Wednesday, July 31, 2019

Disguised?

I was in an online conversation about the disparaging comments about African delegates to the United Nations that then-Governor of California Ronald Reagan made to President Nixon. One of the interesting pieces of the conversation touched on the fact that, so far as has been revealed, Mr. Reagan never repeated those sorts of comments. There are no other recordings of him making them to anyone else, and no such comments in his personal papers.

So... Was Governor Reagan making these comments to President Nixon because he understood that the President would approve of them?

I suspect that this defense is going to be employed sooner or later, and, given what we know right now, it's plausible. Assuming, that is, that anyone who wasn't genuinely a bigot, but might reasonably be one, would ever knowingly falsely signal that they were one. Or, perhaps to be more precise, would they do this in the late 1960s?

I know a number of people for whom the answer is "no." I, for my part, am not so sure, because it seems that there could be a worthwhile advantage in convincing someone, especially in a presumably private conversation, that one agrees with them, regardless of what one actually thinks of their position.

Not, I believe, that it will make much of a difference. The battle lines in this are likely to be ideological, rather than factual, as is often the case.

Monday, July 29, 2019

Hydration

The expressway exits near my home have traffic lights at the ends of their off-ramps, and this creates places for the down-and-out to panhandle passing cars. Some of the spots have been claimed by "regulars," who may be found there on a more-or-less consistent basis; others are more first-come, first served. While this Summer hasn't become unreasonably warm yet, the midyear months in the Puget Sound area are often unrelentingly sunny, the several cloudy days that we've had over the past four weeks are quite unusual. And standing out in the sun all day, holding a sign asking for help, seems sure to make one thirsty. And so, at this expressway exit, the spot where the panhandlers usually set up shop is becoming marked by a growing collection beverage bottles.

Sunday, July 28, 2019

Connected

I'd come across this old David Horsey cartoon, and it reminded me of the initial messaging of the Obama presidency. Clearly, this isn't the tack that President Trump and company have been taking. And that's at least in part to President Trump having an instinct that President Obama did not. That the fear, prejudice, anger and resentment that Mr. Horsey casts as people's security blankets are an integral part of who they are, and giving them up without attaining satisfaction for the perceived wrongs that birthed them feels like losing.

President Trump is often cast as a racist because he's clearly taken sides in respect to racial tensions in the United States, but I think that he's always alert to resentments and prejudices as tools that he can use. When the President tweeted: “Sweden has let our African American Community down in the United States,” it was cast as a cynical ploy, born of the idea that Black voters were gullible enough to fall for it. But I think that President Trump has learned to connect with people through their resentments. And while his political base prevents him from attempting to connect with Black voters by validating any resentments they may have over domestic injustices, citizens of Sweden aren't a part of that base. Accordingly, the President is free to seek connection on the basis that ASAP Rocky is being mistreated by racist Swedes. And I suspect that he'll do the same wherever he believes that there is political or economic advantage to be gained.

But President Trump is not new in this. He may do so more openly than prior politicians, but seeking friendship (however ephemeral) by casting oneself as the enemy of someone's enemy is an old game in politics. And as long as people define themselves, at least in part, by who their enemies are (in other words, forever), the path to power that is offered will remain attractive.

Thursday, July 25, 2019

Look Both Ways

You can never be too careful when crossing the street.

Tuesday, July 23, 2019

Stick or Stone?

Sticks and stones, according to the saying, may break one's bones, but words will never hurt one. It's a convenient aphorism that's often deployed when children complain that some or another child has called them a name. But it's rarely, I suspect, an effective one. And this, I believe, is mainly because for all that adults are willing to tell children that words don't really matter, they'd never really believed it themselves.

President Trump, when he said that certain unnamed United States Representatives should go back to their "home countries," kicked off yet another coffeepot conflagration. And a lot of discussion has been ignited over whether or not the President is racist. While I understand that it's something that a lot of people want to talk about, I think the focus on whether or not the term "racist" applies, either to the President directly or to his comments draws attention in the wrong directions.

