It Could Have Been Worse: On The Normalization Of Fascism

As we move from 2017 to 2018, there’s one position that I see some political analysts taking that I find more repugnant and irresponsible than others. On the one hand there are still literal Nazis who are freely walking about today targeting various racial, ethnic, and religious minorities (among others), and one would certainly conclude that these drecks of humanity represent the absolute worst of who we are. But on the other hand, if the Overton Window could remain fixed far to the Left of literal Nazis, they would be an aberration that could easily be addressed by law enforcement and not by disingenuous discourse that treats all content of speech to be equal simply because the first amendment doesn’t explicitly condemn hate speech and calls for the violent end of pluralistic democracy. So I do find my stomach turns just a little more at the commentator who looks at what happened during approximately the first year of the Trump Administration and says, “2017 could have been a lot worse.”

This is, on one level, strictly speaking true. To the extent that we are not currently living in a dictatorship, wherein the various racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, gender, etc minorities are sent to death camps, yes it is true that it could be worse. To the extent that my face has not been eaten by a mountain lion in 2017, yes it is true that it could be worse. I frequently use the “could have been worse” mantra on a quotidian basis to try and keep a view of what privileges and blessings I have in my life, but to use that argument in this context is at best irresponsible and ignorant of the vast amount of work that went into keeping it from being worse, and at worst sympathetic to the positions and people who actively are trying to make it worse.

The single greatest asset the American people have, at this time, is the incompetence of Donald Trump as an individual, a businessman, and most importantly as a politician. His inability to form coherent sentences, let alone coherent policy, has limited his ability to enact a Muslim ban, for example. His inability to attract and retain talent has made it difficult for him to effectively get all of his horrendous policies pushed through the much more responsible career civil servants. However, there is a two edged sword to his impotence. His bumbling rhetoric and unhinged habit of lashing out can often do great damage, much like the directionless rage of a flailing animal is indeed still dangerous. What’s more, lurking in the wings are more competent ideologues who are just champing at the bit to pretend to be the adults in the room when Trump is finally vacated, while simply continuing his policies.

But I feel I’ve been rather vague, at this point. What is, after all, so bad about the Trump Administration in 2017? First off we’ve seen the ascendancy of the euphemistically labeled “Alt-Right.” These fascists have already taken the lives of people whose only crime is being opposed to fascism. Worse, the police sympathetically look the other way at fascist protesters while coming down hard on anti-fascists. Worse still, legislators in several states have attempted to pass laws in the last year to explicitly condone running over protesters with cars. The shift of the Overton Window to the Far-Right has been a steady effort for decades, but now we see what happens when a major political party feels comfortable openly embracing the worst of the worst of American society as a treasured foundation for their base. All of this is succinctly demonstrated when in the wake of the death of Heather Heyer, the president of the United States claimed that there were fine people on both sides, that there was violence on many sides, that opposition to fascism is morally equivalent to fascism, etc. Of course, it could be worse, we could have Brown Shirts marching the street, but for the moment all we have are Red Hats marching the streets.

CHIP has been left unfunded for months now, and most state programs will be lucky to get by on the funding they have through January. The Children’s Health Insurance Program should be the easiest thing to pass in the world, who could possibly oppose it? To be blunt, Republicans. Old guard Republicans like Orrin Hatch as well as the so called young guns like Paul Ryan assure us that we cannot afford such luxuries as keeping children from dying of preventable disease, because we need to inflate the military budget more and slash revenue by giving corporations massive tax breaks. Even charlatans like Marco Rubio see the benefit in at least pretending to be shocked at how crass the GOP has become at throwing the poor under the bus to give handouts to the rich because it’s gone so far. But hey, it could be worse right? At least they left in the charitable giving deduction in the tax bill… as far as anyone can tell.

The private prison industry has been booming under Trump as he funnels various DREAMers and DACA/DAPA recipients into de facto concentration camps. And before I hear people claim this is one Godwin’s Law too far, let me remind you Trump used his first pardon on Joseph Arpaio a man who bragged about what he called concentration camps, used to lock up undocumented immigrants. The window is fast closing to fix what Trump broke with the callous termination of programs that protect productive, law-abiding residents of this country, at which point we will get to see first hand how 2017 could have been worse.

Let’s next discuss judicial appointments. Trump supporters love to mention how many appointments Trump has successfully made over this first year, in part because it is one of the few metrics he hasn’t insecurely inflated. By blocking President Obama’s nominations for years, the GOP made a huge back log. You might recall that was the whole point of Harry Reid’s use of the “nuclear option” in the first place. They weren’t blocked because Obama’s nominees were unfit, but because they had President Obama’s taint on them. But Trump, by virtue of not being Obama, has been allowed to put forward ideologically pure, young nominees, with little or no experience and the Republican Congress looks the other way only unless it becomes a televised embarrassment just how unfit the nominees are. We will get to see just how much it will be over the next decades to have judges who are ignorant of the law, rule on important issues that just don’t sit right in their gut.

On the topic of nominations, Trump’s indifference to doing his job has the upshot of leaving vacant hundreds of positions that are necessary to the competent management of government programs. It’s never quite clear if this is intentional or not. Certainly the appointments he has made seem intentionally designed to be nihilistic sledgehammers, poised to undo the basic functions of government that go unnoticed until they go unfulfilled. One can’t look at Rick Perry, Ben Carson, Betsy DeVos, and Scott Pruitt and imagine that these are the best our country can offer to manage our nuclear material, provide affordable housing, defend the right to quality education for all students, and prevent environmental abuse. However, Trump’s ignorance of even the most basic details of how government works is a plausible argument for why he’s incidentally destroying the various programs that everyone depends on, even if they aren’t immediately faced with that reality on a daily basis. But it could be worse I suppose, I don’t know how necessarily but I’m sure someone will inform me eventually.

I could go on like this, but even I have my limits when it comes to pedantry, so I’ll begin to wrap up by pointing out that what has kept things from being worse is the persistent resistance to Trump’s attempts to make things even worse. Trump and the Republicans tried to kill the Affordable Care Act several times, and only the dogged resistance to those callous bills kept things from being worse. Trump’s ban on military service by trans individuals seems to be overturned for the moment, and that’s because of the repeated efforts of patriotic Americans to uphold the rule of law against an administration that has open contempt for the legal process. Robert Mueller has thus far been successful in avoiding the unhinged and unfounded attacks made to try and stop the Russia Investigation, but only by repeated reporting on the facts and the dedicated effort of the people to remain informed in spite of cynical attempts to propagate “Alternative Facts.”

Look, it could be worse, and it likely will be worse in the next year. And that is because at every level the Republicans are in positions of power. All three branches of the federal government, the majority of governorships and state legislatures, and the judiciary all over the country are infected by a political party that has gone off the Far-Right cliff. The only way we will be able to make things better is to draw out this poison at the ballot box. The only way we could make it worse is to try and rationalize away all the huge threats posed by the Trump Administration by trivializing it, by shifting the rhetoric ever further to the fringes of the Right.

We Let Terrorism Work

We’ve just about reached the end of summer. Kids are headed back to school, families are wrapping up vacations to the beach, but there may yet be time to watch Jaws, to remind you just how close you were to dying in a shark attack at that beach. Except that’s a movie, that’s fiction, that’s not the world we actually live in. Since we entered the 21st Century, 17 Americans have died in shark attacks. To put that in perspective, approximately 200 people died each year in that time due to collisions with deer, yet Bambi isn’t classified as a horror film. And that’s just it, the reason why we worry more about sharks than deer is because it makes a more compelling and scary story, irrespective of the facts. While that might make for good entertainment, the same phenomenon is in its own way contributing to an overarching problem we face in society, particularly where culture meets politics.

Fear works as a tactic, not just for terrorists but for journalists and politicians and advertisers and hell even me. There’s no reason I necessarily had to choose that title, even though it’s ultimately the thesis of this essay, but people are far more reluctant to read something entitled “On the Repercussions of a Society Misled by Emotions.” Fear is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. We evolved the traits of fear to avoid predators and to remember scenarios that would threaten our existence. In the service of keeping people safe, fear can actually be a very advantageous emotion. However, there’s a cost associated with anything, and the cost of fear can be the loss of rationality, growth, or even just a sense of well-being.

