I was reading an article in Orion magazine, written by the Irish author Paul Kingsnorth, called Life versus the Machine and thought this part was particularly interesting -
"When I was young, I thought that the world was divided into good and bad people, and that I was one of the good ones. Later, slightly older, I thought it was divided into informed and ignorant people, and that I was one of the informed ones. Older still, though still not nearly old enough, I thought it was divided into Bad Elites and Good Masses, and that since I had no money or power, I must belong to the second category.
For a number of years, I believed that this second category was made up of people who, if they knew the truth about the human massacre of nonhuman life, would demand significant changes to society, and be prepared to make sacrifices accordingly.
I was an idiot.
Now I think that humans like ease, material comfort, entertainment, and conformity, and they do not like anyone who threatens to take these things away. I think that even the people who say these things should be taken away in order to prevent the collapse of life on Earth do not really mean it."
Being a human he talks about what he has or has not done to reduce his carbon footprint. He then quotes Samuel Beckett saying, "You're on Earth. There's no cure for that."
It's interesting to think about that quote in context of what we can or can't do individually to reduce our carbon footprint vs. what we choose to do individually to reduce our carbon footprint. As humans we'll do whatever we want but while doing that we should not fail to recognize that there is no out there, away from here, where we can go - as Dr. Bronner the soap maker tells us on his soap bottles, we are "all-one" on this "spaceship earth".
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And now for something completely different, as they used to say on Monty Python.
It's one of those easy to misunderstand complex discussions where some might be tempted to think this a rock they can put in their pocket to throw at the next hippie they hear talking about reducing our carbon footprint.
I'd listen to the whole lecture and do further research if you are interested.
It does say something about the dangers of moving to the radical extremes of either left or right ideologies. It also confirms the observation that individual humans are complicated and not the simple stereotypes we use to try and understand contemporary or historical individuals or groups of individuals.
Humans contain lightness and darkness - as Russell Crowe said in the movie 3:10 to Yuma, "even bad men love their Mamas".
I'm still reading American Amnesia and am looking forward to getting to the part of the book where they suggest ways to fix this broken system.
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If you live in the San Francisco Bay area a knee replacement will cost you more than $100,000. In Fresno, approximately 150 miles away, it will cost you less than $14,000. In the U.S. a patient was quoted $78,000 for a hip replacement - not including surgeons fees. The patient got the hip replaced in Belgium for $13,660 which included all provider fees, operating room costs, five days in the hospital, a week in rehab, and round-trip airfare. On average, U.S. insurers pay $10,000 when a woman gives birth, in the Netherlands it's $2,824. American's spending on health care accounts for about one-sixth of the domestic economy compared with around one-tenth or less in other rich nations. In 1980 Switzerland and the U.S. had comparable per capita spending on health care. Switzerland moved to control costs while universalizing coverage. By 2010 the Swiss were spending about a third less per person than we were. If the U.S. would have followed the same trajectory we would have saved $15,000,000,000,000 (trillion). That remarkable sum could have financed a four-year college degree for more than 175 million Americans. It could also have eliminated all federal deficits over the same period and left a healthy surplus. Take out rising medical expenditures and the federal budget is more or less balanced as far as the eye can see. In 2010 Republican politicians made cutting food stamps the centerpiece of their agenda for fiscal constraint calling for $40 billion in cutbacks over five years. The federal government spends more than that on health care every three weeks. In the early 2000's when Medicare Part D was enacted, and since that time, the Republican party blocked efforts to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices to contain costs. Republican politicians pursued changes to Medicare that increased, rather than restrained medical costs. In particular the growing role of private plans within the program. Through an aggressive lobbying effort and gaming of the reimbursement formulas this has cost Medicare nearly $300 billion in excess payments between 1985 and 2012. Even facing these headwinds Medicare costs have risen slower than private insurance costs in recent years. Medicare has seen a 1% per increase in costs vs. private insurance increase of 4% per year for comparable procedures. The health insurance industry gave the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over $102 million dollars to fight health care reform in 2009 and 2010. Since reporting began in 1998 pharmaceutical manufacturers, medical device makers, health insurers, hospitals and medical professionals have reported spending over $6 billion on lobbying. Between the start of 2009 and the end of 2010 three industries - health care, finance and energy each spent $1 billion dollars on lobbying. No one knows how much dark money is spent in these efforts. Republican politicians in the 2000's jumped on the "tort reform" bandwagon claiming frivolous malpractice lawsuits were causing health care costs to rise. So called defensive medicine to avoid these lawsuits account for a tiny fraction of health care costs (1 to 2 percent). Texas and California, two states that enacted caps on damages (tort reform), saw their medical costs rise as quickly as states without such measures.
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Republican politician Rick Scott the recent Governor of the great state of Florida and now one of it's newly elected Senators oversaw the largest Medicare fraud in history during his tenure as CEO of the health care corporation Columbia/HCA.
I can't help but think that there has to be some division within the business community about Republicans and some Democrats catering to special interests in the health care industry to maximize profits. This drives the costs for consumers (including businesses who pay for health insurance for their employees) ever higher...while we see increasingly poorer outcomes relative to other rich nations.
If you are a Republican, in case you didn't already know, this is not your father's (or mother's) party.
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Since we're talking about numbers how about a song about math?
Well not exactly but I'm a fan of Laurie Anderson and am really glad B and I got to see her in Seattle years ago.
This is the 2000th post I've put on this blog since I started it a little over sixteen years ago - my how time flies. Here's an example of a post from back then. I've left this blog dormant for periods of time but I've been using it lately as a way to organize some of my thoughts in these amazing times.
I like to listen to lefty podcasts and have been impressed recently by some of the podcasts from Seattle based Pitchfork Economics hosted by Seattle venture capitalist Nick Hanauer.
The three I've listened to so far include a podcast with the provocative title, "Why Does the U.S. Hate Families?" discussing the challenges working people face in finding and paying for quality child care. They also discuss how the U.S. lags other developed nations in helping working families with child care and early childhood education, and how this adversely impacts the U.S. economy.
The second podcast is titled Do Regulations Kill Growth? It's got a really interesting discussion about the pillow industry from Nick Hanauer who says, "he grew up in a profoundly dishonest business - specifically the pillow business." It's interesting if you like to collect weird facts like how much it costs to produce a white goose down pillow vs. a ground up chicken feather pillow - but it's also being used to illustrate a point about how markets without appropriate regulation can fail to work for consumers and honest business owners.
The third podcast is an interview with Yuval Harari a lecturer in the history department, Hebrew University Jerusalem and the author of several books including the 2014 book - Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. I haven't read that book but it sounds worth reading based on the podcast and the blurb on Amazon that says it was on the summer reading lists of Barack Obama, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.
