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Hello! I am back. I courteously request that you kindly forgive my two week absence from writing posts about dark gods, bottom-dwelling fish, the cold darkness of outer space, weird art, and, um, pretty flowers in the garden. The fact of the matter is that, after a long and vivid life, my grandfather passed away. Not only did the funeral take me out of town (back to the tiny mountain hamlet in Appalachia where my family comes from, and to a cemetery where I am related to pretty much everyone), but his death also spelled the definitive end of an era and left me with some pretty serious questions. (also I loved Grandpa and was mourning him, but we will leave such personal matters aside)
I will write up an appropriate obituary here at the end of the year, but to quickly summarize: Grandpa spent his working life overseas operating on behalf of the United States government, fighting and winning the nation’s great twentieth century battles. He was in German-occupied Italy when it fell to the allies. He was in Burma when the Imperial Japanese army was defeated. He was in Egypt during the Suez Canal Crisis, and then in Somalia, then in the Belgian Congo when it became Zaire. He was in Indonesia when the pro-communist Sukarno abdicated power for Suharto. And he finished up his foreign career in Vietnam working to best assist American allies there.
Even during the chilliest parts of the cold war, Grandpa’s work of defeating Soviet puppets (or subalterning them to become useful to the United States) was not highly visible or well-understood by Americans at home. These days that lack of diplomatic (or realpolitik) perspective is hurting us. The United States seems to benefit from having a comprehensible international competitor. After the events of the late eighties and the breakup of the Soviet Block, the perspective concerning the Cold War has gone two very opposite ways.
There is a narrative on the right that we won the Cold War outright and can now turn our back on the world and focus all of our attention on making American billionaires much richer and perfecting fundamentalist Christian theocracy. Thinkers from the left seem inclined to regard the outcome of the Cold War as foreordained and spend their energy lambasting the methods which America employed to counter Russia’s dirty tricks as some sort of capitalist imperialism or neocolonialism. Like all good-hearted people, I regard the first point of view as naive garbage which is pulling us towards fascism. Unfortunately, the well-intentioned liberal line of thinking is likewise dangerous garbage which is enabling the current international crisis of democracy. Please read this chilling article from the Atlantic about what happens when there are too few people like Grandpa (hint: we still have terrible foreign enemies and they are working hard to prolong our political stalemate and deepen our internal tensions…or just end our democracy outright and put their own puppet in charge here).
Anyway, this is a short post to explain my fortnight-long absence not to contextualize the affairs of the whole world (again, that Atlantic article does that). Also, as you can probably tell, being in West Virginia disturbed me. It is one thing to see America’s political divisions on some colorful map. It is quite another to come face to face with the number of earnest Americans who honestly believe our future lies in “far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and of the economy” (to borrow a sentence straight from Wikipedia).
So Grandpa is gone and his hard work is coming undone. I will get back to writing about the garden and the oceans, but I will try to spend more time writing about the affairs of the world. The political crisis of the 21st century is well underway and America and our embattled democratic allies are quickly losing ground abroad and at home. We are all going to have to spend more time explaining why authoritarianism is bad and why we need to spend money and time influencing what happens overseas. Likewise we are going to have to keep defending fundamental liberal and democratic values here, as well. We will have to patiently do the best we can to minimize the coming disasters of 2022 and 2024. Otherwise the red spots on the map will keep spreading and there will be no United States–just another Russian puppet of the sort that Grandpa spent his life fighting.
Congratulations to the People’s Republic of China for successfully landing its six wheeled rover “Zhurong” on Mars. Arguably China is now the second nation to land a functioning probe on the red planet (the Soviet Union landed a rover on Mars back in the 70s–but the craft quit broadcasting immediately after touchdown, providing no new information and a questionable asterisk in the hall of space records). You can read about the mission here at the AP, however I am writing this short blog post to note that, as of the time of writing this, there is no mention of this epic accomplishment on either the FOX news homepage (which announces that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the most partisan member of congress and is harassing her colleagues) nor on CNN (UPDATE: there is a small notice on CNN deep in the weeds).
Undoubtedly the moguls of both partisan sites know what their readers will click on, but I can’t help but wonder if American media consumers are becoming ever more separated from a larger grasp of human affairs as our nation is torn apart by the messy divorce of our political system from reality.
