A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

This is based on a comment I made in a Facebook thread on the upcoming tax proposal. There was a discussion about whether taxes are too high and whether we spend too much or too little public money on social services. Nothing here is particularly new, but it seemed worth including on my blog.

I think our economy is changing in ways that aren’t sustainable. The traditional model where you are reasonably intelligent and willing to work reasonably hard and, as a result of your efforts are able to make enough money to sustain a middle class lifestyle seems not to be working for a lot of people.

I know there is disagreement about whether people are lazy or dumb or have unrealistic expectations about what constitutes “middle class.” But I don’t think the explanation for why so many people are struggling is simply that they are lazier, stupider, or greedier than they were 50 – 60 years ago.

So, with that as my premise, I don’t know that social spending is the best answer to helping people reach and remain in the middle class, but it seems to be a possible answer. If the middle class continues to erode, wealth disparity continues to grow, and a sense of hopelessness spreads further in the population, I think we’re in for some ugly social upheaval.

I feel like a primary goal of our economic, social, and legal systems should be focused on helping people reach and remain in the middle class. To me, this means a good education, a good work-life balance, good access to healthy food, safe communities, clean air, fresh water, and affordable healthcare. I’m probably missing some critical elements, but these don’t seem unreasonable or too pie-in-the-sky. The best way to get people to a place where they are law-abiding, educated, and productive and the economy to a place where work is adequately rewarded is apparently hellishly difficult, otherwise we would have made it there. But, we get distracted by all manner of things and so it’s easy to lose sight of our larger goals. To me, this is a big one.

Also, a Monty Python quote posted by a friend recently seems appropriate right about now:

Well, it’s nothing very special. Try to be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.

Tipsy posted a link to a very interesting piece from R.R. “Rusty” Reno at First Things entitled “The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism”. I am not linking to it as full-throated agreement. For starters, he has a negative view of corporate push back in support of gay rights during Indiana’s RFRA debate. But that’s just one piece of a much larger discussion which, for any flaws one might find, is undeniably thoughtful.

All right – that throat clearing out of the way, I was most struck by this passage:

Retro figures such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn gain traction, not because voters believe in socialism, but because they intuit that they cannot live in a world of pure dynamism and openness. We are drowning in freedom. … And in our age, which has taken economics to be the key to almost everything, that intuition naturally comes into focus with calls for limits on economic freedom.

Retro-socialism is a dead end. But in the absence of alternatives that promise stability and relief from the existential exhaustion of perpetual dynamism, Sanders, Corbyn, and others on the left are likely to garner support. The same can be said for populist sentiments that endorse nationalist economic policies of protectionism and subsidies that fly in the face of free market principles.

(emphasis added). This reminded me of the sense I got from history books when I was researching Indiana history for my bicentennial series, particularly the part about the 1920s and the rise of D.C. Stephenson & the Klan. Warren Harding’s promise of a return to “normalcy” had a lot of resonance.

Following [World War I] which, itself, was hot on the heels of the Progressive movement and the Industrial Revolution, Americans generally and Hoosiers in particular would be bone weary of change raising the appeal of a return to “normalcy” and giving rise to the Klan who promised a return to the good old days.

At the time I was writing, I framed it in terms of the people at the top of the social heap being exhausted (because they are the ones who have the most to lose from change.) Reno frames it as a core human desire “to give ourselves in loyalty to permanent things” by which he mostly seems to mean God but in a more general sense to “ends, purposes, and projects to which we can entrust our loyalty.”

Whether it’s God or something else that we stand for, as the saying goes, “if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.” And when we’re exhausted by change, we seem to be particularly vulnerable to malignant hucksters promising a return to the good old days.

Puerto Rico is suffering. Like a lot. 3.4 million Americans have been without power for 5 days and the prospect of getting the electric grid up and running seems to be distant. 90% of the distribution system may have been destroyed. 91% of cellphone sites are also out of service, according to the FCC.

Despite this crisis, I’ve been hearing more about whether football players will stand or kneel during a game. Judging from the emotional energy spent online during the past couple of days, the manner in which sports professionals choose to observe the national anthem and conduct their protest is more alarming than the prospect of 3.4 million Americans facing a humanitarian crisis. Hell, I’m guilty of knowing and talking more about Kaepernick than what’s going on in San Juan which is, by the way, the only Puerto Rican city I can name without looking at a map.

I think this is a combination of the bike shedding effect and a sense that Puerto Rico isn’t *really* American. The “bike shed effect” is based on a metaphor used to describe Parkinson’s Law of Triviality. I actually like the term “bike shed effect” here better because I don’t want to dismiss the concerns of Kaepernick or those who oppose him as “trivial.”

He provides the example of a fictional committee whose job was to approve the plans for a nuclear power plant spending the majority of its time on discussions about relatively minor but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bike shed, while neglecting the proposed design of the plant itself, which is far more important and a far more difficult and complex task.

