Falling in Line

The old saw about liberals and conservatives is playing out to be uncomfortably true: “Liberals fall in love, conservatives fall in line.” Conservatives like to mouth insults like “sheeple” without doing much thinking about what those words mean and, usually, that is just entertaining. Today, not so much. After the FBI raided their Führer’s palace in Florida, Trump fanatics are threatening civil war. It doesn’t matter to the Marching Morons that Trump had illegally taken and stored top secret documents in his treasonous rat hole. They are not only fine with der Führer’s close connection to Russian dictator and international criminal Putin, they celebrate their MAGA-wing’s common cause with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Their designated spokesman, Tucker Carlson, has become almost as popular in Russia as he is in the uneducated white power crowd in this country. How did a group so misnamed as “conservative” become so radically anti-American?

Easy. They fell in line.

Remember the “never Trumpers?” Yeah, I barely do too. It took so-called “RINOs” about a month to decide their usual out-of-control deficit spending, internal problems buck-passing to immigrants, racism, and pro-war money-grubbing would get a bigger pass with Donny than with an actual conservative. Donny knows how to speak to morons and Republicans are on most level not that bright. But one thing they have been for at least 200 years is “desperately seeking royalty.” The people who consistently vote Republican are also people who would have been Tories in 1776 and they would rather take a knee to a king than admit that their personal problems are due to their personal failures. They imagine that living in a dictatorship or under a king anointed by priests and other royalty would, somehow, solve their problems.

Back in late 2016, our Maytag dishwasher died, the 2nd unit of this model in 3 years, and I’d written a negative review about the product and company on a couple of big box hardware store sites. A woman from Maytag’s “customer service” emailed me to setup an appointment with a repair tech, supposedly at no charge to me. The guy who showed up for the repair was a sixty-something local driving a beat-up Ford van with his business decal flapping in the wind and a call tag from Maytag. He took a special interest in our dog and the opportunity to rant about how much better off the country was going to be with Trump in charge. We, obviously, disagreed, and I speculated that the country would be going through another economic disaster like the Reagan/Bush years and the end result would be an even smaller middle class, an even more obtrusive and invasive government, and a less secure nation. Just like the Reagan years.

The goober went into full worshiping rant mode about how grateful he was for Reagan and his economic policies. They guy claimed to have been a “mechanical contractor” in San Diego during the 80s and, if you know much about construction trades from the 80s you’d know they threw their lot in with Reagan to stop the metric conversion process. Reagan made all sorts of promises to protect unions, which won their support, and he betrayed those promises almost immediately without any penalty at all. He did kill metrication, which pretty much put the stake in US manufacturing's heart, so there is that. I guess construction workers would rather fall out of the middle class, suffer all sorts of economic instability, and see their futures limited to regular downgrading than have to learn a rational system of weights and measures. It’s good to have priorities.

“Devotion” is a word that most accurately describes the fervor Reagan and Trump culters exhibit. I used to wonder how and why people would fight for a king and now I know. Sort of. I don’t understand it at all, but I’ve sure seen it enough to recognize it. So, I know people will do that stupid thing and I have met them and do not understand their motivations at all. It is, apparently, akin to religion where people want to feel that they are part of something bigger, longer-lasting than just their own lives. Of course, they are wrong and we are all just insignificant specks of dust in an infinite universe that could not care less if we live or die. Reality sucks, so I guess the alternative is make up some crazy religion, pretend a god has chosen your Führer, and if you can do that you can probably imagine that the Führer is going to carry you to heaven/nirvana with him (as a servant) when he dies. I guess the “live free or die” thing has morphed into “live on your knees and beg” for these racist, sexist, incel libertarian-fascists?

Me and the wannabe Maytag tech argued a bit about politics and reality. Being a fanatic, changing any part of his locked-down mind was impossible and any real effort was pointless. I was mostly interested in observing his attitude toward his fluffy wimp of a “fearless leader.” He literally worshiped Trump and Reagan. His eyes got all glassy and his already pasty face got whiter. Of course, he charged me $60 to tell me my Maytag dishwasher was unrepairable. A few days later, I replaced the Maytag with an LG dishwasher that has been working reliably for the past 6 years.After listening to our conversation, my wife commented, "I used to think it was only 14-year-old girls who were that gullible. Now, I realize that some people never grow up."

Your Move?

W\hen I was a kid, 19 years old in fact, I was convinced of the message in William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson’s 1967 SF book, Logan’s Run, was on the money: “Don’t trust anyone over 21.” Chickenshit screenwriter David Zelag Goodman “adapted” the book to a screenplay and raised the termination age to 30 for the 1976 movie and that is about all there is to say about that subject.