When I was in high school, many of my classmates had no qualms about calling me "nigger" to my face. The common understanding of the reason for this was that those classmates were unreconstructed racists. But as I grew older, I started to realize that perhaps it had nothing to do with racism at all, rather, it was the fact that I was put out by being called nigger that prompted many of the people around me who used it. Or, to be more accurate, it was the expectation that I would be put out by being called nigger. In other words, a certain set of my classmates would call me nigger because they understood that this was an effective was to get under a Black person's skin.

And I suspect that President Trump, who reminds me of some of my more unpleasant classmates in other ways as well, is working under this same logic. When he Tweeted: "Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough," I suspect that this had nothing to do with their ethnic backgrounds. Rather, he was calling them out as "un-American" in a way that was easily at hand, and would resonate with the people who supported him. While the first is a guess on my part, based on past experience, “when the crowd at Trump’s rally in Greenville, North Carolina, on Wednesday trained their eyes on Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, chanting ‘Send her back!’ in a play on Trump’s own words from a few days before,” the latter was proven.

Given this, does the label of "racist" make any particular difference? I understand those who feel that spades must be identified as spades, but the battle lines here were drawn some time ago, and the rhetoric has had its effect. The President's supporters have, once again, their proof that the President resents who they resent. Whether the President's resentment is real or feigned, in support of them or for reasons of the President's own, is beside the point at this stage. Representative Omar (and the other members of "The Squad") represents something threatening and un-Americans to them, whether that be the encroachment of non-Europeans/non-Christians or the abandonment of America's peculiar implementation of Capitalism, and the President's Tweets showed that he understood that. Race was tangential, not central, to that. Likewise, the American Right is coming to expect the charge of racism whenever it clashes with a non-White public figure, so much so that the term is losing any force that it may have had. Not that such force was universally useful in any event. Like any large collection of people, the American Right is diverse enough that it can be expected to have constituencies that will respond in a number of different ways to any given stimulus. There were always going to be people for whom the term "racist" simply wasn't important. I expect that President Trump is one such. He's unlikely to be motivated to put more work into his messaging, or be less direct in showing his followers that he understands their concerns, simply because Democrats call him on it.

Eventually I learned to disinvest in what my classmates would say about me. Not because it offered me any control over the situation; I'd come to understand that when it came to the verbal slights that were thrown in my direction, there was no control to be had. Instead, there was a certain peace. Not being caught up in something that I couldn't influence allowed me to shift my attention to more important things. To be sure, maybe for the people who find the charge of racism important, it is the highest item on their list of priorities. But if it's not, that energy may be better spent.

Monday, July 22, 2019

Exploitation

Another person emulating the suspect's username told the BBC they did so "for social media clout", adding: "People will do anything that gains them followers and some popularity."
Kelly-Leigh Cooper "Bianca Devins: The teenager whose murder was exploited for clicks"
Leaving aside for a moment the nakedly self-serving incentive for someone hoping to bring people to their social media account to find pictures of a murdered teenager to claim that "everybody does it," it does appear to be true that there's a certain amount of internet desperation to become an "influencer." It strikes me as being something along the lines of playing the lottery; while one can say that people who pin any amount of hope on the strategy are bad at math, one might also say that they're actually quite aware of their dismal chances of "making it" any other way. And if impersonating Brandon Clark online in hopes of attracting the attention of internet voyeurs has a chance of leading somewhere, there's going to be someone who sees that as the best chance available to them at the time.