When I first heard the name Nick Hanauer from Seattle I confused his name with Chip Hanauer the hydroplane racer and was thinking - wow what a diverse set of interests. I'm still impressed with the quality of some of these podcasts even if Nick isn't a hydroplane boat driver.
The blog associated with Pitchfork Economics is hosted on Medium and called Civic Skunk Works. Pitchfork Economics is also one of the shows on TYT.
It seems appropriate that people in Jet City who are interested in breakthrough ideas to help society would use the term skunk works that we usually associate with technological breakthroughs in the aerospace industry
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This is my take on part of what professor Harari was saying in the podcast-
Humans are able to organize and cooperate to a greater extent than any other animal. We are able to do this through shared stories. We have created stories to describe all sorts of things, including human constructs like money (as a concept), appropriate minimum wage, and the mostly pseudo-science of economics. When we say something is a natural law or God's law what that really means is humans created a story about some thing which for a variety of reasons eventually came to be thought of as an inviolable law.
The point being that significant changes are possible if we change our shared stories.
The story of the day from some is "the economy is doing great." If you are a 1 percenter, or better yet a .1 percenter, or heavily invested in the stock market that might be so, but for a significant segment of the population the economy isn't doing great and hasn't for about 40 years.
Barbara Ehrenreich's book Nickel and Dimed - On Not Getting By in America provides some insights into what it's like for the people who survive on the wages from a minimum or low-wage job(s).
Of course the first step to solving any problem is to recognize there is a problem. We can help people recognize the problem(s) by changing the stories we tell each other. So....when a political adviser said it's (all about) the economy stupid - he was right. The challenge is to expand the stories we tell about "the economy" beyond the simplistic notion that it's the stock market, or the unemployment rate, or GDP.
We might talk about the success/failure of the economy in terms of gross national happiness which includes these nine domains -
1. Psychological well being
2. Health
3. Education
4. Time use
5. Cultural diversity and resilience
6. Good governance
7. Community vitality
8. Ecological diversity and resilience
9. Living standards
We might measure our country's economic success by tracking how well we are doing at fulfilling Maslow's hierarchy of needs for citizens of the U.S. We have to fulfill humans basic physiological needs for warmth, rest, food, water and shelter - before we can move up the ladder.
When we talk about what the economy is and how it is doing we need to tell stories that include facts.
Facts like 40% of Americans can't come up with 400 dollars in case of an emergency. Facts about the tragic levels of childhood poverty in the U.S. Facts showing stagnation in wages for middle class workers and explosion of compensation for CEO's over the last several decades. Facts showing corporate tax cuts don't result in increased R&D or worker wages/benefits. Once we expand the notion of what the economy is and who it should serve we can tell each other better stories and over time improve our country for all people.
All those facts made me think of this scene, from the 1964 Pink Panther movie "A Shot in the Dark", where Inspector Clouseau is explaining the facts. ;-)
The words used to describe political belief systems can be hard to understand when we consider the history of those systems.
A popular belief, aided by corporate media's constant repetition, is that the Republican Party is the party of conservative beliefs. The ideologies promoted by the modern Republican party since the 1980's actually trace their origin to the English philosopher John Locke who was an important figure in the development of classical liberalism. Classical liberalism emphasizes free markets and individual rights, particularly the rights of individuals to thrive or fail based on individual merit.
A case can be made that conservatism is derived from the thought of Edmund Burke. This type of conservatism places a strong emphasis on custom, convention, tradition, bonds of social order and the defense of ancestral institutions. Wendell Berry who decries the destruction of small farms and communities in the name of free market capitalism demonstrates elements of this type of conservatism.
Free-market capitalism disrupts culture, community, and family - making it antithetical to conservatism. The ideologues of free-market capitalism refer to this disruption of our social fabric euphemistically as creative destruction. Capitalism has created unprecedented wealth and worked better than any other system to distribute that wealth but it's been failing to do the latter for decades.
The Republican party of today has gone beyond the roots of classical liberalism to what is called neo-liberalism. This ideology holds that the state should be as small as possible to maximize individual freedom. In this worldview, freedom allows members of society to thrive or fail based on individual effort - a meritocracy. It's appealing to think that people who succeed deserve their success because of their individual merit - intelligence, thrift, and hard work. Sounds fair right?
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He gets criticized probably rightly so by some, but Edward Murray's book Coming Apart The State of White America 1960-2010 illustrates just how misguided and unfair the idea that people rise or fall in society based on individual merit has become.
Murray talks about "super-zips" his name for select areas in the U.S. with excellent private schools - from pre-K to university level, excellent medical care, easy access to healthy food, low crime rates, and professional jobs with high incomes. He contrasts these areas where the super-elite reside with areas that regular Americans live that have failing public schools, high crime rates, low wage jobs and persistent poverty.
If by accident of birth you happened to not be born in a super-zip but instead into an area where there is no pre-K education, failing public schools, limited or no access to medical care and healthy food, high crime rates and broken families - often as a result of rampant addiction...well then the meritocracy doesn't work so good for you. If you don't have any boots it's hard to pull yourself up by your bootstraps as they say.
We now have generations of people who know the U.S. only through the vantage point of the super-zip(s) in which they were born, educated, work and live. When I was a kid, rich and not rich people lived in the same neighborhoods, attended the same churches and schools, shopped at the same grocery stores, had drinks at the same bars and got to know each other to some degree.
Murray holds that the emergence of super-zips has resulted in a cultural split between the residents of super-zips and the rest of the country. Cultural splits in what and where they eat, what they drink, how much TV they watch, which TV shows they watch, what they read, when or if they marry, how they raise their children.
He proposes this has led to a class system in the United States which didn't exist prior to the 1980's/90's. In comparison Nancy Isenberg's book White Trash The 400 Year Untold History of Class in America makes the argument that class has been part of America since it's founding. Richard Nixon said in 1959, "The United States, the world’s largest capitalist country, has from the standpoint of distribution of wealth come closest to the ideal of prosperity for all in a classless society." Murray's book illustrates how far we have departed from the society Nixon observed in 1959.
Do we live in a democratic or aristocratic society? Murray and Isenberg are both making the case for this being an aristocracy. Murray is pointing out how the last several decades have brought class divisions into sharp focus. Since it's founding America has been ruled by elites which worked because our meritocratic system allowed everyday Americans to enter the elite class. The development of super-zips broke that system. The last time we had a revolution in the U.S. it was a rebellion against rule by a titled nobility in England. Super-zips provide us with kings, queens, lords and ladies today with inherited wealth, privilege and massive political power...they just don't have the titles.
Super-zips provide our country with CEO's, politicians, supreme court judges and the popular media. So....we have lots of very powerful people who are clueless about how the other 90% of America lives - what they believe, what they fear, what they need or what their dreams are.
