Michael Gruber's Blog, page 2

Reality Show

I find I am finally exhausted with public life. I can't summon up any interest in the unfolding drama anymore. Maybe others share this view. If enough others exist, then the ratings will go down, which paradoxically will, have more effect on the Administration than the polls or marches.

Because, as often observed, Reality has become a Reality Show, and, you know, it's a terrific reality show. The brilliant but misunderstood genius is attacked on all sides by effete, mendacious jackals and envious snobs. Betrayed by his all too weak supporters, he fights on to restore the greatness of America and finally give the ordinary white guy a break. If you pitched it as fiction, it'd be too on the nose.(That, however, did not stop Ayn Rand.)

I don't know about stability, but Mr. Trump IS a genius of the first order, on par with history's greatest demagogues. Who would ever have thought that you could do that? To treat reality as a reality show and have that show accepted as real by enough people to send you to the White House? He's least as good as De Gaulle. Unlike the General, however, not another portion of talent does he have, the fellow is a complete zero, but that one thing he does have is one for the ages. As Cezanne said about Monet, "Only an eye, but, my God, what an eye!'

We now actually inhabit the reality that he has sculpted as his last and greatest artwork. In this new reality a person the old reality would have considered totally beyond the pale as a serious presidential choice--a somewhat dim old gent, semi-retired, an infamous playboy, the proprietor of a third rate real estate & branding company cum money laundry, a (merely) possible Kremlin asset--is really the President of the United States. And we must believe it--we have no choice.

Until November, of course, which is why 2018 will be a strangely suspended year. The reality show will run until at least then, because it's obvious by now that the present Congress is going for full impunity against any and all investigations and a full buy-in to Mr Trump's version of the real. They're all Apprentices now. And they're going to try to screw with the vote, everybody sort of knows that, because those guys understand that they can't really win a fair election, especially in 2018, and they're now so deep in the shit with Mr Trump that they absolutely must have the reality show become the permanent reality. Plus, well over 120 million Americans think he's doing just great--they're in it already.

So that could happen. Some manipulation of machines, or more restrictive statutes, maybe some October Surprise--the predicted Blue Wave becomes a dribble, and America, as it has many times in the past, shifts its identity. We will have decided to be a rightist authoritarian state with mass corruption, impunity for the rulers and crooked voting. The histories will reflect this, and declare the greatness of Trump. He'll be on the money, like Jackson. Or not. The demos might set things right, and decide they want the reality ante 2016 again, and put a Democratic super-majority in there, and what follows then will follow.

But meanwhile,I think I'll stop watching, at least for a while.

 

Sick as a Dog

 

Has anyone had the standard seasonal flu shot and still got the flu, or some awful flu-like illness? It's now Wednesday and I'm just emerging from this horror. My first clue was last Friday,  12/29. I went to the gym, sat on the rowing machine and started my usual 2K meter warmup. I pulled the handle about four times and I was done.  I mean I literally did not have the strength to pull another time. I went home feeling vaguely out of sorts, did my usual evening activities, and awakened the next morning with worst sore throat of my life; and I am old. It was like razor blades had been jammed into my glottis. Swallowing made tears spring from my eyes and I writhed like actors do when they are pretending to have a bullet yanked out. Of the hideous liquid cough and the explosive diarrhea --wonderfully coordinated, BTW--I will maintain a discrete silence. 

It was the throat, though, that was the killer. Did you know that if you can't swallow, you can't push fluids like you're supposed to? Or eat?  So, I started to dehydrate, which sent my electrolytes askew, which meant that my muscles started to cramp, rendering my hands mere twisted claws. Really painful.

On New Years Eve, when we should have been in Portlandia dancing our slippers to rags, we lay in bed and moaned.  And coughed, because it was nearly unbearable to swallow cough medicine. The next morning I called the doc, who was not impressed, because I wasn't running a fever. He said to come in if my fever spiked, and take Tylenol. 

More misery followed. Just think about how many times an hour you unconsciously swallow spit, and then imagine that an ice pick gets jammed into your throat every time. Then I had something between a powerful urge and a revelation. I got down the stairs to the kitchen (don't ask!), packed a glass full of ice, added orange juice, and drank. The first hit was agony, the second less so, and by the end of the first glass the cold had so numbed my throat that I could drink almost normally.  I remember sitting there in the dark, giggling with pleasure, feeling like Pasteur.  

Thus I was cured. I'm still not 100 % , but neither am I a statistic. One the plus side, I dropped ten pounds. I weigh exactly five pounds more than I did when I checked out of the army in 1969. I don't know what this crud was, but as a diet aid, it'd be hard to beat.

MY SEXUAL HARASSMENT CONFESSION

MY SEXUAL HARASSMENT CONFESSION

 

On two occasions, while working in a senior government position, I have been formally accused of sexual harassment. The first occurred somewhere in the mid-80’s, during an EPA staff retreat outside Washington, D.C. A contractor had been hired to facilitate, and one of their ideas was to run a role-playing scenario. Each of us, in our hotel rooms, received a package containing a dump of information about an environmental problem, and we were supposed to analyze it and write a report for our boss, with recommendations, and then present it to a contractor employee who was playing the boss. It was time-limited to two hours and the report had to be written out in longhand, just like in real life.