When I was in secondary school in the 1980s, one of the required classes for every pupil was “Civics”. Civics, which was a broad overview of American law, civil rights, and government (with some small intersections with economic and military affairs) took place right before lunch and involved a great deal of (sometimes heated) discussion between the teacher and the students. It was also a thrilling class because we got to discuss an actual presidential election as it happened–and everyone was extremely excited over whether Michael Dukakis or George Bush (Senior!) would prevail. I also remember my fellow students getting especially worked up about 4th amendment questions, about Larry Flynn, and about how old you had to be to vote (for Bush or Dukakis!) or to run for the Senate. Although I did not notice it at the time, “Civics” at Valley Forge Middle School was taught fairly well and students who emerged with an A in the class also had a decent holistic understanding of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship and a simplified but workable macro-understanding of government.
A peripheral side note in civics class was “the filibuster” which was mentioned briefly as an obscure legislative tactic of last resort last used by racist southern politicians during the civil rights era. The filibuster was presented as a desperate measure by which a benighted United States senator could stall legislation by endlessly talking for hours and hours until he (the theoretical senator was a”he” in 1980s civics class) turned blue and keeled over, whereupon the senators could go ahead and vote about pressing national affairs. It was mentioned that the filibuster had an earlier past when it was maybe (?) used for nobler aims than just promoting segregation and Jim Crow. Somebody brought up the Jimmy Stewart movie, and then we moved on. Apparently that was all you needed to know about the filibuster back in 1988!
[actually, I think the teacher might have tried to add some additional information, but the bell rang and we rushed off to hair metal and savage adolescent delights…or at least to lunch.]
I suspect a modern version of civics class would be mostly about the filibuster and would not bother with any of that minutiae concerning the Bill of Rights, separation of Church and State, Article 1 institutions, or the draft…or any of the things which used to seem important in the 80s. The filibuster is why contemporary America is paralyzed with political deadlock and is swiftly becoming a failed state. It is why the Chinese laugh at us as a used-up empire as they build continent-striding super railroads and bribe every dictator in Africa to do their bidding. It is why young adults today shrug sadly about affairs of government and don’t bother to vote. They know that no matter how they vote, nothing will happen and nothing will ever change. The filibuster will kill any reasonable law. It will destroy all reform. It will prevent any change from the status quo of never-ending trench warfare. The filibuster is killing American democracy.
What happened? How did a footnote from civics class (humorously named after Dutch pirates!) rise up to throttle our entire society and destroy our democracy? In 1980s civics class we were taught that the true genius of the Constitution is that it allows reform. When vested interests or revanchists try to thwart the will of the electorate by means of out-of-date antidemocratic rules, the free people of the United States and our elected champions in Washington rise up and fix the system. That is no longer happening in America for a variety of reasons…but almost every one of those reasons directly or tangentially involves the Senate filibuster. Today’s post was a hair raising prequel to another essay about how to fix the rot which is affecting the world and threatening the future. Political problems are at the very heart of what is going wrong. America’s greatest political problem in 2021 is legislative gridlock. The filibuster is the cause of that problem.
I recognize that international audiences are now asleep as they read about obscure chicanery in poorly designed U.S. parliamentary rules. Yet unless the United States gets back to a political system involving good faith deal-making, the waves of nationalism and populism which are buffeting the democratic world will grow into tsunamis. We will talk about how to move forward in tomorrow’s second installment.
The Republican senators and congresspeople who support Trump’s attempt to annul our election and destroy the United States government are each traitors. In order that the country can heal from wounds and stay united, the United States has a long history of grimacing and allowing suchlike seditionists to carry on with their lives unmolested (the eras after the Civil War ended or World War II started both jump to mind). Indeed, Joe Biden has already openly stated his preference to move on and not waste time or resources with vendettas against Trump’s supporting cast of cowards, liars, toadies, enablers, and suchlike stooges. Pending the results of tomorrow’s Georgia senatorial race (at present, the two cartoonishly greedy Republicans are polling in a dead heat against the earnest Democratic challengers), Biden may well be forced to curry favor with these sycophants himself. Sigh…
Yet this is a real coup attempt, and these grotesque people really are attacking our beloved democracy out of cynical opportunism. When history gives us more perspective on this debased & criminal era in Washington, I have a feeling that a lot of these grandstanding Republicans will try to act like this was some sort of joke or performance or “statement” [that is assuming this is not the dress rehearsal for a more effectively staged coup which gives First Consul Cruz or Emperor Tommy Tuberville or a similar nightmare]. As this fine article in the Atlantic explicates, we should never allow the “Dirty Dozen” to normalize what they have done (it might be a “baker’s dozen” with Kelly Loeffler thrown in, but that evil, crooked woman is so mercurial that I can no longer tell what she is up to).