No wonder the media elites who grew up in the super-zips keep wanting to travel to fly-over country to figure out what's going on with those Trump-voters. Media bashing is fun but I'm more interested in how CEO's, politicians and supreme court judges could possibly represent the interests of people they know nothing about.
I have to confess to being sort of an elite-lite in how out of touch I have been with what's happening outside my bubble. I was surprised to see so many Trump signs when driving from the West coast to Montana a few years ago. I'm starting to get it I think. In my defense I'd say I sort of lost track of what was going on in the larger world - what with work and kids and all that life stuff.
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So much for meritocracy what about this idiocracy? You probably already know that is the name of a movie. I'm using it in a more generic sense to consider the possibility of a group/nation/world of idiots.
The long quote that follows is the introduction to the book - Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman: "We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions."
In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.
This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right. Here's a video of Neil Postman discussing his book in 1985.
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It's not yet clear where this leads, but Neil Postman was quite prophetic. If no one reads books and we have an unlimited number of distractions every waking moment it's hard to see how society progresses. An informed citizenry is necessary for a democracy and we aren't becoming informed through antisocial media, TV or radio. One last thing on the movie Idiocracy. I haven't watched the whole thing for years but I have been watching the trailer. The trailer makes me a bit uncomfortable in it's simplistic stereotyping and disdain for poor people but it is a comedy and probably contains some truth. It's worth considering if this is some elite created propaganda implying that since we theoretically live in a meritocracy, it's okay for fortunate people to look down on poor people because they are too lazy and ignorant to better themselves. I thought the poor peoples house with the dirt bike spinning around in the yard looked kind of fun - at least to my younger self.
The Roosevelt Institute paper is 82 pages but John Cassidy summarizes it's content in a short article which he ends with this statement -
In its concluding section, the Roosevelt Institute report strikes a hopeful note. “The task ahead is large, but it’s not impossible,” it says. “We are at a rare moment in our politics when older paradigms for how we govern our society and shape our economy no longer work, and a new worldview, though emerging, is not yet dominant. Americans are hungry for big, new ideas, and voters will reward leadership that is able to articulate those ideas clearly and put them into action.The conservative policy agenda that triumphed from the nineteen-seventies onward was an expansive one, and it will take an equally expansive effort to roll it back.” Let’s hope that’s right.
Yes let us hope.
I addition to having hope, I think this statement from the article is worth thinking about -
"The conservative policy agenda that triumphed from the nineteen-seventies onward was an expansive one, and it will take an equally expansive effort to roll it back."
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Just how expansive an effort would it take to roll back 30 or 40 years of government policies enacted by politicians at the behest of the wealthiest and most powerful people and entities in this country to favor the privileged few at the expense of the majority of American people?
I'm not overly confident that most Americans understand how organized, well funded and pervasive the radical right's takeover of government has been. If you've ever had occasion to read Jane Mayer's work concerning money in politics or her book Dark Money, or Nancy MacLean's book Democracy in Chains - The Deep History of the Radical Rights Stealth Plan for America you would know that uber-wealthy individuals have been setting the groundwork, and manipulating the levers of power to make government as dysfunctional as possible for decades.
The radical libertarians goal is to eliminate or neuter government and government regulations and allow the free market to rule. In this short sighted and ahistorical view; if capitalism is set free from the coercive effects of government, then prosperity and social benefits will be maximized.
Never mind that no developed country in history has ever followed such a path to prosperity, or that when our country was at it's most prosperous (post WWII until the 1970's) government took an active role in markets, or that the experiment the radical libertarians started in the 1980's has proven to be an abysmal failure for a large segment of the U.S. population.
Some (more all the time one hopes) find it troubling that a government controlled by a small group of individuals/corporations is a simple description of fascism. The fact that there are no large successful economies in the world that follow the libertarian dream of minimal or no government does not deter the true believers or their paid spokespeople.
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The actor/President Ronald Reagan said in his 1981 inaugural address, "Government is not the solution to our problem it is the problem." He followed up at a news conference years later with this, "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
Since that time, corporations and plutocrats have bought right wing politicians to do everything they can to ensure government doesn't work. They have done this knowing that if people perceive government as irredeemably dysfunctional they either - give up on the political process and don't vote (which benefits the GOP) or support the radicals that fund and control the GOP in their efforts to dismantle government.
The resulting weakened non-representative government allows corporations and plutocrats to run the country. It's some crazy radical stuff for those who were taught we live in a representative democracy to think there is some stealthy forces dismantling our government - but this version of the story doesn't interest corporate media, so we've all come to believe it's just a bunch of business oriented folks trying to make government more efficient for the betterment of all.
You have to do some careful reading and research to start to see the contours of how radical this stuff is. Most people have heard of the Koch brothers and know they fund radical right wing libertarian causes with tremendous amounts of money. There are many other suppliers of dark money but they are the most well known. The Koch brothers father Fred C. Koch was a founding member of the John Birch Society back in the late 1950's.
When I was a kid the only way to know anything about the John Birch society was to know someone who was in it or somehow get your hands on what they called the Blue Book - which explained the principals of their organization. If you saw a sign that said "Get the U.S. out of the United Nations" or "Fight Fluoridated Water" it was probably from the Birchers. They were considered an extreme radical conspiracy minded libertarian group and pretty much forgotten about by most Americans (me anyway). Sixty some years later the sons of Fred Koch have as much if not more power in politics as the GOP.
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Ronald Reagan was a spokesperson for one of the biggest corporations in America prior to being elected president and after his election he became the spokesperson for all big corporations and plutocrats in America. His conversion from liberal democrat and president of a union (SAG) was quite extreme...unless we think about how absolutely power corrupts.
I know people love Reagan and he was a good cheerleader sort of person but his policies (which are now called neoliberalism) proved to be incredibly damaging to middle and working class Americans. You can pretty much draw a straight line from Reagan to Clinton to Bush to the dismal performance of the United States in key indicators of a nation's overall well-being, compared to any other economically developed country of our time.
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One of my favorite stories concerning Ronald Reagan's veracity was written by Oliver Sacks in his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. I like it because it illustrates how smart people can be fooled by a skilled politician's use of words. The chapter about Reagan is called The President's Speech. Here's part of it -
What was going on? A roar of laughter from the aphasia ward, just as the President's speech was coming on, and they had all been so eager to hear the President speaking. ..
Thus the feeling I sometimes have-which all of us who work closely with aphasiacs have-that one cannot lie to an aphasiac. He cannot grasp your words, and so cannot be deceived by them; but what he grasps he grasps with infallible precision, namely the expression that goes with the words, that total, spontaneous, involuntary expressiveness which can never be simulated or faked, as words alone can, all too easily. ..
