We live, simultaneously, in two different worlds. Ultimately, we live in the World of Nature, a world that we did not create and the world upon which all life depends. Most immediately, we inhabit a "human world" that we create ourselves. Because our human world is the result of our own choices and actions, we can say, quite properly, that we live, most immediately, in a “political world.” In this blog, I hope to explore the interaction of these two worlds that we call home.
Gary A. Patton
I was an elected official in Santa Cruz County, California for twenty years, from 1975 to 1995. Now, I am an environmental attorney, practicing law in Santa Cruz County. If you would like to contact me, send me an email at gapatton@mac.com.
https://weirdtwist.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/11-primitive-foot-bridges-strung-across-deadly-gorges/ For a translation, click here For a biography of Antonio Machado from Wikipedia, click here.
An article by Nathan Heller, in the December 18 & 25, 2017, edition of The New Yorker, identifies Estonia as a "digital republic."
In other words, the article is not talking about some "abstraction," but is claiming that an actual country, a nation, is now qualitatively different from the kind of political republics that exist in what most of us still consider to be the "real" world, a world that is definitely more "analog" than "digital."
Heller's article is worth reading, perhaps particularly if you teach a course in "Privacy, Technology, And Freedom," as I do. Here's a sample of what Heller has to say:
I booked a meeting with Marten Kaevats, Estonia’s national digital adviser. We arranged to meet at a café near the water, but it was closed for a private event. Kaevats looked unperturbed. “Let’s go somewhere beautiful!” he said. He led me to an enormous terraced concrete platform blotched with graffiti and weeds.
Seagulls riding the surf breeze screeched. I asked Kaevats what he saw when he looked at the U.S. Two things, he said. First, a technical mess. Data architecture was too centralized. Citizens didn’t control their own data; it was sold, instead, by brokers. Basic security was lax. “For example, I can tell you my I.D. number—I don’t fucking care,” he said. “You have a Social Security number, which is, like, a big secret.” He laughed. “This does not work!” The U.S. had backward notions of protection, he said, and the result was a bigger problem: a systemic loss of community and trust. “Snowden things and whatnot have done a lot of damage. But they have also proved that these fears are justified.
“To regain this trust takes quite a lot of time,” he went on. “There also needs to be a vision from the political side. It needs to be there always—a policy, not politics. But the politicians need to live it, because, in today’s world, everything will be public at some point.”
What Kaevats says about the United States is accurate. I know that because of the readings I have done for my course. Citizens in the United States most emphatically do not control their own data, and this makes the possibility of totalitarian political control a continuing and looming threat. This is what the documents revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013 conclusively demonstrated. And the reaction of government officials in the United States has been anything but positive, if you think the politicians should be trying to "regain trust."
Even more important to me than Kaevats' criticisms, as outlined above, was the way he described why he got involved in an effort to establish a "digital republic."
Kaevats admitted that he didn’t start out as a techie for the state. He used to be a protester, advocating cycling rights. It had been dispiriting work. “I felt as if I was constantly beating my head against a big concrete wall,” he said. After eight years, he began to resent the person he’d become: angry, distrustful, and negative, with few victories to show.
“My friends and I made a conscious decision then to say ‘Yes’ and not ‘No’—to be proactive rather than destructive,” he explained. He started community organizing (“analog, not digital”) and went to school for architecture, with an eye to structural change through urban planning. “I did that for ten years,” Kaevats said. Then he found architecture, too, frustrating and slow. The more he learned of Estonia’s digital endeavors, the more excited he became. And so he did what seemed the only thing to do: he joined his old foe, the government of Estonia.
To transform our world, we must be "for" something, and must say, "Yes," not "No," if we are to create a future that will respond to our deepest aspirations. New digital technologies are the latest way that human beings are projecting human agency into the world, to control it and make it theirs. Republics are, at least as Americans understand them, "democratic" in both their origins and intentions. This is, of course, the story of our American Revolution.
A new revolution is needed, now, and it cannot be a revolution premised on violence and destruction, if democracy and the nation are to survive. Maybe, just maybe, the "digital republic" of Estonia has some lessons we should learn.
I have a recommendation for those who have not yet tuned into the Black Mirror series on Netflix. You should! For those not familiar with Black Mirror, here is what Wikipediahas to say about it:
Black Mirror is a British science fiction anthology television series created by Charlie Brooker, with Brooker and Annabel Jones serving as the programme's showrunners. [Black Mirror] centres on dark and satirical themes that examine modern society, particularly with regard to the unanticipated consequences of new technologies.