However, at that young, energetic, optimistic, stupid and childish age I imagined the world was a lot easier, more simple place to “fix” than it is. I was a microscopic part of the 1968 McCarthy Children’s Crusade, the student campaigners who imagined logic, decency, and compassion would be enough to stop the Vietnam War. We had no idea how oblivious, callous, and vicious our parents—the self-anointed “Greatest Generation”—were but we would find out. There were a lot of things that we didn’t know about our home country and system of government because the history we had been fed in school was pure propaganda and corporate and white power bullshit. A lot of our understanding of physics, psychology, politics, and history could have been corrected with an understanding of “hysteresis”: “the phenomenon in which the value of a physical property lags behind changes in the effect causing it, as for instance when magnetic induction lags behind the magnetizing force." In politics and culture, hysteresis is often accompanied by violent opposition to changes in the cultural “properties.”

Unlike a few of my friends of the time, I did not go to Chicago for the ‘68 Democratic Convention, so I missed out on the Chicago Police Riots. But I did participate in a rally in Dallas that also went bad when the Dallas cops surrounded the park (Lee Park, ironically), barricading the protesters with cop cars bumper-to-bumper around the park, and swarming the place with batons swinging and gas and mace filling the air. Earlier in the day, we’d been pelted with beer cans and trash as we marched (legally) through downtown Dallas, protesting the war and waving our Eugene McCarthy banners high. Between the violent opposition to anti-violence and the Democratic Party’s betrayal of their own convention rules, resulting in the appointment of Hubert Humphry as their loser candidate, I gave up on what passes for a political system for the next 8 years.

In the 1968 election, I wrote in Eugene McCarthy and someone for VP. In the 1972 election, I wrote in McCarthy, again. In 1976, McCarthy ran as an independent and I voted for him, again. And that was the last time I wrote-in or voted for a candidate who had no chance in hell of winning a major political office. And I have voted in every election in my life since.

Recently, I saw a meme from a Rebecca Solnit quote that said, “A vote is not a valentine, you aren't confessing your love for the candidate. It's a chess move for the world you want to live in.” That, in a concise nutshell highlights the problem with independent candidates in a two-party political system. (You can thank Thomas Jefferson for your lack of voting options.) You can pretend to be participating in the system while not contributing to the problem by tossing your vote at a a no-chance-of-winning-anything candidate or you can play the fuckin’ game. This thought goes nicely with the old “Liberals fall in love, conservatives fall in line” truism that too often explains why the left couldn’t get Jesus appointed as Pope while the right could elect corporate shills like Reagan, the Bush’s, or, worst of all, the psychopathic, narcissistic, and demented Donald Trump to President of the United States. If you want to stare in the face of massive failure, the 2016 election/appointment (by the Electoral College) is the penultimate failure of the politics of avoidance.

If you aren’t a chess player, maybe the complexities of democracy and progress are above your head and in a world that was full of competent adults I might advise you to take your fuckin’ valentines and find a cute little clubhouse in which to play with them and the rest of your pipedreams. However, until the robots take over and apply strict logic to every decision every culture might want to make, you’re going to have to grow the fuck up and see if you can pull yourself away from your phone and Twitter/Facebook/TikToc’/blahblah and learn something about how your system works and doesn’t.

A chess game is the perfect simile for voting in a democracy. Consider this game. Let’s say my opening “gambit” is to move my 5th from the left pawn two spaces forward (called “1.e4”) and you realize that is the move Bobby Fischer called the “best by test” and my conservative approach pisses you off. So, your move is to remove your corresponding pawn from the board (exactly like a no-chance-in-hell 3rd party vote). Works for me. I move my knight from g1 to f3, which really irritates you into throwing a wonderful tantrum and you pull your Queen from the board. Now, I’m putting some money into the game and, being the kid you are you take my bet. A move or two later and we’ve got side bets of a vehicle pink slips and a house title on the line and you’re in checkmate. Sound like the 2016 election? If it doesn’t, you need to read a lot more and by “read” I do NOT mean bullshit from social medial but actual history books.

Remember, just because you don’t contribute to the system doesn’t mean your enemies are going to quit. In fact, they will not only keep regressing the country toward total chaos they will march unimpeded fully-armed and with the nutty belief that they are doing some damn god’s work.

Over in a Moment

“Nobody knows anything,” is one of the many brilliant phrases from one of my favorite authors, William Goldman. Mr. Goldman created a host of phrases (and ideas and principles) that we use every day as if they have always been part of ordinary language.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

• “If he’d just pay me what he’s spending to make me stop robbing him, I’d stop robbing him.”
• “I keep asking myself the same question, ‘How can I be so damn stupid as to keep comin’ back here?'”

The Princess Bride

• “Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”
• “When I was your age, television was called books.”
• “Life isn't fair, it's just fairer than death, that's all.”
• “Inconceivable!"
  "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
• "My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die!”
• “We’ll never survive!”
  ”Nonsense. You’re only saying that because no one ever has.”
• "Get used to disappointment.”
• “You seem a decent fellow," Inigo said. "I hate to kill you."
  You seem a decent fellow," answered the man in black. "I hate to die.”
• "You mean you'll put down your rock and I'll put down my sword and we'll try to kill each other like civilized people, is that it?”