And while one can make the point that people should never be in the business of seeking to better their own position through other people's incorrect desires, that horse has long fled the barn. I'm sure I'm not the only person who felt that the BBC, along with who knows however many other news organizations, could be credibly accused of exploiting Miss Devin's murder themselves. After all "teen-aged girl meets adult man and their relationship ends in tragedy" isn't exactly rare enough that it would otherwise have been considered newsworthy, let alone something that should make international headlines. One wonders how many of the internet voyeurs who went looking for pictures of Miss Devin's murder did so after they'd heard the photos were out there through a respectable news outlet.
 It may be easy, and perhaps even expected, for people to see the internet voyeurs and the people who wished to cater to them as just another basket of deplorables. After all, it's a safe bet that at least some of the people who were promising pictures and videos were simply taking advantage of a convenient internet commotion to feed their egos. But how many people were hoping to jump-start their struggling would-be social media careers or get people to their web stores in the hope that once the initial disappointment wore off, they'd stick around? I don't know how much internet desperation is actually out there for what appears to be the glamorous, wealthy and leisure-filled life of the internet famous, so I don't know to what degree this phenomenon can be considered a symptom of something that perhaps bears looking into. But to the degree that a teenager's murder can look like an opportunity that one can't afford to pass up, something's likely broken.

Sunday, July 21, 2019

Sculpting

A sand sculpture in progress at a local arts festival.

Friday, July 19, 2019

Insecurity

This was part of the emotional force of the tea party: not just the advancement of racial minorities, gays, and women but the simultaneous demonization of the white working-class world, its culture and way of life. Obama never intended this, but he became a symbol to many of this cultural marginalization. The Black Lives Matter left stoked the fires still further; so did the gay left, for whom the word magnanimity seems unknown, even in the wake of stunning successes.
Andrew Sullivan "Democracies end when they are too democratic."
I have never met a person who was simultaneously desperate to survive and magnanimous. The gay left that Mr. Sullivan refers to may have had stunning successes, but for the people I met, they were also tenuous ones, liable to be rolled back at any moment. Likewise the white working class; for all that they'd held sway in American politics and the American economy for generations, they see the advancement, and the anger, of non-whites, sexual minorities and women as something capable of permanently marginalizing them the moment that "the left" regains power on the national stage. When has a perceived life-or-death struggle ever lead to magnanimity?

For people to be magnanimous in victory, they have to be secure in that victory. And, perhaps I am overly pessimistic in this, but most of the people I meet in my day-to-day life strike me as deeply insecure; victorious doesn't even enter the picture. When Mr. Sullivan wrote his piece, the 2016 election was still in the primary stages; some Republicans still hoped that there would be a way to unseat Donald Trump as the presumptive nominee, although that hope was soon to be snuffed out. Likewise, it was still "an age in which a woman might succeed a black man as president;" that Democratic hope would last until November before dying. Three years later, everyone is still in existential fear of unending cultural, political and economic marginalization; they are still openly insecure in their positions in life and their responses to that insecurity are the raw materials for the tools of stoking insecurity in others. President Trump is still able to inspire his supporters to what is often regarded as virulent bigotry by casting his political opponents as not only hateful, but powerful; the Battle for America was not won in November of 2016, and the barbarians are still at the gates, bloodlust in their hearts. For Liberal America, especially the Progressives, the past two and a half years have been a disaster, and many perceive their cause to be on the brink of destruction.

A struggling white man in the heartland is now told to “check his privilege” by students at Ivy League colleges. Even if you agree that the privilege exists, it’s hard not to empathize with the object of this disdain.

I would disagree with Mr. Sullivan here. Not because I fail to empathize with "a struggling white man in the heartland," but because my experience teaches me that it is decidedly easy for people not to empathize with him, disdain or none. For empathy is a component of magnanimity, and it is smothered by fear. When people feel that they are in a fight for their lives, and if they don't win now, there will be no viable later, empathy is simply viewed as an unaffordable luxury. When empathy comes to be seen as an impediment to bringing desperately needed positive change through necessary evils, it becomes a weakness, and those who champion it are unintelligent, credulous or unethical. In such a circumstance, the conclusion that "the Other" is intentionally malevolent becomes commonplace. And empathizing with the person who engages in deliberate wrongdoing is seen as itself wrong. Likewise, it's common for people to see themselves as unambiguously and self-evidently on the "right side" of things, and to see a failure to recognize that by others as proof of ill-intent. And so it's easy to begin a cycle of self-reinforcing demonization, where each side both pushes back against the other as wrong, and sees pushback from others as proof that those others are wrong-headed.

