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.

Labeling Ourselves

Now that the US has decided to speed up the country's decline into a failed empire and 3rd world banana dictatorship, pretty much everything that once resembled civil society is vanishing. Which means the loud pipe morons are proudly demonstrating their assholiness with every opportunity. Apparently, our degeneration has given every spoiled white boy license to act like an asshole; from eBikers to bikers to neo-Nazis (alt-right, to the genteel) to your neighbors and their yard tools.Bicyclists are engaging in hit-and-run road warrior crap. In our fading empire, every nitwit with $200 to blow can buy an assault weapon and another $100 turns it into a machine gun with enough bullets to take out a theater full of victims. We have elected officials who set levels of stupidity and assholiness that astound the rest of the world. Not us, though. We haven't had anything near enough stupidity.

Back here in Minnesota, I have a neighbor, who I  call "Slo Mow Man," who mows his lawn "conservatively" every 2-3 days. He's a retired California civil servant who moved to Minnesota to spread his retirement money further into the 21st Century. I have never seen anyone drive a riding lawn mower so slowly. He mist have had a low-low gear installed at the local Hardly shop. Likewise, when he uses his wood chipper, he fires up the motor and, apparently, wanders around his several-acre-yard gathering sticks, hiking back to the chipper with one of two twigs in his hands, tosses them in, and goes back to wandering. The wood chipper runs all day and rarely does any actual chipping. All of that pales when the snow flies or the leaves fall. His use of the leaf blower is a source of depressing entertainment, if you are deaf. It's kind of hilarious to watch him blow leaves off of his driveway, into the wind where they blow right back as he creeps down his driveway at a pace that would frustrate snails. You just know this guy pisses into the wind, too. Likewise, after he takes 2 hours to plow the snow from his driveway, he whips out the leaf blower and tries to blow the snow dust from his driveway, turning a 20 minute job into nearly an all-day affair. 

Typical of that crowd of folks, he's convinced the rest of the country is "lazy, entitled, and resentful of white people." Ok, he's probably right about the last point. Hell, even I don't like white people much and I am one. 

After going over this sad, degrading history, I have decided that we need a new national anthem and this is the song I recommend. (20 years ago, it would have been Jame's Brown's "Living in America.". Those days are long gone. Today, you'd have to be desperate at the level of those who are willing to risk Trump's immigrant concentration camps to "eat your heart out" to become an American.) We've become the sort of international laughing stock that the wingnuts used to claim we were during the Obama years; when US perceptions in the Rest of the World was about as good as it has ever been. Today, that perception is dropping out of sight, to the point that our chimp President was laughed at while addressing the United Nations.

Awful, Better, Best, and Perfect

An acquaintance recently sent me an ad for a President Obama memorial Xmas ornament. I was tempted. He was sarcastic, calling Obama “Uncle Thomas” and “Onkle Tom” followed by a list of Obama’s real and perceived imperfections. He’s an old, middle class, white guy who probably doesn’t know any actual black Americans but he’s convinced that Obama was a tool of the power elites and “that’s how I perceived him, as did and do many in the black community. I knew well before he was elected that he had to be a tool of those who truly govern the country.” I don’t know about the “many in the black community,” but about 10% of that so-called community voted for Trump; mostly proving you can fool some of the people all of the time. I’m tempted to buy one of those  ornaments just to piss off the nutjobs on the far left and right. Anything that irritates those two herds of nutjobs and morons is worth owning and a bargain at $22.

I only wish the world was that clear and simple? My experience tells me that nothing is as simple as it looks from thousands of miles away or even across the street.

I admit that I was and am impressed with Barak Obama’s performances as President of the United States. That is saying something, because I’m mostly unimpressed-to-disgusted by the presidents I’ve observed in my lifetime. Starting with Truman, who was president when I was born and left office when I was five years old, through Bush II there haven’t been many bright moments in American executive branch politics.

While he didn’t stay in office long enough to accomplish as much as he might have, Jimmy Carter was probably the 2nd best president in my lifetime. He was too much of a micro-manager, a typical fault of self-made business men, he had a vision for the United States that would have positioned the country far more soundly than the mess made by his successor, Reagan. We’d have moved into the metric system, evolved away from oil and carbon-pollution energy sources, and our education system wouldn’t fallen to 3rd world status. But Carter lost to a candidate every bit as goofy and unqualified as Trump before anything resembling Fox News existed; when he had the Fairness Doctrine to balance the media foolishness. Today, Carter wouldn’t have a chance even as a Democrat. He’d be too easy a target. All I really know about Kennedy comes from history books. I was 15 when he was murdered, but there was no politics in my life at the time. I do know that many of the adults I knew in Kansas were not unhappy he was killed. So much for the good old days when we were “one country, united.”