The image above is from Episode #1 in Season #3, "Nosedive." This episode was a pretty compelling picture of how our society would look if we took seriously all those social media "likes." In the world portrayed in "Nosedive," a person's ability to participate meaningfully in society depends on the "score" that he or she has received from those persons with whom he or she has interacted. Those "likes," or "dis-likes," add up. Every interaction gets a score from 1-5, and if your overall score is too low, you won't even be able to rent a car, must less move into the gated community of your dreams.
Apple CEO Tim Cook looks forward to a “common future in cyberspace” with China, he told the Chinese government’s World Internet Conference earlier this month. This was an embarrassing gesture toward a state that aggressively censors the internet and envisions a dystopian future online.
The experience of lawyer Li Xiaolin may give a taste of what that future looks like. During a 2016 work trip inside China, he tried to use his national identity card to purchase a plane ticket. To his surprise, the online system rejected it, saying he had been blacklisted by China’s top court. Mr. Li checked the court’s website: His name was on a list of “untrustworthy” people for having failed to carry out a court order in 2015. He thought he had resolved the issue, but now he was stranded more than 1,200 miles from home.
Mr. Li’s dilemma was due to the Chinese government’s ambitious “social credit system.” Launched by the government in 2012, it vows to “make trustworthy people benefit everywhere and untrustworthy people restricted everywhere” by the time it is fully implemented in 2020.
The main character in "Nosedive" had problems getting on a plane, too.
What Black Mirror tells us is that our modern technologies may, indeed, have dark consequences. One good reason to watch Black Mirror is to help inoculate oneself against the glittering promises that our new technologies advertise. That iPhone X, with its powerful facial recognition capabilities, may not be such a wonderful invention, after all!
I have a hunch we may get a look at why facial recognition isn't such a good idea in some future Black Mirror episode!
David Litt, a former speechwriter for President Obama, and the co-executive producer of The Big Bang Theory, has written an engaging column on how Doug Jones beat Roy Moore in Alabama. Click this link for his post-election analysis, which features a deconstruction of the language Jones used in commenting on one of Moore's most colorful campaign gambits.
In the column, Litt quotes a somewhat famous political expression:
You shouldn’t mud-wrestle with a pig, because you both get dirty and the pig likes it.
That makes me think about how our current president keeps inviting us all to jump into the pigpen with him - and about how most of us are willing to accept the invitation. National journalists try to match the president, Tweet for Tweet. The rest of us repair to our Facebook pages, where we can pillory our president's latest stupidity with what often amounts to a savage seriousness. Just remember that political wisdom that I have cited above: "The pig likes it!"
Litt has another idea. It's worth thinking about, too, as we get ready to put the holidays behind us, and to climb into the ring for the 2018 elections:
No, most 2018 races won’t feature an (alleged) child molester. But in the age of Trump and Bannon, plenty of them will feature ersatz tough-guys eager to turn politics into a pissing contest. By making his opponent look ridiculous, Doug Jones reminded us that Democrats don’t have to play that game to win elections. With carefully-chosen words, and a healthy appreciation for the power of mockery, they can corral the pigs without getting mud on their hands.
A recent edition of City Journal (a rather conservative magazine) carried an article on homelessness in Portland. According to the article, homeless persons in Portland are having an extremely negative impact on downtown businesses. The magazine called what is happening in Portland a kind of "disgraceful anarchy."
The situation described in Portland did not seem that different from the situation in my own home town of Santa Cruz, California. It did not seem that different from what I believe is the current situation in many places throughout this country.
Seeing our current homeless crisis described as a "disgraceful anarchy" reminded me of the inauguration speech that President Trump gave on January 21st. As you will probably remember, President Trump painted a dark picture of an America characterized by shuttered factories, crime-infested communities, and failing infrastructure. He promised the nation:
The American carnage stops right here, right now.
"Carnage" is defined as "the flesh of slain animals or humans." A second definition is "great and usually bloody slaughter or injury (as in battle)." "Anarchy" means "a state of lawlessness or political disorder due to the absence of governmental authority." Given the actual meaning of these terms, it would seem fair to say that both the president, and City Journal, are way too extreme in their descriptions.
While that is undoubtedly a fair assessment, let me suggest another thought.
The extreme terms, "disgraceful anarchy," and "carnage," were used by City Journal, and by the president, to make clear that their position is that the current situation is unacceptable. Let's not quibble with the words. I, personally, might be more inclined to say that the situation "sucks," as does the woman in the picture at the top of the column, a picture pulled from the City Journal article. Whether you say it "sucks," or is nothing but a "disgraceful anarchy," or that the situation amounts to "carnage," it is absolutely true that our current economic and social situation is unacceptable and intolerable. Extreme words get this message across.
