The Beginning of the End

FiveThirtyEight.com tells the story of two Obama supporters who were nearly assaulted for showing up at a McCain rally in Florida.

"I had a guy tell me he was gonna kill me," reported one of the men.

This has gotten out of hand. The point that Bill Bishop has been making over at The Big Sort, that we are separating ourselves into mutually exclusive groups, is becoming more and more apparent.

"We read apart, live apart, watch apart, blog apart, and drive apart; we are one country that lacks any shared experiences or, it seems, common purpose."
Bill Bishop

"A house divided against itself cannot stand."
Abraham Lincoln, 1858

Lincoln, however, did not expect the Union to be dissolved - the house wasn't going to fall. He understood that one side or the other would prevail, and that, in effect, a monoculture would come into effect. It took a war, but the culture of slaveholding was extinguished, and the United States became a Free nation.

Will today's Liberals and Conservatives wage war to eliminate their opposition? And if they don't, how will we return to shared experience or a common purpose? A war with outsiders has never, despite what some people have said, brought this about. During the Second World War, European Axis prisoners of was routinely received better treatment than did black soldiers, or Japanese-American citizens, at the hands of the United States. The war against Communism in Veit Nam seemed to do little or nothing to make us into a single society, accepting of all its members. And a woeful lack of trained speakers of Arabic to help wage the War on Terror didn't keep the military from expelling homosexuals with required skills.

I don't claim to have a spectacular imagination, but I don't know what else would work. As the partisan atmosphere becomes more and more toxic (as people simply recirculate their own air more and more), we've moved beyond looking for solutions to simply looking to assign blame. While it is important to understand the conditions that brought us to the point where we are now, the public floggings of the people who nurtured those conditions (while it may be satisfying) does nothing to change those conditions. We are reaching a point where partisan bickering will take us to a point where we beat each other with fiddles while our home burns around us.

Anyone who has ever attempted to get a quarter-dozen people to agree on all the toppings for a pizza understands the impossible task that lies before anyone who would attempt to forge 300,000,000+ people into a single cultural entity. In very real ways, our society is only as harmonious as it is because we stopped engaging with one another around many important issues.

If there is one thing that is a strike against both Senators McCain and Obama, it's that they didn't have the sense to walk away while they still could. I suspect that whichever of them wins, a year from now, they'll wish they hadn't. Senator Obama is likely to get some time to work with things - he's likely to have a Democratic Congress to back him up - in so far as a Congress run by Democrats can do anything in concert. But the Republicans aren't going to be content to wait out their exile in the political wilderness - sabotage will be the order of the day. You could make the point that even the most strident Republican would back a good idea that came from the other side - but once you've become convinced that simply the fact that it originated with the other side makes it a bad idea, monkeywrenching goes from being contrary to a sacred duty.

In the meantime, the house will become further divided against itself. And I expect that this time, it will fall.

In Defense of Consumerism

Can we PLEASE stop whining about the "consumer economy?" I, for one, am okay with the consumer economy because the alternative is either a welfare state in which a large percentage of the population is supported while they do nothing useful, or one in which everyone works in necessities and infrastructure, mainly standing around doing nothing.

One of the hallmarks of a modern society is that if you add up all the people that you need for necessities (food, clothing, housing, that sort of thing), and infrastructure (roads, law enforcement, power, basic communications, et cetera), you get a number smaller than the total number of people in the workforce. If we all only purchased those items that we really needed - becoming a nation of ascetics, as it were, what would everyone else do for a living? Subsistence farming? And are you really sure that if everyone lived like you, that your job would survive?

I don't get up and go to work every morning because I'm enamored of consumer society. If I don't work, I don't have a way of making money to buy food, clothing, shelter and transportation, and I don't have the skills or the resources to supply all of these things myself without help from anyone else. And I likely don't have the skills to be able to trade with people who are good at it, as I'll be out-competed by people who are better farmers, tailors or carpenters than I. My skills lie in other areas. Areas that, frankly, don't directly keep anybody alive or our society viable. If everyone decides to avoid those things, I lose the opportunity to work. And with that, I lose the ability to pay for the things that keep me alive and our society viable. And so I become a either freeloader or a semi-skilled, make-work charity case - neither of which is good for the culture as a whole.