The fact that all ten living former Secretaries of Defense came together and signed a letter admonishing military personnel to obey no illegal orders and stay aloof from the presidential transition, makes me think that Trump’s disgraceful call to the Georgia Secretary of State was not the only illegal or extortionist call which he made. Our senators swore an oath to protect the country and our constitution. These twelve are doing the opposite. Even if they stay in office thanks to moronic voters back in their home states, let us always remember the following senators: Ted Cruz of Texas, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, James Lankford of Oklahoma, Cynthia M. Lummis of Wyoming, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, Steve Daines of Montana, John Neely Kennedy of Louisiana, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Mike Braun of Indiana and Roger Marshall of Kansas. Right now there is nothing we can do to punish them for their attempt to pull down the American experiment in self-government, but the worm has a way of turning. Perhaps someday you can block their appointment to a board, prevent them from becoming a university president, or simply remind a fellow voter who they really are. You never know what will happen, and I think society should ALWAYS recall that these criminals tried to give us Trump as a life dictator.
I, for one, will never forget that when the Republic stood in terrible peril, these caitiffs said “maybe I can use this opportunity to become a hero to Trump’s base and advance my career!” SHAME! A pox upon these villains.
It is Earth Day again.This year the Earth actually is recovering (slightly) from humankind’s rapacious quest for unending resources and eternal growth…but only because we are all bottled up inside our domiciles angrily stewing. Who knows what mischief we will get up to when we are allowed outside again?
I still think the natural habitat for humans is not the gentle mother planet, but the harsh depths of outer space–an environment more suited to our dark cunning, violent factionalism, and infinite appetite. Admittedly, space is an inhospitable place of terrifying extremes…but it is rich in natural resources (and seemingly undeveloped). To be succinct, it is exactly the sort of place that allows for infinite economic growth. Unlike Earth, space would be unharmed by any status displays that weird billionaires want to indulge in. By international/interplanetary treaty, Earth could be a sort of nature preserve where natural humans could dwell under extremely constrained terms for 4 score years. After that, they would have to either return fully to the Earth to lie forever beneath the hill, or go off-world, quaff immortality potions, mine asteroids, sleep for millennia in hypersleep, jump through wormholes, and what-have-you.
Admittedly we don’t quite have the technology for this yet (though I feel that current engineering, aerospace, and ecological knowledge would actually allow for more spacefaring and spacesteading than we admit to ourselves). But really think about how much more appealing it would be to live as a colonist/adventurer in the heavens than it is to be an indentured servant in some moronic cubicle farm here on Earth.
We’re killing the planet for THIS?
Of course, right now I suspect there are readers who are shaking their heads and tutting and saying Earth Day is not about wild flights of imagination…it is about living sustainably! But we have had fifty Earth Days, A half century’s worth of ecological scolding and corporate greenwashing has not accomplished very much in terms of changing the way we live or the political/economic calculus which goes into our true global-level decision making.
This Earth Day affords us a real opportunity to truly think about where we are going at a species-wide level. As soon as we are allowed outside we will go right back to running over baby skunks with SUVs and tossing PVC jugs into the ocean. Primates are not my favorite life form, but I really do love humankind just the way we are: curious, insatiable, aggressive, and free. I also truly, truly love our unique planet of dazzling, beautiful, irreplaceable webs of life. We can not have both things if we keep going like we are now going. The point of no-return is no longer hundreds or thousands of years from now. It is now.