Perhaps the fact that candidate Trump called out our current American reality as unacceptable, and used extreme terms in doing so, is one of the main reasons he is president today. Those who don't like his approach to dealing with the problems (shutting down our system of environmental protection, and giving tax cuts to the rich), had better start showing some similar outrage.
And I don't mean outrage about President Trump. There are plenty of reasons to be outraged about our current president, and about what he and the Congress are doing. But what about the American carnage that has turned our cities into a kind of disgraceful anarchy?
Trump, City Journal, and the woman in the picture are right on target. Those who want a government that is more humane, and more protective of the natural environment, and that works for the benefit of ordinary men and women, people who are increasingly being driven into homelessness, will have to campaign on the outrage of the real situation that ordinary Americans face.
Being outraged about President Trump, and about what he is doing, may be well justified, but that is an outrage that is largely misdirected.
If we want to replace the politicians who are selling this nation down the river (the president is right up there at the top of the list), we'd better start getting outraged about the conditions that are impacting ordinary Americans, and ordinary American communities.
Current conditions are absolutely unacceptable, and if the president and his supporters are the only ones saying that, with the president's opponents focusing on the president's obvious and enormous personal failings, the voters are likely to go with the guy they think understands just how outrageous conditions have become.
The image above does, pretty much, capture the nature of the reflections I have on my ever more frequent birthdays. They seem to be coming around more often, at least!
I am not ashamed to admit that I tend to see myself as quite capable and energetic. Possibility is my category of choice, as it always has been (or as it has been ever since my father finally got me to see the light). Utopia is my educational background, and that's the honest truth. I got "Honors in Utopia" at Stanford University!
I don't think I am unrealistic about which way that "arc of history" bends, at the individual level. Still, I'm sticking with The Traveling Wilburys, all the way, and I am definitely "going to the end of the line."
You can listen to the whole song using the link I've made available, and I recommend you do that! It's a great song. A pertinent verse is provided, right below, and you can click right here for the full lyrics.
Well it's all right, even if you're old and grey
Well it's all right, you still got something to say
Well it's all right, remember to live and let live
Well it's all right, the best you can do is forgive
It is always difficult (at least for me) to decide upon an appropriate Christmas Day posting for this blog. The blog is, by its nature, both personal and political. Do I try to remind myself (and anyone reading the blog) of the Christian message that is, at least supposedly, the reason for the celebration? Or, should I do what our current President complains about, and take the "Christ" out of Christmas, and comment, in one way or another, on the more crassly commercial aspects of the holiday?
In the past, I have taken different approaches. In 2015, I focused on the commercial aspects of Christmas, and discussed "Christmas And The Three R's." I crafted my Christmas message as a pitch for recycling, with an emphasis on the very first of the "R's," that commandment to "Reduce."
In 2013, my posting was much more "religious." A picture of Jesus was at the top of the column, which I titled, "Something Is Happening Here." I managed to quote my friend Bob Dylan to that effect.
This Christmas - and Merry Christmas to all who may be perusing this posting! - I can accommodate both approaches by simply referring interested persons to the December 23-24 edition of The Wall Street Journal.
The Opinion Page of that edition of The Journal has an editorial by Vermont C. Royster, who was the editorial page editor from 1958 to 1971. Royster's editorial, In Hoc Anno Domini, was apparently first published by The Journal in 1949, which has published it every year since. Because The Journal has a paywall, clicking the link above may not get you the whole text. If that turns out to be true, you can get the idea by clicking right here. Royster's editorial gets right at the heart of the holiday: Something is happening here, and it's very, very good!
But the pre-Christmas edition of The Wall Street Journal has a very non-religious holiday treat for readers, too. Accompanied by the lively illustrations of John Cuneo (one example above), The Journal has published an extremely engaging piece of short fiction, called "Santa #9."
I recommend this "Christmas Short Story" to you, and if you can't get through The Wall Street Journal's paywall, then try clicking this link. There is nothing particularly "religious" about this story, which ends up being a not-too-subtle critique of the octopus of capitalism, and what it has been doing to America.
Merry Christmas is my message! I think I said that before. It's worth repeating, and let me be clear. This greeting is emphatically NOT brought to you by any politician, living or dead.
I teach a Legal Studies course called, "Privacy, Technology, And Freedom." One of the most important topics addressed in the course is the way "Big Data" is being used to impact politics. Anyone wanting a quick introduction to this topic is invited to click on the following link, to read an excellent article by Zeynep Tufekci.
The December 18 & 25, 2017, edition of The New Yorker ran a profile entitled, "The Numbers King." Jim Simons is a mathematician and hedge fund manager, and he is the subject of the profile. Simons is fabulously wealthy, with his income, last year, being $1.6 billion dollars. That figure is not assets; that is Simon's annual income. Most of the assets, apparently, are sequestered far from the reach of the United States Internal Revenue Service.