All the President’s Men

• “We’re under a lot of pressure, too, and you put us there–not that I want it to worry you–nothing’s riding on you except the First Amendment of the Constitution plus the freedom of the press plus the reputation of a hundred-year-old paper plus the jobs of the two thousand people who work there—(still building)—but none of that counts as much as this: you fuck up again, I’m gonna lose my temper.
• “Follow the money.”

The Ghost and the Darkness

• “Have you ever failed?
  ”Only in life.”

Magic

• “Wow! Brains as well as boobs.”

Adventures in the Screen Trade

• “It’s an accepted fact that all writers are crazy; even the normal ones are weird.”
• “The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.”
• “I write out of revenge.”
• “A good writer is not someone who knows how to write- but how to rewrite.”
• “You can never trust what you read.”
• “There is one crucial rule that must be followed in all creative meetings. Never speak first. At least at the start, your job is to shut up.”
• “One of my great breaks is that I have only done work I wanted to do.”
• “Nobody knows anything.”
• “But this is life on earth, you can’t have everything.”

When I was young, in my 20s if you can imagine that, anything William Goldman wrote, I read. His first book, The Temple of Gold,. came out when I was nine and I didn’t read it until I was in my 20s, but I was a 25-year-old fan by the time The Princess Bride was released, in 1973. I read that book to my daughters when they were babies and they grew up knowing the story as if it were a traditional fable. In 1987, when the Bride movie finally came out, we were all living in California and saw the movie in one of the Orange County theaters where Rob Reiner liked to first showcase his films. (We saw the 1984 premier of This Is Spinal Tap in the same theater, because my employer—QSC Audio—had provided some technical assistance for the film,) Apparently, not many people ever saw The Princess Bride in a theater, but millions or billions have seen it on VHS or DVD. For people who loved words, for 25 years years, William Goldman was a writer’s writer. It would have been hard to imagine he could be forgotten.

And that, finally, brings me to the fucking point of this screed.

Last week, I decided to do one of my semi-regular William Goldman binges and when I went to my local library organization I discovered the regional library system only owned one William Goldman book, in hard copy, and not a single one of his books in eBook format. (Have I mentioned that I have grown to really dislike paper books?) So, I read Adventures in the Screen Trade again and put as many Goldman books as I could find in the state’s MNLink system on reserve. The first of the MNLink books arrived yesterday,. Magic, and it came from the Raugust Library, Jamestown College. That’s Jamestown, North Dakota! It is a very beat-up paperback 1977 first printing copy that dramatically demonstrates how far from today’s consciousness one of the most famous American writers has fallen. Magic was described as “One of those once-in-a-generation novels that changes everything” and, today, the only copy of the book the Minnesota state library system can find is in a North Dakota college. I had to look it up, Jamestown is a 15,000 person shriveling burg halfway between Fargo and Bismarck. It is “the ninth largest city in North Dakota,” for whatever that is worth.

A few years ago, my step-sister made one of her fairly regular attempts to convince me of life-after-death. I shoulda kept it, but it was a picture of some old people practically crawling over each other in some kind of celestial ecstasy with the caption, “Wouldn’t you wish for this if you could have it?” Or something equally weird. For me, the answer is consistently “no.” As Mr. Goldman would have said, “But this is life on earth, you can’t have everything.” After you’re dead, you can’t have anything. Wishin’ and hopin’ won’t change anything about that, either. As Mr. Goldman’s fading fame proves, after you’re dead you just vanish from everything; no matter how famous, rich, powerful, or irritating you may have been in life. When you’re dead, you are not just dead, you are gone.

As an afterthought, I wanted to figure out who that North Dakota college library was named after. What I got when I tried to search for that information on the Jamestown College website was a “Page not found. The requested page was not found.” I suppose Mr. or Mrs. Raugust were North Dakota rich people, emulating Andrew Carnegie’s tactic of creating libraries all over the country to paper-over his vicious robber baron history. Even Carnegie’s massive effort is fading from history since “The USA had 1,689 public libraries built thanks to Carnegie grants. Of those, about 750 are still functioning as libraries today.” Outside of New York City, where 31 of Carnegie’s 39 original libraries are still functioning, greedy old Andy’s buildings are mostly gone or converted to other less-respectable or admirable purposes. Today, however, Carnegie’s most substantial “invention,” vertical integration (the act of controlling every step of production, promotion, and marketing an industry; aka monopolies) are well and thriving. The robber baron’s best friend, Ronald Reagan, tossed out every progressive move the country had made since Abraham Lincoln in 8 brutal, avarice years (Remember “Greed is good?”) and, today, the Bezos, Musks, Zuckerbergs, Pages, Brins, Kochs, and the rest of the billionaires who own the nation’s governments are having a field day with . . . everything.

The good news is that they will die and disappear with no more of a trace or memory than Carnegie. The bad news is that the good and great, like William Goldman will suffer the same fate.