A Great, Ignorant, Simple-Minded Land

 

April 15, 2022

Cathedral City, California

     In my ongoing critiques of the United States, I am, as you can imagine, always on the lookout for validation from outside my own perspective.  Recently I read a quote from W. E. B. DuBois, one of the more insightful scholars and commentators on the state of the country, particularly, but not exclusively, from the perspective of race relations.  It had to do with the famous Scopes "Monkey Trial," in which a young man was prosecuted in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925 for breaking that state's law against the teaching of evolution in public schools.  By way of commentary, DuBois said, "Americans are now endeavoring to persuade hilarious and sarcastic Europe that Dayton, Tennessee, is a huge joke, and very, very exceptional.  The truth is and we know it: Dayton, Tennessee, is America: a great, ignorant, simple-minded land."

     To be sure, "hilarious and sarcastic Europe," for its part, is certainly not free from its own monumental ignorance and self-centeredness.  Each of the powerful nations of western Europe, in particular, has its own utterly unselfconscious sense of exceptionalism that tends to edge out any introspection regarding its own faults and quirks.  The phrase "my shit doesn't stink" comes to mind.  A look at the haphazard and often unsuccessful individual national European approaches to the Covid pandemic should tell us something about that, and if we need to look further, there's the whole disastrous history of the 20th century, and for that matter, many earlier centuries.  And, after all, from what part of the world did the United States inherit its narrow-mindedness, bigotry, and pure hypocrisy, if not from those countries in particular?  And who were France, Spain, and Britain rooting for during the Civil War, for their own selfish capitalistic reasons?  (Hint: not the North.)

     But back to evolution.  In the 1920s, with universal public education only recently having been adopted, state by state, some states were at pains to keep their public school children from being taught anything other than that the world was created in six days, about 6000 years ago.  (God, being a regular hard-working dude like us, needed to rest for a day after all that heavy-duty creating, and thereby set the precedent for the six-day work week, which lasted all the way into the 20th century.  What he did the next week, of course, was to begin fucking with human kind in his sadistic anal way.  And just for shits and giggles, for his own cosmic amusement, he faked the dinosaur evidence, the carbon dating, the geology, and everything else.  I mean, he's God, right?)  Back in the 1600s, one British "scholar," the Anglican prelate Bishop James Ussher, even figured out that creation began on October 23, 4004 BC.  As good a time to create a planet as any other, I guess.  Although this view of creation is still adhered to by an uncomfortably large number of evangelical Christians, and by certain ultra-conservative Jewish and Muslim folks, by the 1920s it was pretty much done for elsewhere in the western world, probably not long after Darwin and his predecessors put a fine point on the subject, though some countries were slow to catch up.  Hence the DuBois reference to "hilarious and sarcastic Europe"--not that Europe wouldn't have found other things in the U.S. about which to be sarcastic.  In any case, the Scopes trial served to shine a bright light on the subject, and in its aftermath the trend that led to several state bans on the teaching of evolution in public schools began to lose steam (although bans on teaching evolution remained in effect in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee until 1970, and such bans have had a small resurgence in the logic-forsaken 21st century).  But in general, the idea sort of faded for the simple reason that dinosaurs have proved to be fun and exciting for school kids and adults alike, even more so than a couple of naked people eating fruit in a garden, as titillating as that might be in the short run.

     Today, a century after Scopes, the U.S is engaged in another paroxysm of denial of the facts, as we are so wont to do.  In this instance, and almost in the same way as some states sought to withhold and deny the facts of evolution, several states are busy struggling with a matter much less removed in time than the creation of the earth.  It is the creation of the racist society in which we all live.  Therefore, as recently as last week I read that the governor of South Dakota has by executive fiat forbidden the public schools to teach anything that would make modern-day students feel somehow bad about their ancestors' misdeeds, particularly, in the case of South Dakota, with respect to Indians, but also with respect to other nonwhites.  Notice that the students the law intends to protect are the precious young white kids, lest they grow up feeling somehow less confident that they are the rightful rulers of this land.  Elsewhere in the country the same thoughtful restraint is being put on the teaching of how, from its first invasion by the Spanish onward through the occupation of various parts of it by the French and the British, this continent and its adjacent islands have been subjected to the systematic annihilation, subjugation, and enslavement of the native populations, as well as by the use of millions of Africans, forcibly imported and bred to be used as slave labor. 

     And regarding the post-colonial period of the country, and particularly the post-Civil War period, some states enjoy restraining the teaching of anything critical about the horrors of slavery and the stubborn resistance of the South to Reconstruction, as well as the imposition of the oppressive post-Reconstruction system of apartheid which lasted at least until the 1960s, and the lingering institutional white supremacist bent of the powers that be in this country, including most conspicuously the increasingly fascist-style behavior of local police forces all over the country, where the nationwide motto has become "If they're Black, shoot 'em if they stand, and shoot 'em if they run."

     Also, to its eternal credit as a great, ignorant, simple-minded land, many of this country's states are now attempting, at the public school level, to curb the recognition of anything other than traditional heteronormative sexuality.  Elsewhere in the news, in our systematic attempt to oppress women (so self-righteously condemned by us when it occurs, as it surely does, in various Islamic countries), a large portion of the country is busy reinstating statewide bans on abortion, in anticipation of a decision by the Supreme Court to greatly curb its legal use.  

     Certainly, some of our policies of oppression, such as wiping out the Indians and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, have been carried on by the federal government acting on behalf of us all.  But in the main there is one strong common thread running through all these retrograde ideas, from slavery through the banning of the teaching of evolution up to the present-day attempts to oppress minorities, women, and gender-nonconforming folks.  And that is that we as a country are consistently impeded from progress because of the powers and desires of certain of our individual states.  The federal Supreme Court legalized abortion fifty years ago, but it is because of pressures from particular states, and the ignorant folks in them, that the issue is once again before this currently conservative high court.  How that will play out remains to be seen, but it ain't looking good.

     As I have opined in previous posts in other contexts, it is the rights of individual states to decide what is good and right for them, rather than the federal government, that underlies many of the evils with which we live in this country.  It strengthens the parochial backwardness of shithole places like Idaho, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, and gives them and other underpopulated states a disproportionate representation in the Senate, thus holding many progressive federal initiatives hostage to the minority.   And when it comes to presidential elections, that tyranny of the few over the many comes out even more starkly.  With our winner-take-all state-by-state system of electoral votes (based on popular representation in the U.S. House of Representatives, but also including two free extras for each state's Senators), as opposed to a straight national popular vote, these smaller states are able to secure the victories of Republicans in spite of the fact that more voters wanted the Democrat to win.  This has happened twice in the last quarter century.

     Except insofar as certain states (like California) are able to exercise more progressive policies than even the federal government is willing to do, often dragging the federal government into a more reasonable stance, the "states rights" governance of the country has been disastrous.  It led to the Civil War, and even in the aftermath of the South's loss, to the institutionalization of horrible suppression of Blacks.  (That's not to say that northern states haven't exercised their share of systematic de facto oppression.)  Today, and for some time previously, the term "state's rights" has simply been code for policies of discrimination and outright stupidity.  I can't think of a single instance where anything good was done in the U.S. in the name of state's rights.