But seeing as I did mention terrorists, we need to remember why they’re called that. Terrorism operates on creating the sense that it is a much larger problem than reality would have us believe. Now, each life that is lost before its time is a tragedy, not only to the victim but to their families and their friends and those close to that tragedy. I would never want to diminish the real pain that those families feel, particularly because we as a society do not allow them the basic dignity that we allow families who grieve after a collision with a deer, which is to say silence. The families who survive victims of terrorism are never allowed a respite, never allowed a chance to heal in modern society because everywhere you look you can see images and stories of terrorist attacks. They are in the news, to be sure, but they’re on TV and on the radio and in the movies as well. Like a child who keeps picking at a scab, we never let these things heal over because somewhere in the world there is always some story that refuses to go unheard.

In a world that is as interconnected as ours, it becomes effectively impossible to avoid hearing about tragic stories 24/7 in real time. This is because in a world with more than seven billion people, almost all of whom can share their stories at the speed of light, the moment there is an explosion in Mumbai we hear about it in Memphis, when there is an attack in Paris we see it on screens in Phoenix, the moment there’s an earthquake in New Zealand it’s reported in New York. To be sure, we see the best of our common humanity when these stories come out as people donate to charities, volunteer their time, or even show solidarity on social media, but there is a cost as well. The constant barrage of news about attacks and violence and unending war gives a sense that each of these tragedies are part of some great and terrible monster lurking just out of sight. This is all the more terrifying because it simply isn’t true, because in spite of reality this ogre ceases to go away.

It is true that there are terrorists, it is true that they attack innocent victims, but it is not even remotely true that groups like ISIS are very powerful or winning or are some new threat. Terror tactics are as old as war; Genghis Khan avoided many battles by simply scaring opponents into submission. Modern terrorism has been around since the 19th Century and in my lifetime it has been getting less prevalent, not more. ISIS has been on its heels for months now, they will undoubtedly kill and maim more innocent people, but their time is drawing to an end. There will undoubtedly be other groups that emerge, who look and sound very much like ISIS and they too will meet the same fate of all terrorist groups, they will die out. It is quite difficult to promulgate a movement that instructs its people to kill themselves. But they seem like a huge threat. They seem like a humongous boogeyman because it’s always talked about, like an urban legend. And like an urban legend, the origin of the story is ultimately less important than its repetition and its corruption in the ears of the next person who hears it.

We live at a time when more information is available to more people than at any point in human history, yet we feel that people have gotten less intelligent. We live at a time when wars are less abundant and less deadly than at any time in human history, yet we feel less safe. When people claim that there has been an increase in the deaths of cops, it’s only true in the sense that 2015 set a record low for police fatalities and 2016 isn’t poised to beat that record. The fundamental problem is that so many of us, too many of us have learned how to shut up opposition. With all the information of humanity at our fingertips, too many choose to sift through only to the opinions that agree with their own, plugging ears against the whole truth. Attempts to present facts and evidence are met with faux skepticism that rests on the comfortable delusion that there’s no way I could be wrong and anything you might put up as a contradiction to that point is necessarily biased and inaccurate.

I don’t want to hearken back to the Bush Administration too much by saying that allowing ourselves to become divided and scared in this way lets the terrorists win, but when I hear the rhetoric coming out of the mouth of the GOP’s presidential candidate, I hear someone capitalizing on terror tactics. The assertions about immigration across the Southern Border are at their best when they’re only misleading, but are more often utterly devoid of truth. For some years now net immigration has been going into Mexico, not into the US. President Obama, far from being a president of open borders, has set the record for deportations. Immigrant communities, even those who are undocumented, commit crimes at lower rates than the wider population. But none of that matters, truth doesn’t matter, what matters is that people can be made scared and if they can be made scared enough they’ll buy snake oil cures and false promises.

The knee jerk reactions, on both sides, to pesky facts makes it impossible for quite a few to take it all in and see the world as it is. We are not facing threats on the level of the Great Depression or World Wars, in fact this is probably as good a time to be alive as there has ever been and tomorrow brings ever brighter promise. People listen to that and hear naivety, they assume that the world must be much darker and grittier because that’s what the movies look like. People assume that cynicism is equivalent to intelligence and so ignore the reality of the world we actually inhabit and in so doing allow themselves to see scapegoats and demons at the gate, instead of human beings.

This much is not new, it’s always been a struggle for us to see all our fellow men as human beings. We’ve demonized based on race and ethnicity, on religion and political party, on class and regional differences, on gender and sexuality. I would not point to America in 1960 as emblematic of a more unified time, nor 1860 for that matter. We’ve always had our divisions and we’ve not always been able to live with those divisions peacefully, but when you look at how far we’ve come it can give you hope that we’ll make it as far as we need to go. The Millennial Generation is the most diverse and among the hardest working generations to ever be alive. Yes, despite stereotypes to the contrary, it’s not every generation that accepted the challenge of seeking higher education on this scale, yet was still willing to accept unpaid internships as the prize.

There is quite a lot to be optimistic about, there’s quite a bit to be happy about, and none of this takes away from the reality that there is still so much inequality and injustice that needs to be accounted for. The world is hard but we’ve overcome much worse and the only thing that could possibly allow all that we’ve built to collapse is “fear itself; nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” See, this isn’t a new threat we face, and what was true then remains true today. But when the truth doesn’t matter, when humanity becomes a secondary concern, when we let ourselves be prey to fear and ignorance and greed we let terrorism work.

Home Team Disadvantage

So it’s that time again, time to gear up for yet another in the series of bizarre spectacles that is generously referred to as the Republican Debates.  We’ve seen that in practice these multi-ring circuses are the political equivalent of the Jerry Springer show, with only slightly more denial of personal responsibility.  The ridiculousness of it all hit particularly hard at the moments when, in complete obliviousness to reality, the candidates claimed that what we all experienced was a demonstration of a civil debate, and more fundamentally that the problem was with a lack of conservative voices from behind the moderators desk.  The common, for lack of a better term, wisdom that has since come out of these debates is that what is needed are real conservative moderators, people who proudly admit to having voted in a Republican primary.  Like damn near everything that was spewed from that stage in Colorado, and in all likelihood will be spewed from Wisconsin, this is about as far from correct as possible.

First of all let’s dismantle the premise of the accusation, that being the moderators have been insufficiently conservative and altogether antagonistic to the Republicans on stage.  The CBNC debate had several issues, not least of all is the continued problem of having so many candidates on stage at one time for such a comparably brief amount of time.  In the recent Democratic Forum in South Carolina, the three remaining candidates spoke for a collective one hour and forty minutes.  The GOP debates have had to cram in an additional seven candidates into a time slot just twenty minutes longer.  The result is, at best, the kind of hard feelings from not getting enough air time that only Jim Webb can truly appreciate.  But even if the candidates were willing to understand that basic reality, which their refusal to ever accept another three hour debate again proves they are not, the simple fact is that so many ambitious people in such an enclosed space are going to make it impossible for anything less than a brutally strict moderator to keep the semblance of order.  And therein lies the problem with the CNBC debate in particular, because they were not in fact willing to be as brutal as necessary toward the GOP.

If, by some strange quirk of fate, the debate had been hosted by MCNBC, then that charge might hold a bit more weight.  Notwithstanding the reality that the most popular show is hosted by a Republican, Joe Scarborough, MSNBC is more liberal as a whole than the other mainstream networks.  CNBC, however, is a financial news network that has more sympathy to conservative policies than the average network.  The pre-debate commentary was filled with conservative commentators from the network talking excitedly about what they hoped their favorite candidates would talk about.  The only times that questions were posed in a less than straightforward manner were when they were directed at candidates who prove by word and deed that they have no business running for middle school president, much less commander in chief of the United States of America.  Of course from my position that description is perfectly fitting of all the people on the stage, but I am a little biased, so I take my cues from Fox News.

And this is the integral point that none of them seemed to grasp.  The questions posed to them were comparably kind and on point in comparison to the first debate, which was hosted by… Fox News.  It wasn’t CNBC that asked Donald Trump repeated questions to point out that he has said truly despicable things about women, about immigrants, etc.  For weeks after the fact, these same babies cried about how they were mistreated by Megyn Kelly, who to her credit did an admirable job with what she was given.  One can only hope that with only eight candidates to handle, the next biased network can handle the animus of all these GOP candidates.  Who’s hosting the next debate again? Oh yeah, Fox Business.  This network draws from a lot of the same personalities for their segments as CNBC, which ultimately is true of almost all networks, regardless of their political swing.  Ben Carson got into a bit of a spat with Alisyn Camerota, who currently works for CNN but as he noted used to work for Fox News.  No, in all of these situations the problem hasn’t been that the GOP has been subject to insufficiently conservative venues, the opposite is actually far closer to the truth.