The whole point behind non-essential specialists in a society is that they support themselves doing things that don't need doing. And in doing so, they invent and improve and innovate. There's a reason why technology advances faster now that it did 2000 or even 200 years ago. I don't know that it's worth giving up, in the name of an ascetic's virtue.

He's Only One Man

Skinheads were plotting to kill Senator Barack Obama. Really? Never saw THAT coming.

But I think that this story focuses a little to much on the Senator. True, Senator Obama is running for president, but he was also intended to be the last stop on a murder spree that would have claimed the lives of more than 80 people, had it gone off. And given that the attackers presumed that the Secret Service would have shot them full of holes when they actually tried to attack the senator, you could make the case that Senator Obama was never really in any danger.

Of course, given the fact that these yahoos were busted before they'd even gotten around to attacking anyone, you could say that no one was in any real danger. But planning mass murder is still pretty serious, even when the planners are only a pair of rednecks out behind the outhouse somewhere. This seems to be lost in the celebrity angle of the whole thing.

Drip, Drip

I understand why Senator McCain has taken aim at Senator Obama's tax plan. I've never really been on board with the idea that tax policy was an appropriate vehicle for the redistribution of wealth myself. (We'll ignore, for the time being, that once upon a time, Senator McCain was. Legislators are supposed to represent the interests of their constituents. This will, at times, result in a certain level of inconsistency.)

But I don't think that I like the direction in which he has taken his criticism. Mainly because, in much the same way as "trickle down" economics during the Ronald Reagan years, it relies on wealthy people to be the final engines of the economy, and in return for that, it seems to favor the greater concentration of wealth, which, in my opinion acts as an active drag on the economy. Because, in the end, wealthy people hoard wealth. That's how they get to be wealthy people. While Senator McCain says that economic and tax policy should encourage people to create wealth, if you then let them keep all of it, the net result is that everyone else is relatively poorer. And in the capitalist system as we currently practice it, it takes money to make money - and so its mainly them that has, that gets. I don't have a problem with the idea that people want to hoard money. Given the chance, I'd make Fafnir or Smaug look generous by comparison. But part of what got into the situation that we're in right now is the increasing concentration of greater and greater wealth in fewer and fewer hands, and the fact that our current financial and legal structures encourage that.

The other thing that bothers me about Senator McCain's current rhetoric is that it makes work seem too much like charity. If we don't let wealthy people keep as much money as they'd like, they'll stop handing out jobs to the rest of us. While I understand that this is pretty much the way things do work these days, why do we want to encourage that? Why give a handful of people the ability to decide whether the rest of us have viable livelihoods?

If You Read It...

...On the Interwebs, it must be true.

This is, perhaps, the most incredibly moronic thing that I've come across in ages.

"i won't put a mccain sign in my yard or on my car 'cuz i don't wanna get vandalized or even attacked or having their houses shot up like people are in other parts of the country."

This, based on a story about a Republican headquarters manager in Central Florida who had his home "shot up" (apparently by a pellet gun).

"The Republican manager said he is convinced he was targeted because of new McCain signs he added around his home.
'All I can tell you is this, I have a very good relationship with my neighbors,' Coverely said. 'I mow my lawn. The only thing that has changed is I have two McCain signs in my front yard.'"

I guess we can send CSI home - Holmes here has it all figured out.

Not to get too caught up in laughing at this guy, but don't kids in Florida get bored and shoot things with pellet guns just like kids everywhere else do? While it's possible that some disgruntled Democrat did take it upon himself to pester Rog Coverely by shooting pellets through his windows, this seems like the sort of act of petty vandalism that must happen a million times a week in the United States, election season or not. The fact that this guy can't come up with a better reason than "Democrats are becoming more aggressive," doesn't mean that he's right.

And such a minor incident doesn't mean "this election is turning violent."