     The policy of state's rights was a dubious expedient for the sake of holding the country together when it began by allowing smaller or less populated states to have an equal voice in the Senate with the giant colonies of New York and Virginia.  This equal representation of each state in the Senate has proved, over and over, to be the tail that has wagged the national dog.  It was the southern Senators who created the idea of the filibuster, requiring a supermajority of Senate votes to pass a great deal of legislation that had been passed by a simple majority in the House of Representatives.  This was done specifically to block civil rights legislation, but the practice persists to this day, preventing the current razor-thin Democratic majority in the Senate from getting a hell of lot done unless the matter before them is almost entirely uncontroversial (such as condemning the Russians).

     But it wasn't just the Senate that was affected by the policy of state's rights.  The committee that wrote the U.S. Constitution was presented with a dilemma from the very beginning, namely, whether or not to include slaves in the population count for purposes of proportional representation in the lower chamber.  This shouldn't have been a dilemma at all, since the slaves were not legally entitled to any representation.  Some northerners quite logically said that since slaves had no status as humans, and were really just chattel, they should not be counted.  After all, they argued, we're not allowed to count our livestock.  Others, in particular men in the slave-holding states, thought that all slaves should be counted, so they could get more Congressmen, and hence more power, in the House of Representatives, particularly since in some of the original states the number of slaves exceeded the number of white people.  This notion was sort of odd, as I said, since the slaves weren't treated like human beings, except insofar as they could communicate as humans, and could be impregnated by both fellow slaves and white men alike.  (Indians, by the way, didn't count at all, since they were considered separate nations, albeit nations that the U.S. could manipulate at will.)  Finally a compromise was reached whereby three-fifths of slaves were allowed to be counted toward the populations of the slave-holding states.  Modern-day people decry this compromise because it devaluated the humanity of slaves by forty percent, but in reality the humanity of enslaved people was already devaluated by one hundred percent, and allowing any proportional representation of slaves, even fractional, only enhanced the power of the slave states at the ultimate expense of both the enslaved people and the free states.  And the post-Civil War constitutional amendments (the 14th and 15th), establishing the full recognition of former slaves as citizens and allowing their men to vote, only gave African Americans a brief moment of enfranchisement, before the white South once more prevented them from voting for another hundred years, but this time with the advantage of being able to count all of the former slaves for purposes of political representation, while providing no effective representation for Blacks at all.  Pretty sweet deal.  The North, by giving up on Reconstruction, had effectively snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

     Finally, with all this in mind, let's return to the original gravamen of this posting, namely, the banning of the teaching of evolution in public schools.  It is no coincidence that the states which disallowed teaching of evolution, and a few that have begun to do so more recently, were all, at one time, slave-holding states or territories.  In fact, with the exception of a few yet-to-become states, like Idaho and the Dakotas, almost all of the most unregenerate and backward states in today's America were once the bastions of the institution of slavery, including Oklahoma, which didn't become a state until the 20th century, but existed back then as the official national concentration camp for Indians from all over the country.  (None of which is to give a carte blanche pass to northern "purple" states like Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, or any other place in the U.S. where conservatism is capable of flourishing on its own.)

     The social historian W.E.B. DuBois, whom I quoted earlier, was himself born into a small community of free Black people in Massachusetts, but the main target of his accusations was the South and its influences on the North, not to mention the ways that northern capitalism tacitly encouraged slavery to exist in the first place.  Because of the disproportionate political power of the South, which drags on into the present day, and whose regressive ideas infect likeminded people all over the country, the South has risen from the ashes of its momentary defeat in the 1860s to become a force for evil even greater than the North.  The brutal institution of slavery, which it fought to protect and expand, permanently corrupted its white population, turning them into subnormal beings.  In addition to its already-mentioned general disregard for basic human rights, the South has been a haven for opposition to organized labor, promotion of capital punishment, promotion of gun ownership, a bastion of backward religious fervor, and promotion of poverty, obesity, and general unhealthiness of body and mind.  The South is, as it always has been, if not always the political, then most assuredly the moral and spiritual leader of the great, ignorant, and simple-minded land in which we live.           

The Devil You Know

April 1, 2022

Cathedral City, California

     Here is a quote from a blog posting I put up a couple of years ago, after the confirmation of the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the supreme court:

We suffer when we assume that there are good people on both sides of the political aisle, because we waste time that could be better spent opposing the bad ones.  Perhaps at one time there were "good" Republicans, but no more.   If they're good, they won't be Republicans.  Sorry, maybe your dad was a Republican and you think of him as basically a good guy.  But your dad was foolish and misguided at best, and bigoted and filled with fear and loathing at worst.  Time to stop thinking there are salvageable Republicans, male or female, and recognize them all for what they are--the minions of the devil.

If it weren't so damned long, I'd like that carved on my tombstone.  But my tombstone would have to be the size of that of the Unknown Soldier, which would be pretty ridiculous, not to mention preposterously egotistical.  And really, who would take the time to read it, anyway, before it got covered with lichen and mold?  So I'll just settle for the name and dates, like most everybody else.

     To be sure, there are Republicans who occasionally do the right thing, but I think it's mostly by accident.  And there are Democrats who don't do the right thing, like that idiot senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia and, locally, Alex Villanueva, the wolf in sheep's clothing who presides as the sheriff of Los Angeles County, no less ruthless than the fabled sheriff of Nottingham.  

     As we begin the long off-year election season (longer even than major league sports seasons), it's probably a good idea to keep in mind that the simpler we keep things the better.  If we're not Republicans (as I assume is the case with all my readers, unless they've randomly stumbled on this blog), we should be prepared for a dazzling display of pure mendacity on the part of the GOP candidates for various offices, from national congressional ones to local state elections of governors and other state officials.

     The Republicans will, as has become their usual habit, simply try to tell the public that tax breaks for the wealthy are good for the poor, that racism and xenophobia are the best forms of Americanism, and that the Democrats are responsible for all the bad things the Republicans themselves have brought about by obstructing the Democrats at every turn.  They will tell us that war is peace, that freedom is slavery, and that ignorance is strength.  Sorry, got a little carried away there at the end, but Orwell's lessons from 1984 are good ones.  That Stalinist future he foresaw wasn't nearly as frightening as the real thing has turned out to be.  It would be one thing if the U.S. was living in dull grey, stripped-down, Soviet-style misery, like Winston Smith's world was, drinking watery gin, and all that.  But we're living instead in a colorful world of multiple television and movie channels, Facebook, movies filled with action comic book heroes, and much more.  It's so dazzlingly bright when we look at the screen that we hardly notice the grimness that dwells outside.  Which is simply the modern version of bread and circuses.  And as for politics and politicians, well, we now expect them to lie regularly, so what's the difference?

     But for as cynical as we all seem to be about politics, it's amazing that we repeatedly continue to vote (or not vote) in opposition to our own interests.  Even people who genuinely care about things like racial, social, and economic justice will fail to vote for Democrats, simply because Democrats don't always deliver on their promises, or because they perceive the "Government" to be some organic evil monolithic force that is out to subdue us all, when in fact the government, when decently led, is the only agency whereby we are decently protected and provided for.  And even when people don't vote for either Republicans or Democrats, they are essentially aiding and abetting Republicans, who generally are in the minority in this country.  By not voting for Democrats they oppose no one and nothing, including evil.  I cannot overemphasize this point.  "This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around," to quote "Life During Wartime" by the Talking Heads. 

     If you're looking for a mantra--a simple and correct evaluation of the state of the U.S. political landscape in 2022--it is this, set out in syllogistic fashion:

     All Republicans are bad;

     Many Democrats are good.