For too long, so many of these ultra-conservative talking head candidates have been taken into the loving arms of the farthest-Right venues where even kid gloves would be too abrasive.  Not one of them is used to being called out by Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, etc when they espouse policies that don’t work on paper, much less in reality.  The point in any of those interviews, before they were running for president, had simply been to attack liberals while pondering how much better the world would be if only they had the power to do what they wanted.  Nobody is going to stop a couple of guys pondering how to fix the world as they drink a couple beers after work, but when those policies have even a slight chance of being put in place, it becomes time to actually question their efficacy, or in the case of this lot, their sanity.

Which brings me to the patron saint of the CNBC debate, Ted Cruz.  Mr Cruz is thoroughly un-American.  I say that not because he wasn’t born in the US or because his father is Cuban, because everyone who chooses America, who works and pays taxes and lives and loves in the US is, in my book, a true America.  It’s not even his more than passing resemblance to a man who headed an un-American House Committee, it’s that Mr Cruz seems to think that the purpose of a primary is to find out which candidate is the most ideologically extreme and put them forward.  No, the purpose of a primary is for each party to choose a candidate who can best represent All Americans.  This is not to say that the goal of a primary is to pick the most moderate candidate or the most establishment candidate or anything like that.  The goal of a primary is to give the major parties their opportunity to see who they think is best able to win the support of as many Americans as possible, so he or she can earn the mantle of the highest elected position.  That could be a conservative, as was the case for Ronald Reagan; it could be a liberal, as was the case for FDR; and it could certainly be a moderate like George HW Bush; however, the point is not to put your party in a bubble that is utterly isolated from the rest of the country and then expect that the whole country could possibly be represented by what eventually comes out.

If for no other reason than to avoid the problem that has so often plagued the GOP of running as far to the extreme as possible in the primary, only to have to try and convince people that you are much more moderate in the general election, the goal cannot be to enforce the walls of the ideological bubble.  The Democrats, for their many weaknesses, clearly understand this and are willing and able to put up with tough questions that they would face in a general election.  Far from being several hours of foot-rubbings and sweet nothings, the Democratic contests have been filled with tough questions.  Bernie Sanders has constantly been faced with questions about his viability, about the realistic possibility of Americans actually being willing to vote for an avowed Democratic Socialist, and also about how his record on guns stacks up in a crowd of Democrats that want to more heavily regulate guns.  Hillary Clinton has had to answer questions about her emails, about the shifting positions she’s held since the 90s, her place in the shadows of two presidencies, etc.  Martin O’Malley was confronted with accusations that it was his direct governance in Baltimore specifically and Maryland more broadly that has led to many of the socio-economic problems he now wants to tackle.  These are all tough questions, but because they’re adults, they answer the questions and show Americans that they are willing able to suffer through even eleven hours of opposition at a time.

There was no equivalent of Hugh Hewitt on the Democrat’s CNN debate, what they got was a series of questions from journalists who work very hard to make their political ideology incidental to their reporting as possible.  None of this being a love letter to the modern media landscape, by any stretch.  The sensationalist tendencies of the mainstream media are a real problem that needs to be faced, but it has nothing to do with the inability of the whole crowd of GOP candidates to answer any question more difficult than “nice weather we’ve been having, isn’t it?”  No, the problem has been and continues to be the total detachment from reality that plagues the modern Republican Party.  If they continue to refuse to deal with truth, facts, the real world, etc then it won’t matter if the Gipper himself rises from the grave and concludes each of his questions with an offer of jellybeans.  The GOP will just continue to suffer from their own self-indulgence, like a Meth addict who sees his teeth falling out and blames his toothbrush for knocking them out.

Risk Assessment

The world can be a scary place, all the more so if you only experience it through the filter of others.  Americans are among the hardest working people in the world, and it is perhaps because we are so often devoted solely to our individual professions that we don’t take the time to actually experience the world.  To stay informed we will trust a few names or perhaps a single network to do the job of informing us, a decision that leaves a large swathe of Americans woefully ill prepared to assess reality and come to reasonable solutions.  I am a fan of NPR and I believe that as a news source it is certainly in the upper echelon in terms of objective reporting on the world as it is.  That said, I make sure that I get corroborating information from other networks some with ideological leanings that I do not share, because you can never be certain where the truth will be.  It has become painfully clear that I am not the rule but the exception when it comes to this, and it is most apparent in the simple inability of so many people to understand what the real problems we face are and how best we can address them.

I have lost track of the number of conservatives who have mocked President Obama’s claim that the greatest threat to the future generations is climate change and not terrorism.  The laughter of the ignorant rings out with undeserved pride like no other, and certainly this is no exception.  How could a concept like climate change possibly be a greater threat than barbarians with Kalashnikovs?  By the same token, how could a colorless, odorless, and tasteless gas be more dangerous than bullets?  Yet it’s not the gun that is banned in war, but chemical weapons.  Obviously, I am using a bit of hyperbole here to make a point, but it’s an important point to be sure.  It’s very easy to see scary images on a screen and recognize it as a threat, particularly if they are repeated ad nauseam, but it’s much harder to fear an abstract concept, even if it is potentially far more dangerous.  And if you’ve never experienced the world around you or even put in the most basic work to stay informed it can be impossible to actually tell the difference between the real threats and the imagined ones.

We’ve come to trust gut instincts because in many situations they are useful and indeed correct.  When you take a test the common wisdom is to go with your first impulse and not second guess your answer.  But that gut instinct evolved from countless generations of human beings needing only to avoid the tiger that might pounce out of the brush, it did not evolve to carefully consider how to deal with microscopic bacteria that are much more deadly.  Perhaps it’s because I have a gastrointestinal disease that I am as skeptical of my own gut, but it seems reasonable to question the efficacy of our immediate instincts to see whether they are still working as they should.  We’re fast approaching flu season, and despite the fact that over a hundred American children are likely to die from the flu this year, it will get far, far less coverage than the two Americans who died of Ebola.

Even in the countries hardest hit by the Ebola crisis, like Sierra Leone, the biggest threat to life was never Ebola.  The biggest killer this year, as was the year before, will be malaria.  This is not to say that Ebola is not a threat or was not a threat, but that we need to remember that just because something seems exotic or foreign does not automatically make it more important than the mundane and frankly banal threats we endure every day.  We don’t consider the risks associated with driving in cars, even though that is literally moving at high speed thanks to repeated explosions.  We do not worry about all the common, every day threats because we live with them every day, so we know intrinsically that just because something is a possible threat doesn’t mean it will always harm you or kill you.  But the moment we encounter a new threat, however small, the fact that it is different makes it much scarier by comparison.  I can only liken it to having a paralyzing fear of sharks, even though you’ve never been to a beach in your life, while keeping a dog as a pet.  Because statistically, man’s best friend is more likely to finish you off than Jaws.  Incidentally, I am actually a dog person.

But let’s take the oh so scary threat of Radical Islamic Terror, the supposed greatest threat according to the Right.  I can certainly agree that we need to combat religious extremism, and we need to defend innocent civilians from the wrath of terrorists, but let’s not pretend that Islamic terrorism is the biggest threat to American civilians at this time, in this universe.  Setting aside the reality that something like obesity is hundreds of thousands of times more deadly to Americans than all terrorism, in the United States, Islamic terrorism is not even the greatest threat out of all terrorism.  White extremist groups and individuals kill more Americans than Islamic extremists to the tune of more than two to one.  Those innocent civilians in Emmanuel AME weren’t killed by Jihadis, neither were the members of the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin, nor the members of the West End Synagogue. It was not ISIS that blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, but you don’t see extra scrutiny given to young, white men with Irish last names when going through the airport.

And my point isn’t that we should therefore start being more paranoid of these more common threats.  Certainly there are issues like healthcare and climate change that we do take too lightly, but in many cases it’s simply that we are making mighty mountains of mole hills.  The world does indeed have many horrors.  The fact that in many places in the world newborn children have a 10% chance of never seeing their first birthday, the reality that human beings are still being sold into slavery, the gruesome truth that every year some 3 million people will die of preventable disease, not to mention the people who live and die without even the hope of a cure should give every person pause.  We do still live in a world where who you are can determine what you can achieve, where you live can determine if you ever know a day of peace, what you think can get you locked up or worse.  But all of these injustices, all of these blights on humanity get rarer with each passing year, and as it does we need to start focusing on what our current threats are.