So break out your biggest craziest concepts about how we can reconcile our huge coarse ambitions with our tiny fragile habitat. Write them down below and we will argue about them. Send them to your senator and to the New York Times. Let’s really have the conversations we have been tip-toeing around for five decades. Otherwise in five more decades we won’t be arguing about how to float farms above Venus or seal the cracks in our domed city on Titan. Without better science, better politics and better IMAGINATION, we will be a bunch of shriveled mummies in a used-up necropolis planet of garbage, plastic, and dust.
Greetings from New York City in this, the year of the plague, 2020. I wanted to write about something today other than coronavirus, since we don’t seem to have actually learned much new information about the virus itself (or if we have, it is information in peer-to-peer medical journals about immunoglobulins, virology statistics, lipid membranes and whatnot). However, whenever I try to write anything else, I keep getting distracted and looking at frothy coronavirus articles, which are really opinion pieces about political or business concerns. Clearly the only subject anyone cares about is novel coronavirus, so why force myself to write a piece about sidewinders or limpets? But what do we write about?
We already explored the hypothesized snake/bat zoonotic leap (concerning which matters I have never heard any further news) and we have talked about the “crown” (corona) embedded in the very name of this virus. I suppose we could write about the President’s stunning incompetence, but we already know that this authoritarian dolt is at best a conman, and, more likely, likely an outright traitor who owes billions of dollars to Russian mobster (of course, if that isn’t the case, he can easily prove this hypothesis wrong by releasing comprehensive financial records).
But our horrible president is not my real target here. I want toget back to talking about an enormous issue that our nation has been failing to deal with: the disastrous trope that “government is the problem”. This concept was cooked up by libertarian plutocrats as a tool for embezzling, defrauding, and plundering the country and it continues to undermine our collective well-being. It is insidious because it is self-fulfilling. As government is defunded and abused, it keeps getting worse. The plutocrats (or their mouthpieces) then say: “See: government doesn’t work! Only private industry produces results!” (although when the economy crashes they demand bailouts for their too-big-to-fail cartels).
Not many people love heeding rules (even good ones). As the government is captured by the people it is meant to regulate, the rules become even more onerous and complicated…and yet they don’t seem to address root problems (does this sound familiar?) This isn’t because of the nature of government! It is because moneyed interests are taking advantage of society!
If this continues, within a few years we will all be sitting in cardboard boxes in the toxic runoff of dead factories talking about how America is the world’s greatest country as other places sale past us. In fact, that sort of sounds like now, doesn’t it?
We have been on the wrong path for forty years and yet we knowingly continue to walk down it. Coronavirus offers us a chance to get off this evil road to serfdom and ignorance. The goal of society is not making a bunch of cartoonish monopoly men much richer. The goal of society is to learn more about existence. That knowledge can be further utilized for saving the world’s ecosystems, and making ark-ships, immortality potions, and all-powerful robot servants. It could be used to keep you and your family healthy and prevent you from dying from zoonotic viruses, Or it could be used for other aims, or for nothing at all! Knowledge stands beyond mere utility. It is not merely a means to an ends, but arguably the most precious of ends already, just in its own right.
Private enterprise is incurious about learning things unless there is a way to immediately use that knowledge to make money. Since this is almost never the way that knowledge works, private enterprise shirks away from from learning things. It revels in ignorance. This is why humankind’s forward technological progress has halted except for very slight incremental progress in consumer-side fields like robotics and computer science.
Whether the doomsayers are proven right and coronavirus kills hundreds of thousands (or millions) of people, or whether quarantines and restrictions succeed in mitigating casualties, this crisis has already reminded us of something critical. Government is not the enemy. Government is us. We need to de-monetize politics to whatever extent we can (and throw quite a lot of white-collar criminals in jail) and we need to get back to research and development. We can once again be a nation that makes astonishing discoveries and builds incredible things and helps people. Right now we are not headed that direction. Do you really want to keep going this way? Think about it as you weather this crisis. Also, best wishes to you and your families! As always, let me know what you think in the comments below.