And what dogs can do here, aphasiacs do too, and at a human and immeasurably superior level. 'One can lie with the mouth,' Nietzsche writes, 'but with the accompanying grimace one nevertheless tells the truth.'
We recognize this with dogs, and often use them for this purpose-to pick up falsehood, or malice, or equivocal intentions, to tell us who can be trusted, who is integral, who makes sense, when we --so susceptible to words-- cannot trust our own instincts.
That quote from Nietzsche, that one can lie with the mouth, but with the accompanying grimace one tells the truth - makes me wonder about the truthfulness of this guy. Not really.
We shouldn't be surprised that people living in Fantasyland where the industrial entertainment complex is going 24/7 365 have been conditioned to believe anything.
The Kurt Anderson book Fantasyland - How America Went Haywire is an interesting look at how American's went from landing a man on the moon, to questioning if we ever landed a man on the moon, to believing the earth is flat - something seemingly settled for centuries until Twitter, YouTube and Facebook brought some of us back to a pre-enlightenment (pre-factual or pre-scientific if you will) society.
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How expansive an effort is required to roll back the takeover of American government by the .1% that has occurred these last few decades?
I think the first thing is to consider how challenging it is to get the story to a majority of voters. Even understanding some of it takes either a fair amount of attention or absent that - trust in someone else's version of how the world works.
I'm not sure people have considered just how entrenched the people with power are and what lengths they will go to in order to maintain the status-quo.
People, hoping to change the status-quo, must have some knowledge of history.
How did American's create a government and economy that lifted all boats (not just the yachts) and made the USA a world leader in technology, productivity, research, medicine and education - from the post-war years until the 1970's? Hint - It wasn't the Reagan revolution - since we've followed those neo-liberal policies the US has fallen far behind other developed countries in these key areas.
The US has even lost it's place as the country with the tallest average height, with various European countries now vying for first. Childhood nutrition and medical care are key factors in how tall children grow to be. Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson devote a chapter titled "Coming Up Short" to this topic in their book American Amnesia - How The War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper.
People wanting to change the status quo have to understand the tremendous effort from unions, activists, protesters, politicians, writers, artists and everyday citizens into creating a government and economy that served all classes. It was a hard fought battle (often literally) over decades.
It was, and is, a battle - between the minority (those with wealth and power) and the majority (working people). Any attempt to regulate the free market was attacked as socialism, communism, un-american or the end of capitalism and prosperity. Even something as seemingly uncontroversial as prohibiting child labor was fought tooth and nail by the free market capitalists. You might argue times have changed but I don't think people change all that much.
It seems to me that in order for political means to overcome the dysfunction in government we need a wider appreciation for how much blood, sweat and tears went into achieving the gains working class people were able to obtain. Consider just one movement that was crucial for gains for the working class in the early 1900's - the IWW or as they were popularly called the Wobblies.
Joe Hill was a Swedish/American labor activist and member of the IWW in the early 1900's. He was charged with murder and executed by firing squad in Utah in 1915. Facts in the case indicate he was innocent and some people believe he was a political prisoner executed for his union activity.
In 1916, a year after Joe Hill was executed, the Everett Massacre occurred. The shingle weavers had been on strike against the mill owners for some time and tensions were high. A confrontation arose on the waterfront between the Wobblies - and the sheriff, deputies and volunteer deputies. From the Wikipedia article -
"At the end of the mayhem, two citizen deputies lay dead with 16 or 20 others wounded, including Sheriff McRae. The two businessman-deputies that were shot were actually shot in the back by fellow deputies; their injuries were not caused by Wobbly gunfire. The IWW officially listed 5 dead with 27 wounded, although it is speculated that as many as 12 IWW members may have been killed."
The IWW is still around today. Noam Chomsky is a member as well as Josh Dukes the peacemaker shot by a MAGA woman attending an event featuring a right wing provocateur named Milo something at the University of Washington.
That word provocateur is interesting, it's a shortened form of agent provocateur which means an agent hired to make trouble. I mention that because it's interesting to think about who, or what group, hires people like Milo to incite violence on college campuses. I suspect it's the same class of people who hired the Pinkertons to infiltrate and damage labor unions.
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I hope the U.S. can effect change through the political process.
If that isn't possible it won't be people of good faith attempting change through peaceful protest that cause civil unrest. It will be confused angry people who more likely than not will have been convinced by Fox and other right wing propaganda to attack innocent people - who they have made into scapegoats.
2016 was an inflection point - there was a primal scream from a lot of confused angry people and we ended up with an entertainer/conman in the White House - who has done nothing that would benefit those people. Being unencumbered by the thought process he did blurt out to the fat cats at Mar Largo what a solid he did them with the GOP Tax Plan. Naturally the audience at Mar Largo is supportive of a plan that redistributes wealth upward. The fact that it leaves an additional trillion dollars plus in debt for our children to pay someday seems to be okay with them too - since they were the beneficiaries.
Fox News and other purveyors of right wing propaganda continue to blame democrats, immigrants, people of color, liberals, college professors, antifa or anyone they can - to avoid the responsibility for the failure of policies they have promoted. But they do this at great risk to our nation. It's not that they are "owning the libs" or whatever the saying is - they are stirring up the base. Considering the rejection of a fact-based reality, along with genuine hardships of that group of people - what happens when they figure out they've been given the shaft once again is anyone's guess.
Power to the people sounds great until we consider that the people who start to exercise power in the streets may be the base - confused, angry, well armed, and enthralled by a demagogue. The fact that the people who own right wing propaganda outlets are willing to continue to lie and rile up the new base of the GOP should concern all Americans. If nothing else it shows how far they are willing to go to retain power. Very risky my friend very risky indeed.
One year after that song was written large scale protests were occurring across the U.S. protesting the Vietnam War.
Two years after that song was written race riots destroyed parts of Detroit and other cities.
Three years after that song was written, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated.
Four years after that song was written, 1969 was called the "year of bombings" by the New York Times in an article that stated,
"During a period of less than four months in the summer and fall of 1969, eight bombings rocked major institutions in New York City. While no one was killed, the bombings caused several injuries, jolted the city, damaged property and became symbols of the radical movements that were challenging the foundations of American society."
Five years after that song was written, Richard Nixon "circled the wagons", using leased city buses, to protect the White House from perceived threats of violence from protesters. Nixon had recently announced an escalation in the war in Vietnam with plans to invade Cambodia and four students had been killed and nine injured by Ohio National Guardsman on the campus of Kent State days earlier, so these were trying times for our nation.
Imagine a time when the president was so afraid of demonstrators that he would build a wall of buses to protect the White House. In hindsight this strange event with the buses seems rather benign but what might happen if enough people are fed up with the status quo?
No one knows the answer to that question of course but it's worth pondering.