Before I read the article, based on a quick scan of the first page, I thought it might be a kind of follow-up to the Tufekci piece, since a heading summarized the article with this description: "Algorithms made Jim Simons a Wall Street billionaire. His new research center helps scientists mine data for the common good." Algorithms are what makes it possible to release the power of "Big Data," which is why I was particularly interested in how the "computational science" being supported by Simons might relate to the "computational politics" that Tufekci analyzes.
As it turns out, the article is largely focused on issues relating to philanthropy, and not so much on the various algorithms that Simon's nonprofit research center, The Flatiron Institute, is helping to develop and deploy. Ray Madoff, who runs the Boston College Law School Forum on Philanthropy and the Public Good, put her concern about what Simons is doing this way: "The rich are running things, and we're just visiting their world."
Rob Reich, a professor of political science at Stanford University, and an expert on philanthropy, is quoted as follows, along the same lines:
Private foundations are a plutocratic exercise of power that’s unaccountable, nontransparent, donor-directed, and generously tax-subsidized. This seems like a very peculiar institutional and organizational form to champion in a democratic society.
The algorithms being developed at The Flatiron Institute are currently being utilized to understand human biology, and the structure of the physical universe. There are three active divisions of the Institute: computational biology, computational astronomy, and computational quantum physics. More divisions (at least one, anyway) will soon be added.
I was disappointed, in one way, that "computational politics" were not mentioned in the article, but I was certainly not disappointed by what D.T. Max, who authored the Simons' profile, had to say about philanthropy. Finding ways to develop and use computer algorithms to "expand knowledge," and to "help humanity," which are the goals that Simons says he is pursuing, is certainly a worthwhile enterprise. But who is in charge of these efforts is pretty important.
Only slightly mentioned was Simons' friend and hedge fund partner, Robert Mercer, who recently stepped down from his management position at the Simons' firm, Renaissance Technologies. Mercer is a person, you might recall, who is providing major funding for alt-right media and the political efforts of Steve Bannon and our current president, Donald J. Trump.
If we don't want, in the future, to have to beg for a "visitor's pass," to visit the world of the rich, we will need to put democracy back in charge of the algorithms that, more and more, create the realities we inhabit.
Desmond Lachman, who seems to have significant credentials as a member of the economic and financial elite, asks this question in a New York Times' column published on December 14, 2017: "Are We In Another Bubble?"
If you click that link, you'll see a different headline on the column, but the "Are We In Another Bubble?" question was definitely being posed by the headline in the hard copy version I read. Lachman's column suggests that we ARE in another "bubble," and a bigger bubble than ever before. The way he sees it, another crash is on the way:
Are we about to make the same mistake? All too likely, yes. Certainly, the American economy is doing well, and emerging economies are picking up steam. But global asset prices are once again rising rapidly above their underlying value — in other words, they are in a bubble.
We all, undoubtedly, remember the last time around, which wasn't that long ago. In 2007-2008, residential real estate was the main category characterized by "asset prices ... rising rapidly above their underlying value." Our current situation is even worse, and other asset categories are now implicated (read the column to find out why Lachman thinks so), but it can't be disputed that the prices now being paid for residential real estate are, as in 2007-2008, vastly greater than the "underlying value" of the homes being bought and sold.
Given that a crash is on the way, I have a proposal for something our government can do when the residential real estate bubble finally, and inevitably, does burst. In a way, my first thought is that our national policy should simply be to let the speculators lose. Let the banks and those other financial institutions that have promoted the speculation go bankrupt.
It's a nice thought, but I think that is an unlikely scenario. While he and I might not like it very much, Ry Cooder is pretty much "on the money" when he opines that no banker will ever be left behind. If you don't know the song, you can listen right here, by clicking to view the video below. At the end of the video, you'll see pictures of the kind of residential real estate left behind, after the last bubble.
Here's my idea: The title to all of those houses went to the banks, after the crash, because the homes were the "security" for the inflated loans that the banks made, pumping the bubble ever bigger. After the crash, the United States government bailed out the banks (and the bankers, personally), but those assets stayed with the banks. Next time, when we bail out the bankers once again, the government should take title to all those foreclosed homes, and sell them back to their former owners for a price that the owners can actually afford, and sell them back with a "resale restriction" that will keep the price down to what an average or below average income person can afford.
If that were done, the government would end up creating perhaps millions of permanently affordable homes, which would not longer be speculative assets, but which would simply be homes available on the market at affordable prices.
This is not, really, a radical idea, and it sure would help us out with our affordable housing crisis, a crisis caused, in many ways, by the speculative bubble that we know is going to burst....
