utterly irrelevant to those who follow. They adhere to a conquering religion. (That’s one reason right wing christians almost never refer to the Beatitudes. What a lot of weak-chinned, namby pamby pacifist nonsense! You have to force people to believe and all that tolerance and empathy will gain you nothing!)

All religions that become aspects of government end up evolving into something other than their presumed intents (or almost all, since some religions are designed from the start to be governments). What we’re seeing in the screeling irrationality of so-called fundamentalists (so-called because if they truly were “fundamentalists” they would adhere to what Jesus presumably said—indeed, they would first know what he said, instead of regurgiting updated takes on Old Testamant Angry God theology—but instead they are soldiers in the march to be religious imperialists always with an eye on the “reward”) is a revelation of what christianity has become for them. They are christians, but they are Constantine’s not Yeshua’s.

Personal aggrandisement, either of wealth or reputation, and a need to silence detractors are the hallmarks of this brand. Naturally they will follow a leader who promises both. We should stop trying to shame them into reason and get some explanation from them as to why they aren’t christians. They are. But they belong to an 1800-year-long tradition of an imperial theology that doesn’t really take Jesus very seriously.

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*No, we actually do not. Not concretely. This is the fly in the ointment in all this. We have no “original” documents, only copies of copies, and none of them agree with each other. It’s a morass of supposition. But. My own personal view is that Yeshua bar Joseph did exist. Someone said some things that have come down to us as his words and whoever that someone was, he was a serious philosopher. There are some radical things in those attributions, and if taken seriously would have posed a threat to the status quo at the time. Whether we call that man Jesus or Sam, it doesn’t matter. Ideas came down to us that still have resonance. The pity is that such a large number of people won’t really look at those words in any but metaphorical and ritual terms.

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And Another Thing

Sort of a follow-up on the previous post. Georgia has handed down over 10 indictments, not only to Trump but to his posse of enablers. Glee has erupted in many quarters, as well as continued bewilderment over how certain people can still support him. We keep assuming, we who are pleased to see the system finally working, that eventually the corruption inhering to these folks will become so obvious that supporters will fall away, will, in fact, “wake up” to the fact that this was grossly illegal, illegitimate, and inimical to our country. Some have. More perhaps than reports show. But a significant number of people are still encouraging him and applauding January 6th.

I frankly do not see why this is hard to understand. It doesn’t matter that what he did was probably illegal (I say “probably” because here we have this little thing about innocence till proved guilty, so I’ll adhere to the principle for now, despite my convictions) because that was the whole point anyway. They believe, if I’m reading them right, that the system that holds what he did to be wrong is itself corrupt and illegitimate, so finding him guilty per its standards will, for them, prove nothing. It will be another talking point for them to remonstrate against the system.

Those of us who do not see any benefit in abandoning a system which, despite its flaws, has managed to sustain most of us for over 250 years are scratching our heads at these armchair revolutionaries (which I believe many if not most of them to be) who are convinced that he was about to bring about the changes they so eagerly await and that now he is being pounded by the very system that he sought to overturn on their behalf.

They Believe, in other words, that Trump was the leader of a populist revolt that would, in the much overused and vacuous phrase, take their country back.

I’ve been wondering for decades—back from who? From what?

When they bring out their lists, if they do, it becomes fairly clear that what they seek is a return to some golden age of white supremacy, low or no taxation, and pure christian values. That this is a fantasy matters little because it is the fantasy they have come to embrace with the fervor of a reformed smoker lecturing others about the evils of tobacco and vaping. Most of the rest of us see this as psychotic because, despite the problems and the flaws (and there are many), the path we’ve been on seems a pretty good one. With hiccups along the way, we’ve been moving toward equity and justice and shedding the dross of past privilege. We’ve been participating in building a world that is fairer and better. It might even happen someday. It’s taking too damn long, sure, but the alternative being offered by the Right is largely what we’ve been trying to leave behind.

And that is what his supporters want, a return to…

Fill in your own blank. My point is, stop trying to parse their convictions according to standards you embrace. For the time being there’s no rapprochement. They do not want women to have autonomy or minorities to have equal power to them or even have a safety net if along with it comes support for people they hate. I don’t have to assume this, they’ve pretty much said it out loud, often and repeatedly. We—you and I who do not think that way—keep defaulting to a reasonable person model that suggests they will see through him at some point.

Well. It’s not Trump they need to see through. It’s themselves.