As bad as things might be for the forgotten people of America what happens when some external event occurs that suddenly makes things much worse not just for them but for multitudes of citizens?
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What sort of external event?
Either one of two things or some combination of those two will occur; we just don't know when.
1. Economic upheaval - this will be due to the latest bubble bursting which is a given considering laissez faire capitalism's history, or something more surprising like the dollar ceasing to be the world's currency.
2. Climate change will result in massive crop losses, fires, catastrophic weather events, and mass unplanned migrations. We've already seen the tip of that iceberg and it would be quite foolish to think there aren't worse effects in the not too distant future.
So what might happen if a lot of people are fed up with the status quo and then one or both of these external events occur?
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In the years leading up to World War II the economies of the U.S. and Germany were suffering. As this article says -
The fragility of the existing order was exposed suddenly in 1929 by a severe economic crisis. The world economy had never returned to full health after 1919, but the buoyant American boom of the 1920s, fueled by expectations of a secure trading future, had masked the underlying problems. When the speculative share bubble broke on Wall Street in October 1929, the impact was catastrophic.
To cut to the chase we all know what happened...Germany chose Nazism and the U.S. chose FDR and the New Deal.
The point is that when you have a significant number of people experiencing economic distress and then some external event occurs that suddenly makes things much worse - no one knows what might happen.
How might history rhyme or repeat given the inequality, lack of opportunity, poverty and a dozen or so other metrics in which the United States is failing miserably over the last 30 years to meet the needs of a majority of citizens. If you'd like to delve into what these failures are, and how they were allowed to happen, I recommend reading the book American Amnesia - How The War On Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson.
If you're strapped for time just watch the part starting at 12:20. He says capitalism needs to be reformed, it doesn't need to be abandoned, it needs to be reformed in order to work better. He goes on to say that our current form of capitalism is not sustainable. We are at a juncture - we can reform it together or we will do it in a conflict between the rich and poor.
He goes on to say he thinks the probability of conflict vs. cooperative reform is 60-40 or 65-35. If we recognize we are at a juncture we can do some things to nudge the probabilities toward a peaceful resolution.
He's created quite a stir on some cable TV shows and internet sites with those comments. For anyone relatively unbiased who's been paying attention nothing he said was surprising. It's understandable it caused a series of apoplectic reactions in popular media given how biased much of the popular media is towards supporting the existing power structure and the dumbing down of complex topics to the point of meaninglessness.
For example Joe Kernan on CNBC saying during the "debate" with Ray Dalio that, "all capitalism is - is the means of production in society are in the private sector - it's not state run." Apparently being unaware of the concept of a "mixed economy" Joe mumbles some more words including "creative destruction", "public school system" and "unions". It's a show, not a debate - the main point seemed to be to argue with some straw man anti-capitalist rather than actually have a dialogue with Ray Dalio. You hear and see this all the time when talking heads on TV or radio attack some fictitious stereotypical democrat, liberal, left wing socialist..whatever.
Almost twenty years ago I was involved in a labor dispute and our union was picketing corporate headquarters. It was a long day and people were tired when the Teamsters showed up, with a nicely painted big semi truck loaded with sound gear and speakers, and began playing a song which seemed really cool to me at the time. We were a bunch of nerds so no threat of violence. I'm not so sure it will be as cool next time...
This interactive map from the USDA Economic Research Service shows childhood poverty rates for non-metro counties in the U.S. Clicking around on it I noticed that 1 in 3 children live in poverty in non-metro areas of Florida, Arizona and South Carolina - some places are better and some places worse, but just the idea that 1 in 3 children live in poverty in places in this country should tell us something is very wrong.
This is the USDA ERS description of what the map depicts -
"In 2017, 22.8 percent of rural children in the United States were poor, compared to 17.7 percent of urban children. At the county level, on average over 2013-17, there were 43 counties in the United States with child poverty rates of 50 percent or higher, 40 of which were rural (nonmetro) counties heavily clustered in the South (30 of these counties). The rural counties with the highest child poverty rates were East Carroll Parish, LA (76.5 percent), Issaquena County, MS (69.6 percent), and Greene County, AL (67.8 percent). Eleven of the rural counties with child poverty rates of 50 percent or higher were in Mississippi—mainly in the Mississippi Delta region—where child poverty rates have been persistently high, particularly among the Black or African American child population."
It's worth asking why there isn't more concern shown by the media and political class about childhood poverty in the United States. Part of the reason is of course that it's neither entertaining nor profitable. It's also one of those inconvenient truths that people probably can't bear to dwell on because they feel helpless or guilty or both.
One might ask why protecting the rights of the unborn became such a central issue for the GOP while apparently turning a blind eye to the rights of the born. No doubt there are people of good faith who are strongly opposed to abortion, however if you want a better understanding of why a political party embraced and fueled the pro-life movement read Thomas Frank's book What's the Matter With Kansas.
The video describes the business practices of a used car company called J.D. Buyrider, one of those "bad credit/no credit" places that preys on poor people. They don't have prices on their cars but do have a sophisticated program to determine what maximum monthly payment they can extract from their customers. Someone making 8 dollars an hour ends up with a payment of 546 dollars a month for a beater car plus insurance. The company makes money even if the cars are repossessed and then resells them to some other person.
I was curious if J.D. Buyrider was still a going concern and indeed it is. In fact this one in Davenport Iowa got 100% recommend and 5 stars from 84 reviewers. I'm guessing 80 or so of those reviewers work for or are related to the owner(s) of this franchise.
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The Business of Poverty goes on to talk about payday loans and mentions that even big banks like Wells Fargo were getting into their own version of payday loans for those 40 percent of Americans who can't come up with 400 dollars in an emergency.
Wells Fargo charged 2 dollars for each 20 dollars borrowed, which based on a 30 day repayment window works out to an annual rate of 120%. They also mention an Indiana law that was enacted to lower the payday loan rate to 28% which sounds high until you consider that prior to the law it was 391%.
Speaking of predatory financial practices, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB), put into place thanks to Elizabeth Warren, has been mostly gutted by the current administration. This administrations most recent proposal is to delay an "ability to pay" rule put into place during the Obama administration. Of course they don't care if someone can pay off a loan - it works better for the predatory lenders if you have to take out another loan.
President Obama appointed Richard Cordray as the head of the CFPB but he was replaced as soon as possible once the greed is good gang got into office. When I was a C-Span junkie I used to enjoy watching the well informed and experienced Cordray run circles around banker-owned politicians like Texas Representative Jeb Hensarling Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee (recently retired).
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The Business of Poverty goes on to cover non-profit hospitals who have begun to sell their patient debts to collection agencies. Some people say that no one goes without medical care in the U.S. because they can always show up in an emergency room. If you show up at the emergency room homeless and unemployed you might get some free help (assuming you don't have a phone number or address where the bill collectors can find you). If you are reachable they are going to go after you for the debt (plus interest).