Frank Bruni, writing in the December 10, 2017, edition of TheNew York Times, reacted very strongly to an opinion column written by a Latino student. Click here for Bruni's column.
The student's column was apparently published in the main newspaper at Texas State University. Bruni quoted the student columnist as saying that there were only a dozen or so white people [in the world] "who rose to the level of decent." The student's column went on to deliver a further message, addressed to all varieties of white people, "good-hearted liberals" and "right-wing extremists," alike:
I hate you, because you shouldn’t exist. You are both the dominant apparatus on the planet and the void in which all other cultures, upon meeting you, die.
The headline on the student column, according to Bruni, was, “Your DNA Is An Abomination.”
Bruni goes on to discuss how our political discourse is now routinely filled with statements equivalent to "I hate you," and "You shouldn't exist." Bruni cites, for example, the following comment, on Medium: "I sincerely, genuinely hope that Arizona Senator John McCain's heart stops beating." The headline on that comment was, "Please Just Fucking Die Already."
We walk, in so many ways, on bridges built of words. What we think, and what we believe, will be based on what we say, on what we tell ourselves is the truth.What we do will be based on what we think and on what have come to believe. There is such ample evidence of abomination and injustice, everywhere, that we can easily decide that everyone else should "just fucking die."
Words of hate will lead us, always, into the realms of violence and death. Therefore, we must be careful about what we say. We believe what we tell ourselves. We always have.
Given this reality - this truth of our existence, that we believe what we tell ourselves - we must all try, whoever we are, to forgive ourselves, and to forgive all others, for the abominations and the injustices that we have both perpetrated and experienced.
Ben Dolnick asks a question: "Is Donald Trump inadvertently displaying signs of enlightenment?" Dolnick answers his own question, too: "Ben highly doubts it."
This internal rumination about the enlightenment (or not) of our current president is found in a column that was published in The New York Times. Online, the column is titled, "Donald Trump, Accidental Buddhist." In the hard copy edition of The Times, Dolnick's column bore the same title as this blog posting, "The Strange Wisdom of the Third Person."
I enjoyed Dolnick's speculative venture into literary analysis, suggesting that speaking about oneself in the third person may be a reflection of the type of "non-attachment" that Buddhism suggests we all should strive for.
This is, actually, a philosophical point worth considering. "Non-attachment," in my opinion, is a very good thing. If we can nudge ourselves into non-attachment by the language we use, we might want to try that third person formula.
In the case of Mr. Trump, however, I'm pretty sure that Dolnick is right. Our current president's habit of speaking about himself in the third person doesn't evidence "enlightenment." All it represents is his well-documented narcissism, pushed to its literary limits.
In an article that ran in The New York Times Magazine on December 3, 2017, Nitsuh Abebe, story editor for the magazine, explored what is "ordinary" (and what isn't) about our politics today.
Abebe's article is titled, "Extra Ordinary," and Abebe claimed that most Americans now believe that nothing is "ordinary," anymore, about our political, social, and economic situation. The illustration accompanying the article provided a graphic hint that our current president, Donald J. Trump, should be considered an exemplar of how nothing is "normal" in our contemporary world:
Citing to Alexei Yurchak, a Russian anthropologist who is a professor at U.C. Berkeley, Abebe suggests that our reality, in fact, may have become "hypernormal."
In 2005, the Russian anthropologist Alexei Yurchak coined a term for a phenomenon he noticed during the final years of the Soviet Union: “hypernormalization.” And last year, the British filmmaker Adam Curtis released a documentary named for Yurchak’s coinage. “Russia,” he explains in the voice-over, “became a society where everyone knew that what their leaders said was not real, because they could see with their own eyes that the economy was falling apart. But everybody had to play along and pretend that it was real, because no one could imagine any alternative.”
This does sound a lot like what is going on in our country today, as the United States Congress moves to enact a "tax reform" bill that everyone knows will give more money to the rich, disadvantage ordinary persons, and vastly increase the national deficit, while the President and Members of Congress are vociferously claiming that the exact opposite is the case. The key point, in this analysis, is that "everybody has to play along" because no one can "imagine any alternative."
I think this observation reflects a profound understanding of how most of us react to the "reality" that seems to be prevailing, and that appears to confront us, at any specific time in history, and in any place. We accept that what we see and experience is "real," as if "real" means "inevitable" and "unchangeable."
In fact, in the human world we most immediately inhabit, nothing is "inevitable" and "reality" is what we make it. The phenomenon identified by Abebe, in which "both governments and citizens essentially cease[] trying to shape the world and settle[] for being able to maintain it," reflects the demise of a genuine politics.
Politics consists of the debate, discussion, controversy, and conflict that ultimately ends in a specific, political decision about what we want to "do," and thus what kind of world we want to create.