I finished on time and then came a knock on the door. Opened, it revealed my “boss,” a woman of about 22, clearly in her first job out of college and palpably nervous. I began my presentation, at which point it was clear that she really knew zip about environment or policy analysis, and was putting questions memorized off a script, and that she was not going to allow any lightness at all to penetrate her first big-girl assignment. Her expression was rather like that of my 7-year-old  daughter when, playing house, she used to talk sternly to her dolls, and I was hard-put not to crack up. My chief purpose during this farce was not to embarrass the woman, and, fearing that if I looked at her face I would indeed lose it, I kept my eyes discretely down. 

So that happened, we returned to D.C. enriched and skillfuller, and imagine my surprise when some days later I was called into my boss’s office and informed that a sexual harassment charge had been lodged against me!  The young woman had accused me of staring at her breasts during the entire meeting. Some of the sting was removed from the complaint I believe, because the contractor had also reported that I was deficient in writing skill, by which  they meant, I imagine, that it was hard to read my penmanship. Guilty.   I explained the hotel room situation to my boss, a woman, by the way, and she said that regardless of what really went down, I had to spend a week in special training in sensitivity, so I went off to another contractor-run operation and was so trained. 

The other complaint stemmed indirectly from the fact that I have a Ph.D. in marine biology but have rarely used “doctor” as an appellation during my government career. One time someone happened to say, “I didn’t know you were a doctor,” and spontaneously, Al Franken-like, I mimed putting on rubber gloves and said, “I am a doctor. Step behind that screen and take off your clothes!” Well, feeble joke, but it caught on around my office, especially in making fun of people with Ph.D.’s who demanded to be called doctor and made much about their academic qualifications. Miming rubber glove donning became something a meme on the subject of bloviating experts.

Some years later, I’m in another government office, this time working for Washington state. I breeze in after an out-of-town trip, and as I walk by her desk the office secretary-receptionist shows me a letter addressed to Dr. Michael Gruber and says, “I didn’t know you were a doctor,” and I do my rubber-glove shtick and walk on by. Later that afternoon, the office manager comes by my office with a woeful expression and tells me this woman has accused me of sexual harassment. I explained my take on the issue, went to the secretary, apologized for any offense, and thereafter treated her with a somewhat chilly professionalism. I should say that before this I had enjoyed, or imagined, a cordial, wise-cracking relationship with her, which I now thought had to stop.

The reason I present this story is not to excuse the truly hideous abuse suffered by many women in the workplace, but to point out that “sexual harassment” covers a lot of ground and that we don’t have a reliable and accepted way of distinguishing between, say, an Al Franken and an actual serial rapist of employees. That young contractor is pushing fifty now and for all I know she’s telling her story on #MeToo—horrible bestial federal manager who ruined her first job by breast-staring.  Misunderstandings happen, and jokes go sour, and it may even happen that people lie. There is going to be a lying scandal sooner or later and reactionaries will seize upon it to torpedo legitimate claims.  We have to be able to discriminate, or else one of the great pleasures of the world—working well in mixed sex teams—will go extinct. I’ve worked for women and had female staff and there’s always sexual energy around. The genius of good supervision is not to deny that energy but to channel it away from sex per se and into creativity. That so many male managers whiff this easy pitch so often is a crying shame.

OUR AMERICAN OLIGARCHY

One of the tragedies of history is the slide into oligarchy by societies that had democratic, or at least republican, ambitions. The Athenian democracy died, as did the Roman republic, as did the Venetian Republic, as did, more recently the revolutionary regimes of France, Russia and Mexico. Now it's our turn.

When a Congress starts doing huge reorganizations of the nation’s tax and health systems that polls show only a small fraction of the people want, when Congresspeople frankly admit that they are working for their funders rather than their constituents, when the electoral system is rigged so that a minority of voters elects a majority of representatives, then it is fair to say that, at least on a national level, we are no longer an actual democracy. 

When democracies die, they become oligarchies. Classically, dead democracies are called tyrannies, but practically, given the limits of one-man rule in a large nation, such states are oligarchies. You might even say that oligarchy is the default state for human governance. Here society is ordered not by law, custom, or voting but by patron-client relationships. You do favors for the big man and in return the big man does favors or you and protects you from other big men. Yes, it’s The Godfather, and most of the world runs so, and has been run so since the beginning of human politics. Democracy is an aberration, a sport fruit of the political tree. It requires tending, an expenditure of energy; it is not a hardy perennial. Democratic societies don’t work well if the people are not educated in civics and civic virtue, and especially where the distribution of wealth is too unequal, because then the rich buy politicians and oppress the plebs. The plebs respond by acclaiming one of the great ones to be dictator, to protect them from that oppression, and the rest is, literally, history. Plato described the process 2500 years ago, and it remains apposite today.