I really miss Sir Terry Pratchett. Looking at the news (and the comments to the news) makes me wonder if this be-hatted weirdo who wrote about witches, imps, and golems was actually the last great humanist…
Today, let’s talk about a concept from one of Pratchett’s later books “Making Money”. Halfway through the novel, two of the characters are trying to unravel a deepening financial mystery which is threatening to derail the economy of the fantasy microcosm which the novels are set inside. The fictional sleuths investigate the late Chairman of the Royal Bank and find that his wardrobe is filled with very specific boudouir costumes. Staring at this excess and pondering the depths of the human psyche, one of the characters forms a social hypothesis which is outlined below (I copied the following verbatim from a Pratchett wiki):
The Horseradish Sauce Hypothesis runs thusly.
Everyone likes a beef sandwich, right?
But just to vary the flavour one day, you put a little horseradish sauce on it.
You discover you like horseradish sauce, so the next time you do a beef sandwich you put a little more sauce on it.
Then a little bit more.
Then a little bit more.
Until one day, you put so much horseradish sauce on the sandwich that the beef falls out.
And you don’t even notice.
I am going to say nothing of truly addictive things like fentanyl, nicotine, lechery, or alcohol (which everyone already knows are habit-forming), and instead write about how society is being conquered by dangerous, low-grade flavors of horseradish. This sounds harmless enough (after all, everyone has to get through their meaningless day jobs), yet, as in the sandwich example above, you don’t notice when the meat falls out. One goes from “reading the news” to internet troll without recognizing it, and it’s happening to all of us.
The internet is the all-time expert on horseradish. It knows the specific variety that everyone likes: shopping, gambling, esoteric adult material, cat photos, Farmville, getting angry about ANTIFA, reading diatribes about how the earth is flat, or whatever. It’s all there. The special sauce which makes the internet so addictive is that it knows what rewards give your brain a little jolt of dopamine and it can administer these little jolts every 5-12 minutes all day. Most people spend all day in semi-isolation in beige cubicles doing meaningless & stressful tasks for distant masters. The internet is to such people what cocaine-laced water bottles are to depressed and lonely laboratory rats. The little razor-hooks can find the cracks in everyone’s façade because they dangerously mimic life’s true sources of meaning and joy. If you squint cross-eyed at the list in the second sentence of this paragraph you can imagine how these things are sad substitutes for friends, romance, knowledge, status, and a sense of belonging.
This is not how I would build a society. It is sad that people have gambling problems instead of fulfilling life quests, or naked pictures of women instead of girlfriends, but I guess it moves stocks, diet pills, and plastic novelty hats well enough to keep the world economy chugging along. The real problem is that the internet has moved beyond being a private venue for embarrassing vices to being the main venue for news and political discourse. It is where society collects and disseminates information and opinions. The internet is now where we self-select into groups. This is not resulting in a golden age of clubs and volunteering, instead it is transforming the country into a boiling cauldron of tribal anger. It feels good to be furious…or maybe not good, but at least it feels like something and one seeks it out every day until the beef in the sandwich is gone and all that is left is the empty calories of spicy sauce.
I try not to write about our déclassé president, because I regard him as a symptom of this problem rather than the problem itself (and also because granting him attention makes him stronger). Yet he is apparently a near-univeral flavor of internet horseradish. People back home in West Virginia can feel the righteous joy of punishing smug coastal elitists by joyously watching that fellow destroy the whole country and rob us all blind. People in Brooklyn can feel the righteous joy of being angry about this mendacious hustler. Getting worked up by the news becomes a dollop of horseradish and we all need more each day. I know I now check to see what grotesque enormity the president has committed before I check anything else. If child poverty in Central Asia dipped four fold or the UN seriously curtailed human trafficking or something I would probably not notice, but I moronically know every dumb thing the President tweeted.
There has always been a degree of degraded spectale to American politics–it’s part of democracy…part of humankind!–but it these piquant empty calories are taking the place of vital nutrients for the body politic. As we stare in horror or glee at the political theater, our problems are not getting solved. New discoveries are not being made. Compromise and reform are not being achieved. When Trump is gone in 2020 or 2024 (assuming the republic survives), we are still going to have this dangerous fascination with outrage.
Making the news into addictive “infotainment” is dangerous. It is less an inquiry into truth and more like the ill-concealed traps and lures within infomercials aimed at the elderly or the ignorant.
