Wingnut Blindness or Illiteracy?

 This is a review left by a wingnut non-reader (typically unwilling to list his real name) on my local library’s website: 

The book is How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.  Apparently, cello9flute made it all the way to page 23 before his tiny, “like new, barely used”  brain ran out of storage space.  I’m assuming cello9flute is a guy, but maybe it’s a flute that is half cello?   Nearly ¼ of the book is about Venezuela and Hugo Chavez, hardly a right wing authoritarian, but the problem with being wrong at this level is that it is hard to tell the far right from the far left because they always meet when their tactics become identical.  It takes a special kind of snowflake to be insulted by Obama’s statement explaining the bitterness of rural America after years of job loss, declining economic mobility, and marginal education, “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."  That is, simply, the truth and is more true today than it was in 2008.  The characters who “would rather be Russian than democrat” are clearly uneducated, anti-American, and “deplorable,” even if they aren’t smart enough to crawl into a basket.  If you are so blinded by cult-loyalty that you compare those words to Trump’s insults, name-calling, and constant lies, reading books past page 23 is likely to be an impossible task. 

The part of that review that stuck in my craw was “you will never raise future generations to support democracy if you teach them in schools that the country was founded on genocide and is irredeemably racist.”  The first part of that statement is obviously a fact, the country “was founded on genocide.” The entire European invasion of the Americas was obviously based on racism and accomplished by genocide.  In the Americas, 20 million indigenous people were murdered by guns, germs, and steel.  That isn’t even debatable, it’s a fuckin’ fact.  Up until the 60’s, every American Hollywood movie about the “settling of the west” celebrated the killing of indigenous people and the pillaging of the continent for profit.  The second part, the “irredeemably racist” claim, is a typical wingnut red herring intended to hide the fact that the author may be incapable of admitting his own racism.

Forty years ago, I was managing a manufacturing company and we were trying to compete in the new six-sigma world of dramatically improved product quality.  As part of our internal systems improvement, my Quality Manager started posting defect charts along the assembly lines.  Initially, practically every station had its own chart.  The charts were maintained by the assemblers and were, mostly, a record of the defects and errors that landed at that station from the previous assemblies.  Some of the defects were from earlier processes and some were from design and manufacturing process issues.  In Manufacturing Engineering, we were trying to identify what to work on by using the Pareto Principle (the 80/20 rule) and those charts were how we sorted our priorities. 

As in most companies (even small ones), the Sales, Marketing, and mismanagement goobers rarely ventured into areas of the company where work was accomplished.  But after a few weeks of posting those charts one of the Sales executives wandered onto the assembly floor with a customer and, immediately, went whining to the CEO’s office.  His argument was that by posting our problems where “anyone could see them” we were damaging “customer confidence” in our products.  Like cello9flute, the sales-goober was convinced that hiding problems was the same as fixing them.  I wasted way too many hours in several pointless meetings explaining to our CEO and Marketing/Sales mismanagement how stupid that argument is and how years of shoveling problems under the rug had created a collection of product problems that only appeared as customer complaints, assembly line work-arounds, and other out-of-sight and out-of-mind expenses.  “You only fix problems that you know about” is the key to any sort of quality control system, but the lethargy of the previous generation of manufacturing mismanagement had led the country to where “quality” meant Japanese products.  In the 1980s, American manufacturing companies were desperately trying to learn the skills that American quality experts had taught Japanese manufacturers in the 50s and 60s.  Step One is “identify, document, and prioritize problems.” 

If we want to be a functioning, sustainable, progressive (as opposed to regressive) nation, we will have to do something about our institutional racism or we’re going to be “irredeemably racist.”  Obviously, people like those who voted for Donald Trump on a blatantly racist platform are likely to be “irredeemably racist” and proud of it.  There is no hiding that fact from anyone, except those who pretend it doesn’t exist.  They are also “deplorable” and tend to delude themselves by clinging “to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them . . .”  And they are blatantly anti-democratic to the point that they don’t know the difference between being a “democrat” or “democratic” and “Democrat” or even being a member of the “Democratic Party.” 

This mental disconnect is so complete that when Florida Governor DeSantis’ lawyers were asked to define “woke” in court, DeSantis’ general counsel, Ryan Newman, proudly spouted that it is "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them."  He added that DeSantis doesn’t believe such injustices exist.  I have quoted that statement several times and it is mindboggling every time I read it.  That is either a monstrous level of ignorance or “irredeemably racist.” 