So, what will life be like in the oligarchy? Obviously, for the oligarchs and their families and retainers, it will be the sweetest life possible. Literature and memoir are rife with descriptions of childhood paradises at the top end of society. Personal service will return at scale, for there is nothing better (as the rich have always known) than servants. When there are no industrial jobs and a thin safety net, personal service becomes more attractive, even a necessity of survival. This change is already starting to happen in the US—personal service, especially in the health and the hospitality industry are predicted to grow faster than any other employment sector in the coming decades. Taking care of the rich is going to be huge.

We will not have to put up with those faceless bureaucrats we've been taught to hate, because bureaucrats are creatures of law and oligarchies are above the law. We will have therefore to deal with faces, the faces of our masters, faces like the faces of Trump and his epigones. We will have to solicit them for favors rather than demanding our rights. I'm sure we'll get used to it, as we've gotten used to so much lately.

Art will flourish, as it almost always does in oligarchies. The rich need entertainment; as we know from Chekhov and others, the great problem of the rich is ennui. All those people with arts degrees that everyone said were useless will have the last last. The rich will build palaces and palace have lots of wall space and gardens ripe for statuary. The explosive growth of the art market will therefore continue. The rich need to see and be seen, so we should expect a flooring of theater, concert music and opera. The old model of publishing having collapsed, writers will again seek patrons, as they did long ago, and add ass-kissing to their literary skills. The press will wither into gossip, because the oligarchy will tolerate no real dissent. Editors and writers will self-censor, as in the oligarchies of old and currently in Russia.

Does this mean a decline in artistic quality? We’ve been told so often that freedom is required for art to flourish that we may forget that virtually all the great art and music and writing we cherish as the foundations of our culture was produced by artists with no rights at all against the sovereign lord within whose territory they worked. The ordinary style of artists under oligarchies is praise for the great ones, combined with a bit of snarky satire. Self-censorship seems, paradoxically, to have a stimulating effect on artistic life: English drama was born in an era of brutal religious and political oppression; opera developed in Italy, the worst-governed area of Western Europe; no one in the 19th century wrote better novels than the subjects of the autocratic czar. So maybe we’ll finally get good fiction, art and films again.

For the rest of us, life will be calmer, more predictable, and duller. News junkies will have to find something else to do with their time, perhaps gardening. Crime will grow worse in the banlieus and favelas that will come to surround American cities, but it will not much effect regular people. The muzzled press will report it only to cement in the minds of the favored races the incurable iniquity of the dusky ones. Of the police terror that keeps those people in their places not a word will be heard.  Daily life will be wonderful for the fortunate admitted to the Green Zones: the rich, their servitors and enablers, and their clients.

The fate of the suckers who allowed the oligarchy to flourish will not be as pleasant. The Great White Dying will continue and expand. The oligarchs have no real interest in people who can’t contribute to their wealth, so the white lower middle, no longer needed in the economy, will experience a sort of auto-genocide, composed of mass shooting, suicides, drug deaths, and diseases associated with pollution, neglect of public health, and despair. On the other hand, during the twilight of the Real Americans, they will finally achieve the goals for which they sacrificed American democracy. Gun use will be utterly untrammeled, and maniacs armed with actual machine-guns will vie for the highest death tolls. Abortion will be completely illegal for the poor, although, naturally, any women with the price of an air ticket will be able to get all the abortions they want. The rest will return to the back alley, where their deaths will contribute to the dying already noted. In short, America will come to resemble Guatemala, with a scatter of Dubais and maybe a couple of Finlands, because there are liberal oligarchs too. That’s what MAGA actually means; that’s actually what they want.

Economically, the biggest change will be the end of American innovation. Oligarchs hate regulations, but they absolutely cannot stand competition. There will be no more disruption. Innovators will be bought out, or crushed, or, as in Russia and the old Ottoman Empire, simply expropriated. Government and the oligarchs will work in tandem here. After a while, no one will bother to improve technology, except the sort designed to delight the rich or to help them live indefinitely. Except in the favored cities, the slow dissolution of our infrastructure will continue, enhancing the American tradition of private luxury and public squalor. Living standards for the proles will decline, as will the markers that go with it: infant and maternal mortality up, teen pregnancy up, life span down, drug and alcohol addiction up, incarceration up, mental diseases up, and the rest of the grim statistics. We see it in Russia now and will live through it here tomorrow.

The American oligarchy will retain the principle of careers open to talent, so that a few bright and ambitious kids from the lower orders can reach the mandarinate, which will keep them out of mischief and demonstrate that America is still the Land of Opportunity. The Constitution will have to be modified, of course, but given the recent success of the oligarchic party, it shouldn’t be hard to call a Constitutional convention to get rid of pesky considerations like civil rights, the income tax, and direct election of the Senate. Since the Constitution was originally written as a means of smoothing relations between oligarchs, there shouldn’t be a lot of changes necessary.

But our oligarchy is still new; the baby has not been pushed too deeply under the bath water. There could be a revolt in 2018 or 2020, if the oligarchs don’t quite manage to restrict voting enough. If that revolt is squelched we will have to wait for excess to take its normal course. Unchecked, capitalism invariably wrecks itself because there is no limit to greed. It would take a 1930s type of economic catastrophe, perhaps augmented by climate change catastrophes to destroy oligarchic control in a revolution either peaceful of violent. 