The mother and daughter they interview for this piece are both employed and their troubles show how misguided the notion is that poor people are lazy. It also demonstrates the fallacy that low-unemployment is this nation's path to a shared prosperity. That would only be true if the jobs being created paid a living wage - but the U.S. job growth is primarily in low wage service industry jobs.
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Finally to wrap up...finally.
I saw some old guy, like me I guess, say that he grew up poor. He went on to say that poverty is a big umbrella that covers a whole lot of different people who have different goals, life experiences, luck and outlooks.
If we could keep in mind that poor people aren't some undifferentiated mass of people or some stereotypical welfare Mom driving a Cadillac we'd have a better chance of addressing poverty.
While we're at it wouldn't it be great if we could treat people who work with their hands or in the service industry in general as human beings due the respect and dignity owed all human beings? Give them some of that good old American freedom - freedom from fear, freedom from hunger, freedom from financial ruin due to medical bills...you know - that kind of freedom.
People lead busy lives. In a representative democracy citizens are able to delegate the making and interpretation of laws to elected officials and impartial judges. When elected officials don't represent the people and judges are not impartial it can take significant time (decades..possibly never) for the impact of lawmakers and judges actions to be recognized by a significant number of citizens.
In addition to not having time, citizens are hard pressed to find useful information in a media environment where profits come from titillating, click-worthy snippets of mostly useless information.
Citizens are also stymied in becoming informed by massive amounts of propaganda intended to shape public opinion to support the rich and powerful in their ongoing efforts to become more rich and powerful. This propaganda can be as overt as what we see on Fox, as insidious as a popular TV show like 24 used to inculcate the public into believing torture of enemies is acceptable, or the militarization of sporting events, and as widespread as all public relations / advertising encouraging people to buy some thing to make them happy/sexy/virile etc.
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So...what's the point?
Assume you have time, a somewhat open mind, and the ability to parse through information to unwrap some of the complexity. By complexity I mean who paid for it, what biases may be present, and the accuracy of the information.
I've been in that situation now for a few years and I can't help but think if I presented some of my viewpoints to my old working self, or most busy working people, they'd think I was a conspiracy nut or a hyper-partisan who's only looking at one side of the story.
I'd say somewhat tongue in cheek that if you think things are bad - you are probably underestimating the scope of the problem. If you can stand a healthy dose of pessimism and skepticism, a contemporary thinker like Chris Hedges has some interesting things to say.
If I sometimes sound like a conspiracy minded nut, I like to think it's partly because I've had the ability, time and inclination to do a fair amount of independent research.
Of course I'm talking about abstractions here - things are great for me and my immediate family. It's a great liberal tradition - telling other people how unhappy they are or should be. Maybe it's a Christian thing, but I can't help thinking about other people. I'd be a better person, Christian or otherwise, if I could say I can't help doing things for other people.
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There are reasons we don't talk about politics in polite society.
I think it mainly has to do with an individual not being able to determine another persons depth and source of knowledge. If you and I don't have some commonality when it comes to depth or source we probably are just wasting time and risking hurt feelings.
Words are tricky things and we use a lot of words as symbols that have meaning to an individual or a group of individuals but lack any common understanding. For example the word conservative means nothing, ditto for liberal, democrat, republican. These words are used as tribal tattoos, or maybe to point to some hazy concept, and not of much use in a good faith exchange of ideas.
Walter Lippmann wrote about this in his 1921 book Public Opinion -
"To the infant there is precious
little difference between his own toes, his father's watch, the lamp on the table, the moon in the
sky, and a nice bright yellow edition of Guy de Maupassant. To many a member of the Union
League Club there is no remarkable difference between a Democrat, a Socialist, an anarchist, and
a burglar, while to a highly sophisticated anarchist there is a whole universe of difference
between Bakunin, Tolstoi, and Kropotkin."
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It's interesting to consider that successful cooperation between people of different races, nationalities, sex, sexual preferences or religions, often occurs in scientific or engineering endeavors where symbols used to communicate are clearly identified, understood and agreed upon.
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Back to the title of this post - Hot Coffee and Dr. Death.
Hot Coffee is a documentary about so-called Tort reform. So-called because depending on who's doing the talking it's either reform or another case of our political and legal systems being corrupted by money. I don't know what it is but it doesn't smell very good.
Dr. Death is the name given by the media to the neurosurgeon Christopher Duntsch.
"Christopher Duntsch, now in prison, operated on 37 people during two years in practice in Dallas. 33 were injured, many grievously. Two died. The quality of his work and his apparent abuse of drugs were no secret, but the butchery continued. Why?"
Yes why?
I listened to the podcast Dr Death on a long road trip and kept asking myself that question. I kept wondering why the civil justice system didn't prevent what happened in Texas and why his fellow doctors had to prod the criminal justice system to eventually bring his reign of terror to a close. It seemed that Duntsch and the hospitals who employed him were unconcerned about liability. Why weren't there multi-million dollar lawsuits acting as a check on this kind of negligence?
Max Brantley provides an answer in his article from the Arkansas Times -
"Thanks to Texas' "tort reform" law to limit damages in malpractice cases, civil court restitution was limited if available at all to the patients and families. Save this article for the next time Chamber of Commerce boss Randy Zook, the medical and nursing home lobbies and others try again to make Arkansas a legal safe haven for butcher doctors and negligent nursing homes."
"When Duntsch’s patients tried to sue him for malpractice, many found it almost impossible to find attorneys. Since Texas enacted tort reform in 2003, reducing the amount of damages plaintiffs could win, the number of malpractice payouts per year has dropped by more than half."
Bush Jr. and Grover Norquist stood with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on the forefront of those selling the idea that frivolous lawsuits are causing unnecessary burdens for corporations and increasing consumer costs. "Grass roots" organizations made up of concerned citizens sprang up all over the country to help fight the good fight. Many of these concerned citizens have ties to the banking, insurance and medical industries.
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The name of the documentary Hot Coffee refers to the 1994 case where a 79 year old woman named Stella Liebrick sued McDonald's over burns she received from spilling a cup of coffee on her lap. She was initially given a settlement of 2.6 million dollars in a jury trial.
This case was like pennies from heaven for the tort reformers. The media treated it as the perfect example of a frivolous lawsuit. The facts of what happened to Stella Liebrick and how McDonald's reacted were overlooked because the story seemed so cut and dried on the surface - some ne're-do-well was trying to take advantage of a corporation's deep pockets.
The story was more complicated. Stella suffered third degree burns that required skin grafts and spent 8 days in the hospital. She asked McDonald's for $20,000 to cover her medical costs and loss of work, they offered $800 so she sued them.