We live in a country and a world that is richer than at any other time in the past, is more peaceful than any other time in the past, is freer than at any point in human history.  Perhaps we’ve gotten spoiled by growing up in a world where it can be expected that every year there will be a great new stride in technology that we’ve become entitled to sense that we only need to put in the meagerest of efforts to think we know everything.  Whatever it is, we are now living in a world where it’s our pleasures that prove to be our greatest threats.  Our increasingly sedentary lifestyle with less than nutritious foods causes heart disease, diabetes, and, as I look at my own physique, a less than pretty waistline.  Our consumption of fossil fuels has put us on a course to irrevocably alter our environment such that human life on earth will be significantly challenged.  But we tell ourselves that these are the imagined threats compared to masked murderers claiming they want to attack the White House, in spite of all the evidence telling us what is already the greater threat.

Finally, the threat to our spirit continues to be those who call for an end to the “snobs” who want to get children educated, those who seek to remove knowledge from the classroom, those who see compassion as weakness, and those who play the victim whenever someone stands up for the oppressed.  It’s not for nothing but that famous poem that ends “then they came for me- and there was no one left to speak for me,” begins with the words “first they came for the socialists.”  There are people in this country who see everything in black and white, and are willing to cry ‘fascism’ over the smallest slights, and they just so happen to be the people who cry ‘socialism’ just as quick whenever someone tries to make government better and not just smaller, even as they depend on social security and medicare.  These are the people who make it so difficult to have reasonable discussions about how we actually address our real issues, and the only solution is to continue the work of putting truth out into the world and hope that something sinks in.

What Facts?

The speed of things on the internet is truly a wonder to behold.  Within a matter of three days, the world learned about a shocking scene in McKinney, Texas and the officer at the center of that scene has resigned.  Now that more than ten million people have scene the original footage, not to mention the countless reposts and reports all over the web, people are still arguing about what it is we even saw.  The rapidity of the internet is such that before a consensus can even be drawn about what happened, the situation has changed dramatically.  What surprises me the most is how willingly people will accept certain storylines regardless of the images and sounds that encounter their eyes and ears.  Because while we may all be entitled to our own opinions, surely we should at least try to agree on the facts.

To set the background with as little bias as possible, here’s my best assessment of what went on before the video begins.  There was a pool party at the Craig Ranch Community Pool.  This pool has restrictions about how many guests can come in with residents, but at some point a flyer about the party was made public, though it didn’t mention these restrictions.  This is presumably because no one expected people outside of that community to see or care about the flyer.  Eventually more people showed up, some without any connections to residents.  The security began to stop people to make sure they were allowed to be there, at which point a small number of people who would otherwise not have been let in, jumped the fence anyway.  Where things get murky is when the police were called, because there are at least two reasons described that preempted the arrival of the police.  Either residents made a call because the people who surreptitiously made it into the party started causing a scene, or as a result of a fight broke out between a white woman and a black woman due to racial comments used against black people.  This community has both white and black residents, but there is video that documents that this scuffle did take place, though it is difficult to hear what was being said before, during, and after the event.  Whether that was the last straw that led someone to call the police or whether it was any number of intervening events, the police were contacted and showed up.

When the video begins, we see one police officer chasing after suspects.  The videographer and his friend pick up a flashlight that the officer dropped and give it to a different officer who was calmly talking to onlookers.  When that first officer comes back, things start to get considerably more active.  And it’s at this point that I want to comment on something that I saw that few people seem to be commenting on.  There were at least three police officers at this scene, and only one of them was shouting, only one of them was pulling on hair, only one of them pulled his gun, etc.  This being my way of saying that the incident here was indicative of one bad cop, whereas the others seemed to be calmly and effectively doing their job well without escalating the situation.

The now resigned officer continues to yell at teenagers that he views as suspects, handcuffing at least two.  He proceeds to scold some of the teenagers he’s apprehended.  He then addresses a group of, mostly female, onlookers, telling them to go home.  They seem reluctant at first, but do start to leave the scene.  One of the young women in that group was, apparently, one of his suspects.  He proceeds to grab her by the hand and bring her down to the grass, she starts to get up and he grabs her by the hair and throws her down toward the pavement.  While this is going on, many onlookers come rushing back to try and help her by at least yelling at the officer to let her go, some get too close for the officer’s comfort and he pushes them back.  Amid these onlookers there are also two young men who come close to the officer in a way that could be perceived as threatening, even though it could easily have been accidental.  The officer looks at them and they back off, but he continues to pull out his gun, which sends them running.  Two other officers arrive, one of whom seems to stop the first officer from proceeding any further, leading him to holster his gun and the other two to chase the two young men.

The young woman that he brought to the ground is still sitting there, but he orders her onto her face.  When she does not immediately comply he grabs her by the back of the head, shoves her onto the grass, puts one of her arms into a hold, and kneels on her back.  For the rest of the film, only that one officer yells at the other people who have been giving him his space but are pleading for him to get off the young woman.  Even when the other two officers bring back one of the young men that fled, in handcuffs, he is the only police officer who yells or in any way keeps the scene from settling down.

I did my best to describe what I saw as honestly as I could, even though I felt it was important to emphasize the actions of the one officer.  Now, let’s discuss what is not the story here.  On Rightwing blogs, I see constantly that they think people are complaining about the gun being drawn.  While there may be a few people who make this complaint, that is not the key issue.  The officer had a reasonable fear that the crowd of people coming at him, might have intended him harm.  While a reasonable person might have hoped he could have pulled out a taser or pepper spray instead of a firearm, considering he had the restraint not to pull the trigger, I think this is the least of the issue for a person in the heat of the moment.  Just as his response to the crowd was understandable, the arrival of the crowd in then first place was quite predictable.  His apprehension of the young woman was quite violent, and they were concerned about her, as you would when you hear a person screaming in fear.  There is certainly an argument to be made that she wasn’t obeying the officer’s orders quickly, but he had the opportunity to handle the situation as calmly as his partners and decided instead to use force.

Without a doubt, part of this story concerns one bad cop who used way more force than was justified.  As evidence, I would again offer his partners who seemed much better at getting suspects and onlookers alike to do what they wanted by being calm, rational, and non-confrontational.  From the very start of the video, this one cop seemed dead set on making this into an action packed event and even when he had moments to calm down and assess the situation he immediately went back to yelling and grabbing and pulling the moment someone didn’t respond his way immediately.  This should be seen as a teachable moment to police forces of what good and bad police officers look like, because we need more of the other two to start earning the trust of communities across this country.  I should also note that after the other officers brought back one of the young men that fled, you can also see on the video that they checked to make sure he was ok after they saw him looking a little injured.

Where things get hazy is what role race played in all of this.  It seems clear that there were incidents of racism leading up to this event, but it’s harder to say what role racism may have had on the scene involving the police.  The first thing people noticed was that all of the police officers were white and all of the people being handled were people of color.  There are statistics that show, in any number of fields, implicit racism when people seem to think that black people can simply endure more pain.  This is true in the medical field where black people are less likely to be given pain meds in ERs and in ICUs, regardless of age.  The many examples of police interactions over the years seem to bear out that white people are treated more gently than black people, regardless of whether a suspect is actually armed or not.

We should all take some small solace in the knowledge that no lives were ended in this incident, though that should seem like the lowest bar for a response to a rowdy pool party.  What I think should be the main story is that we are now entering a time when reality is being filtered by ideologies to an extent where people can see the exact same video and disagree on some of the most basic details.  The problem is exacerbated by the speed with which stories are handled and blown up online.  In an ideal world, journalists would be able to get all the facts and put them into a tempered summation of what actually happened, but there are significant barriers to this being possible anymore.  Again the speed with which these things spin out of control makes it nearly impossible for the full story to be adequately told before everyone feels they have enough information to come to their own decisions about it and close themselves off to the truth.  Even if they could, news networks seem much more interested in keeping the sensationalism going to attract viewers, while ideological media seeks only to spin the events.