Otherwise, the presidents who have mismanaged the country in my lifetime have all been awful or less-awful.

The Wrong People Are Giving Up

When Barak Obama became President in 2008, morons like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Alex Jones, and the Marching Morons who listen to their chin dribble all threatened to leave the country; as if some other country would want them. Obviously, those people went no where and whined like the fluffballs they are for 8 years of economic recovery and mild attempts at restoring economic equality and an even milder form of justice in this declining nation. Who were they kidding? What 1st world country would want our no-talent, hate-jocks? In fact, unless you are among the rapidly shrinking minority of Americans with actual marketable talents, no other country wants American immigrants at all. Even our immediate neighbors, Canada and Mexico, are becoming picky about who they will take from their overly violent, uneducated, and clearly insane neighbor.

However, since none of those people contribute anything irreplaceable, most everything carried on as if nothing had changed. Other than carrying out the garbage and doing work better performed by immigrants, legal or otherwise, it’s not like Trump’s fans are big economic drivers or scientists or doctors or anyone who makes a useful contribution to the GNP or the national character. The only money behind Trump comes from the worst people in the world: trust fund brats and hedge fund gangsters and actual mobsters. The people who voted for Trump are, literally, the dumbest people in the nation, making a contribution to the nation’s GNP that is so insignificant that if they were to leave the United States, the country left behind would be greatly improved and the new nation formed of Trumpetes would be a large, powerless Bangladesh. “The less-than-500 counties that Hillary Clinton carried nationwide encompassed a massive 64 percent of America’s economic activity as measured by total output in 2015.  By contrast, the more-than-2,600 counties that Donald Trump won generated just 36 percent of the country’s output—just a little more than one-third of the nation’s economic activity.” Trump likes to speak in terms of “winners and losers,” but he and his followers are classic losers by any standard of measurement and have been at least since G.W. Bush’s “victory” in 2000: Al Gore’s 659 counties contributed 54% of the GNP while Bush’s 2397 only kicked in a 46% share. Red states are consistent non-contributors to the nation’s economy in every 21st Century measure. In fact, the only area where red states have an advantage is in resource extraction. In other words, red states on their own would be competing on a level footing with South Africa, Russia, the Arab states, and parts of South America. The only criteria that matters in those economic activities are price; the lowest price/margins win.

The unemployed and/or completely dependent alt-right characters have definitely done damage to the people who have, traditionally, supported their enemies with everything from Social Security, Workman’s Compensation, Medicare/Medicaid, healthcare in general, and the science that has driven the nation’s economic success since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Now that everything from the National Park System to healthcare to bankster regulation to the environment is being attacked by the goons in the White House, a lot of people are wondering, “Is this actually my country?”

Those who have come the US with the hope of joining a thriving economy are definitely questioning that decision, “Technology companies across the country said they did not support the travel ban, and the mood is dark across the California tech sector” It’s not like the whole country is attracting high-tech talent. The red states are giant antigravity zones, not just repelling non-white, non-native talent, but driving out homegrown high performers. Not only is the Trump immigration policy driving non-US talent to more welcoming nations, US talent often feels compelled to “immigrate” to the only place in the country that is overwhelmingly driven by innovation: Silicon Valley. Now, you have to wonder if home-grown talent will be looking for a “better world” elsewhere. It could just be who I know, but in the last month I’ve had conversations with two Boomer families who have to go overseas to visit their grandchildren: a pair of physicians permanently immigrated to Ireland and an engineer and a physician now calling Australia “home.”

A good reason for the fear generated by Trump is his promise to “make American great again.” The people who are energized by this promise couldn’t make a contribution to make their own backyards “great.” The only job they could possibly imagine Trump creating for them would be as members of the Gestapo. The far right loves Trump, but they are otherwise useless, non-contributors to the nation’s economy or future. What else could they be hoping for?

At the other end of this high-output vs. low output America conflict will be both the people who leave and the people who decide to quit fighting for people who don’t appreciate the effort. If Trump saps that energy, you can safely assume the country will experience another economic crash, as the banksters and hedge fund gangsters leverage themselves into oblivion and the Marching Morons pretend to keep up by borrowing every penny they can borrow for their new cars, boats, big screen televisions, and the rest of the crap they can not afford and don’t need. This time, there won’t be a Barak Obama standing by to bail out the morons and regulate the criminals. In fact, the young people who might have been the people to take on that job, might just be watching the “fun” from Toronto, Sydney, London, or Berlin.