The flag thing is relatively easy to have an opinion about. If you only know the broad strokes — the flag is good & you should stand and honor it OR racism is a problem in America and peaceful protest is a core part of our democracy — you know enough to have an opinion on the issue and get into an emotionally invigorating fight with someone about it. There are lots of people with more nuanced opinions and understanding of the details, but those aren’t necessary to get in the game.

Puerto Rico, by contrast, what a mess. It’s all so big and hopeless, far beyond our poor power to add or detract. And, besides, lots of bad stuff happens in the world. We can’t be concerned about all of it. Maybe if they were Americans . . .

Well, maybe they’re technically Americans, but Puerto Rico doesn’t really seem like part of our country. Part of it certainly has to do with race. They’re mostly people of color, and we have this concept of Americans being mostly white.  But it’s certainly not just race. What the hell is an “unincorporated territory of the United States,” anyway? It seems to be a concept invented by the Supreme Court in the case of Downes v. Bidwell which loosely translated amounts to having your cake and eating it too.

“While in an international sense Porto Rico (sic) was not a foreign country, since it was subject to the sovereignty of and was owned by the United States, it was foreign to the United States in a domestic sense, because the island has not been incorporated into the United States, but was merely appurtenant thereto as a possession.”

An unincorporated territory is a territory as to which, when acquired by the United States, no clear intention was expressed that it would eventually be incorporated into the Union as a State. Consequently, we’ve possessed Puerto Rico for 119 years without either making them a State or letting them go their own way. They don’t have a Representative in Congress or Senators in the Senate. (If they did, there would probably be more and swifter federal action on the crisis taking place there.) So, it’s not terribly surprising that citizens of the 50 states don’t have a clear idea what to make of Puerto Rico.

I’m no expert in Puerto Rican history, but just as a crash course, here you go: The U.S. took possession of Puerto Rico in 1898 after the Spanish American War. That war saw us fighting Spain, supposedly because of provocations on their part in Cuba — but probably because they were growing weak and we were growing strong. Spain didn’t have any business having an empire in our backyard. And, anyway, all of the other cool kids were getting empires. So, we had our splendid little war, defeated Spain, freed Cuba, and took over the Philippines, Guam, and  Puerto Rico for good measure. Puerto Ricans have officially been U.S. citizens for a century (having been granted citizenship in 1917). While they have some local autonomy, “ultimate governance of the island is retained by both the U.S. Congress and President.”

Consequently, they are Americans but not Americans. And, while they struggle with the crisis caused by Hurricane Maria, including conditions that we would find intolerable elsewhere in America, we are fairly indifferent to the plight of our fellow citizens. At least when compared to our concern for whether athletes  stand or kneel during a pregame ceremony.

 

 

I had a quick Tweet where I suggested, “If you communicate with someone in a way that makes them shut down, you’ve eliminated yourself as a source of feedback for that person.” I was about to contribute to the ensuing discussion with some additional thoughts, but it seemed easier to turn this into a blog post.

Changing minds happens on the mental equivalent of peripheral vision. There are too many defense mechanisms in place if you try to go at it head on. First of all, you have to establish a relationship. And, I don’t mean this in a cynical way. Don’t establish the relationships to manipulate someone into changing their mind. Establish the relationship because the person has value. Even if you disagree with someone in major ways, there will be points of common interest or common cause among people of good will. Talk about sports, beer, kids, the challenges of work, the wonder of nature and the stars, anxieties about the future  . . . whatever.  While you’re talking about these things, chances are that you can move each other on the other stuff indirectly or subtly.

If someone knows you as a person, they can very well disagree with you strongly, but they’re a lot less likely to write you off as delusional or malicious (unless you’re, in fact, delusional or malicious). Coming at someone you barely know and demanding that they agree with you because [citations] just isn’t going to work.

This is slow, often unsatisfying, and, if the need is urgent, impractical in a lot of cases. But, even if it’s not sufficiently effective, it’s still more effective than shouting at someone then calling them dishonest or malicious or stupid for not agreeing with you. Even if you have the most iron clad citations of all time.

And it only works when you’re talking about people of good will. There is, of course, malice in the world. But I think it’s less prevalent than we imagine. (As I say, over and over, everyone is the hero in their own mental narrative.) This doesn’t work for the malicious. You’re just going to have to persuade enough people of good will, then organize them to steamroll the malicious people of the world.

Some people take offense because they have legitimate grievances. Others seem to take offense because doing so gives them a kind of currency and at least momentary significance. A lot of offense taken and/or expressed probably has some mix of the two.  What prompted this post was online debate over Tina Fey’s “sheet cake” skit. Some are calling it a tone-deaf response to the legitimate problems of Trump by a privileged white woman. Others are calling it incisive satire by a woman aware both of real problems and her privileged position.

I’m an educated white male professional and United States citizen with just about any kind of privilege you’d care to name. So, I’m in a uniquely bad position to judge where one stops and the other begins. I don’t have any particular take on the Fey skit. All I can say is that I was mildly amused by it.