There is a quote from Anais Nin which succinctly and poetically summarizes the horseradish hypothesis: “Abnormal pleasures kill the taste for normal ones.” It seems deceptively straightforward until you think about it, and then its tragic power becomes evident. Really think about how you look at the news lately…are you trying to determine the truth of what goes on or are you looking for a dollop of outrage to push you forward to the next sensational click?
The beef is falling out of society’s sandwich in a lot of ways right now. I concentrated on political problems because they are top-tier troubles, but the other ignoble horseradish is part of this too. Everybody needs some special zest, but if the banquet is nothing but novel jallop, we all begin to starve!
What is the most powerful force in human affairs? Most people would probably assert that love is paramount. Compassion for one’s mate, one’s family, or one’s fellow beings is sublime, and love certainly always takes precedence over baser motives…in art, literature and music. Compelling arguments can be made that pursuit of status is the most important thing (I suppose this includes ambition, greed, pride, and fame-seeking in all of their guises, good and ill). An idealist would say the pursuit of wisdom is our greatest drive: it is only through wisdom that we understand the world and collectively move upwards (or, indeed, know anything at all). Cynics might say that the pursuit of pleasure motivates people. Religion, with its false certainties and self-serving rules could also conceivably be named as the prime motivator of our social species (probably by some priest in a silk robe riding a palanquin weighed down with gold).
Unfortunately, these are all wrong. The greatest force of human affairs is fear. Any felon or dictator (or middle manager) knows the fastest way to make people behave a certain way is to credibly threaten them. Fear also lies beneath all the other drives listed above. Even when people are motivated by love, it is their fear of losing love (or never finding it) which makes them act. To motivate a parent, tell them their children are in danger! Economists tell us that the pain of losing a thing is more intense than the pleasure of attaining it (and I believe them). But superseding any of that, fear is a fundamental constituent part of all of us. Terror and anxiety are hardwired into us by evolution. An animal which doesn’t watch out for predators, traps, and adversaries is soon dead.
I will tell you another reason I say this. I am afraid. I am afraid to even write this terrible truth. When I was a child I lay awake, unable to sleep because I was afraid that God would send me to hell for some infraction. When I finally realized that there are no deities except for the ones we imagine, I became afraid of death which brings an eternity of utter oblivion. I was afraid that nuclear war would burn away our civilization and leave the last survivors to die rotting and screaming of radiation-poisoning. I was too nervous to talk to girls. I hid in books and even they made me afraid. In sleep I was tormented by nightmares. The only time I haven’t been afraid was when I was drunk. So I drank as deeply as I could. Then one day I became even more afraid (rightly) that drink was dragging me to my grave and robbing me of myself. Our fears are not necessarily wrong or false—but feeding them by indulging them…or trying to run from them…it only makes them worse.
I have told you that fear is the main motivator of folk (of all our fellow animals, actually). It has saved us time and again…it is how our forbears survived this world of fangs, traps, spears, Assyrians, and mustard gas in order to reproduce. But it is a terrible weakness too. Politicians and the press know this better than anyone. Listen to the speeches. The main point is generally that you will be gunned down by madmen or outdone by foreign competitors if you don’t follow a certain leader. Watch TV and look at how the ads manipulate you to buy snake oil and salad shooters by invoking your fear of cancer, old age, or other people. The news today is instructive. One group of politicians says “if you don’t carry a gun, you will be gunned down by a madman and the other side wants to ban guns!” the other side says “only if we ban guns, will we not be gunned down by madmen” and on and on they go, in a circle, about every subject. It is driving us all crazy and reducing us to sad, angry tribes of wretched cowards.
This is just terrible! No wonder the authoritarians are creeping back and the quacks and con-men do such boom business.
There is only one recourse. I am sure you know what I am going to say…but my point is a paradox, so I will say it with a tale ripped from popular literature. Did you read ‘A Game of Thrones”? It is the story of an execution and its aftermath. The first scene foreshadows this, and has the best moment of all of the novels. A group of conscripts and draftees are attacked and slaughtered by unstoppable monsters. The terrified survivors of this attack run away and are subsequently caught by the authorities (the main characters!) who put the deserters to death. The beheading is seen through the eyes of a child who is watching his father act as executioner. Afterwards the child, Bran, is confused. His foster brother said that the condemned man was afraid when died, but his other brother said the prisoner was brave and died well:
“What do you think?” his father asked. Bran thought about it.