Or not. Once established, oligarchies tend to be quite stable. Rome and Venice lasted for a thousand years. So it may be that historians a thousand years hence will look back on the American democracy as a brief and feckless interlude between the British American Empire and the empire of Donald the Great. We'll probably know which in just a few years.

 

 

 

 

Gym Rat

GYM RAT

I was a studious child who wanted only to be left alone to read and draw. This was not allowed in my family, so I was made to go out on the streets with my athletic cousins to play stickball, punchball and other games playable with small, pink rubber spheres on the Brooklyn streets. I was talentless a these sports. I could neither catch, throw nor hit and was always the next to last one picked for a side. At school, I dreaded gym class. I couldn't do any of the athletic tasks they had there and resented being asked. So far so normal for the typical dough-soft intellectual.

After school, with few spasmodic exceptions, exercise and I never met. One of these was the military: I actually got into great shape in the army, and it took many years as a pastry-eating bureaucrat to ruin that body.

By late middle age I was fifty pounds overweight and I had devastating back pains.well on the road to a Vicodin addiction, I decided to give physical therapy a shot. An attractive young woman made me do things I didn't want to do and after all the sessions my health insurance would pay for, she gave me papers illustrating the exercises I was supposed to do at home. I did not do these. 

The back pain returned. I didn't want to take dope anymore. I found myself avoiding the mirror in the bathroom. And then, for reasons I still can't quite comprehend I decided to start my PT exercise program and start using the stationary bike and the rowing machine I owned that heretofore had been mere objets d'art.  I stopped eating like a fat guy and lost forty pounds, which after five years remains off. The back pain vanished, never to return. One sadness here: if you're fat in middle age, even if you come to weigh what you weighed at 22, you will never look like you looked then, because the expanded flesh doesn't shrink away again; it just sort of hangs there on your belly. I have learned to live with this. 

Then I got a note from my insurance company saying that they would spring for a gym membership. I had once tried a gym, but I went so infrequently that the cost per calories burned was ridiculous. A free gym is somehow different. I love going to a free gym. I bought some sessions with a trainer to learn all the gym stuff I had always disdained, and now I am mildly addicted to violent exercise.

I go to a small, friendly neighborhood gym called Ranier Fitness & Training. I try to go every other day for about 45 minutes. On the days I don't go I put ten miles on the bike or do my old PT core building things. A couple of years into this, I have actual muscles, and a tiny hint of definition, which I didn't think was possible for septuagenarians, but apparently the body responds.  I still look like crap, of course, but somewhat tighter crap.  

Exercising makes you gain weight by slowing your metabolism and making you hungry, so I am now living on a tiny fraction of what I used to eat; plus, muscle weighs more than fat, so actually getting to my 'ideal' weight will have to wait until after I am dead. Meanwhile, I am amazed by how good I feel and, especially, that I don't regard going to the gym as a nuisance. It shows that one can actually change habits late in life, and also that all the boring advice telling you that diet and exercise are the keys to good health turns out to be true. It's never too late. And free!

Also free are my two big weight-loss and get in shape secrets, although I could earn millions by writing a book and being on TV in a leotard. One is when you get out of bed, put on gym clothes and don't take them off until you do the exercises. The other is become even more of a pain in the ass about eating than you already are. Find a menu that works for you and eat nothing else, and it helps if you eat exactly the same meals every day. The point is to get sick of food. Good luck!

Just a Suggestion

 

Thinking about the kneeling NFL athletes, and the reaction by some fans and the billionaire boys who own the teams, and of course the president of the United States. This reaction might be summed up as: O you trained apes, how dare you spoil our fun! Look at all the bananas we have lavished upon you, and you do this? Just play the game, you apes, and by the way, stop all this business about brain damage. You don't get all those bananas for your brains. Hit harder, play hurt, that's a lot of why we have this stupid game, to watch big black guys harm one another. And don't you dare interfere in our new favorite ritual, in which a stadiumful of self-indulgent hypocrites thanks for their service the poor battered people who protect their sorry asses. So stand up and Respect the Flag!

Actually it's quite brilliant as a ploy. It changes the conversation from a protest against police killing unarmed black people with near-impunity to one about patriotism, as ever, as fucking ever, the last refuge of scoundrels. And I agree. Everybody should stand up and salute the flag and sing the anthem.

Then, come next February, they should fuck up the Super Bowl.

They should get nude; they should play in slow mo; they should dance in circles; the possibilities are endless. Let there be a 0-0 tie!Let the Vegas gamblers weep! Imagine the indignation of the billionaire boys and the President of the United States! Let there be an asterisk in the record books next to Super Bowl LII. That might attract some real attention to the problem of police killing unarmed black people with near impunity, don't you think? Just a suggestion. 