     Therefore, if you want a chance to increase good in the country, you must vote for Democrats.

See how easy that is?  You don't need to evaluate things any further.  But just in case, here's another thought from a previous posting about the Republican thought process, particularly with respect to the pandemic.  It was written early in the rough going of 2020, but it as relevant now as ever, as people begin to unmask with the thoughtless glee of young children given permission to do whatever they please, but still too immature or uninformed to understand the inherent dangers of the world: 

Right wingers, led by the example set by their leader, are not only heedless and ignorant of the concept of the public good, but also apparently incapable of thinking of anyone but themselves.  Government of the selfish, by the selfish, and for the selfish is their credo as they careen down the highway of destiny.  Can you imagine anyone during the middle ages parading down the streets proclaiming their RIGHT to get the bubonic plague, or to give it to someone else?  People would have thought they were crazy.  They barely understood the disease, or the germ theory of disease, in anything like the way we understand it today, but one thing everyone knew was that they sure as fuck didn't want to get it, and if they could help it, they didn't want to give it to anyone else.

     So, my friends, in this case at least, don't heed the old adage, "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't know."  Avoid the devil you know and opt for those who might just embody the better angels of our nature. 

The Power Of The Dog

March 26, 2022

Cathedral City, California

     As Oscar night fast approaches, our chief regional newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, is busy gushing over Hollywood's yearly output.  Full-page ads and special articles abound in the features section, promoting this movie or that, and using superlatives ordinarily reserved for God alone to describe the accomplishments of the director or various of the actors.

     One in particular that has garnered my attention is, as of this writing, in possession of more nominations than any other movie the industry has deigned to consider one if its own this year.  That movie is called The Power of the Dog.  It was directed by Jane Campion, and stars Kirsten Dunst, Benedict Cumberbatch, Kodi Smit-McPhee, and Jesse Plemons.

     I have watched this movie, and for the life of me I can't see what's so great about it, or that it's even mildly great, from the standpoint of acting, directing, writing, editing, or cinematography (in all of which categories, and then some, I think it's been nominated).  Gretchen and I watched the first 25 minutes or so and stopped because we were bored with it.  But later, seeing all the hype and thinking that I might have missed something important, I watched the rest of it.  Then I watched it again, just in case.  Nope, it didn't get any better.  Oh sure, there's a plot, but damn, does it take a long time to unfold, and when it does you still don't quite know what's what.

     First, I should say that I don't think a movie needs to grab you right out of the chute, to borrow a rough tough rodeo term.  I am pleased to let the storyteller begin with a few clearings of the throat, so to speak, in advance of starting off in earnest.  And of course I don't expect the entire plot to be revealed immediately.  Nor do I demand that a movie be absolutely unambiguous.  But I do like to see a tiny bit of action, or whatever passes for action, within the first quarter of the movie.  That didn't happen.  Nor did it happen during the second quarter, or even the third.

     SPOILER ALERT here.  If you haven't seen it, I'll tell you how the story begins, and begin to lay out my several grievances against the movie.  It's 1924, and a couple of brothers own a cattle ranch in a vast expanse of what is supposed to be Montana.  I say "supposed to be" because Jane Campion, the director and writer, who is from New Zealand, chose to film it there, and have New Zealand mountains and plains stand in for those of Montana.  Most people who watch the film probably can't tell the difference--mountains are mountains, right?  But having spent a decent amount of time in Montana myself, I could easily tell the difference.  There's something distinctly volcanic and non-Montana-ish about the topography of New Zealand.  So what? you might ask.  Well, here's what: for all the hoopla the film has garnered about its magnificent scenery, there's very little integration of the story into this grand background.  Almost all the action, if you can call it that, takes place indoors or in comparatively confined areas outside.  The majority of the outdoor parts of the movie could have been filmed in front of a blue screen and a second unit could have been sent to the real Montana to shoot some nice backdrop footage, and no one would have been the wiser.  It's all well and good to use New Zealand as the setting for some completely fictional place like Middle Earth in the Lord of the Rings movies, or when the actual story takes place in New Zealand, as in Jane Campion's movie The Piano (another snoozer), but not when there's a surfeit of vast wide open expanse in the very location where the movie is set.

     So, on with the story.  These two brothers, one a chubby would-be gentleman rancher and the other a rough and tumble dirty cowboy (but, curiously, Yale-educated), run this ranch.  The chubby one is played by Jesse Plemons, who in general I like, but who, in this case could have been substituted for by the Pillsbury Doughboy or the blow-up copilot from Airplane! for all the drama he brings to the role.  Advocates of the movie will say, well, he's supposed to be dull and unanimated.  Yes, that's true.  But do you want one of the major characters in any movie to be dull and unanimated?  I can get that for free by looking in the mirror.  And speaking of dull and unanimated, the much-touted Kirsten Dunst is almost equally dull, looking like she's just stepped in out of a rainstorm, with a washed out and unkempt 1920s curly permanent that resembles a worn mop and, I swear, never changes.  She develops a penchant for booze and spends a lot of time in bed or drunk, and occasionally expresses her fear of Phil, her menacing cowboy brother-in-law (oh yeah, she marries the Pillsbury Doughboy, offscreen, and comes to live at the ranch).   She even yells a bit here and there, but ultimately she's a timid rag doll, and not at all interesting to watch.  Nor are she and her real-life partner Jesse Plemons given anything interesting to say.  And the host of ranch hand extras who surround the place have virtually no part in the story other than to grunt and occasionally call someone a name.  They're supposed to be slightly menacing, I think, but they're not.  At all.  

     The remaining two main characters, brother Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), are a little less dull, but just plain weird.  Peter is the Kirsten Dunst character's young adult son, who's studying to be a doctor but spends some time at the ranch on summer vacation.  Reed-thin, and limper than his mother's dishrag hair, he's as true an oddball as there ever was, twirling around, making paper flowers, dissecting rabbits (for medical purposes), and, I shit you not, swaying his hips with a premodern hula hoop.  All this is supposed to convey, I guess, that he's gay, and a gentle and delicate soul, and he gets called names on account of that, which upsets his mom, but doesn't seem to faze him much.  He seems to be fairly comfortable in his own unique skin, and not nearly as weak as mommy thinks he is.  But I think the writer-director tries a bit too hard to make him into a sort of helpless, pining away, closeted soul, which ends up just making him a bizarre and rather insulting stereotype of a certain effeminate type of person.  Still, his real sexual proclivities remain unknown.  All we know is that he loves his mother (though he's aware of and complains to her that she's overprotective) and likes to wear tennis shoes instead of cowboy boots.

     Phil, on the other hand, is truly closeted.  He's constantly praising his long-departed rough-riding cowboy mentor (and naked sleeping bag buddy), Bronco Henry, the secret love of his life, who apparently molded Phil into a butch man's man, in the Greco-Roman style.  Phil rolls his own cigarettes, castrates bulls, and never takes off his chaps and spurs, even indoors, and his crew lays around shirtless (but in chaps) and swims nude.  Guy stuff.  Wait a minute: Bronco Henry?  Why not Bronco Clarence or Bronco Leslie?  Is Jane Campion just trying to make fun of gay people here, or merely of gay stereotypes, or is she simply, as I suspect, clueless?  It's hard to tell, but if she's not trying to parody something (besides herself), then she's really got her head up her ass.