Forgetting this, we either pretend that things that are unacceptable are "normal" (and try not to think too much about that), or denounce the fact that our unacceptable reality is not "normal," and become paralyzed by this truth.
Abebe's conclusion is as follows:
What if, when we fret that something has gone awry with America, we are merely getting a glimpse of a dysfunction that is actually normal, and has always been normal, and has merely been papered over, for a few decades, with careful management? We’d have to believe that the nation’s history includes wild partisan divisions, irrational conspiracy fantasies, bursts of political violence, absurd manipulations of truth, willful subversion of constitutional principles and loads of bumbling ineptitude.
Read your history! So thus it has been from the beginning.
With energy, and will, we can change the world (as we always have before)!
Little Jack Horner sat in a corner eating his Christmas pie. He stuck in a thumb and pulled out a plum and said, "What a good boy am I."
This well-known nursery rhyme is actually a commentary on the England of King Henry VIII. Who knew? Well, probably lots of people knew, but I didn't. You can get an explanation of the "Little Jack Horner" nursery rhyme by clicking on this link. That will take you to a transcript and an audio file of an interview on NPR's All Things Considered, "The Reason Behind The Rhyme."
I made this discovery about "Little Jack Horner" as I pursued another topic entirely. I regularly read The Washington Post, online, and I have always cringed, internally, when I come upon one of its regular columns, "The Plum Line."
I don't cringe because of the content of the column,which is largely focused on critiques of contemporary politics. I mostly agree! It is the title of this column that has always driven me crazy, because I have regarded the title as reflecting an illiterate reference to the real expression, which is "plumb line."
In fact, as my admittedly brief, browser-based research reveals, there is no such expression as "the plum line," at least in accepted usage. The proper expression is, as I thought it was, "the plumb line," and that refers to a tool used in construction, a tool I have had occasion to use in my admittedly limited past forays into carpentry.
A "plumb line" gives a line that is straight and truly vertical.
Would that our government were straight and true as well, instead of being driven by the pursuit of "goodies" that might be pulled from the pie of our pernicious politics.
My research has served to alleviate my cringing reaction to the title of the Post's column, and only because I happened to run across an explanation of the "Little Jack Horner" nursery rhyme as a byproduct of my research.
My research effort on "the plum line" was to prove to myself that this expression was bogus and illiterate, but I have now decided that a column called "The Plum Line," focusing on contemporary politics, may be "on target" after all. The way I see it now, the title represents a very subtle commentary on the degeneration of our government and politics today. What should be a search for a "true" line has become a search for personal and special advancement, at the expense of our society as a whole.
Hats off to The Post for highlighting, ever so subtly, that uncongenial truth!
Stephen Kessler is a Santa Cruz County-based writer. His columns appear frequently in the Santa Cruz Sentinel. On December 1, 2017, Kessler's column was titled, "Unholy wars: When religion is politics by other means." Kessler concluded his discussion as follows: "Whether it’s the Koran, the Five Books of Moses, the New Testament, Marx’s “Capital” or “The Art of the Deal,” whatever scripture anyone tries to pass off as justification for seizing power and dictating policy is fiction in a constitutional democracy ... Don’t let religion hijack politics."
Ali A. Rizvi is a Pakistani-Canadian writer (and he is a physician and a musician, too). Rizvi resides in Toronto, and has just written a book, Atheist Muslim, that makes pretty much the same point that Kessler does. Here is what Rizvi says in a recent interview in The Sun: "Secularism — the separation of religion and state ... allows both freedom of religion and freedom from religion. It lets us not only revere certain ideas, but also challenge and satirize them ... Remember that secularism isn’t anti-religion. It separates religion from the state, making religion a personal choice that can’t be imposed on us by society or government. We’ve seen what compulsory, state-sponsored religion did in the history of Europe, and we see it happening now in the Muslim world."
Both writers, without directly saying so, are celebrating the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. This very first provision in our Bill of Rights is perhaps best remembered for its guarantee of "free speech." In fact, however, the First Amendment begins with religion:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...
Religion, everywhere, and at all times, does try to "hijack politics," and to use the powers of government to mandate practices that derive from the religious beliefs of those in power. Rizvi's interview discusses the horrible impacts that this has had in the Arab world, but comparable horrors are associated with all the world's religions, including Christianity.
The genius of our Constitution is to demand a total separation of religion and politics. Majorities cannot impose their religious views on anyone, and everyone has the right to believe and worship (or not to believe and not to worship) as he or she may choose.
Secularism is the salvation of the people. Let's not forget it!
Pictured above is a high-tech "suicide machine," called "the Sarco." That name must have been chosen, I think, as a way to reference the word "sarcophagus," which Wikipedia defines as "a box-like funeral receptacle for a corpse, most commonly carved in stone, and usually displayed above ground, though it may also be buried."