That Good Old Grand Old Party

 

 

I am a yellow dog Democrat. Is this phrase still current? It refers to a voter who would vote for a yellow dog as long as it was running on the Democrat ticket. I inherited this religion from my Mom, who was a union and party stalwart in New York back in the day, and a classic FDR adherent. She told me I should always vote D because the Democrats were for the people and not the rich guys, and so I did and do to this day. The strange part of this is that, after finding my way into government work at the local, state and federal levels, I ended up spending nearly my entire career working for Republicans. That I could do this successfully is itself a demonstration that these people were not anything like current Republicans. A couple of them thought it was sort of cool to have a liberal Democrat on their staff, rather in the way that it was once a la mode among Fifth century barbarian chieftains to have Christian advisors. At the time, I was a policy guy and speechwriter and so most of my work was putting their often vague ideas and instincts into words that would make stuff happen in the government agency involved, or communicate to various interests what the agency was about to do.  They had no ideology besides a (perhaps naive) patriotism and retained their optimism about the future of the country. They considered themselves problem solvers; their philosophy was pragmatism. If they were religious, they did not intrude their religion into policymaking. They were law-abiding and decent in language and manners.

They believed that capitalism was by far the best system ever devised to advance the prosperity and freedom of humanity and they believed that its excesses and defects could be cured by sensible government policies. They were by and large well-off and wanted everyone to achieve what they had, and thought it was really possible. They didn’t, as far as I could see, resent paying their fair share of taxes, and were enthusiasts of public works and improving legislation. (Lefties occasionally forget that this is the party that gave us the transcontinental railroad, the land grant colleges, anti-trust legislation, the regulation of food and drug safety, Pell Grants, the interstate highway system and the EPA.) They were in general supporters of civil rights although they hated identity politics. They were historically the party of good government and supported the Civil Service. They thought that the leaders of big corporations were essentially honorable people who wanted to do the right thing. They prized rationality, and suspected ideology on both ends of the political spectrum. They were good customers for analysis and scientific discovery.

We disagreed a good deal. I thought they had been too insulated from the depredations of American capitalism. Like most people raised in private comfort, they had not had to contend much with the public squalor that America has always accepted, or the injustice that its citizens who were not middle-class white males had always endured. They could tend toward self-satisfaction; Babbitt was never far away. They didn’t quite get that nice folks in positions of corporate power sometimes arranged things so that citizens died or had their lives ruined.  Well, as they say, only two cheers for capitalism. If the essential issue of American politics is the extent of state control of economics, then these guys were willing to get down in the debate. They didn’t say that government was the problem; they were interested in governing and they were good at it. I believe all of them were shocked and dismayed when the Dixiecrats and money cranks and religious fanatics stole their party, which now, somehow, seems to include actual Nazis.

I believe that American politics can’t right itself until something like this vanished party is re-constituted. Every good thing the US government has done has been the result of a dance between the center right and the center left.  Without a dancing partner, the left inevitably strays into factionalism and an unforgiving search for purity. It loses the ability to govern, just as the current gang of reactionary bozos has lost the ability to govern. 

As I say, I am not of this party so I don’t have a sense of how to accomplish this task. But I believe there are lots of Americans who would find a real center-right party attractive. At the very least, there must be many decent Republicans who are appalled at the way their party has moved in recent years and many independents who might join a revival of the classic GOP big tent. Here’s a final irony. The political ancestors of these guys invented the primary system as part of the Progressive reforms established around the turn of the 19th-20th century, because they thought it was better for voters to select candidates than leave it to political bosses. That primary system was what destroyed centrist Republicanism by making it possible for tiny minorities of the electorate to decide who got to serve in government. These minorities chose a group of increasingly reactionary, weird, intransigent, ignorant people who try to promulgate policies that the majority of Americans don’t want. As the president would say, sad.

 

 

 

 

More Violence, Please

Back in the Seventies I had a study grant from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. This was during the first wave of feminism, the theme of which was that women could do, and had the right to do, anything that mainly men had always done. Women were entering law school and medical school and earning MBAs in numbers never before seen, and I wondered whether the same trend would apply to violent crime, another area in which women had never been prominent compared with men. What I found was that feminism was something of a bust in the darker regions. Female criminals were not remotely as violent as male criminals.  When women did perform violent acts, they targeted their own bodies more than those of others. 

But that was then. Now we’ve had more waves of feminism and women can join the combat units of the military, there was an Oscar-winning movie about a women prize-fighters, every other action movie has a gun-toting female shooter . . . and there’s Wonder Woman! Yet despite all this media encouragement, women still lag behind men in the commission of violence. We have three women on the Supreme Court and yet when someone takes a machine gun and mows down a crowd it’s always a guy. And it’s not that women are inherently nicer than men or less capable of killing. From teens bullying their peers to suicide to Soviet snipers in World War II, it’s hard to argue for a biological barrier to female violence.  

And yet we still don’t see it, at least not in real life, at least not to scale. On an average day in America two or three women are murdered by their loved ones; once in a blue moon, a woman strikes back.  When women are abused, they cry, they complain, they go to the authorities, they punish themselves, but they almost never draw blood from the man.  We talk a lot about “glass ceilings” in business, art, academia and politics, but hardly ever about that one. This, rather than the White House, is the real last frontier of feminism.