We need to be able to take a step back, because we are setting ourselves up for even bigger problems down the road.  It may feel like you’re more informed by having all this raw footage and news as it happens, but this doesn’t seem to be the case, because it’s hard to get any context from a seven minute long clip.  The world is safer and more prosperous than it has ever been, which is not to say we don’t have serious problems, but to put them in perspective.  The reason why people seem sure that the world is flying apart is because they have exceptional video like this available to them all the time, while the majority of boring old reality gets ignored.  Cameras and camera phones only start rolling after the action begins, which means that if you aren’t looking deeper into reports about what happened before and around the events you see, then you aren’t any more informed from seeing the footage.  There are bad cops, but even in this video, they are the minority.  There are incidents of racism in this country that need to seriously be addressed, but we need to be able to view human action as potentially separate from racial problems, if and when the facts lead in a different direction.  There is a wealth of information to be found on the internet, but we need to be able to responsibly sift through it if it’s going to be any use.

Big City Lawyer

Americans have a long tradition of trusting the innate goodness and virtue of the common man.  It’s not for nothing that Thomas Paine’s famous pamphlet from the Revolutionary War is entitled “Common Sense.”  It speaks to an almost uniquely American sentiment that all truth can be felt from one’s own gut.  It is therefore because of the common goodness and innate wisdom of all people that we chose a democratic government, which hopes to hone the vast experiences of all the people into a government for all the people.  However, there are some things that seem wrong, but turn out to be true; and there are times when you need to learn more, because your gut is fallible.  Yet there is a surprisingly large sector of society that lives according to the stolid belief that any attempt to learn more is dangerous and any claim to expertise should be suspect.  This, to say the least, is a problem.

People who watched SNL back when Phil Hartman was on it, might recall a recurring skit he did called “Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer.”  Hartman played a character, Keyrock, who was a caveman living 100,000 years ago, who became frozen in ice only to be thawed out, attend law school, and become the Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer.  I bring this up because the butt of the joke was that he would almost invariably be able to convince people of his point by spinning down home truths from his past as a caveman. https://screen.yahoo.com/unfrozen-cave-man-lawyer-1-223412426.html He feigns ignorance to speak to the “common sense” that the jury should instinctively know.  Obviously this is a farce, as he has no qualms fitting into society, driving an expensive car, using a state of the art brick phone, getting through law school, etc.  He is not just some common man, but it works to his advantage to play the fool and appeal to that common virtue of all Americans.

This is not the only example, as comedies are routinely filled with stock lawyers and politicians who use the phrase “I’m no big city lawyer,” not as a means of putting their comments in an appropriately humble context, but to paradoxically lift them above their opponent.  Heck, Stephen Colbert’s character in the Colbert Report is essentially that character to a T.  The character he is playing, in other words, is Bill O’Reilly and the Fox News team.  See, Mr O’Reilly went to Harvard, which you might recognize as a fairly prestigious school, but he never seems to bring that up.  Similarly, Gretchen Carlson went to Stanford, but that seems more unknown to her audience than her Miss America win.  They too are playing a part, which is to say Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.

Those last two really didn’t get a college degree, though in the case of Mr Hannity it wasn’t for lack of trying.  They really are like the approximately 60% of Americans who do not have a college degree, and because they are just like the average guy and that makes them better than the experts.  There is a portion of America that is skeptical of the doctors, journalists, and scientists who try to tell them things that don’t seem quite right to them.  They don’t like to hear that they have a common ancestor with chimps, they don’t like to hear that the government can do things that the individual can’t, and they don’t like to hear that there might be consequences to their gas guzzler.  But there is something altogether unwholesome to the way that people who clearly do know better, play a part to tug at these heartstrings and assure people that those pesky facts that make them feel weird aren’t actually true.

From the more academic side of things, e.g. Thomas Sowell, to the the people who make you wonder how they ever learned how to tie their own shoelaces, e.g. Alex Jones, there is an overwhelming skepticism to the proposition that experts can do anything right.  Yet these same people are able to display profound cognitive dissonance as they can use and profit from modern technology, created by those same experts, while being as stupid in their political lives as they are.  People like Ted Cruz, Don McLeroy, or Ben Carson are capable of saying the most insanely stupid things, utterly without any grasp of reality, yet they were able to become a lawyer, a dentist, and a neurosurgeon respectively.  It simply boggles the mind how people can be, at the same time, both that smart and that stupid.  Then you recognize, for some of them, this might not actually be the case.

I am perfectly willing to concede that some people really are that stupid, and because of charisma or some personal characteristic they are able to succeed in life, but I find it hard to believe this is the case for all of them.  Certainly with the Fox News pundits, it should be quite easy to point out that many are simply playing a part to win ratings and thus heaps of money.  If P. T. Barnum taught us nothing else, it’s that there is good money in giving stupid people what they want.  But I think it should be clear with any of the politicians that aspire for the highest elected offices, at least on the Right, there are some incredible acting chops being wasted on politics.  Someone like Rick Santorum might really be that stupid, but for the people with an actual chance at the White House the game is much more subtle, to be sure.

On the road to the White House, a conservative candidate might be expected to cast doubts on climate change, evolution, or the scientific method altogether.  This challenge to be as simple as possible goes on throughout the primaries, but they are always conscious that they can never go too far, or else they will be steam rolled when they have to appeal to the general public.  This is why the best of them simply obfuscate, they claim to have doubts about basic facts of science, history, reality, etc regardless of whether they believe any of it.  All the while they are hammering home incredibly simple soundbites that people can memorize and repeat.  This much is applicable to both sides, because all the successful politicians are expected to boil down entire policies into three word chants that the masses can understand, but we do this at our own peril.

Here’s why it matters, we need people to be better.  We used to expect more from ourselves because we demanded more from ourselves.  It used to be a privilege to go to school and learn and better yourself, but now there is a growing movement that thinks when kids learn new things it’s actually indoctrination and so it’s to be avoided at all costs.  Kids themselves don’t look favorably on going to school for the most part, because what more is there to learn?  And frankly with the way that many states actively dumb down curriculum, they may have a point.  Incidentally this is exactly why we need Common Core standards in the first place, but that’s really a tangential issue to this point.  The point is that everything in the zeitgeist, everything has to be dumbed down to include as many people as possible, when it used to be that standards were set higher and people were expected to rise to the occasion.

The famous example of newspapers showed that readership increased as the difficulty of the reading material decreased.  Papers tend to stick around the 7th or 8th grade reading level, because it just so happens that the average American reads at the 7th or 8th grade reading level.  Movies too, just seem dumber these days.  Plots and characters are as simple as possible, and absolutely everything is explained to the audience to ensure that no one gets confused.  What’s more these same bland movies are essentially copied and pasted into sequels, prequels, reboots, reinterpretations, adaptations, etc.  That’s why you have Fast & Furious 7, The Hobbit part three, six Paranormal Activity movies, not to mention however many iterations of Spiderman movies in the last decade.  This is not to say that there aren’t engaging, provocative, novel, and intelligent movies out there, but those that come out tend not to do well, even if they become critically acclaimed.

When I started up this blog, there were plenty of “helpful” sites that claimed to have all the answers about how to increase readership, and thus profitability.  Without exception they suggest limiting paragraphs to two sentences whenever possible, with three being an absolute max.  Use pictures and other visuals as often as possible to break up posts.  Limit sentence length and use a tone that people will recognize.  Numbered lists are very effective at catching attention and keeping posts brief.  In other words, keep it simple stupid.  This makes perfect sense to me, but you may have noticed that I don’t follow many, if any, of these rules.

If you listen to speeches by FDR, you’ll quickly notice that he speaks in a fairly antiquated, if not pompous, way.  He has flowery but effective speeches, and this isn’t just because he was from a different era.  The average American did not speak like FDR, and that’s because he came from an affluent family in the best parts of New York society.  But the people respected FDR, and part of the reason why they respected him is because he treated them like adults, as equals and not like children.  He didn’t dumb things down, he didn’t talk down at them, he treated the public as if they were mentally competent people entrusted with the responsibilities associated with a democracy, and they rose to the occasion.  He told the people he was going to talk frankly about the war and where the fighting was going on, and sales of world maps sky rocketed, because people wanted to be sure they knew about what he was talking about.  But now that we have all the information in the world literally at our fingertips with smartphones and 4G internet, politicians still feel the need to treat everyone like infants and tone down their rhetoric accordingly.