Let the Whining Commence

Half-wit Trump voter, Teena Colebrook, is already whining about the result of her thoughtless vote, and the middle-class misery hasn’t even started yet. When Trump announced that he was nominating general all-around Wall Street scumbag, Steven Mnuchin, for Secretary of Treasury, she wimpered, "I just wish that I had not voted. I have no faith in our government anymore at all. They all promise you the world at the end of a stick and take it away once they get in." The majority of the country is with you, Colebrook. Everyone with an IQ over 50 wishes idiots like you weren’t allowed to vote.

Colebrook’s whining comes from the fact that Mnuchin was the CEO of the bank, OneWest, that foreclosed on her property in 2009, forcing her out of her home and investment property to the tune of a $517,000 debt on a $248,000 loan. She is one of the many Trump voters who knowingly voted for the guy who told the idiots enrolled in his bogus Trump University, “People have been talking about the end of the cycle for 12 years, and I'm excited if it is . . . I've always made more money in bad markets than in good markets.” So, who did Colebrook think she was voting for,  Santa Claus? Based on the fact that this math-disabled character “purchased” the property with an “interest only loan,” I suspect she believes in a collection of mythical characters, so Trump’s inane “I will give you everything” promises (at least 276 of the craziest things anyone has ever said to the voting public) probably sounded credible.

A friend was in Red State territory, Kentucky, during the election and she was struck by how many times she heard, “I’ve never vote for a Republican before, but I’m voting for Trump.” Her argument was that Trump said the things these once-working class voters wanted to hear. She was convinced that Bernie Sanders was the only Democrat who had a similar message, but that’s not true. Sanders promised things that his opponents, including Clinton, called “free stuff,” but he had plans for financing everything he promised. Sanders was consistently truthful, while Trump was consistently disinterested in reality or facts. Sanders promised that he'd work with and for his voters and the middle class, but warned that the forces against accomplishing anything significant were powerful, vested, and well-heeled. "It will be a fight," he promised.

Trump’s chumps were equally disinterested in reality or facts. Completely nutty promises like making the Michigan auto industry “bigger and better and stronger than ever before” or getting "Apple to start building their damn computers and things in this country, instead of in other countries” or bringing the coal industry back to the Appalachian Mountains (and the old coal-mining jobs) without a lick of knowledge about manufacturing, rational tax incentives, technical education, or any other bit of expertise that might be useful in recreating the manufacturing society that Nixon, Reagan, and the Bush’s trashed.

Telling Americans the truth is not a politically successful tactic. President Jimmy Carter tried that in 1980 and Americans fled the dismal, hard truth for the Reagan fairy tails and many still feed themselves the “we can borrow and leverage our way back to prosperity” drivel Nixon started and Reagan perfected into a “deficits don’t matter” mantra that every Republican politician and faux-business-critter has abused since. Republicans and alt-rightwingers have committed themselves to “borrow and spend,” pretending that is somehow better than the “tax and spend” charge they levy on Democrats and progressives. Carter tried to be a role model for Americans scaling back to their means and they rebelled, choosing the phony pomp and pretense Reagan offered, general criminal and treasonous behavior, and the massive national debt he generated.Before Reagan, the US was a creditor nation. Since, we've been deeper and deeper in debt.

And we’ve done it again.

The Price of Being A Nation of Assholes

One of the few terrific management books of the last 100 years is Robert Sutton’s 2007 The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't. In case you are a typical American and don't have the mental capacity to read a book, Sutton offered two tests for identifying assholes:

1. After encountering the person, do people feel oppressed, humiliated or otherwise worse about themselves?
2. Does the person target people who are less powerful than him/her?

Sound familiar?
To provide guidance to the generally clueless sort who make corporate decisions, Sutton also gave us a dozen identifying asshole behaviors, he called them The Dirty Dozen:

1. Insults
2. Violation of personal space
3. Unsolicited touching
4. Threats
5. Sarcasm
6. Flames
7. Humiliation
8. Shaming
9. Interruption
10. Backbiting
11. Glaring
12. Snubbing

Thanks to the Electoral College and the ultimate American asshole, Alexander Hamilton, we are about to experience a federal government totally staffed by assholes. Outside of the 61,900,651 confirmed assholes who voted for Trump (as of November 8, 2016) any normal person would recognize all 12 of those behaviors as Donald Trump’s prime personality markers.  From my own personal experience in this past election, those characteristics are core pseudo-conservative principles, too.