“Can a man still be brave if he’s afraid?”
“That is the only time a man can be brave,” his father told him.
Only when you are afraid can you be brave. Only through such bravery can you avoid being ruled by fear. The theme is echoed later on as the protagonists’ fortunes falter and their little sister is lost in the midst of a brutal civil war. To make her way through this terrifying world of armed goons and psychopaths with knives, she repeats a mantra again and again. “Fear cuts deeper than swords.” It allows her to keep her wits when others freeze. It lets her do things she would be afraid to do otherwise.
“Fear cuts deeper than swords.” It is a platitude from a dime-store fiction (and a metaphor–don’t test it at home!), but it embodies a critical truth. Winston Churchill said it as “Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because it has been said, it is the quality which guarantees all others.”
On this side of the ocean, our one life dictator (so far) said the same thing in his first inaugural address to nation terrified of the Great Depression “The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself.” I am saying this to everyone, but most of all to my fellow citizens. We need to remember FDR’s words again and again. In our world of seething change and garbage content which indulges facile drives, these words are as true as they were back when World War II bore down on all of us.
We MUST change. We must look long and deep at whatever scary thing the clickbait article says and then think instead of just feeling. We must listen to our cowardly leaders carefully…and then we have to ignore our instinctual emotions and repeat “Fear cuts deeper than swords.” Look at what I am saying right now (it’s scary stuff) and then repeat this mantra. Embrace your fear and understand it…and then do what is right instead of what makes you less fearful. “Fear cuts deeper than swords.” Repeat it when grasping old cravens on a screen tell you to give in to fear and submit to them. Otherwise we will not live in the land of the free and the home of the brave. We will instead be in the land of the fear, the home of the slave.
My family is from West Virginian and I have some relatives back home who are fierce red partisans who ardently believe that fascist mismanagement of our country by the executive branch will restore some imagined golden age (I, on the other hand, think that America’s leadership crisis is dangerous and will, at best, make the future dimmer and more difficult… but we’ll talk about that closer to the midterms). At any rate, on a vexing Facebook feed from the Mountain State, I spotted this meme, which is meant to counter the idea that politicians are beholden to financial contributions from the gun lobby. Ripped straight from the frothing mouth of social media, here is a list of the top 50 lobbying spenders:
These numbers are worth talking about on two levels. First, although this list doesn’t explain much about NRA contributions to candidates (why! they’re not even on the top 50 list!), it shines a rather disconcerting light on why American healthcare costs more than twice as much as it does in other developed nations. Health outcomes from our system are not nearly as good as they are in, say, Chile or Slovenia, and life expectancy in the United States is falling, yet it seems like pharmaceutical and insurance companies have at least found something to throw money at! This differently organized chart of direct political donations by industry over the last 20 years makes this point even more dynamically:
There are some other unpalatable truths in there, as well, if you are in the mood to find out why net neutrality got binned or our national transportation policy is a mess.
However, both of these charts are misleading when it comes to the gun lobby, which brings us to our second point. Here is a rather more accurate breakdown of NRA spending.
The red and pink parts are what shows up in the earlier charts. That yellow portion of the pie is “outside spending”. This money does not directly support candidates, instead it is used to attack opposing candidates who propose gun legislation. These ads tend to come from “Americans for safe homes” or suchlike anodyne organizations which are funded by the NRA’s “Political Victory Fund” (or they can come straight from the NRA which likes to have member, after all).
I suppose if my libertarian cousin were reading this, he would angrily retort “Yeah! But what about the outside spending by insurance companies, pharmaceutical firms, and trial lawyers? What is that like?” I have no answers (and I am tired of looking at charts), but that really IS an excellent question. Here is another one: how are we supposed to have a democracy when figuring out who is paying for different sorts of political outreach is like figuring out Chinese shell companies? (as a side note, if you invested a lot of money in Chinese public companies, you may wish to look more closely at the control of such entities).