Maybe I'm wrong about why the name "Sarco" was chosen, but we know that the bodies of Egyptian royal persons, buried in a sarcophagus, were still around thousands of years later, and when it is time to die, there is a natural human tendency to regret that fact, and to want to continue on, somehow. This machine is probably named to provide a kind of illusion that you might be able to do that, with the only real promise being that the machine will take you out of this life in high-tech style.
The article in which I read about the Sarco claims that it is "a technological marvel, resembling some kind of futuristic sleeping chamber, that aids in voluntary assisted dying. Australian doctor Philip Nitschke, whom Newsweek identifies as the 'Elon Musk of assisted suicide,' unveiled the new apparatus ... just days after lawmakers in the state of Victoria voted to legalize euthanasia. The device simplifies what Nitschke dubs 'rational suicides,' ensuring that the process is painless and easy—an optimal way to go."
I am in general support of the right of individuals to make individual choices about their lives and bodies (and thus about their deaths). Just to be clear, though, I am not likely to be signing up for a visit to a "Sarco Center" when I get to the end of my time on Earth.
I continue to believe that the human world that we create, and that we most immediately inhabit, is not the world in which we "ultimately" exist. The World of Nature, the World that God created, for those not offended by religious language, is the world that has brought us so mysteriously into existence (both collectively and as individuals), and that is the world that has the final claim upon us, in my way of thinking about it. Thus, when I die, I am planning to go the "natural route," as humans have done for millennia. If pain comes at the end, I am hoping for palliative care, and I'm hoping, at the point of final pain, and when my end has come, to be able to remember the joys and blessings of such a wonderful, miraculous life.
In Santa Cruz County, my own community, local officials are involved in a "Unified Corridor Study," to try to find a way to reduce traffic congestion. See picture #2 for an illustration of how our local problem looks, from an on-road perspective. One major suggestion for alleviating traffic congestion on Highway One, in Santa Cruz County, is to widen the highway.
Too many cars on the highways? Let's build more roads! That is the time-honored (however ineffective) way to deal with traffic congestion. As I have pointed out before, more than once, we can't "build our way out" of traffic congestion.
While I know it seems counter-intuitive, building wider and more roads doesn't, in fact, reduce congestion. "Induced demand" is a real thing. If we provide more space on the roads, more cars will quickly use it all up. "Wider highways and more cars stuck in the jam," is how I usually phrase it. And if you are wondering where all those cars would come from, take a look outside at your residential street. Lots of our residential streets look just like picture #3. Thousands of cars are parked along the streets, or in driveways, just waiting for room to run:
#3
If new construction isn't the answer (and it is not) what can we do? My prescription is pretty basic. It's one of those lessons we are supposed to learn in kindergarten. Instead of trying to make room for more cars, which is a costly and ineffective strategy, we should, instead, be finding ways to increase the number of people carried by the cars already on the highway.
"Sharing," in other words, is that "kindergarten solution" that would actually work. "Sharing" is the magic word.
In the realm of transportation planning, as in all things political, we will start "moving along," again, when we start moving along together.
Yesterday, I suggested that it might be good to study "Trump As A Technique." I will stick by that recommendation, but part of the president's "technique" seems to rely on an effort to take the truth out of politics. That is not a "technique" that we can long tolerate, if we want to preserve any chance that we can establish and maintain a government "of, by, and for the people," a phrase that captures what has always been our highest aspiration as a nation (if never our actual accomplishment).
The president's statements about "tax reform" provide a good example of the phenomenon. As The Washington Post reports: "The GOP tax plan on the cusp of becoming law diverges wildly from the promises President Trump and top advisers said they would deliver for the middle class — an evolution that shows how traditional Republican orthodoxy swamped Trump’s distinctive brand of economic populism as it moved through Washington."
Pictured below is the President trumpeting the idea that once his "tax reform" proposals are enacted it will be possible to file one's tax return on a nice, red, white and blue postcard. That was back in November. No mention of that promise now!
The New York Times ran a profile of the president in its Sunday, December 10, 2017, edition. The article actually said a few nice things about the president, but it didn't try to excuse his continued inability to remember his promises (if only to acknowledge a change of mind or a change in course).
As we struggle to find our own techniques for operating in today's political world, I'd say that the "high road" will necessarily require that we say, always, what we think is true, and that we always state, truthfully, what we intend to do.
A technique of political persuasion that is premised on those two principles will bring our politics back from the political wilderness in which we find ourselves now. We're going to have to make a sharp left turn!