     Anyway, long into the movie, Phil stops making fun of Peter and starts in earnest to groom him into a hard (or at least harder) cowpoke, apparently the way old Bronco Henry did to the young studious Phil so long ago.  He's going to wean the lad off his mother, and make a real man out of him, because that's the kind of man he's attracted to.  As for Peter, maybe he's flattered by Phil's attention, and maybe he's a little tempted to go along, but there's something too off-putting about Phil.  It could be that he stinks, literally, or that that's not the type of relationship Peter wants.  I'm sure he hates the fact that Phil intimidates his mom so much.  In any event, Peter has other ideas, and a plot to hatch, which he does, but in such a slow moving, improbable way, and so late in the game, that we're left with a movie that ends not with a bang but a whimper, consistent at least with the way it has plodded along throughout.

      Like a decennial groundhog, Jane Campion emerges every so often with a movie of dubious quality.  If this film wins big tomorrow night, it will be for one reason, and that is that Campion is a female director and film writer, and it's important to give a female director and film writer an Oscar.  It certainly is, but at what cost, as far as quality is concerned?  Hollywood is hellbent on making amends for its historical sins of exclusion, but can only seem to do it by naked sporadic tokenism.  Two years ago, under pressure to give awards to movies made by nonwhites and non-Europeans, it gave away the entire store to a quirky Korean movie.  A few years before that, under pressure to recognize not only Black film contributions but gayness, it got a twofer by rewarding a movie called Moonlight, about nothing much more than a kid who grows up in bad surroundings, realizes he's gay, gets a handjob on the beach from another guy (in the moonlight, get it?), then goes on to become a lonely drug dealer.  I mean, really, is there nobody in the Academy with any brains?  I guess not.  

     Proponents of The Power of the Dog, or perhaps those who simply want gayness to figure more prominently in the movies (a laudable goal certainly, if it's not done to ridiculously), have suggested that there's a genre called the "gay western" to which this movie belongs.  Well, that's a pretty short list, as far as I know.  The only other one that comes to mind is Brokeback Mountain, and that was more a love story than anything else, and in addition to love it had drama, tension, sadness, and most importantly realism.  The Power of the Dog isn't possessed of any of those things.  It's just a dog of a movie that seems to have become inordinately powerful to the powers that be.  So its name is the only thing about it that works.

  

And Now For Something Completely Different

March 17, 2022

Cathedral City, California

     Nah, just kidding.  This won't be different.

     Politics is the ultimate insoluble problem.  It's just people throwing words around, right?  People hurling ideas and accusations at one another while holding shields to ward off the opposing ideas and accusations, and meanwhile taking bribes and emoluments from the highest bidders.  It's meaningless and a pain in the ass, not to mention something that saps our energy and gets the country nowhere.

     Well, no.  Not really.  Politics is, in fact, idealism.  Without political parties and factions within those parties, there would be no debate on any significant ideas, except informally.  And whether you agree with the politics of either party (because let's face it, there are only two in the United States, like it or not), the actions of its members, taken as a whole, reflect the ideals of that party, although they may be watered down by attempts at consensus.  That's why it's not too difficult to figure out, in this country, which party stands for what, and it's also the reason that people who profess to be undecided between the two parties are, to put it bluntly, idiots.

     By "ideals" and "idealism" I don't mean anything superhuman or celestial, or even necessarily good.  I simply mean the things upon which, if wishes were horses, as the saying goes, any given politicians and their adherents would ride.  They are the cherished beliefs, hidden or otherwise, of those politicians and the folks who vote for them.

     Republican ideals include American exceptionalism (the belief that the United States is the greatest country in the history of the world), white supremacy, hatred of nonwhite immigrants, hatred of taxation, glorification of wealth, suppression of organized labor, and nostalgia for the days when men were men and women were their handmaids.  More recently, the Republican idealists have added abolition of legal abortion and of homosexual marriage, and hatred of gender fluidity, vaccinations, and free elections.

     The ideals of Democrats also start with American exceptionalism, because that's been pounded into our brains from birth, regardless of who we are or which party we favor.  Republicans may think we're the greatest country on earth because of who and what we have been, whereas Democrats may think we're the greatest country on earth more because of who we can be.  But nobody here, unfortunately, can get past the idea that God has blessed this country above all others.  That's a typical nationalistic trait the world over, of course, but we carry it even further than all but a few other western countries. 

     However, Democrats espouse, in addition, the ideals of racial and gender inclusiveness, the equality of men and women, support for organized labor, help for the poor, help for immigrants, belief in the right of women to choose, belief in the benefits of taxation however much we may hate it, belief in science, and most importantly belief in free and open elections, particularly because, unless statistics lie, there are more Democratic votes out there than there are Republican votes, and to believe otherwise as a Democrat would be self-defeating.

     I know I veered off into cynicism with that last comment about Democrats' belief in free and fair elections.  But let's face it, wouldn't any self-respecting Democrat be happier if Republicans just didn't vote at all?  Certainly Republicans feel that way in reverse, which is why they wish to make it harder for nonwhite people, who tend to vote Democratic, to get to the polls.  They're not about to have another election stolen from them by the Black voters who decisively tipped the balance in favor of Joe Biden in 2020, and to whom, be it known by one and all, Joe Biden owes his very political life at this point.  In fact, I imagine that most Republicans would be much happier if Black people were somehow prohibited from voting at all.  They certainly had it that way for a long time, especially in the South (back when the Democratic party was what the Republican party is today).  But, you say, aren't there Black people who vote Republican?  Yes there are, but not those who have any self-respect.  I say this at the risk of being presumptuous about the thinking of an entire race in this country, but come on, is there really any reasonable voting choice for Black people?  I think not.  However imperfect and disappointing the Democratic party may prove to be on progress toward racial equality, it at least professes to be committed to that ideal.  Republicans don't even pretend to be.

     (A word here about foreign policy.  Because both parties are burdened with the myth of American exceptionalism, their foreign policy views do not vary significantly.  This posting is really meant to discuss domestic policy, since elections in this vast country, separated by two oceans from the rest of the world, are seldom won or lost on the basis of foreign policy.  We really care most about, as Bill Clinton famously said, "the economy, stupid."  There are a few slim differences, I guess.  Republicans, because they believe we're better than any other country, tend to be more snooty and isolationist in their approach to the rest of the world, and Democrats, because they believe we're better than any other country, feel it is their responsibility to insert the joy of our magnificent way of life into whatever corner of the world they think might need it, by force, if necessary.  Both parties earnestly believe that if everybody else on earth could just be more like us, governmentally, economically, and socially speaking, the planet would be a happier place.  But in the end, voters care much more about the price of gasoline than they do about whichever country we might be in the process of interfering with.)