It Sucks to be Us

A few days ago, a friend made the usual denigrating comment about how incompetent “government” is and I made the same response I’ve been uttering for more than 40 years, “Since ‘government’ is us, that’s why ‘you always get the government you deserve.’”  As usual, he blew me off without much thought (that reply almost always gets the same response) and we went on to fluffier subjects. It’s true though.  Nobody gets to bitch about their government without deserving a substantial portion of the blame.  I don’t care what kind of government you have, if you’re a citizen of that neighborhood, city, county, state, or nation, your government is a reflection of who you are, how much you care about your country and neighbors, and how much attention you pay to the direction all of those things are taking. 

In the United States, if you have voted for any Republican Presidential candidate in the past 60 years, you’ve voted to dumb-down government at every level and you’ve mostly succeeded in that goal.  From Reagan on, every Republican candidate almost without exception has argued that “government is the problem” and they have “worked” (abusing that term viciously) to break as many functional aspects of government as possible.  The latest iteration of that model, President TacoTrump, is very likely to succeed in breaking everything at the federal level while Republicans at the state and local level are doing their best to equal that damage as far down the governmental pyramid as possible.  

[If you are wearing your Big Kid Pants and are up to reading an actual book (or two) about who works (or worked) in the US federal government and what they do to keep the rest of us safe, healthy, and able to vote and have some influence on our destiny, I strongly recommend Michael Lewis’ The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy and Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service.  Those books will not only inform you about what we’re giving up in this current disastrous moment in our history, but you’ll also have to suck up your disappointment in your own pointless life in comparison. Because, outside of medical professionals, public defenders, a rapidly vanishing percentage of “law enforcement” authorities, and firemen who don’t hose protestors, pretty much nobody else in society does anything as important as critical government services.]

Thirty years ago, I worked for a Colorado medical device manufacturer that had taken so many device design and manufacturing shortcuts that the $500M/year company was in the process of dissolving itself into a scrap pile of marginal patents for competitors to pick over.  That process would take about 3 years, but early on FDA engineering inspectors prowled the company hallways like temporary employees.  While some of the company employees were busy trying to shuffle and hide the various infractions and incompetency and corruption from the FDA inspectors, I regularly heard many of our engineers say, “thank god for the FDA” because they knew the outcomes of the problems the regulators were uncovering.  In the early 90s, the US had a pretty robust FDA and most of the rest-of-the-world were far behind us in patient safety and medical device and drug regulation.  Thanks to Republican voters bending over and taking it in the rear to benefit corporate executives, we’re trailing-edge today and our national failure during the COVID pandemic is a prime example of that outcome. 

But as citizens and voters, this is the government we elected and the outcome we, apparently, wanted. 

I have worked in semi-regulated to seriously-regulated industries for most of my career.  I have yet to meet the classically described “lazy government employee” in my capacity as a design and manufacturing engineer, a field clinical engineer, a reliability assurance engineer, or even as a college instructor.  And I worked with at least a few dozen of those government employees in every capacity of my career.  I have, however, had plenty of experience with greedy, incompetent, vicious, useless, and flat-out evil corporate executives in EVERY job I’ve had.  In fact, I have yet to experience a single CEO, COO, CFO, CIO, CTO, corporate president, vice-president, or even a director who demise wouldn’t have improved every aspect of the businesses they mismanaged.  And I’ve suffered a few dozen of those useless zombies, too. 

The difference between government and corporations is that individuals can change government.  Corporations are, by design, idiotic and corrupt and they only thing that can keep them from gleefully destroying life on this planet is government regulation.  The difference between incompetent government and a functioning, sustainable society is the citizens and their quality, moral values, and participation.  Nothing points out the power of active, sentient citizens like the “3 ½% Rule”: “If you want to overthrow a dictator, resist an authoritarian regime, or create a movement that can change the national status quo, you don’t need half the country to join, you only need 3.5 percent of the population . . .”  My favorite explanation of this newly discovered statistical fact is from my favorite podcast, “You Are Not So Smart #313.”  If we can’t assemble 3 ½% of the population to fix the disaster we’re spirally into, we deserve every moment of misery that we’re going to experience.