You still think...yeah but we all know hot coffee can burn.
McDonald's coffee wasn't just hot it was extra hot. McDonald's required franchisees to hold coffee at 180-190F. This was 20 degrees hotter than other coffee tested in the area and hot enough to produce 3rd degree burns requiring skin grafts in 3 seconds. Over a period of ten years McDonald's had received 700 complaints from customers burned to varying degrees by their coffee.
How hot should coffee be? According to a study by the National Institute of Health, "The preferred drinking temperature of coffee is specified in the literature as 140+/-15 degrees F (60+/-8.3 degrees C) for a population of 300 subjects." Starbucks serves coffee at 145-165 degrees F. McDonald's thought it would be a good idea to give people in cars a super heated cup of coffee because they probably weren't going to drink it right away.
I wouldn't take the documentary Hot Coffee at face value (it's biased and one of the subjects may be less then completely credible) but it has real people talking about what happened to them. You could use it as a jumping off point for doing your own research.
Finally I'd say the story in the documentary from Colin Gurley's parents is maddening and heart wrenching. Perhaps so much so that it would spur citizens, politicians and power brokers to search for real solutions for real people? We can only hope. Colin's case is summarized by the NY Center for Justice and Democracy -
"Colin Gourley suffered terrible complications at birth as a result of a doctor’s negligence. He has cerebral palsy. He cannot walk. He could not speak until he was five. Irregular brain waves and the amount of time he has spent in a wheelchair have affected his bone growth. He has been through five surgeries and needs to sleep in a cast every night to prevent further orthopedic problems. His twin brother, Connor, survived without injury.A jury ruled that Colin was a victim of medical negligence, finding that $5.625 million was needed to compensate him for his medical care and a lifetime of suffering. Last month, the Nebraska Supreme Court upheld a cruel Nebraska law that severely cut this jury verdict to one quarter of what Colin will need. As a result, Colin will have to rely on the state for assistance for the rest of his life."
A Google search for the term "running government like a business" returns over 400 million results. It's a popular phrase no doubt. We often hear politicians touting their business experience claiming they will run government like a business.
Promoting the idea that government services would be better if they were run like a business assumes that business is more efficient and responsive to customers than government agencies.
Is this true?
Have you ever had cable TV service? Have you ever contacted the corporation who provides that service to ask for their assistance in some problem you are having? How'd that go for you?
Given my personal experience I'd much rather deal with the V.A., Social Security Administration, Medicare, public schools, public libraries, the post office or the DMV than Comcast. Comcast isn't evil it's just an example of a large corporation fulfilling it's duty to maximize profit. Given their market position and absence of competition they can treat product quality, customers and their workers as secondary concerns.
No doubt there are businesses that are more efficient and customer focused than many government entities, however it's also true that some businesses - particularly large corporations, can be extremely inefficient and not satisfy their customers needs.
There's multiple reasons for this - customer knowledge, personal relationships, market forces, engaged and loyal workers, profits/losses directly impacting the owner, a need to be efficient in order to profit - to name a few.
How can an inefficient business that doesn't satisfy it's customers remain a viable enterprise? Don't we have the invisible hand of the free market that will smite these slackers down?
No - there's no such thing as the free market. For insights into why this is true see Thing 1 in the excellent book, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, by Ha-Joon Chang a professor of economics at Cambridge. It's a fascinating book and not at all as boring or overly complicated as you might think a book about economics would be.
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In many cases these corporations have obtained some type of monopoly removing consumer choice.
We also see government providing aid to corporations through corporate tax rates, top income tax rates benefiting grossly overpaid CEO's (compared to any other nation in the world), and in some cases massive tax breaks to try and entice a corporation to remain or locate in a community. In the case of defense spending the government uses our tax dollars to prop up corporations by purchasing overpriced, sometimes unnecessary, often times dysfunctional military hardware and systems.
Considering the amount of money in politics it shouldn't come as a surprise that government wastes our tax dollars on defense spending and favors big business over people. Well most people anyway. A small group of very wealthy people have major influence in many governments - currently and historically.
Government works for big business, not for small business. Consider small farmers displaced by industrial corporate farming or small shop owners displaced by big box stores to begin to understand how government policies have favored large business over small.
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My premise is that many corporations are less efficient and customer focused than either government entities or some small businesses. These inefficient corporations survive due to government policies that immunize them from market forces.
Amazon is an interesting anomaly given it's size, efficiency and customer focus. This is part of what makes Amazon so disruptive.
U.S. government anti-trust policy was changed in the 1970's in a way that super-charged the scope of disruption possible. These changes led to devastating impacts on communities as big box stores and online shopping displaced small businesses.
It's interesting to note that 80% of the profits from a big box store leave the local community. In some places the community leaders, youth sport coaches, school board members, boy/girl scout/4H leaders, who also happened to own or work at small businesses, left the community as well.
What happened in the 70's? Robert Bork promoted a new theory of antitrust that held that as long as consumer prices remain low there's no need for government intervention. This is known as "the consumer welfare standard" and was a radical change from existing antitrust law.
In this American Prospect article David Dayan writes that under the Borkian standard -
"Mergers are judged...solely on whether they provide benefits to consumers. Other by-products of market concentration—negative impacts on worker wages, squeezing of suppliers, fragility in the supply chain, reduction in innovation, and constraints on personal liberty and democracy—sit in the background, behind the consumer-based frame. It essentially cuts people in half, presuming that only their rights as buyers of goods matters."
It doesn't take much imagination to see how fragile supply chains are. Consider something as critical as the food supply. When small farms have disappeared from your community and food is trucked, shipped and flown in from hundreds or thousands of miles away it's obvious there are many places where this complicated system could breakdown.
Antitrust and other government policies could be used to protect local businesses, local food producers, and therefore local communities. Vibrant local communities would take the pressure off urban areas to provide jobs and housing for people displaced from dying small towns. If young people could stay in those small towns we'd see less fear, anger, and misplaced resentment that comes from the primarily white older citizens that remain. The electoral map would shift significantly in rural areas. I see this in how my home state of Montana has evolved politically over the years.
Mike Mansfield was a U.S. senator from Montana during the 50's, 60's and into the 70's. Mike Mansfield was what we'd call a liberal democrat nowadays (although I hate using those labels...finding them mostly meaningless). In the senate he helped pass LBJ's Great Society programs including Medicare, Medicaid, The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. Mike Mansfield was born in Brooklyn, grew up in Great Falls and lived an amazing (by today's standards) life as a young man. He was well rounded, intelligent, moral and diplomatic; serving his final years as a public servant as U.S. Ambassador to Japan.
Capitalism is a disruptive force for families, communities, religious beliefs, cultures, the land and the environment (to name a few things). A free marketeer promoting laissez-faire or unfettered capitalism is willing to sacrifice these things that make human life meaningful and satisfying.