     Which brings me back to my earlier characterization of people who are undecided between the two parties as "idiots."  That they are, for sure.  But why?  First, let me say that there are absolute idiots safely within the confines of both parties, the Republican party more so than the Democratic party.  Poor white people who vote Republican invariably do so against their own economic and social interests, since the Republicans don't care about them at all, and are anti-labor and dedicated to keeping their wages as low as possible.  But these idiots cling to the idea that it's better to be poor and white than to be Black, and they resent the idea that Black folks are allowed to make any progress at all (except in sports and music, where it's permissible).  That kind of idiocy is probably most impressively on display in the state of West Virginia, one of poorest and whitest states in the union, where the only decent way to make a living (until recently) was to condemn yourself to a short life mining coal underground, followed by a miserable death from lung disease.  Today, only about 10,000 West Virginians mine coal underground (about one percent of the male working population), and about 2,500 are involved in above-ground strip mining.  The largest legal employers in the state are Walmart and various chemical and pharmaceutical companies, which have never been threatened by the Democrats.  Despite these facts, West Virginia gave the Republican candidate his largest majority of any state in the union in both 2016 and 2020, based on his support of coal mining and white supremacy, in that order.  These are people who would benefit greatly from the ideals of income redistribution espoused by the Democrats, and who would be far better off without the evisceration and poisoning of their land by the strip mining of coal, which provides very little in the way of jobs for them any more, but plenty in the way of water pollution.  So West Virginians are a special bunch of idiots.  But they're white, and proud of it.  And pretty inbred too, which might help to explain things. 

     Democratic idiocy tends to take the form of "cutting off your nose to spite your face."  The more left-leaning members of the party will sometimes refuse to vote for a Democrat because that person isn't as progressive as they would like them to be.  This happened in 2016, contributing directly to the loss of the presidential election by the Democrat Hillary Clinton, and the unleashing of an unprecedented reign of terror by her Republican opponent, because Clinton wasn't as far to the left as Bernie Sanders is.  Enough Democrats threw their votes to the Green Party and another minor party to deliver Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to the more united Republicans, and that made the difference in the electoral vote.  This they did despite Bernie's earnest urgings to vote Democratic anyway, even after he lost the nomination.  That goes hand in glove with another bit of Democratic idiocy, namely, clinging to the belief that there could ever possibly be a viable left-wing third party in this country, or any government run by even a moderate socialist.  The answer to the question of whether that's possible is a resounding NO, borne out solidly by party politics at least since the time of the Civil War.  I confess I used to be this kind of idiot, but ceased to be well before the turn of the century, and in any event my votes for the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Labor Party, and the Communists didn't make a bit of difference in the outcome of any election.  Since we do not have a parliamentary form of government where parties can form ruling coalitions, third parties do nothing but mess things up for one of the two major parties, and deliver the presidency to the candidate whose party remains more united.   

     So back, once again, to the truly undecided idiots.  I'm puzzled by them, and would be tempted to dismiss them out of hand, except for the fact that virtually all presidential elections, and most congressional ones as well, seem to be run on the basis of both candidates trying to appeal to these undecideds.  I mean, why bother to spend millions just to preach to the choir, right?  They must be people who don't really possess as solid or uniform a set of ideals as do the Democrats or Republicans.  This might be due to the fact that they just don't pay attention, or simply do not possess any moral compass.  Even most "one-issue" voters can easily choose between the parties.  LGBTQ voters will easily choose Democrats.  Cuban exiles will easily choose Republicans.  And so on.  In some ways I respect an avowed right-wing white supremacist gun-toting Republican thug more than I do a person who is so benighted as to be unable to decide between the two parties based on their platforms and their members' performances while in office, particularly as the differences have become starker.  Partly this has to do with the fact that, as I said, they don't pay attention to the issues, only to the individual, as if a presidential election were a large version of American Idol or your high school prom king and queen election, rather than a duel between two different political philosophies.  Fortunately for the country, Joe Biden got elected in 2020 not because he was particularly attractive, but because he was less grotesque than his opponent.

     The undecideds, also, are folks who profess the sentiment presented in the very first paragraph of this posting, namely that all politics is worthless bullshit, and corrupt bullshit at that.  This belief relieves them of having to think and choose.  I really hope people like that don't vote at all, because the Republicans need their votes more than the Democrats do.  A flat-out numerical breakdown of voting in this country reveals that Democrats outnumber Republicans, and have outvoted them in seven of the last eight elections, even when the Republican has won.  But due to our unique form of electoral politics, giving individual states control of the process, the majority does not rule nationwide when it comes to the presidency, or for that matter, the senate.  And it bears mentioning that this system was conceived by a group of guys in wigs who were trying to make a country that could hold together even though half of its states had slavery and the other half didn't, and who had absolutely no intention of ever allowing nonwhites or women or people who didn't own property to vote.

     So, as we enter another hectic round of primaries and congressional elections, I wish to make this plea to all voters who are undecided about which of the two parties' candidates to vote for:  please don't vote.  Watch American Idol instead.

     

Supreme Politics

February 24, 2022

Cathedral City, California

     Let's talk about the Supreme Court of the U.S.  I'll dignify that rather flaccid group by capitalizing its name, although it probably doesn't deserve such respect at the moment.   The constitution gives the president the authority to appoint justices to the Supreme Court, but the Senate must agree to allow the appointments to go into effect.  Since no one has much of a sense of the history of the country or of the Supreme Court, and since the news media love nothing more than to sensationalize things and foretell the doom of the nation, today it's sort of assumed that the bunch currently comprising that body is uniquely politicized, just as the country itself is aware of its own increasing political polarization.  There persists a myth, or perhaps more accurately a misunderstanding, regarding the political neutrality of the Supreme Court.  In fact, it is indeed highly political, and has been ever since the inception of the country, but particularly since the beginning of the 1800s, when party politics really began to heat up.  

     Before getting more into that aspect of the Court, let's take a look at its current makeup.  In the days of yore, when George Washington and his early successors were appointing justices, the country was run solidly by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, save for a Catholic or two, usually from Maryland, which before it was a state was a British Catholic colony.  Such was the case with the Supreme Court, which didn't acquire its first Catholic justice, in the person of Roger Taney (from Maryland of course), until 1836.  Taney died in 1864, and another Catholic didn't come along until about thirty years later, but a tradition of sorts then evolved to reserve at least one seat for a Catholic.  Not long after the turn of the century, in 1916, the Court got its first Jewish justice, Louis Brandeis, and thereafter for most of the 20th century there have usually been one or more Jews on the Supreme Court.  

     Fast forward.  Today's Supreme Court is a far cry from the bewigged gaggle of WASPs who first inhabited it.  Protestants?  Well, I think there's one, Neil Gorsuch, although it appears that he started life as a Catholic but seems to prefer to be an Episcopalian now.  There are two Jews left after the demise of Ruth Ginsberg--Elena Kagan and Steven Breyer--although the latter is soon to depart from the court.  There is at present one African American justice, Clarence Thomas, who filled the "Black" seat on the Court after the death of Thurgood Marshall.  Soon there will be another African American, a woman, whose religion I don't know at this point.  It appears that of the top three likely candidates for nomination to succeed Breyer, one had a Jewish father but hasn't revealed her own religion, another is married to a Jewish man but might be Protestant herself, and the third is Catholic.  After all that shakes out, the breakdown of the Court will be as follows: six Republicans and three Democrats; five men and four women; seven whites, one Latina, and two African Americans; and seven or eight Christians and one or two Jewish persons, including six or seven Catholics, one or two Protestants, and one or two Jews.  It'll be a complex group demographically, and never before has the Court been quite this far away from its initial WASPishness, which on a stand-alone basis seems like it might be a good thing.