Scott Adams' cartoon, above, was published on Sunday, December 10, 2017. While the cartoon did not directly accompany a San Jose Mercury News article about Adams, also published on December 10th, perhaps it should have.
The Mercury News article was titled, "‘Dilbert’ creator Scott Adams talks new book and why he backs Donald Trump." The main point of the article, at least from my perspective, was Adams' claim that the general public, and particularly the Democratic Party establishment, has vastly underrated the president's political skill, if "political skill" is taken to mean proficiency in public persuasion.
Trump as "Wally," in other words, may know just what is is doing, however out of touch with reality he might appear.
I don't share Adams' good feelings about president Trump, but I do agree with the point Adams makes about the president's persuasive powers. I certainly recommend the article, and I think we would all benefit from listening to what Adams has to say:
"In my opinion, understanding Trump as a technique is insanely important. You can see that a lot of people don’t understand it as technique, and they are frightened to death." []
While Adams certainly acknowledges the widespread fear, he is convinced that a president of Trump’s ilk was what the nation needed — and that the American public will be able to rein him in, if needed.
“The country needed to be broken before it was fixed. The government had just been ossified,” he says. “And I thought, at the very least, he was going to break it. So I did favor somebody as a destroyer — a destroyer of all the ways we used to think. And what’s different about the way I approach this is that I have very high confidence in Americans as a group to break stuff and fix it. It’s what we do best.”
Whether it's Caitlin Johnstone or Scott Adams pointing this out, our government has been (and still is) "out of control." Specifically, it is out of the control of the ordinary men and women whose government it is supposed to be. If that diagnosis is correct (and let's add Bernie Sanders to the Johnstone/Adams list of those advancing that diagnosis), we need to do something new and different as we seek to resuscitate our politics.
Studying "Trump As A Technique" may be worthwhile, as we try to figure out (once again) how to ensure that a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" does not perish from this earth.
Former United States Senator Jeff Bingaman was a classmate of mine at Stanford Law School. Jeff retired in 2013, after representing the State of New Mexico in the Senate for thirty years. Recently, Jeff talked about politics with Stanford Law School Professor Pamela S. Karlan. His observations, as published in The Stanford Lawyer, are well worth reading. Click the link to be redirected to a transcript of Jeff's conversation with Professor Karlan.
I posted Jeff's thoughts to my Facebook page, highlighting the following comment in particular:
I sat through the impeachment effort and the trial regarding President Clinton and became convinced at that time that high crimes and misdemeanors is a high bar and you’ve got a high bar to jump in order to prove that a president committed a high crime and misdemeanor, as contemplated by the Founders. I think that’s still the case. Obviously, if something outrageous and illegal surfaces as part of one of the ongoing investigations, then that may change things very dramatically but, absent that, the people of the country chose Donald J. Trump as president and we’re going to have him as president for four years. That’s my perception.
Sticking with Faulkner, here is the wisdom to which I repair, when faced with any challenge, including a potentially life-ending catastrophe like President Trump:
I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure; that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail...
Let's not forget these words!
Of course, we won't "prevail" by waiting around to see what happens. We're going to have to prevail by taking action ourselves.
"Don't criminalize politics." That is the plea of Alan Dershowitz, in an opinion editorial appearing in The New York Times on November 29, 2017.
Dershowitz is a well-respected legal and constitutional scholar. I think he's right. It doesn't take long to read his column, and I commend it to you.
Dershowitz contends that "elastic criminal laws should not be stretched to cover Mr. Trump’s exercise of his constitutionally authorized power... An overly flexible, easily expanded criminal statute is a loaded weapon capable of being fired by zealous prosecutors at almost any target. It’s time to store the weapon until it is really needed — and not the next time someone wants to wound his political enemies."
I want to highlight a point not specifically mentioned by Dershowitz, though certainly alluded to in his column. If, when we think that our elected officials are doing a bad job, we conclude that their derelictions should be addressed by criminal proceedings, we are essentially suggesting that we should let "somebody else" take care of our political problem. There is a large, stand-alone bureaucracy that prosecutes criminal violations. Citizens stand by and observe; they don't prosecute the violations themselves.
Our politics MUST be based on an engaged citizenry. To the extent that we see ourselves as "observers," and "spectators," urging others to take action, we depreciate the long-term prospects for genuine democracy, and for the continuance of democratic government. Dershowitz alludes to this issue when he says, "the proper place to litigate the wisdom of [governmental] actions should be at the ballot box, not in the jury box."
I want to make it explicit. We must be political actors, not political observers. We can't wait around for someone to prosecute the malefactors criminally. This is our government - it is a government "of, by, and for the people," right? If that is right, then we shouldn't be expecting governmental prosecutors to handle our political mistakes. We need to take care of those ourselves.