As it stands now, there is an unfortunately large population that is content being uninformed, unchallenged, unengaged, and simply unbothered by anything resembling reality. I, for one, don’t mind if someone I respect uses a word that I don’t recognize or makes a reference I don’t get.  There is nothing keeping me from looking up words for both meaning or spelling, and it has never been easier to find out what a person is referencing just by punching in a few words into google.  In fact, you feel all the better once you go out and learn something you didn’t know before, because you put in the work to do it.  You appreciate it because it wasn’t already there, and because you did something to earn that new information.  But, it seems so much easier to just read two sentences that confirm your previous beliefs and keep on believing that you know it all.  It’s just so comforting to be secure in the absolute knowledge that you know more about evolution than the biologist who spent decades in research, isn’t it?

Well, here’s where I make my stand, at the end of a decently long post.  I’m no big city lawyer, myself.  I have had advantages that seem utterly impossible to the vast majority of the world’s seven plus billion population, and with those I have gotten a bachelor’s degree, but I am by no means an expert in political sciences, philosophy, literature, etc.  I am an American, as much as the hardworking farmer or factory worker.  I am one man who has seen the level of discourse in politics lowered so far that it would be laughable if it weren’t terrifying, and I’ve had enough.  I may just be some guy with a blog, but there’s one thing I do know, a democracy is only ever as good as its people.  If we’re seeing structural problems with our government, it’s only because we’ve let it happen.  It’s long past the time when we should have acted, but there’s little sense on dwelling on the past.  We need to get to work now, and we need to show a little self respect by demanding more of ourselves.  Only once we’ve done that can we be justified in expecting more of our leaders.

What You See and What You Get

Why are there so few good things in this world that don’t come with a major downside?  I understand that the world, being an infinitely complex place, does not lend itself to the kind of black and white moral treatment that characterizes the ideology of the far right, but damned if that wouldn’t make things easier.  Take for instance, the ability for people to be able to communicate with each other across the globe virtually instantaneously, this would seem to be one of the greatest achievements humanity can boast.  We live at a time when it is perfectly possible and surprisingly banal for people who live in vastly different places to conduct business, exchange information, or just chat in real time.  This technology makes the world smaller and brings the lives of people, whom they otherwise would never have heard about, right into their homes.  To quote Charlie Chaplin when talking about the, now, archaic radio technology, “the very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men.”  But then, as now, these inventions come with some truly unfortunate side effects.

I could easily expound on the military potential of these inventions, the capacity for social media to be used in aiding groups like ISIS, etc.  But in some way that would seem to miss the point.  In many ways to say that the military applications of something like internet or radio technology is the side effect is to get history utterly backwards.  It was because of military research, defense spending that we have this technology in the first place; therefore, to complain about this would seem to condemn the potential good at the onset, unless someone can realistically explain how we might actually fund such research without the looming fear of war to catalyze the effort.  No, there is something else that I want to talk about, something that makes getting anything done in politics virtually impossible.

In 1787, when the founders convened in Philadelphia, it was not with the expressed goal of writing a radically new Constitution.  The failures of the Articles of Confederation had made it necessary for some revision to come about, but no one thought it would be much more than that.  The expectation would be that over the course of the convention certain amendments and tweaks could be agreed on to make the Articles workable, but then someone got a really good idea.  They decided to keep the goings on of the meetings secret, at least until they had finished.  This should come as some surprise to people, who are perpetually told that sunlight is the best disinfectant, but sometimes anonymity can be really useful to getting things done.

Obviously, once they had finished what had become the Constitution, the work became public and there was a very public debate over whether or not it should be accepted as the law of the land.  But when they were writing it up, when they were arguing over what got in and what didn’t, it was crucial to all involved that they have the liberty to speak freely and make deals, which might otherwise prove unpopular to their constituents.  They didn’t have to worry about the theatrics of politics and were instead free to actually legislate.  Of course what they came up with was imperfect, including such gems as the 3/5 Compromise, but it was without a doubt an improvement on the Articles, and arguably among the most important and effective documents ever written.  So what about today?

Every major news network has huge blocks of the day devoted to politics, most especially to the preening and the performing that every politician and candidate must do in order to get into office.  But once you’re in office you never seem to get a chance to stop with the political posturing because there is no longer a space devoid of cameras or microphones or all the rest.  On the House floor, the debates are not done to convince the other members of your position, but to give a nice enough soundbite or memorable enough picture to get you through your next election.  This is why you can have a sitting senator do something as asinine as throw a snowball and have it count as a position on climate change.  Let’s face it, it’s worse on the right, because on top of making claims that will appeal to constituents and general audiences they are all forced to out conservative each other or risk being attacked from the even farther right by a Koch funded “grassroots” opponent.

Something as inert as C-Span makes it nearly impossible for anything to get done any more because everyone involved knows that they can’t afford to say something popular, regardless of what they think or what needs to be said.  Every comment can and will be used against them in the court of public opinion, and with elections as frequent as they are, it does not bode well to make mistakes like speaking the truth.  This is why we can only expect to hear vague platitudes about how great this country is and how much we all love it, particularly in the run up to elections, which seems perpetual at this point anyway.

It goes without saying that the opposite extreme is no good either.  We cannot simply give our politicians absolute anonymity to do and say what they will at all times.  How else are we, as an electorate, supposed to hold our representatives accountable except by being informed of what our leaders say and do?  Well to that I say, we seemed to get along just fine for the generations that lived before the time of 24 hour news networks.  There is an equilibrium that needs to be reached that keeps politicians in the light enough to stop the worst kinds of corruption and shady dealings, while at the same time giving them the freedom to actually get things done.  But that’s the kind of truth that people simply don’t want to hear.

If politicians are doing something wrong it can only be because we aren’t aware enough about every single thing they do.  This makes all the sense in the world, especially when cases of corruption and bribery are still less than unheard of.  Isn’t that right Governor and Mrs McDonnell?  We’ve seen so many examples of how politicians can do truly horrendous things when they are asserting their power outside of the light of day, to the point where the mere suffix “gate” is a cliche for any real or perceived scandal, e.g. Watergate, Benghazi-gate, Bridge-gate, etc.  But the trouble with sunlight is the same problem with bleach as a disinfectant, too much and you simply kill everything.  In this case, we’re killing good governance.

Now if we’re being honest, the constant obstruction in the legislature is clearly more the fault of one side of the aisle than the other.  If you needed any other proof, just look at how well the right deals with itself when it finally has power in dealing with something as simple as the funding of Homeland Security.  But their greatest obstacle in getting anything done is the knowledge of the responsible majority that they can’t do what is needed because it is unpopular with their base and the cameras are rolling.  Sure there are some crazy and stupid people who actually believe the bull they spout off, but most of the Republicans just aren’t as blinded by ideology as all that.  The bulk of the GOP, like the bulk of Democrats, like the bulk of Americans just want to get back to business as usual and actually get things done.  They don’t care about the petty squabbling that only makes sense to those who freebase pure, uncut conservatism. Generally, they care about getting a budget passed and simply making things work, you know, like a politician should.  Instead they have to stand strong for the Tea Party and fight the good fight for the Gipper.

So this is the dilemma, with our great strides in opening up the world we have closed down our ability to get things done in a representative democracy.  We are able, in a way never seen before, to see the workings of our government at every single step, and what we get is nothing done.  It might be worthwhile to take a step back, then.  It might be time for us to remember that ultimately we want a job done right, and then figure out how best we can assure that the job is actually done right.  I think it might be time that we allow our politicians to do a little wheeling and dealing behind closed doors, and then hold them accountable for when they are actually able to get something done, something they can be held accountable for.

Pervasive Liberal Bias

I tend to listen to a lot of Right wing commentary, both for work and because I apparently have a masochistic side to my personality.  Once you get past the mind-numbing lunacy, the unearned sense of pride and accomplishment, and the nearly overwhelming density of wrongness in most claims you are left with some basic observations.  One of the observations that comes to the forefront of my mind is that there is a streak of conservatism that centers on the mistrust of basically everyone.  It might be worth taking a moment to shed a tear for those who live out these lonely lives incapable of trusting anyone, but it’s not strictly speaking the point of this post.  The lack of trust manifests itself in many ways, but a common way is in the belief of a conspiracy between liberals and professions that provide information.  Simply put, many conservatives believe that because many professors, journalists, and artists are liberal that there is a conspiracy from the Left to force feed their ideas on the rest of the world.  I would like to offer an alternative.