Now that the media are full of stories about the sexual depredations of famous men, I have to wonder whether a tad more violence on the part of victims would have led to a different set of stories. If someone had worked Harvey Weinstein’s face over with an icepick way back when, if one of the women drugged and raped by Bill Cosby had gone back to his house with a pistol, if one of the women assaulted in a fraternity house had, instead of uselessly complaining to the university, returned to the scene of the crime with a gasoline bomb, we would be having a different conversation today.

And yeah, it’s against the law and women would go to prison and that’s not fair. The law, or public indignation should suffice to deter men from sexual assault. But it doesn’t, and despite the current revelations, I doubt it will in the future. Think about this: if Donald Trump had hideous scars over his face and one ear and a surgically reconstructed nose, all demonstrably the result of assaulting women, he probably wouldn’t be President today. If you really want to stop the rape culture, it’ll take a revolution and revolutions don’t happen unless lots of people go to jail. Or die.  It was true of women’s suffrage, it was true of civil rights, it was true of anti-colonialism and ending apartheid and it’s true here too.

Striking back and risking jail for it is a kind of guarantee of good faith. It destroys both the consensual argument and the “it never happened argument.” It’s hard to argue to the cops, “Hey, I thought it was consensual until she sliced off my dick,” or “I never touched that woman—the fact that I have a nail file jammed into my ear with her fingerprints on it is pure coincidence.”  Obviously, if only a few women do this, it will be “those crazy bitches.” If hundreds or thousands do it, it’s a movement and it will change the world.

Or women could decide that, in the end it’s not worth it. At the higher social levels, violent resistance may reduce career opportunities. At the lower, it might take out an abusive breadwinner. That’s an individual choice. But we live in a nation whose primal myth is redemption through violence, in which a bloodbath is worth a dozen lawsuits.  Women, think about always carrying something sharp. Go for the face.

Yelp for Liberty

"How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" 
— Samuel Johnson

I first read that when I was a sophomore in college and it shocked me.  Dr. Johnson was talking about the Founding Fathers, whom I had been taught in high school to worship as secular gods. This shock was aggravated by my recently cultivated admiration for the Great Cham of 18th century London literary life. He was brilliant and witty, so how could he not like George Washington?

Well, this kind of dissonance is what universities are supposed to produce. You take a kid from a lower bourgeois background who'd only ever read best-sellers and genre, who'd been stuffed with predigested jingoed-up high school social studies, and expose him, as my college did, to The Canon of Western Literature, and the result is  kind of intellectual panic. That’s what’s supposed to happen in college.  Maybe your mom told you not to suck on pennies because ‘you don’t know where they’ve been;” good advice, and college teaches you not to put ideas in your head unless you  know where they’ve been.

It also teaches you to hold contradictory ideas your head at the same time, without going crazy. For example, the Founding Fathers were trying to “form a more perfect union” a main purpose of which was to “secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.”  In order to do that, however, they had to allow the Constitution to embrace slavery, the antithesis of liberty, because the nation they were conceiving politically in liberty, was economically dependent on chattel slavery. The whole nation, by the way, and not just the South.  So these gentlemen, whose high-minded sentiments are enshrined in our founding documents, also thought it was sort of okay to own human beings, to get rich by working them to death, to rape them, to consider the progeny of these rapes as slaves themselves, to sell children away from their families, including the children of their own loins. (It is not recalled sufficiently that some fifteen per cent of the people held in slavery in the United States by 1860 were indistinguishable physically from their masters. Scarlett O’Hara’s nanny would not have looked like Hattie McDaniels, she would have looked like Scarlett O’Hara, and might have been her half-sister.) So we have to recognize the nobility of their sentiments at the same time as we despise them as drivers of negroes.

This we may call the National Filth. All Americans are in it, some up to the ankles, others up to the chin. Some drown in it. Some think the shit is Shinola, that it doesn’t exist or that went away a long time ago. Some think that if you mention it, you don’t love our country, but that shouldn’t be a problem, because almost everyone loves someone with a serious problem. (Dad is a drunk; Bubba shoots heroin…) If we’ve learned anything from our long immersion in the culture of therapy it’s that denial doesn’t make the problem go away; it makes it worse.

Our problem is compounded because while the drivers of negroes lost the Civil War, they managed, by a remarkable intellectual sleight of hand, to win the battle of history. I was educated in the New York City public schools eighty-five years after the end of that war, and what I learned there was that the war was terrible tragedy of complex origin (Name the five causes of the Civil War—15 points), that Robert E. Lee was a noble fellow, far more attractive than General Grant, that Reconstruction was a failure, that black legislators in the South were corrupt and incompetent and were rightly flung from office by decent white Southerners. We did not much discuss lynching or Jim Crow. Once, in elementary school, my lilly classmates and I were shown (what a treat!) D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, and cheered for the Klan riders as we would have for the Lone Ranger. I can only imagine what history classes were like in the actual South; perhaps they are still shoveling out that shit.

As we have seen recently, the National Filth is still robust, and stoutly defended as sacred heritage by young men united in their disappointment with modernity and their ignorance of history, marching under flags symbolic of lost causes. In this they are encouraged by the sly ambiguous condemnation of their President.