And here's the thing about a conflict with "evil." It is, almost by definition, a very high-stakes contest. And when people are given to understand that their very survival is at stake, then all bets are off, because on some level, concepts such as empathy, magnanimity, moderation and "playing by rules" are all predicated on the idea that there are more important considerations than winning. But if losing means final obliteration, what consideration could be more important than winning? Magnanimity is set aside until after the threat has been effectively and permanently neutralized. In order to show mercy, the other side has to need mercy. The undefeated don't need that. And for the insecure, the enemy is always undefeated.

Tuesday, July 16, 2019

Undirected

As much as I suspect that I did the right thing by "cutting the cord," and thus cut myself off from broadcast and cable television news, I do feel that it leaves me out of the loop to a degree. It turns out, however, that nothing cures my feeling of needing to know what's going on in the world than actually looking into what's going on in the world.

Well, that's not actually true, I suppose, because most of the time, reading the news doesn't leave me with the feeling that I have any more insight into what's going on in the world than I did before I started. (This is especially true of "positive news" sites or pages, that tend to concentrate on small-scale human-interest stories.) But this is the thing about reading the news, especially international news; there's very little, if anything, that I can actually take any useful action on. Of course, providing individual citizens with actionable information isn't really the point of most media outlets, especially those that are allowing free access to their reporting.

Not that I know what I'd actually do with information that I could directly use. And maybe that's why reading the news comes across as unsatisfying.

Sunday, July 14, 2019

No News

While some political analysts from both parties insist the media should not focus on the President's Tweets, but rather policies, we need to note here that Tweeting is the President's preferred form of messaging, that the Tweets come on the weekend that the President has directed raids directed at removing individuals and families with deportation orders from the country and when recent infighting between some of the [Democratic] Party's more progressive members and Speaker Nancy Pelosi has come into public view.
Michel Martin "Florida Democrat Responds To Trump's Racially Charged Tweets Against Congresswomen"
And...? None of this makes the fact that "President Trump Tweeted that progressive Congresswomen should return to their countries of origin," any more newsworthy or otherwise worth spending time on. It's already understood that of the progressive Congresswomen (who have become known as "the Squad") that people believe the President was targeting with his Tweet, that only one was actually born outside of the United States. On that basis, there is an argument that this could be added to the President's list of false or misleading statements, but to what end?

This is nothing more than the President taking pot shots on Twitter at people who have the temerity to disagree with his policies. And he's doing it in a way that appeals to the nativist component of his base of support. In other words, it's water being wet. For Trumpist voters, whether or not the members of the Squad were born in the United States or not is beside the point. If they're not enough like themselves, they don't count as genuine Americans. The President isn't likely to do anything of the sort himself, but if someone comes up with some "evidence" that the Squad's membership aren't really citizens, expect Birtherism 2.0 to manifest. As for Democratic voters, they're not likely to escalate the dispute between the Squad and Speaker Pelosi over this. They understand that President Trump is attempting to sow division in the Democratic ranks in order to boost his chances of remaining in office come January of 2021.

Given an entire planet to cover, it strikes me as unlikely that President Trump being President Trump is actually newsworthy enough to give a Democratic Representative one-tenth of an hour-long broadcast simply so they can tell everyone that they're outraged, outraged by the President going after his political opponents on Twitter. And given the 20 seconds of airtime given over to justifying the piece, I'm sure that it likely struck someone at NPR the same way.