What does it mean for the future of the country when half of our voters idolize assholes? Keep in mind that, on average, the least educated portion of the country voted overwhelmingly for Trump, demonstrating why Trump and Republicans “love the uneducated.” For one, it means our media will continue to become more mean spirited, less fact-oriented, more focused on profit and less on public service, and society in general and public service will be less inviting to decent, intelligent people. I’m a firm believer in the FACT that incentives are everything. When society rewards politicians’ bad behavior far more consistently than decency, manners, intelligence, and competence, people with those qualities will find other places to commit their time. Eventually (as in January 20, 2017) our federal government will be almost fully-staffed by the worst, most selfish, least capable people in the country. The country is about to experience at least two years governed by all assholes. I don’t think this is going to work out the way these voters expected or hoped.

Breeding Contempt

A guy I knew back in the 60's stumbled on to one of my other blogs this week. Since that blog used to be attached to a business I ran for several years, he found my phone number. My wife has never been able to tell my work from her television watching, so she stumbled up the stairs with phone in hand and interrupted my work flow with my all time least favorite thing; a telephone.

If I were able to go back in time, I don't know who I'd want to eliminate first:: Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Richard Nixon, Joe McCarthy, the asshole who invented the subwoofer, or Alex G. Bell. Of all of the technological devices I've suffered in my life, I think the telephone is the most obnoxious, least civilized, most useless device in history. Yeah, maybe someday I'll desperately need to call 911 and I'll wish I had a cell phone with me in my dying moments, but I doubt it. I'd just as soon die and get it over with in my dying moments than be bothered by the usual sort of EMT who will insist on torturing me with his/her lame attempts at inserting an IV in the vicinity of a vein. Been there, done that, won't do it again.

The upside of the long, tortured conversation was that I finally installed a lock on the door to my studio. Next week, I'll work on soundproofing the door so that I won't be able to hear her knocking at the door when the damn telephone rings and she feels compelled to answer it but isn't willing to suffer the consequences of that foolish decision.

The motivation for adding a lock to the studio came at about 3AM after a night of restless reliving of that miserable conversation. I should know better. I had these same conversations with my father for 45 years. The call started innocently enough, as the caller wanted to tell me his history of western Kansas R&R bands. Again, been there, done that, won't do it again. I listened for a while, hoping for a moment to cut off the call and end the conversation before I actually began to relive some of my miserable years in Kansas. I was almost there when he made a really stupid comment about how he'd been living on federally subsidized AT&T pension and Social Security for thirty years and was worried that "that commie Obama" was going to drive the country into the ground and leave him penniless.

Like most Kansans, this is a guy who worked for a federally protected monopoly for his whole "career" and has lived off of a pension for more years than he worked. Listening to him change Faux News "history" was about all I could take and, again, I should have cut off the call. But I'm an idiot. Usually, I can keep a grip on my optimism ("'Pessimist' is what an optimist calls a realist."), but sometimes I pointlessly hope that I can get through to people who are clearly uninterested in hearing anything outside of their narrow world. This conversation will, hopefully, help remind me that is fuckin' stupid.

What I learned from this pointless "conversation" was that Glen Beck and Bill O'Reilly are "intellectuals," socialism and fascism are the same philosophy/economic system/politics (based on the overwhelming evidence that Hitler's political party was "National Socialist") and that Hitler hung out with "Bohemian liberals" before rounding up his "old friends" and incinerating them, and the rest of the mindless propaganda has congealed into a muddy goo that I can not penetrate, decipher, or purge from my memory. If I weren't worried about the effects of combining heart medications with alcohol, I'd down a bottle of Jack Daniels and try to forget about the whole thing.

His knowledge of anything outside of small town Kansas was embarrassing as was his knowledge of world and American history. His rambling defense of Faux News reminded me of the recent poll that found FN viewers would be better informed if they never pulled their heads out of their asses to get their Newspeak fix. I probably made his day by saying that I didn't believe that China has a chance in hell of becoming democratic, that 8,000 years of taking two steps back for every step forward has condemned the mainland Chinese to being what they are until the blessed asteroid eliminates the genetic stain of humanity from the earth. In the usual pseudo-concerned voice of pseudo-conservativism, he called that statement "racist." He understood me to be saying that "orientals can't be democratic." Now that is, in fact, racist, but it's what he said, not me.

Like the Chinese state, I don't think Kansans or Nebraskans or Texans or Okies can be democratic, either. Those once great populist, progressive places have purged themselves of intellectuals and creative people and what they are left with is the result of nearly a century of unintentional down-breeding. For decades, every smart kid born in those places is run out of town efficiently and completely. All of those states are single party governments and they are all Republican. I would be willing to be some of my very own money that will not change in my lifetime or my kids' lifetimes.