Suffice it to say that they order such things better in Germany, whose own National Filth is recent enough to be recorded on film.  Regardless of what particular Germans may think, the German state is solidly on the side of remorse and apology. There are lots of Holocaust memorials in Germany, but none celebrating the undoubted valor of the Waffen-SS.  We have the opposite: hundreds of monuments celebrating the valor of the South but none commemorating the long continuing story of the torture, rape and murder imposed on black people, which that celebrated rebel valor was aimed at perpetuating.

At this juncture, justice is probably beyond our grasp. Justice might have involved the mass hangings of the Confederate generals and political leaders. It might have required a dragonnade of the entire South, shipping the white ruling class on its very own Trail of Tears to some barren place in the Nevada Territory, and turning their land over to the people who had worked it for so long.  Absent that, perhaps a little remorse and apology would be in order.  Some twenty years ago I happened to be in Melbourne, Australia, and was able to observe the first National Sorry Day.  During the first half of the 20th century it was a policy of the Australian government to forcibly remove Aboriginal children from their families and “educate” them to be imitation white people in prison-like “schools.” (We did the same to Native American kids; for a take on the Aussie version, see the film Rabbit-Proof Fence.)  The Australian people felt remorse for this atrocity, the government acted, and Sorry Day was established.

There is, of course, no Sorry Day in America, because, well, we didn’t really do anything wrong, and it all happened ever so long ago and things are just peachy now.  We don’t have drivers of negroes anymore, but oddly enough we still have the loudest yelps for liberty coming from those who want to do other people dirty: those victims who are hideously constrained into baking cakes for gay couples, or oppressed into providing contraceptives in employment health plans, or brutally lashed into to provide employment and housing and public accommodation to people whose skin disgusts them, or dragged into oppressive courts because all they did was shoot a threatening unarmed black guy. Jeez Louise! Where will it all end? Really, it’s worse than slavery! It’s no wonder that so many lovers of liberty march under the swastika, that dear banner of freedom, or the flag of rebellion in service of slavery.

On the other hand, no one in the world is better at integrating disparate people into one nation. This process is a little scary because every time we add a new population the nation changes, and change freaks out weak spirits.  This change is always for the better, because it’s a strength not a weakness, a feature not a bug. It’s the feature, in fact, the core of American exceptionalism.  Can anyone imagine an America entirely inhabited by the descendants of the original colonists? It wouldn’t be the country we love. We all know this, but sometimes, in times of great demographic upheaval, we forget. There have always been people in  America who resisted this change (as now) and America has always, eventually, rolled over them, because bigotry never beats e pluribus unum. This will happen again, despite the Swastika Boys and their yearning for liberty from the future.

Politically correct

The first time I heard the phrase “politically incorrect” was in 1973 or thereabouts, in a steamy city of the South. It came from the mouth of an actual American Communist, and he was referring to a woman he knew who had stopped drinking Coca-Cola because of a dispute between one of Coke’s sugar suppliers and a leftist union. Coke was no longer politically correct, he said, and the tone of the remark was “some of our comrades need to lighten up. The Revolution does not need distractions.” The speaker here was a man who owned the complete works of Kim il-Sung (over twenty volumes) and similar volumes full of Stalin’s speeches. I was there because I worked for the county government and I thought it would be a good idea if we had someone on the metro council who was poor,  a working stiff, or a union guy. I stupidly imagined that one is on the left because one thinks that ordinary people often get a raw deal, and that capitalism needs a good whack upside the head once in a while, lest capitalists imagine they are gods, and that such a person might be thought to look with favor on gaining political power, so as to do that kind of good for real people. But I had misunderstood the Marxist project, which seemed at the time to be getting adjunct professorships at public universities and hoping for the armed workers to seize control of the power plants and TV stations. Electoral politics was a fraud, it seemed, and a front for the exercise of bourgeois hegemony.

Now it’s forty years later and the phrase “politically correct” has become a weapon of the right, essentially to excuse any vile public language, or to mock those who object to it. But that’s not why I keep thinking about that long ago evening. Even back then it was obvious that no avowed Communist could ever have a place in electoral politics. The Democratic party had long since purged actual leftists from their party. For decades, the presence of commies or fellow travelers in the Democratic Party was a potent stick used by Republicans to suggest that Dems were somehow soft on Stalin. The purge was effective. What we now call the political left in America is what in my youth we called the center. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are Humphrey Democrats. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are Rockefeller Republicans.

On the right, however, the purge of the extremists didn’t happen. Nixon embraced with enthusiasm the racist wing of the old Democrats, and their ideological descendants now dominate the GOP, along with the kind of religio-fascist who, were they Muslim rather than nominally Christian, would be Taliban.  Where the Dems further purged the McGovernite wing of their party after the debacle of 1968, the Goldwater wing took over the party after his in 1964.  In 1980 and 84 Reagan won in landslide elections on platforms indistinguishable from the one that sank Goldwater.  From there the rightward slide has continued.