Saturday, July 13, 2019

To Buy, Or Not To Buy

Bernard Marcus, co-founder and first CEO of The Home Depot, has pledged financial support for President Trump's 2020 reelection campaign. Those people who ardently oppose President Trump being reelected are unhappy with this, and have called for a boycott of The Home Depot; presumably in an attempt to lever Mr. Marcus into keeping his money to himself. President Trump took to Twitter to denounce "the Radical Left" for "using Commerce to hurt their 'Enemy'." And some media outlets followed up with articles pointing out, in effect, that the President has no problems with calling for his supporters to use commerce to hurt their (and some would say his) perceived enemies.

While it's entertaining to watch the back-and-forth, it's unlikely to amount to anything other than noise. Because, as with any number of things, boycotts aren't understood to be either good or bad on the basis of what is being done. Rather, who is doing it and who it is being done to become proxies for broader questions of questions of right or wrong. It's possible to view the success or failure of a boycott as merely an indicator of public sentiment, and leave it at that. Whether the boycott succeeds or fails, it served to illustrate the public's general understanding of some or another issue. But when boycotts are viewed as being an enforcement mechanism for objective moral or ethical principles, ideals that are independent of public preferences, then attitudes about them are going to shift, depending on the viewpoint of the observer.

Sometimes, at least in hindsight, there's a strong link between the action and a broad public understanding of virtue. The Montgomery Bus Boycott being a prime example. Today it's seen as a triumph of non-violent resistance to oppression. But imagine for a moment that Richard Spencer and his supporters were able to bring down a metropolitan public-transit system by boycotting it for failing to reintroduce segregation. I'd be very surprised if there were a broad media message that it was hypocritical to support Dr. King's boycott, but not Mr. Spencer's.

And in this, I think that the focus on the tactic in a way that casts the President as hypocritical is unhelpful. The President supports, and calls for, boycotts when he understands them to be in support of a preexisting standard of virtue. Okay, so that standard often comes across as self-serving, but this is nothing new; nor unique to the President. Most people's formulations of right and wrong tend to line up with their current lives and choices. Noting that people will support a specific action when it aligns with their belief systems, yet oppose it when it works against those beliefs seems to be stating the obvious.

Friday, July 12, 2019

Rules

"I don't trust the perception that the world puts on people when they see things and they don't ask a question, they don't look to find out the truth," [Mississippi Republican gubernatorial candidate Reprentative Robert Foster] said.

"Perception is a reality in this world, and I don't want to give anybody the opinion that I'm doing something that I should not be doing."

Mr. Foster said following the #MeToo movement, "men are under attack all the time".

"I'm not going to allow myself to be put in a situation with any female where they can make an accusation against me" without someone else in attendance, he said.
US politician insists on chaperone for interview with female reporter
The BBC goes on to state that "Some argue the practice [of the 'Billy Graham Rule,' popularized most recently by Vice President Mike Pence] is a matter of professionalism in the workplace while critics decry it as sexist and unfair to women in professional settings." My first thought was that one could likely draw a clear partisan division between those who see at as professionalism, and those who see it as sexism. There is, of course, more to it than that.

But then again, I'm not above being somewhat twitchy about the idea of being in those sorts of situations, myself. As a Black person in the United States, a good number of well-meaning people effectively told me that if I weren't careful, I would be seen as a predator, and that would have serious consequences. But it's worth keeping in mind that my parents and many of my aunts and uncles were old enough that Emmett Till's lynching happened within living memory. Even so, it strikes me as paranoid when I worry that going out to dinner with a friend, or watching a movie together could end very, very, badly.

My friends, however, see those worries as sensible, if perhaps overblown; even though it's not particularly likely that I'd wind up in a situation where I'd be staring jail time (or worse) in the face due to a casual get-together gone aggressively sideways. There's a history there, mostly of dismal race relations in the United States, and that's enough that my worries would seem founded to them. For my part, I try not to worry about it anymore. But I will admit that this is partially out of the sense that there's really nothing to be done about it. Sometimes, one is the windshield, and sometimes, one is the bug. It's just like that. Representative Foster is apparently under the impression that even though "perception is reality in this world," that he can still protect himself by controlling the optics. "In this world," though, a lot of the time, what people may perceive about someone doesn't necessarily have anything to do with that someone. If he honestly thinks (and I'm not sure that he does) that always having women chaperoned in his presence for public and business will be enough to protect him, he's setting himself up for a potentially rude awakening.