I grew up in the country and I actually sort of like guns, although they have no place here in Brooklyn (there’s some smug coastal NIMBYism for you). Unfortunately, the glowing fantasy of power and control they provided is evaporating as I get older (plus, the fact that I go through life unarmed makes the notion that a gun would help me an even greater stretch). We’ll get back to America’s relationship with guns and power later this week, right now though, looking at these charts is making me feel even more powerless. I have no MONEY. How is one to make one’s point to the world in such circumstances? A bunch of dull charts about how giant nebulous lobbying groups are misleading us with dark funds?
Happy New Year! Welcome back to Ferrebeekeeper. We’ll talk about the perils and sweet promises of 2018 later this week. It is a year which offers much…assuming we can prevent complete political meltdown, war, and pestilential horror (and can manage our empty & overheating economy into something more useful). There is another election coming (thank goodness). Innovation,experimentation, and exploration, though woefully underfunded, still continue.Here at the old blogstead, I am adding some new topics and leaving behind some older themes which are played out. Also, for my professional life, I am planning a big new art project and some exciting shows. So keep watching for details on all of these things!
But first I want to start the year with a homily from my grandmother. Grandma Ferrebee is (locally) famous for her kindness and generosity, but also for her earthy wit and her grasp of the barnyard fundamentals which underlay the (thin) veneer of society. Additionally, she ran a beer hall in rural West Virginia for decades so beneath the affable exterior is the cold steel required to run a small business of any sort, much less one with a lot of drunken hillfolk running amok. I didn’t always appreciate her bucolic wisdom when I was younger (the scatological nature often struck me as unseemly) yet lately this fable seems uniquely apt. Here it is (paraphrased):
Once upon a time the organs of the body became embroiled in a noisy contest concerning which organ was preeminent and controlled the body.
The brain said “I am the seat of intellect and I direct all of the conscious and unconscious nervous impulses. The limbs do what I say and the body responds to my commands. I alone can apprehend the future and create lofty abstruse thoughts of things beyond rude physicality. I properly and truly rule the body.”
The heart then replied “I am the seat of emotions. Your fears and joys…your hatred and yearning comes from me. I am synonymous with love–eternal and sublime! Plus, on a more literal level, I pump the blood which make all of the organs function. The heart is the center of a person and I am the most important organ.”
Then, before any of the other organs could say their piece, the ass stopped working: the system filled up with shit and the whole body died.
It’s…uh..pithier when Grandma tells it with her West Virginia twang and her knowing looks, but I think I have conveyed the fundamental message. It is a message we need to think about in our “United” States. This red/blue rubbish is useful for pundits, but poisonous for a functioning nation. Our political parties of increasing furious ideological purity are becoming like some autoimmune illness. Ayn Rand Republicans who believe that a healthy and robust society can exist without a thriving middle class and contented workers (to say nothing of scientists, creative professionals, and technocrats) are deadly con-artists misleading us into disaster
Likewise democrats who split hairs over esoteric social manners, and carp forevermore on status conveyed by hereditary victimization left over from bygone eras have lost sight of the future as well. We have a motto about how things are supposed to work.
It is a dangerous time for our nation. I am writing here about The United States, which I know best, but all of the great democracies are afflicted by a wave of strife and malaise…indeed the whole world is convulsed by change so rapid that only authoritarian nations are dealing with it at all (mostly by pilfering the till and building Potemkin cities). We can talk about the larger ramifications of this in the coming year, but first we need to talk and listen instead of shouting slogans like we are in the cultural revolution or something. Democracy is not inferior to whatever China calls its brand of oppressive authoritarianism, but we need some reforms to make it work right. And we need to be patient and compassionate with each other while this process happens.
Above all, we must remember that, just like in the story, society needs people of all sorts in order to function. The nation needs both the sharp-eyed riflemen from Kentucky and the shrewd-minded accountants from Montclair. The states are deeply heterogeneous but stand beside each other through any crisis–structural, cyclical, or natural. We are not the “Fiscally Independent and Selfishly Aloof States of America”. Our name is much finer than that. We need the brain and the heart (and everything else) to work together if we are going to move forward…or even survive (for with a vastly greater population, our margins for error have shrunk). Also we need to go back and think symbolically when we look at this story and not just put the ass in control.
ferrebeekeeper 