In some sense, I think the complaints about “political correctness” is a flip side of the same coin. Some folks making this complaint are just assholes who are mad that someone is calling them out on being jerks. Others are people of good will who legitimately feel like, despite the best of intentions, they are scorned by people who put what seem like arbitrary landmines everywhere in the culture. A lot of the complaints probably have some mix of the two.

(No doubt I have given offense here by engaging in an impermissible degree of “both sides”ism.)

I’ve been hearing a lot about “Antifa” lately. Well, let me tell you about Antifa.

Antifa is a ten-foot-tall, two-ton son of a bitch who could eat a hammer and take a shotgun blast standing!

Did I ever tell you about the time I went horseback riding with Antifa, but there weren’t any horses around? Well, Antifa throws a saddle on my back and rides me around Wyoming for three days. Well, wouldn’t you know it, my stamina increases with each day and I develop tremendous leg muscles. So anyway, Antifa decides to enter me in the Breeders’ Cup, right, under the name Turkish Delight. And I’m running in second place, and I’m running and I break my ankle! They’re about to shoot me. Then someone from the crowd yells out, God bless him, ‘Don’t shoot him, he’s a human.’”

Antifa is a son of a bitch! He would eat a homeless person if you dared him!

I went camping with Antifa … I’m in the back of a pickup with Antifa and a live deer. Well, Antifa, he grabs the deer by the antlers, looks at it and says, ‘I’m Antifa! Say it!’ Then he squeezes the deer in such a way that a sound comes out of its mouth — “Annifa!” It wasn’t exactly it, but it was pretty good for a deer.

I once saw Antifa scissor-kick Angela Lansbury.

Did I ever tell you about the time Antifa was in a production of ‘The King and I’? On opening night, Antifa chloroformed the entire cast and slowly eats them in front of the audience for two hours. The production got pretty good reviews.

Antifa sheds its skin once a year.

Did I ever tell you about the time Antifa went hunting? He decides he’s going to hunt down all four of the Banana Splits. He stalks and kills every one of them with a machette. They all begged for their lives…except Fleagle.

Oh, wait. My mistake. That was Bill Brasky.

“Antifa” is the latest right wing boogeyman. It got a Wikipedia page on August 8, 2017, following an Atlantic article by Peter Beinhart on August 7, 2017. But, judging by right-wingers casting about for false equivalence to Klansmen, Nazis, and Confederate sympathizers, Antifa is legion.

I’m happy to condemn violence as a political tool. Here: “Violence should not be condoned as a political tool.” But it’s not a deep concern for pacifism that motivates the Antifa panic. It’s a desire to always focus on how bad liberals are.

Let’s not pretend there is any equivalency between a movement that didn’t even rate a Wikipedia page last month and movements that have plagued our country for a century and more. At one point in the 1920s, the Klan counted something like 1/3 of white protestant Hoosier men as members. Confederate monuments erupted over the Jim Crow south in public spaces as a way of demonstrating who was in control. Nazis killed 6 million Jews in the Holocaust and embroiled the world in a war that would kill about 60 million people. Condemning the Nazis, the Klan, and the Confederates isn’t based on a desire to focus on how bad conservatives are — at least it shouldn’t be.

It should be dead easy for conservatives to join in the chorus of unequivocal condemnation for history’s assholes. And for many it is. George H.W. Bush spoke out against David Duke in 1991, and he and his son spoke out against the Charlottesville groups today. That’s what makes Trump’s hesitation so confounding. This should be a softball for any public leader. Trump is not a man known for weighing his words. The fact that he hesitates to condemn these guys tells you what you need to know about how he views them.

A lot of people are spilling ink on the violence in Charlottesville where white supremacists gathered to “Unite the Right,” ostensibly in protest of the removal of Confederate statues. I’m not sure I can do much better, but I feel like I ought to post something here anyway.  Those who feel some affinity for the movement but aren’t ready to go full on Nazi are espousing some variant of a “Both Sides” argument. Either they want to blame violence that erupted on the counter-protesters or they point to some incidence of violence that took place at an event with a message they did not favor.

It’s fine and appropriate to be against violence. However, it’s a little telling if “All Violence Matters” flies out of your mouth easily but you choke a little bit when trying to spit out the idea that white supremacists have uniquely bad and dangerous ideas and they are bad people for holding those ideas. If you’re a Quaker or a pacifist or something and messages of nonviolence are a passion of yours, I’ll give you a pass — but that’s not what I’m seeing.

And it’s no surprise that these guys (and it seems to be almost entirely male) had an event that came to violence. White supremacists like to talk tough and invoke violent metaphors. Judging from the things you see out of the broad overlap between “Men’s Rights” activists and white supremacists, you see a toxic view of masculinity that regards nonviolent responses to challenges as emasculating. Their beliefs and fragile egos make them almost uniquely unable to co-exist with other ideas or turn the other cheek when confronted.

So, sure, violence is bad. That can be, and perhaps should be, said every day. But this event gives us a particularly relevant opportunity to reaffirm our commitment to opposing fascists like the ones we saw trying to “Unite the Right.” People celebrating the Nazis in defense of statues of rebel traitors are uniquely un-American.