That bit of cynicism, and American history, aside, I really do understand that an otherwise innocuous situation is unlikely to genuinely go anywhere nearly that far off the rails. After all, this is 2019, rather than 1959. I can go to the bank, and they'll have a picture of a mixed couple out house hunting without needing to worry about bricks or Molotov cocktails being thrown through the windows. The world that my parents and other relatives warned me about is long gone. I don't have to be as careful about whom I'm seen with, and what impressions people may receive from that, as my grandfathers would need to have been.

So why not look as askance at my concerns as Representative Foster's? (Although, to be sure, I've met people for whom my own concerns about being seen as predatory are also nothing more than misogyny veiled in false caution.) Part of it is, I think, the potential partisan divide that I noted before. I don't really hang out with anyone who buys into the whole "men are under attack all the time" thing. To them, it just sounds like Representative Foster is attempting to ingratiate himself with conservatives by claiming that a vast, left-wing feminist conspiracy is out there looking to make life difficult for innocent men like himself. There is also the fact that my concerns are also very tied up in race. The exact reasons for that are many and varied (and perhaps somewhat sad), but the end result is that I was socialized to be more cautious around some women than others.

In the end, I find Representative Foster's position to be somewhat ironic. In a world where it's supposed to be understood that while not all men may be harassers or worse, any man can be. And Representative Foster is reacting, or perhaps overeacting, to that understanding that he's no longer viewed as above such things due to his position. And he's reacting in a way that's familiar to me; even if that isn't the reaction that some people may have wanted.

Tuesday, July 9, 2019

Scary Stories

I came across a collection of H. P. Lovecraft stories in Costco a couple of weeks ago, and have started reading it. The first impression that I received is that it's a lot like reading Charles Darwin. One thing that occurred me when I was reading "On the Origins of Species" was the odd sensation of watching someone discover something that's now considered to be everyday knowledge. While Mr. Darwin's insights were pioneering 150 years ago, our knowledge has far surpassed that point, and so it now seems surprisingly basic. Reading Lovecraft is the same way. The settings for his stories are almost a century in the past at this point, and the stories themselves seem like the sorts of things that you'd find Cub Scouts and Brownies attempting to scare one another with during campouts. The subject matter does tend to be little beyond what one would expect grade-school children to work with, but the overall "tell instead of show" construction reminds me of how I remember the stories of my childhood to work - there wasn't any truly frightening imagery in the stories, just the repeated reminders that the characters were terrified.

Robert E. Howard, a contemporary of and correspondent with Mr. Lovecraft seemed to do the strange and weird somewhat better. But this is, I think, because Mr. Howard wrote the Conan the Barbarian stories in the third person, and was much more able to create rich descriptions of the character's physical reactions. And so while Mr. Lovecraft's first-person narrators would often simply inform the reader that they felt some indescribable terror, Mr. Howard would convey that through characters' reactions to that emotion.

This creates an interesting disconnect. I've been told countless times that H. P. Lovecraft was a master of the horror genre. But the genre has come so far, and moved so quickly, that it is difficult for me to perceive that mastery in the works that I've read to this point. Instead, it seems pioneering, and it's interesting for that. I can understand how people were drawn to this new variety of scary story, even if by now, it's old hat.

Sunday, July 7, 2019

LOL

Recently, I've started noticing ways, large and small, that people seem to go out of their way to laugh at one another. I was noting this to a friend of mine, and they said: "Well, sometimes, laughing at people is a good way to get them to look at themselves and make changes."

"When," I asked, "was the last time that you made a positive change because people laughed at you?"