It is certainly true that an overwhelming majority of college professors tend to vote for the Democrats, even if they might not specifically identify as Democrats themselves.  The same is true to a lesser extent for journalists, and certainly artists have a tradition of being on the avant-garde, which is typically on the Left.  Here’s something that these professions generally share, a greater than average experience looking at reality, truth, facts, etc.  So my hypothesis for understanding this trend between information and liberalism would have to be that the people who generally know more than the average bear come to the conclusion that, on the whole, the Democratic platform is simply closer to reality than say the Republican platform.  I know this may seem jarring to those who get the bulk of their information from the conservative echo chamber, but it just so happens that studies tend to back up this claim.

Repeatedly we’ve seen the statistics that show how people who regularly consume conservative media as a primary source, and likely only source, are not simply less informed but more misinformed.  This is to say that while a network like CNN is less than likely to be the ideal for informing people about the world we inhabit that it does actually leave people better informed than those having had no interaction with news media.  Fox News, by contrast, not only fails to impart reality but is quite successful at imparting lies to the point where the average person would be better informed having had no access to news media of any form.  So it should come as no great surprise when the people actually working for these organizations that leave people better informed, have opinions that differ from those who work in the conservative echo chamber.

Conservative parents tend to be a little scared of sending their children off to college, because it is true that many professors are of a more liberal mindset.  But the line between the fear of indoctrination and the fear of information becomes so faint in these discussions that it might as well not exist at all.  See college professors, on the whole, are not narcissistic propagandists who only want to create classes of ditto-bots.  In fact, my experience with college professors leads me to believe that what they want is to create students who can think critically and consider problems from different points of view, even those that might differ from their own personally held beliefs.  Shocking I know, but teachers are more concerning with getting students to think than to obey.  Professors tend to play the devil’s advocate to give the conservative point of view if the class is thinking only from a progressive point of view, to give the religious point of view if the class is thinking only from an atheist point of view, to give weight to differing points of view that cause people to consider whether their opinion is right or simply the one they first had.

And I think part of the problem people who fear these institutions face is the conflation of understanding that there are other points of view and the belief that all those points of view are equally valid.  For example, I can imagine the point of view of someone like Vladimir Putin, his desire for a strong nation and access to the resources that will allow his people to flourish. I can imagine that, but it is not an opinion that gets equal weight to the recognition that Russia is not the only country in the world, and if it’s “accessing” resources by invading other countries that it is being xenophobic in its nationalism, and that’s a problem.  This is a concept that news networks often struggle with.

In attempting to be an objective news source, networks tend to repeat the simple narrative of side A versus side B and that there must be a solution C that falls in between where the truth exists.  In most examples I would have to agree that truth lies in between the extremes, but if person A claims the earth is round and person B claims it is flat, then I’m sorry the only compromise that gets us to reality is if person B realizes they were wrong.  So news networks actually do themselves a disservice when they continue this format in circumstances where one side clearly has the better argument.  This fact was parodied by John Oliver in the context of the climate change discussion, where one side has facts, reality, and about 97% of scientists in agreement while the other side has a sheet of paper with legible writing on it.  And rather than simply accept that the people who actually know what they are talking about might be closer to the truth, the response on the Right tends to be an utter mistrust of intelligence.

Now, I’m willing to accept that intelligence is not a simple number line where those who test well get a high number score and those who don’t, don’t.  IQ tests, while easily understood, are not the perfect barometer for intelligence.  After all the associations that claim to be populated by people with high IQs, like Mensa, tend to be populated with people who elicit the response, “really, they’re smart?”  This in contrast to people that are generally perceived to be intelligent because of things they can prove in the real world, like Stephen Hawking who is not a member of Mensa but who clearly is actually quite bright, to put it lightly.  Furthermore there are indeed many different types of intelligence, ranging from competence in a given task, the ability to solve problems on the fly, the capacity to absorb and retain information, etc.  However, whereas a rational person would recognize intelligence and give due deference in the appropriate fields, the skepticism in conservatism seems to say that expertise is the thing that disqualifies you from having an objective opinion in a given field.

This is what creates the living, breathing straw man that is Rick Santorum.  “President Obama once said that he wants everybody in America to go to college.  What a snob.”  See there’s defending the rights of people making an honest wage without the benefit of higher education, and then there’s vilification of the people who want to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to get a college education.  Mr Santorum and many on the Right fall on the latter side, and to the peril of every American and human being more broadly.  Because while it may be true that simply having an education may not be enough, to tell people that the desire to ensure the best odds for success is snobbery puts down the society as a whole.

Society advances by the ideas of very smart people.  Sometimes those people are smart in spite of having no organized education at all, but a brilliant idea without the capacity to explain it, to expand on it, to flesh it out is brilliant idea squandered.  How many great inventions and works of art have never been brought about simply because the people with those ideas never learned the math behind their invention or the craft behind their masterpiece?  It just so happens that the people who wish to ensure every great idea is given the proper environment tend to vote Democratic, in no small part because they don’t hate intelligence.  New ideas can mean changing your initial assumptions, it can mean granting a greater range of possibilities than you first believed possible, but in every case it means bravely facing the facts and not hiding from them.  We are none of us perfect, so when you get corrected it is best to take it in stride and learn from it.  It just so happens that the people who have greater insight in the fields of biology, chemistry, physics, statistics, geometry, journalism, the arts, and every other field expanding our understanding of reality lean to the Left.  I get the feeling that reality itself might be closer to where they’re leaning.

The Whole Story

“Opinions are like assholes. Everybody has one and they usually stink.”  Now that everyone else on the internet seems to have given their opinion on the situation in Ferguson, MO it’s probably as good a time as any that I bring my own to bear.  Nobody knows what they’re talking about.  I’m not trying to be flippant with what I say here, but it seems quite clear that throughout this whole debacle there has been a conscious effort to keep people from knowing all the details as well as the normal desired ignorance people choose to have about the world around them.  So with that as the foundation for the national discussion, it seems unsurprising to find that many, if not most, of the comments are ignorant to some extent at least.  Unfortunately, while I was enjoying Thanksgiving with my friends and family I did not find the time to peruse the four months worth of courtroom proceedings to get the full details of the case for myself; therefore, this post is likely to be about as ignorant of the truth as any other.  But seeing as that hasn’t stopped anyone else from making a pithy response, I might as well continue.

There are many divides in this country.  The divisions between class, race, region, political parties, religion, etc are often so deep and profound that a person could almost be forgiven for not recognizing the problems that face people outside of one’s own bubble.  Almost is the operative word though.  As much as we keep moving ourselves to areas that more closely reflect how we look or think, we cannot allow ourselves to forget that this is a large problem and just because you don’t experience a problem based on a minority status, doesn’t mean that others, whole groups of others within this country are not experiencing it on a daily basis.  This is why I find it particularly sad to see the same pattern emerge from stories like this and that of Trayvon Martin.

The black community in America faces many challenges, day in and day out.  The black community faces these challenges in near total silence.  The silent struggle that so many minority groups in this country is felt all the more painfully in the way that our nation has trended back toward segregation, even without the compulsion of a government force.  The fact that your zip code could nearly be attributed with a skin color is true throughout this country, and it is true in the communities in and around St Louis.  This is why when any kind of attention is finally shone on these communities they take it as the once in a lifetime opportunity it really is to expose the iniquity they face.  Sadly this means that if the story that brings the attention comes with even one asterisk, the whole opportunity is tarnished and the people ignored again once the next news cycle begins.

I do not know exactly what happened on the day that Michael Brown was shot to death, which is precisely the strategy of the Ferguson Police Department.  There was a deliberate effort made to shroud the details of what happened with doubt, only releasing those few details that corroborated the story of the man who walked away from the incident, whether they had any significance to the events that took place or not.  The release of the video of Michael Brown shoplifting some cigars was a deliberate attempt to justify his killing, even though the police originally claimed that the officer involved did not make any connection between that and the person he killed.  His story has recently changed to say that he did in fact make the connection, which benefits him regardless of the truth of the claim.  And even if it is true, in what context could the punishment of shoplifting with death be considered justice?