It’s hard to grasp that what has happened to the Republicans, starting with Reagan, is essentially equivalent to the CPUSA having taken over the Democratic Party, winning control of the government, and trying to establish a Leninist program. What saves us now from a form of actual fascism, on the Russian model, is the incoherence of Republican ideology (economic libertarianism doesn’t really fit with sexual and racial repression, etc.) and the transcendent incompetence of Mr. Trump. We can easily imagine, however, a competent fascist like Vladimir Putin in power. Unlike Putin,  a professional chekhist and a self-made man, Mr. Trump is a show-business personality with inherited wealth. He is soft and foolish where Putin is hard and serious. The fate of such fools is to be made into figureheads or eliminated, and I believe this will be Trump’s fate too.  But he’s not an important figure. The Russians wanted a tool who would bring chaos, disunity and disgrace to the US government and work against historic American interests in the world—and they got it. They won this round. The question is, what’s the next round like?

To figure this out, you have to get that both Trump and Putin are creatures off the same world-historical event—the collapse of doctrinaire communism in both China and the USSR during the 1980s. Most economic concessions to wage earners, such as the kind that liberal governments established between the late 19th and the middle of the 20th centuries are the result of fear (Marx’s famous “specter of communism”) which is nearly the only factor that makes capitalists give up anything. If FDR was the father of the New Deal, Josef Stalin was the Mom. The prospect of being hanged from a lamppost, it seems, uniquely concentrates the minds of bankers on allowing the common people a decent life.

Such a prospect no longer exists, of course, leaving capital free to maximize profits and the incomes of the hyper-wealthy at the expense of the general population, whose response is (of course!) to continually return to public office the enablers of this process. It is hard for me to see a way out of this from the left.  That’s because there is no left left, if by “the left” we mean a disciplined party (not a mere congeries of interest groups) aimed at curbing the excesses of capital, driven by and responsible to, a sense of social solidarity among people who work for a living. The reason for this vacuum is the same reason why the the United States is not a social democracy like Finland, Germany or Japan, or really every other developed nation—the American Dream, wherein the ideal career is entrepreneurial: I’m gonna make it big and if you don’t, you’re a loser and I have no responsibility for you. The Great Depression was particularly hard on the Dream, another reason why the New Deal could be put into place, and then, after the War, the Dream became reality. Guys who drove fork lifts at Ford could live like European bourgeois: they could own a home, or two homes even, a car and a boat. They could take vacations and send their kids to college. Their wives did not need to work outside the home. They had generous health care and pensions.

That this aspect of the Dream occurred via unions driving liberal politics, that it had to be fought for, often with actual spilled blood, was once widely understood, but not so much now. The reactionary right has been astoundingly successful in liquidating social solidarity among Americans. The Democrats, while pushing the necessary social revolutions, forgot about the people they originally helped save, a deadly oversight. The American race thing did not help either.  People do not like being forgotten, and it was easy to characterize the Dems as the party of giving our stuff to Them: hence Reagan Democrats, hence Mr. Trump. Now the Dream has become (for everyone but the highly educated and the fantastically lucky) mere nostalgia, a manure from which only fascism grows.

The only interesting question now is whether the United States will follow the path many younger democracies have taken, and descend into authoritarian blood-and-soil nationalism. Fortunately, Mr Trump is as incompetent at fascism as he was at his many other endeavors, so we are unlikely to see actual assassinations of journalists carried out by his regime, nor prominent opposition politicians imprisoned on phony charges. Or not just yet. Unfortunately, along with stupid, Mr. Trump is extremely lucky. After each screw-up, each bankruptcy, he has landed on his feet, with his few billions more or less intact. This is often underestimated in affairs, but not by Napoleon, who always demanded that his generals, whatever their military talent, also be fortune’s darlings.  A massive, deadly, lucky Muslim terror attack on US citizens, for example, would set Mr Trump up nicely, and that could happen, whether naturally, or arranged by some third party with an interest in encouraging American fascism, and American weakness in the world.  Nearly everyone would instantly forget the corruption and the Russian business and rally around the throne.

Mr. Trump should have organized a private army before he started his run; we are lucky he did not. The next Trump may correct this oversight, and also be the things Mr. Trump is not: ascetic, disciplined, a religious fanatic, coherent, strategic. Such a person might actually take over version of the Republican Party and actually drive through a frank nationalist/white supremacist program.  The current GOP is now just six states short of the state legislatures needed to convene a Constitutional convention, and redraft the national charter, one that might begin “We the white, Christian people . . .”

Can’t happen? Unimaginable? Here’s a fun fact: Mr. Trump’s fanatical support seems to have settled around 37 per cent—nothing he does seems to cut too deeply into that core. Thirty-seven per cent happens also to be the proportion of representatives the Nazi Party had in the 1932 Reichstag. It seems to be all you need.

As noted above, this prospect can only be scotched by conservatives putting country above party. Some things are more important than tax cuts, just as some things were more important in 1932 than the revenge and military expansion that the Nazis promised. The conservatives flubbed their chance then, and it remains to be seen if there is any real resistance to nascent fascism on the American right from people who are not either dying or resigning. The greatest act of political courage I’ve seen in my lifetime was Lyndon Johnson pushing through the civil rights and voting rights acts, even though he understood it would destroy the Democratic Party in the South. He thought it was worth losing elections to expel racism from his party. It remains to be seen if decent conservatives will risk that in order to expel fascism from theirs.