Friday, July 5, 2019

Crisis Ethics

There’s a very high cost to our politics for celebrating the Trump style, but what is most personally painful to me as a person of the Christian faith is the cost to the Christian witness. Nonchalantly jettisoning the ethic of Jesus in favor of a political leader who embraces the ethic of Thrasymachus and Nietzsche—might makes right, the strong should rule over the weak, justice has no intrinsic worth, moral values are socially constructed and subjective—is troubling enough.
Peter Wehner “The Deepening Crisis in Evangelical Christianity
There are a number of religions that are going to run into this sort of "crisis" again and again. And, as I understand things, it's due to a simple, but often ignored, reality. Ethics, whether they are those attributed to Jesus or those laid out by Nietzsche, are means rather than ends; ethics are goal-oriented, they are not goals in and of themselves. This is especially true in a religious context organized in the way that Christianity is. People may speak of certain activities as "doing God's work," but an omnipotent deity would presumably have no pressing need for everyday people, with their limited faculties, to do anything important. The work is about showing oneself to be aligned with one's faith.

The anonymous "pro-Trump figure" that Mr. Wehner corresponded with touches on this when he notes that “And to a person, it was all about ‘the fight’.” And if the fight is all about preserving a specific vision of America, American culture and American Christianity so that they may be deployed to do their god's work, then whatever ethics helps to win the fight are the right ones. This isn't about an understanding that “might makes right, the strong should rule over the weak, justice has no intrinsic worth, moral values are socially constructed and subjective,” or even whether those points are objectively true or false. It's about an understanding that a genuine loss, a genuine victory for whatever conceptualization of "evil" they believe in, is a real and present possibility.

I was listening to a radio story today about the Democratic contenders for their party's nomination, and how many of them were making the point that in order to save American democracy, people had to shift their focus away from playing the game better, as it were, and change the rules of the game. And this, I think points to something that a lot of people may not fully appreciate. It's one thing to contest something with someone else to find out which is better. It's quite another to engage in a "fight" or to play a "game" with the understanding that there's a correct outcome and an incorrect outcome.

In other words: "Winning isn't everything. It's the only thing."

And this is always the danger of bringing moral/ethical considerations into politics. When the rules of a game, or the ethics of the fight are threatening to lead to the wrong outcome, then it is they that are incorrect. An attachment to a strategy, treating “the ethic of Jesus” as the most important thing come from only a limited number of places. One is that the proper ethic is an end in itself that transcends all other ends; that as long as the proper strategy is employed, whether other conflicts are won or lost is immaterial. Another is that the proper means will eventually guarantee the proper ends; that if there genuinely is some sort of “existential struggle” under way, then properly prosecuting the conflict will guarantee victory. There may be others, but without at least one them in play, then it stands to reason that the “Conservatives & Christians” that Jerry Fallwell Jr. was speaking to would seek a “street fighter” over a “great Christian leader” who turns out to be too much of a “nice guy” and a “wimp” to ensure the correct outcome.

Perhaps the crisis is really one of significance. While an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent deity should have no real need of assistance in shaping the universe to its whims, this does kind of make people unimportant in the grand scheme of things. And not all religions do well with the idea that people are unimportant. And so perhaps the need to have, and to win, “the fight” is more about a need to be instrumental in the final outcome, and thus, to matter. And when do things matter more than in a crisis?

Wednesday, July 3, 2019

The Extremists' Censor

So Nike had apparently created a line of shoes for this Fourth of July with the flag attributed to Betsy Ross on it. They then pulled said line of shoes, after they'd already made and shipped them, due to complaints from Colin Kaepernick. At least, this is what the Wall Street Journal reports. From what I understand, this was based on anonymous sourcing, so I couldn't tell you how accurate it is. Of course, is being taken as ironclad truth, especially on the conservative side, some of whom (at least on LinkedIn) are now loudly decrying the lack of love of country on display.

But I get it. This sort of thing happens all the time. There is an understanding that White Supremacist and other "Alternative Right" groups have adopted the "Betsy Ross" flag as a symbol.