On the other hand, the grand jury, being the only people truly qualified to make the decision, did not find sufficient evidence to even bring an indictment for a crime onto this officer.  Their decision would seem to indicate that there may very well have been an imminent threat to the officer’s life in the moments that directly preceded Michael Brown’s death.  In the context of self defense, it should certainly seem understandable that the officer brought his firearm to bear.  But the reality of a grand jury and the lack of a survivor to give the other side of the story leaves us with many more questions, and more to the point it leaves those who were finally given a voice to talk about the problems they face with the feeling of desperation as once again the game seems unacceptably rigged against them.

This is why the protests and riots have gotten as fierce as they have.  When people lose all hope of justice through society, what tethers do they have to protecting that society?  If you believe that this decision was simply the final straw in the story that black lives are simply worth less than white lives, then it would seem understandable why people might get violent in their response.  And to people who are using these riots as an opportunity to impugn the entirety of the black community, or to claim that only black people get this violent with their riots, then the only appropriate words I can think to describe your character are synonyms of racist.

However, the simple fact that despair and the sense of nothing left to lose are understandable cannot be interpreted as condoning violence, destruction of property, vandalism, etc.  As I stated in my post “Better,” the only way to win fights for justice and morality is by being better, and in this case some people of Ferguson have lost that battle.  By giving into the most base feelings of hatred, these few have smeared the character and dignity of the whole, however unfair that may be.  For many people, the sight of smoke and fire in the streets signals the end of the conversation and not the beginning.  It is a sad but true fact, that unless something profound changes in the conduct of the campaign for justice and soon, the death of Michael Brown will not serve any significance to America other than a temporary opportunity for those in their own secure bubbles to mock and scorn those who live in a completely foreign world within our common national borders.

The world keeps turning, and the people who don’t live in Ferguson are already forgetting what they heard and what they saw, because they don’t live in Ferguson.  The news has already shifted, quite readily, to the stories of Black Friday deals and disasters.  The people would much rather move on from uncomfortable conversations and enjoy the holidays.  But our comfort has lead us unfeeling to those unable to escape reality so easily.  As we tuck into our Thanksgiving meals we do so pleasantly unaware of those going to bed hungry.  As we turn up the thermostat as the snow begins to fall, we do so secure in the ignorance that others huddle together for warmth.  As we change the channel to our favorite show, we do so blinded to all the stories and histories that need to be told.

You see, the whole story here in Ferguson is not understood by me or by Darren Wilson or by Al Sharpton or the grand jury or any other single person or group of people.  It is not understood because we remain steadfast in our conviction that the problems of this world can best be remedied by ignorance rather than action.  It is not understood because we choose the path that tells us that if a story isn’t on the 24 hour news networks, it isn’t worth talking about.  It is not understood because we would rather remain in our own personal bubbles: unchallenged by other ideas, unmoved by the plight of others, undisturbed by the issues we choose not to see.

A Little Truth

“The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” Bertrand Russell.  It’s really satisfying when you find a quote that just perfectly encapsulates how you want to frame a conversation.  The only trouble with using a quote like this is if I take a firm stance by the end of this I might be inadvertently calling myself stupid.  Well regardless, I’m going to press on with what I have to say and it concerns the trouble with a little truth.  As human beings we don’t know everything, in fact of the near infinite quantities of things, we probably know very little.  It is important to remember that when talking with people, it’s all the more important when talking about politics.

Ebola is a terrifying virus.  Since its discovery in 1976 it has jumped to the forefront of out imaginations of just how terrible a disease can be.  Like the Black Death it creates terrible images in our heads and becomes a shorthand for all illness in popular culture.  It starts off harmless enough like a cold or the flu but then the symptoms become ever more horrifying until finally the poor soul that contracts the disease feels the sweet relief of death.  There is more than a little truth in the depictions of how horrid a disease this is, and the threats to societies in West Africa are real, but we need to get a little context here before we completely flip out.

Since its discovery in 1976 the disease has mutated so little that doctors treat it as one unchanged strain, in stark contrast to influenza which is constantly changing and has multiple iterations.  The variety associated with the flu is why you need to get a shot every year, and why some years the best predictive power of scientists isn’t enough to predict the strain that does cause the most trouble.  And although Ebola has a high mortality rate, anywhere between 50-90%, this is not even half the story.  With proper medical care the disease is surprisingly treatable, you just need to have constant monitoring of the patient until their own immune system builds up its defenses, which is why so far every patient brought to America with disease is still alive.  Furthermore it is very hard to spread.  You are only contagious when you are showing systems and even then you need to be swapping bodily fluids to transmit the disease.  All of these problems are easily treated in a country with adequate sanitation and quarantine protocols.  And now let’s get to the real story, because there is a reason I brought up the flu a few times so far.

So far the number of people that have died of Ebola in the history of the disease is about 3000 people.  The flu kills around 36,000 people each year just in the United States, but you don’t see people flipping out when they catch the flu.  Diseases are serious and if you don’t know if you’re alright then you should definitely check with a doctor, but the world doesn’t stop turning just because there’s a new outbreak of an obscure disease.  The fact that more than 12 time the number of people die annually in a first world country to a disease like flu than have ever died of Ebola should be testament enough to what our priorities should be, yet the headlines are filled with horror stories and worse that make people act crazy.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard people worrying about terrorists or infected people or infected terrorists that are crossing our border “RIGHT NOW!”  Media organizations are at their most profitable when something is going devastatingly wrong.  9/11 was great for TV news ratings because everyone wanted to know what was going to collapse next, why we needed to be afraid, who we needed to fear.  Never mind the fact that the closest Al Qaeda has gotten to repeating their despicable performance was to strap non-functioning explosives to the underwear of one guy, terrorism has just never been that great a threat to the United States.  And it seems almost too obvious to say this but in the grand scheme of things we have more to fear from tomatoes, which may carry foodborne illness, than ISIS.  This is not to say that ISIS is an ignorable problem, just that we need to remember that there is more to the story of what is actually going on in the world than their threats to attack the White House.

ISIS has been successful because there hasn’t been anyone to stop them, the Iraqi armed forces literally fled rather than fight them.  But when they are confronted, by say the Peshmerga forces of the Kurds, then it becomes quite clear that this is not Nazi Germany poised to conquer all of Europe.  There are many reasons to fight ISIS, and security is among those concerns, but the fear that they are going to come invading the US is as laughable as Ronald Reagan appearing on the GOP ticket in 2016.  But again the media has failed in its task to inform viewers, instead choosing to scare them and the results are in and of themselves a little scary.

The latest numbers I saw showed that about 16-17% of all Americans think that President Obama is a Muslim, whether openly or secretly.  It should come as a surprise to absolutely no one that these are almost all Republicans who believe it, but I digress.  I bring this up only because of the massive stink people made over President Obama’s association with Trinity United Church.  But the small truth that Barack Obama spent part of his youth in Indonesia, a Muslim country, and has expressed some nostalgia for the call to prayer in the morning is enough to trump the actual truth of his religion.  This would seem to be a small issue, and in a secular republic like our own an utterly unimportant one, but I think we all know why this matters.

There is a large contingent of the political Right that sees any cooperation with the president as tantamount to aiding Islamist extremists or else with some other conspiratorial group they assume President Obama works for.  They are unwilling to work with him on anything, even things they agree with, on the basis that he is “destroying our country.”  And they are able to justify this belief based on things that, in a vacuum, are not untrue.  It is true that Obama said “you didn’t build that,” but the thing he was claiming that you didn’t build were the roads you used to move the products of your business and not the business itself.  It is true that Obama said “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose,” but that was only because he was quoting John McCain.  You may remember John McCain as the guy that Obama beat in 2008, in part because they had to keep talking about the economy.  And it is the fact that these little truths exist that make it nearly impossible to prove to people that they are wrong.

We can’t adequately address issues until we know what the truth surrounding them is, and this is problematic because the truth is a constantly changing thing.  But the changes over time get more and more minute, so the more we can agree on the bigger points the better.  Ebola is a dangerous and deadly disease, but it is the famine that is now striking these countries that is the real problem.  ISIS is a serious threat to global security, but only if they are left unopposed indefinitely.  President Obama is at least nominally a Christian, which should matter to no one other than himself.  But more importantly, he is doing his best to lead a fractured country that only pulls itself further apart because of really petty and ignorant stuff.  I am perfectly willing to be shown evidence that anything and everything I’ve said is wrong and I will adjust my point of view accordingly, but I see a great big population that won’t make the same concession.  A large number of people so certain that they couldn’t be wrong that it makes more sense to scuttle the country rather than to help in building it up.  And well, that’s just stupid.