     You might well ask why it matters in the least what the religions of the Supreme Court justices are in a nominally secular nation, and most of the time you'd be right.  Who gives a shit about their religion, or whether they are religious at all?  Roger Taney, the first Catholic (pictured above), was a nasty and vehement racist and slaveholder, who gave us the Dred Scott decision, containing one of the most blatant manifestos of white supremacy ever to emanate from the Court.  In it he declared that a black person had no rights that needed to be respected by any white person.  But most of his fellow justices were slave holders, too, and went along.  The Catholic justices who followed Taney were a mixed bag.  Until very recently, that is.  Most of today's Catholic justices have been carefully chosen by their appointers (the two George Bushes and Donald Trump) not to increase religious diversity, but rather to decrease it, because their conservative Catholicism influences their political thinking in a rightward direction.  This is not to say that Catholics in the U.S. on the whole are Republicans; statistics indicate that they're split pretty evenly between the two parties.  But today's members of the conservative bloc, all Catholics save for the high church semi-Catholic Neil Gorsuch, are meaningful partly because they were selected based not only on the basis of their Republican political conservatism but also on the assumption that since they are Catholics they will oppose abortion rights, will support public spending for conservative parochial schools, will uphold discrimination against gays in the name of freedom of speech, and generally will erode the separation of church and state in as many ways as possible.  All of these things are coming to pass, thanks to that Catholic conservative bloc.  It would have been just about the same if the Bushes and Trump had appointed right-wing evangelical Protestants instead of Catholics, except that evangelicals on the whole aren't as intelligent or well-educated enough to become federal justices.  There is, to be fair, one lonely liberal Catholic on the court too, in the person of Sonia Sotomayor.

     Which brings us back to the inherently political nature of the Supreme Court.  Many people inadvertently confuse the nominally neutral role of judges at the lower levels of state courts with judges who are appointees to the federal bench by the President.  That's understandable.  When you're facing a judge in an ordinary courtroom, you are entitled to expect that judge to at least appear to be fair and impartial (even though many are not), and not to impose their political agenda on you, whether you're a prosecutor, a criminal defendant, or a civil litigant on either side.  The personal politics of the judge should not enter into whether you get a fair trial at that level, and if it does, that judge might be accused of committing some reversible error, the one thing lower court judges fear the most, because it's a sort of a rebuke to their competence and marks them as fair game for appeals from then on, not to mention limiting their chances of upward mobility.

     Now let's look at the federal judiciary, by contrast.  Because federal judges at all levels (district courts, circuit courts of appeal, and the Supreme Court) are appointed by the President or someone working for the president, and approved by the Senate, it is not merely by chance that they are usually of the same political party as the President is, or at least not significantly opposed to that President's politics.  And there are hundreds of federal judges--870 as of now.  Once on the bench, federal judges are there for life, so long as they behave themselves.  Their big boss is the Chief Justice of the United States, but they may be impeached by the Congress, just as a president may be.

     At the district court level federal judges are trial judges, just like their state counterparts.  But at the appellate and Supreme Court levels they do not retry cases on the merits, except for the Supreme Court in very limited circumstances.  Instead, they review lower court decisions and decide whether some federal (and hence constitutional) issue needs to be addressed.  However, they are all thoroughly political, especially the justices of the Supreme Court.  They wouldn't be there if they weren't, because no President with his wits about him would squander the chance to put his imprimatur on the Court by appointing someone who didn't think like he did, at least in broad terms.  Because federal judges are appointed for life, the one thing a President may do that will ensure his or her political legacy long into the future is to appoint federal judges and Supreme Court justices.  Other executive actions can be undone by successors, but the appointment of judges and justices cannot.  Donald Trump's single most nefarious accomplishment while president was getting three extremely conservative justices onto the Supreme Court, and they could well live for another thirty years before the Devil calls them home.  

     Again, this isn't new.  Thomas Jefferson was the first president this country had who would, in today's politics, be considered a Republican, although he was counted as a Democrat until very recently. (The labels hadn't been exactly settled on back then, but there were Federalists, like Washington and the Adamses, and their opponents, the Jeffersonians).  Why would Jefferson be a Republican today?  Well, for starters he was an avowed white supremacist and a profound hypocrite, as most Republicans are.  While eloquently declaring for the basic rights and equality of all persons, he owned hundreds of slaves, and forced one of them to be his concubine when she was about 14 years old, showing her off in Europe as he courted the French.  She soon got pregnant and ultimately gave him six more slaves.  (By the way, the aforementioned woman, Sally Hemings, happened to be Jefferson's late wife's half sister--in other words, Jefferson's father-in-law had sired her with one of his own slaves.)  Even though as president he signed a law banning the U.S. involvement in the international slave trade, at the time of his death he freed only about ten of his own--those with the cherished Jefferson blood coursing through their veins.  Also, he was in favor of the rights of individual states over the federal government (a perennial guise for pro-slavery and white supremacy, and a staple of the Republican party of today).  State's rights eventually led to the Civil War and since then has been the excuse that former slave states have used to perpetuate the suppression of minorities.  He also favored tax reductions, primarily to benefit the already wealthy, like him, another favorite Republican hobby horse.  Jefferson nevertheless gets high marks for his "forward thinking" and for being a brilliant and verbally nimble Renaissance man.  This forward thinking included his purchase of the French claim over the middle third of what is now the United States, enabling the spread of slavery and the forcible removal of east coast Indians to west of the Mississippi.     

     But the bane of Thomas Jefferson's existence during his eight-year presidency was the domination of the Supreme Court by independent and judicially-active Federalists appointed by Washington and John Adams, headed up by Chief Justice John Marshall, who, in 1803, established that the Supreme Court was completely independent from any sitting president and, moreover, was the ultimate authority on what was, and was not, constitutional.  Until then, that hadn't been quite clear, and Jefferson really didn't care for the idea.  While Jefferson did get three of his boys onto the court, he didn't have the majority of Republicans he would have wished for.  It wasn't until thirty years after Jefferson, when Andrew Jackson took office, that the Supreme Court was altered for good and filled with men even more roguish than the self-aggrandizing Jefferson would have chosen.

     Occasionally, nevertheless, the Supreme Court of today surprises even those who favor the politics of its majority.  Donald Trump found out, to his dismay, that he didn't own them, when they turned down, for the most part without comment, his sore-loser claims regarding the 2020 election.  But that was more a matter of repelling Trump's outright idiocy than it was of rejecting his basic Republican political views.  In related areas, such as allowing states to suppress voting rights and abortion rights, the Court will even things out for Trump and his followers in the coming months and years.

     In conclusion, lest anyone think for a moment that the Supreme Court of 2022 is overly politicized, bear in mind that there has never been a time in the history of the country when the politics of that august body has not been overwhelmingly in evidence, from the upholding of slavery and segregation, to the suppression of immigration, to the dismantling of the New Deal, to the enhancement of civil rights and the rights of criminal defendants, to the legalization of abortion and gay marriage, to the restriction of affirmative action, to the upholding of corporate rights, to the tearing down of the wall of separation between church and state.  Those of us who grew up in the days of the Earl Warren court were happy enough with its liberal decisions, even when presidents were not.  Today, barring a quick series of untimely deaths within the conservative majority, we will be living with some unhappy constitutional interpretations for the foreseeable future. 

Is It Warm In Here, Or Is It Just Me?

February 1, 2022

Cathedral City, California

     Let's talk about global warming, shall we?  Or climate change, as they like to call it, since the overall warming of things also causes anomalies in some places that don't make it warmer, and then stupid people are likely to say, "Global warming my ass, look how fucking cold it is out there!" and the point gets lost.  It's about two or three degrees of complexity beyond the thinking capacity of the average knuckleheaded American, at least, to connect the dots having to do with changes in ocean currents and weather patterns and all that.  Only when people in south Florida are up to their ankles in water at the Tiki Bar listening to Jimmy Buffett songs will they really get the point.  And maybe not even then.