And... so?

Why cede this particular symbol to them? While I understand people being upset about Nike pulling a shoe with what is commonly regarded as a symbol of American history on it, it may have made more sense to push back against the idea that people who wish to deploy that symbol in the name of racism and nationalism should be allowed to retain it.

True, this sort of thing is par for the course. The swastika has been effectively given over entirely to the former Nazi Germany and those who would resurrect its ideology in the modern day, without any real thought to the other people who understand very different meanings for it. I'm of the opinion that we've done them a disservice, but that's neither here nor there. Fleeing from any symbolism appropriate by the wrong sorts of people, lest one be considered the wrong sort of person (or someone who sympathizes with them) oneself is unlikely to go away anytime soon. So instead, people are left to argue over what symbols should or should not be abandoned and whether ulterior motives or "hateful agendas" are actually at work.

The desire to purge discourse of symbolism used by extremists (however one defines that term) is understandable. The fear that extremists will use innocuous-seeming items to communicate and coordinate their actions in the public square, to the detriment of the public, is rational. But it's a game of whack-a-mole that can't ever be won. There are a few words and images that are so ubiquitous that attempting to use them as codes would be fruitless; but a lot of the language is fair game, and so the codes, like euphemisms and dysphemisms, will simply drift from one thing to the next. And the language, and the general body of speakers, will be the people who end up poorer for that.

Monday, July 1, 2019

Finger Pointing

I saw a "sponsored link" from Taboola titled: "Dear Sen. Harris, here's why Biden worked with segregationists in Senate." I didn't bother with it, for a few different reasons. One, Taboola = clickbait. The World Wide Web already suffers from a fairly low signal-to-noise ratio (even without random blogs like this one cluttering up the place) and, in my experience, Taboola links are pretty much all noise. Secondly, I already understand why Senator Biden worked with segregationist Senators in the past. Back in 1973, when he joined the Senate, there were still enough segregationists in it that one couldn't simply ignore them or oppose everything they did. And finally, I already understand why Senator Harris picked this particular fight. She's angling for a demographic that considers the compromises that were made in the past to be morally reprehensible, and is seeking to differentiate herself from the former Vice President, and the policies (not to mention the constituency) that he represents.

There is a strain of idealism that understands that the way to bring about change is to be both critical and unforgiving of people for not having been the change; either in the present or in the past. This mode of thinking has always had adherents, but it does seem to be more common among younger people than Generation X or Baby Boomers (although I may be wrong about this). Given the importance that is being placed on the Millennial (and perhaps post-Millennial) vote, it makes sense to appeal to them, and even though Senator Harris is herself a member of Generation X, she seems to be angling for the "young person" vote.

And this is just the way the electoral game is played. Senator Harris is a longshot candidate, at least at this stage of the game. To be sure, there are a LOT of longshots in this race, given that about a quarter of registered Democrats (and some people who aren't registered) are running for the party's nomination. Former Vice-President Biden is currently the front-runner, and so he may as well have a bull's-eye embroidered on the back of his suit for the other candidates to throw knives at. American campaigning is not a process in which candidates explain that while the other candidates might be good, they themselves are better. Rather, they state reasons why the other candidates are bad - given that the only votes that matter are the ones that are actually cast, sowing Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt in a bid to make the less-committed take a pass is just as effective as turning out ardent supporters to vote, and likely vastly easier than minting new ardent supporters.

And this brings us back to idealism. Senator Harris has come in for quite a bit of criticism herself for criticizing the former Vice President. But this is how the game is played. Whether Senator Harris is angling for a Cabinet office, the Vice Presidential position or to genuinely be the United States' first woman and second non-White President, seeking to undermine the front-runner for her own advantage is simply politics as usual. It's fair to criticize the Senator for not changing the game that she's playing, but, at least for the time being, that has to also come with a realization that she's unlikely to win if she does so, unless the public themselves change their voting habits. Given that, I think that the Senator made the right bet.