What do we get in return for these sacrifices?
Everyday low prices.
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Please don't take my criticisms of capitalism to mean that I don't appreciate all the good things about our country. My point of view is that capitalism must be regulated to some extent for the good of citizens, families, communities and small businesses (and for the good of capitalism according to Professor Chang).
Any pure ideology is bound to fail in the real world - socialism, communism, capitalism, democracy..you name it. An ideal society would use the best ideas from great thinkers implemented by a representative government chosen by informed citizens.
Absent that ideal, if you believe that American government has swung too far towards the interests of industry, corporations and the ultra-wealthy at least we could support politicians who will help swing things in the direction of providing for the interests of the majority of American people. In other words, a representative democracy - of, by, and for the people.
I've been using my time lately reading, listening to podcasts and watching videos. My general goal is to learn new things so a lot of my reading is non-fiction. Not to imply we can't learn a lot from fiction or that it isn't enjoyable. It's more about constraints of time, eyesight and ability to stay awake than anything else.
I've loved reading, libraries and bookstores since I was a little boy. I still remember the smell and the cool marble floors in the Stillwater County Courthouse where the public library was. The elderly librarians were always so nice to me. Part of the joy of summer was being able to go to the library and read books. My grandmother was a reading teacher and lived with us so she had a big influence on my reading as well. Spending time in Portland nowadays is a pleasure partly because I can go to Powell's Books. As I get older I sometimes wonder if my desire to keep putting ideas in my head is to make up for the things I forget. I also can't help but think how ignorant I am...but I try.
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I was watching this video from a graduate class in the KSU Political Science department discussing Wendell Berry, and his book "The Unsettling of America - Culture & Agriculture" which led me to think about how becoming an adult is mostly learning how to do stuff - walk, read, write, play nice with others, use indoor voices, ride a bike, share things, drive a car - you know adult stuff.
Wendell Berry is a native of Henry County Kentucky where he grew up on a tobacco farm owned by his father. He is a critic of large scale corporate and industrial capitalism in general, with a particular focus on the impact to small farms, communities and families.
He's viewed simplistically as a left wing environmentalist. His thinking is much deeper than that and incorporates many schools of thought - idealism, liberalism (left wing), Liberalism (classical), Burkean conservatism, socialism/Marxism, libertarianism, communitarianism, Christianity, and strong human-centered environmentalism.
One part of the lecture that intrigued me was the discussion, that starts around minute 14 of the video, about Berry's statement that "the disease of the modern character is specialization."
This idea is somewhat similar to Karl Marx's description of alienation, absence of creativity, and loss of human dignity experienced by workers in an industrialized capitalist economy. Marx provides a lot of ideas worth considering, but this particular statement from a Kentucky farmer struck a chord with me.
Think about a small farmer. They are anything but specialists. Depending on the farm they may be raising chickens, gathering eggs, feeding cows, shearing sheep, planting crops, harvesting crops, reading about farming techniques, doing the bookkeeping, fixing the tractor/combine/bailer or other machines, mending fences, milking cows etc. etc. etc.
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As an aside - one of my favorite books about someone learning about farming is E.B. White's book "One Man's Meat" written in 1942 about his experiences after leaving his job at the New Yorker in 1938 to try his hand at farming in Maine. The historical setting and worldwide trauma occurring just prior to World War II is embedded (lightly) in the book but it's mostly good stories about adventures on a small farm. E.B. White also wrote Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little as well as being co-editor of the Elements of Style.
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Returning to the idea that specialization is the disease of modern character. Worker alienation is a Marxian idea but Berry also proposes that specialization leads to abdication of responsibility. Instead of thinking about how we can solve a problem we seek a specialist to solve it for us.
One way to look at this is if we are unhappy, overweight, out of shape, lonely, sleep deprived - to name just a few things, there are any number of specialists wanting to sell us their services, books, pills, or trinkets that might solve our problem(s) or at least make us quit dwelling on them for awhile (if it's a really nice trinket or good pill).
Another way to look at this is that, rather than being a specialist and depending on other specialists, we become adults by learning how to do many different things.
I sometimes wonder what it's like for someone who lives a sheltered life. Someone who has never driven a car let alone maintained or repaired it, mowed a lawn, planted a garden or a tree, grew flowers, fixed a leaky faucet, cooked a meal, washed a dish. In some ways it would be like living as a young child. One can only imagine how helpless and fearful a person would be knowing that without the ability to pay someone to do things for them...they would be lost. I can't help but think of the current resident of the White House as I ponder this, and how fear drives bullying and phony manly man behavior...but I'm done letting that guy live in my head.
You could consider this helplessness in more general terms. Why is accumulating and holding onto wealth paramount for some people? It's not so much the money; it's the fear of being helpless that causes the extreme emotional reactions. Threats to accumulation of wealth threaten their ability to pay the people who take care of them and their possessions. If you didn't know how to cook a meal, wash your clothes, take care of a baby, make a bed, drive a car, shop for groceries etc. and someone told you it was suddenly your responsibility of course you'd be afraid.
Gardening, riding a bike, changing your oil, driving etc. Doing things yourself creates a sense of independence, individual efficacy and impacts how you view your role in relationships with other people and institutions.
Someone once told me you can always learn how to do something and I believe that's true (absent some super complex tasks). It's so rewarding and simple to know you've done some thing yourself.
A central question in philosophy is what constitutes the "good life". It might be as simple as this...
Learn, and learn to love, all those adult things - washing dishes, fixing bikes and leaky faucets, assembling furniture, setting up electronic devices, vacuuming rugs, mopping floors, mowing lawns, pulling weeds, going for walks, riding bikes, reading to a child, changing a diaper, cooking a meal or doing your taxes. As an adult there's no end to what you can do - make some beer, make some bread, plant a tree, grow some grass, paint something, sew something, teach a child something, travel far, stay home, experience conflict and resolve it...the list is endless my friend, and so are the joys.
I wrote this entry a couple of days ago and set it to auto-post so by the time it's online I will be happily playing with my grandchildren and being with my family enjoying our time together. They will, I'm sure, appreciate me not bringing up my half-baked philosophical, religious or political meanderings/rants :-)
I really do need to take a break though...and I'm glad to have that much self-awareness.
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That song invariable causes me to tear up for what we lost but no one claimed the world is fair. I get similar feelings that my hard heart is softening when I listen to Hobo's Lullaby or Deportee by Arlo Guthrie.
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Jakelin Caal Maquin
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We can learn from the Buddhist teachings how to sometimes disengage from the noise of the outside and our inner worlds. When we find that still small place we can appreciate how wonderful life can be right here, right now, with these people, in this place.