    I'm not blogging here for the benefit of anybody who doesn't think global warming is happening.  But I also do not wish to beat a dead (or slowly drowning) horse.  The science is there, and I believe it.  Ice is melting off the glaciers at the poles, and when you add more water to a container of water (the oceans in this case), the water level goes up.  Anybody who's had Scotch on the rocks should know that.  And the carbon dioxide layer that is causing the melting is also holding in more heat everywhere.  So there you go.

     In a book I read recently, the author divided people's reactions to the inevitability of global warming into three categories:  optimism, in which people think that everything's going to be pretty much okay, come what may; pessimism, in which people think the world as we know it is going to be disastrously obliterated; and futurism, in which people are searching for a way to escape the planet and start over again somewhere else.  I'll address the futurists first, to get them out of the way.  They're a bunch of fools and nuts, and also monumentally selfish for thinking they can leave their own shitty mess behind and create another one somewhere else.  

     Now let's take a look at optimism and pessimism about the effects of global warming.  First, let me say that I don't fall squarely within either of these two camps.  I would call my own view one of guarded optimism.  I don't think everything's going to be great, by any means.  Lots of people will have to move because they live too close to shore.  And there will be large populations that can't move because they're too poor, and so they will fall victim to typhoons and floods and tidal waves.  Everyone won't be as affluently tidy and industrious and foresighted as, say, the Dutch.  Besides that, as it gets warmer, the distribution of fresh water will change, too, and agriculture will surely change as a result, maybe for the better and maybe for the worse, but change it will.  And that will be that.

     But there's this, also.  We're heading for hell in a fairly slow-moving handbasket.  That gives us time to come up with solutions, which is something we have a tendency to do when we are forced to.  By "we" I mean our species.  Other species will, for the most part, have to fend for themselves, unless they are ones we particularly care about and depend on for our own survival, like livestock and pets.  Whether or not that's a good thing is not going to be the subject of this posting.  But the fact remains that the only reason we care whether certain species become extinct is because it affects us in some way--morally, aesthetically, or materially.

     Back to the warmth.  It's a done deal, for sure, but the real question is what it will do to the resources we depend on for survival.  Our survival is paramount to us, just as, I assume, the survival of other animals is paramount to them.  Everything we've seen about human progress indicates that as time has gone by, there have been more of us and fewer of other species.  Maybe some day it'll just be humans and corn and a handful of pollinating birds and insects.  And that'll do it.  

     Here's a funny thing about global warming.  These days, absolutely every damned thing that happens, weatherwise and climatewise, gets blamed on global warming.  If there's a hurricane in New Orleans, well, that's global warming.  If it's a colder winter than usual in Iowa, that's global warming.  If it snows in Istanbul, well, you know what to blame that on, right?  This warming trend gets the blame for it all, whether it's at the root of it or not.  And in any event there's not a goddamned thing we can do about it, really.  Iacta alea est, as Caesar said.  The die is cast.  We can certainly slow the progression of warming a tiny bit, or speed it up, but we can't change the fact that it's going to keep happening for the foreseeable future.

     So I say, relax.  But by relax, I don't mean do nothing, only just quit wringing your hands, or gnashing your teeth, or doing any of those other things that start with a silent letter (knocking on wood? psyching yourself out?).  Worrying is going to do absolutely no good, and will divert us from our goals.  Instead, get to work, mankind.  Already we've seen what can be done in this country when the government even modestly encourages (under the current administration), rather than vigorously discourages (as was done under the previous administration) the transition to energy sources and usages that spew less carbon into the air, or at least slow that process down.  Windmills, which I personally hate and consider a blight on the landscape, are proliferating, and getting bigger and more efficient.  So I'll put up with the ugliness, at least until they come up with something better.  Solar panels are another good way to create electricity, and we seem to be creating more solar areas in the deserts and on rooftops, and most importantly, the collection technology is improving.  And those are just the two that come to mind.  Electric vehicles are a foregone conclusion and going full tilt now, too, though the source of the electricity for their recharging needs to be cleaner, too.  

     However, despite all our best efforts, even if we were to somehow magically unite worldwide on the issue of carbon emission and dedicate ourselves to putting the brakes on it, nothing will reverse its inevitable course.  There are too many people using too much stuff for that to happen, and the rest of human progress has done nothing but create conditions for the population to increase, rather than decrease.  And even as we try to become more affluent and spread a higher standard of living throughout the world, we create more of what has put us in this global warming mess in the first place--cars, appliances, and the need for more carbon-emitting energy.  So should we throw up our hands and say, in effect, forget about it, because it's only going to get worse?   Should we somehow, magically, revert to some prehistoric manner of living?  That would be the thinking of the pessimists on the issue.  And it is going to get worse, or warmer, anyway.

     Coming to grips with global warming is a little like suddenly facing up to the fact that you're getting older.  Your first impulse is to deny it, as many people are denying climate change, or ascribing it to natural fluctuations in the earth's temperature that have happened historically over millions of years, and doing nothing except to ensure immediate comfort.  Then after that, with respect to aging, your impulse is to panic, and to ascribe every little thing to the aging process.  Oh my god, I have an ache or pain that I didn't have yesterday--I must be getting older.  Shit!  Then after that, for some folks at least, the next step is to get busy changing lifestyles in order to stave off the effects of aging--changing diet, getting more exercise, taking medication to improve cardiovascular health, all the while cheating a little here and there.  That's the stage where we are now vis a vis global warming, at least among the Paris Climate Accord nations.  But as with aging, while that may buy us some time, it's not going to reverse the process.  It's going to progress.

     But here my analogy breaks down.  Because with individual human aging the inevitable outcome is, simply, death.  On the other hand, with climate change we don't know the outcome yet.  It might be the death of homo sapiens, but I really doubt that.  Nor will it be some sort of accelerated evolution in a specific direction, like Kevin Costner with his gills in that silly movie Waterworld.  Rather, I predict that we'll muddle along for a long long time, just getting warmer and dealing with it.  And who knows whether this will come about, since it will happen over centuries and this blog will disappear or become as incomprehensible as the languages on the Rosetta stone once were.

     So fuck it, and don't worry.

    

In The Year

January 19, 2022

Cathedral City, California

     I woke up on the morning of New Year's Day with an old song from the late 60s in my head, "In the Year 2525," by Zager and Evans, a couple of one-hit wonders from Nebraska, of all places, who had a band called The Eccentrics.  Although statistically speaking, some famous and semi-famous people are bound to be from Nebraska (Johnny Carson and Henry Fonda come to mind immediately), I've always had trouble imagining anyone returning to and staying in Nebraska after fame has touched them, however briefly.  But this is just what Denny Zager, one-half of that duo did.  Now in his late 70s, he lives and builds custom guitars somewhere in the Cornhusker State.  The other half, Rick Evans, died in 2018 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  

     I don't have much more to say about Zager and Evans, the guys, because that's all I cared to find out from Google.  And it's enough about them.  Unless they sold and signed away their royalty rights to the song (a distinct possibility, given the shady nature of the record business), this tune must have generated a nice modest income for them, having sold millions of copies over the years and having been played on oldies stations for decades to come.

     The song, as its name states, is about the future, and how things will be dramatically different.  And like any such song, or story, or movie of the sort, it was wrought from the uneasy feeling that was generated (pre-social media, mind you), by the 1960s news of the fast-changing nature of things, scientific, political, and otherwise.  The song was written earlier in the decade, but it came out in 1969, around the time the first men walked on the moon.  And it even has a subtitle.  The complete name of the song is "In the Year 2525 (Exordium & Terminus)."  The latter two Latin words mean beginning and end, although really the song isn't about the beginning of anything in particular, just about the possible end of things, or maybe the beginning of the end, I don't know.  I think it was an affectation put in there to give it a bit of an intellectual flavor.

     The song is basically silly and self-parodying, but I think it's meant to be taken seriously.  It fancifully predicts various changes in human conditions over thousands of years.  Here I might as well set out at least some of the lyrics, in case you weren't around when it came out, or have forgotten, or were living in a country where it didn't get any airplay:                                                                            

        In the year 2525, if man is still alive

        If woman can survive, they may find

        In the year 3535

        Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lie

        Everything you think, do and say

        Is in the pill you took today.

        In the year 4545

        You ain't gonna need your teeth, won't need your eyes

        You won't find a thing to chew

        Nobody's gonna look at you ....

                                                                                                             

And it goes on from there, at intervals of a thousand years or so, with humans needing less and less of our physical faculties, due to technology, and being able to choose test-tube babies, then ending with some expectation that God might come back and put an end to it all, because, of course, we've fucked everything up--we haven't taken care of the earth.  This was a sort of amalgamation of Christian orthodoxy and the then-current thinking of disaster mongers like Paul Ehrlich (zero population growth), and a general uneasiness about technology that persists to this day.

     The idea of a dystopian future based on technology gone awry wasn't new to Zager and Evans, of course.  There was Orwell's 1984, and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and that granddaddy of time travel books, H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, which came out over 125 years ago.  Really, when you think about it, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein sort of got that ball rolling back in 1818.  But let's not forget that granddaddy of dystopian fantasies, the book of Revelation at the end of the Christian bible.  At any rate, from the very birth of television and cinema we've been churning out stories by the truckload about the future gone off the rails, because they sell like hotcakes.  Hotcakes gone horribly awry.  The Hotcake that Ate Cincinnati.

     The thing that practically all science fiction has in common, regardless of its media form, whether it's a lightweight pop song like "In the Year 2525," or a serious tome like Fahrenheit 451, or a series like the "Planet of the Apes" movies, is that it's not really about the future at all.  Nor it is about the past.  It's about the present, and the things in the present that scare us, whether they be pollution, or nuclear warfare, or runaway technology of some sort, or the evolution of species.  And it's never about how much better things will be in the future, but rather about how messed up they've become.  Which brings me to my main point.

     Fear rules us.  It is the motivator of all hatred, distrust, search for meaning, religious mumbo jumbo, you name it.  The conglomeration of media machines that perpetuate fear are our main sources of information, and the touchstones of all our anxieties.  Back before there was much in the way of mass media, fearmongering was almost exclusively in the adept hands of religious practitioners--the clergy, whether you called them priests or prophets or soothsayers.  Keeping people in fear of danger on earth and eternal damnation has been the business of Christianity throughout its history, and a hell of a lot of money has been made by helping people to think they are staving off that damnation.  And before Christianity, going back thousands more years, even farther than Zager and Evans went in the other direction into the future, fear of the unknown kept us as a species guessing and wondering what would happen next--famine, fire, eclipses, floods, injuries, attacks by predators, you name it.  All fear, naturally, is based on our fear of the one thing over which we have no control whatever, namely, the fact that sooner or later we are all going to die. 

     But just a brief look back into human history ought to infuse any sensible person less with fear than with hope, at least in terms of what we're capable of doing technologically to postpone our inevitable demise.  Yeah, sure, we've killed lots of people with wars.  I'm not forgetting that.  But as far as what we've been able to accomplish for the overall success and longevity of our species, we've really kicked ass.  Let's go back just a hundred years, a mere twinkle in the eye of the Almighty, if we're disposed to think in such terms.  In 1918, when the influenza pandemic was sweeping the world, we had no penicillin to fight off the secondary bacterial pneumonia that was one of the main reasons the flu killed so many people rather than just making them sick and miserable.  Smallpox was deadly everywhere because medical science hadn't yet perfected mass inoculation against it.  Diabetics routinely died because insulin injections hadn't been developed.  Tuberculosis was something to fear, as well as diphtheria and whooping cough and yellow fever and cholera and a host of other illnesses or conditions.  In fact, a century ago infectious diseases of all kinds were the leading cause of death, period.  But besides that, people clogged their arteries simply as a byproduct of their normal diets, and high blood pressure was considered inevitable, so heart attacks and strokes just happened once you got to a certain age.  Cancer was considered pretty much unpreventable.  Those things all happen now, too, but a hundred years ago human life expectancy was at least twenty years less than it is today.  And that's just the medical side of things.  

     A century ago most people didn't have telephones or television.  Cars went 30 or 40 miles per hour tops, and the roads they bumped along on weren't much good.  Air travel was barely in existence.  Computers hadn't been invented.  Human sanitation still mostly consisted of outhouses and pumps on the back porch and ditches filled with sewage that ran indiscriminately into the nearest river or ocean.  Women were even more restricted in their opportunities and independence than they are today.  It was against the law to be anything other than hetero in your sexual practices.  And as for being nonwhite, well, forget about it--you just had to hunker down and take whatever shit the white man felt like dishing out.  I could go on and on.  And true enough, many of those things aren't even close to being fully corrected yet.  But incrementally, we're getting better, not worse, than we were then.  And still, we tend to be pessimistic in our predictions for the future.  Bad news sells.  Optimism doesn't.  Humans seem to be born to be fearful, despite all the evidence to the contrary.  Fear, I suppose, was wired into us at an early stage in our development, and hasn't left, only found new outlets.   

     Now, a thing like Covid has to give one pause, since it's not really a good piece of news for the human species, and shows how vulnerable we can be.  But consider the fact that science and governments, in just two years, have fostered and created vaccines and boosters that effectively mitigate Covid's worst symptoms (so far at least), and have made these vaccines readily available, for the most part, to those who choose to get them, and also, come to think of it, to the stupid assholes who refuse to get them.  The virus, which only wants to live, like we do, has, thanks to those unvaccinated people, stayed alive and well, but also has mutated into a form that is much more alive and well than its original version, if less deadly at present.  Viruses don't want to kill off their hosts, they just want to be able to pass successfully from one host to another.  But here's the good news.  Even an unscientific guy like me knows all that, thanks to the diligence of the scientific community.  And the scientific community, in two years, knows more about this virus than it learned about smallpox or cholera or the plague over hundreds or even thousands of years.  So that's a bit of a silver lining in the dark cloud that hangs over us currently.

     Nevertheless, we'll continue to be bombarded by worst-case scenarios, both in the news media and in the science fiction extensions of our current fears.  And the lines between the two will continue to blur.  I don't know how many people actually believe in zombies and vampires and the probability of a meteor hitting the earth soon, but I'll bet it's a significant percentage of the population.  And an even larger percentage don't believe that medical science can assist us in managing things like Covid, if we would only listen.  Now that's scary.