Who Are the Good Guys?

For most of my life, I’ve thought I could tell who the good guys were in novels, movies, and history. Based on that assumption, I thought that most of us were cheering for the same folks at the end of the movie. After the 2016 elections, I’m not so sure.
I thought I’d post a few pairs of pictures just to calibrate myself with your ethical standards. Take, for example this pair of mythical characters. Who do you like here: the poor kid from Kansas who works for a liberal newspaper and wastes his time saving ordinary people from catastrophe and rich criminals or the rich guy to takes what he wants and could care less about who he hurts?


Being a rock and roll sort of guy, I thought this comparison is pretty obvious, but apparently I’m wrong. So who do you like: the artist who donates lots of his time to charity and who is actually a musician or the NRA spokesthing who crapped his pants to get out of fighting in Vietnam and who has threatened to murder the current President of the United States?

This ought to be a telling comparison. (The first guy is Jimmy Stewart, in case you’re confused and too young to remember Xmas movies.) The characters are Stewart as George Bailey, a man who has given up his dreams in order to help others, and Gordon Gekko, a Reagan era idol famous for his unrestrained greed and a 1980’s tag line, "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good." I don’t know how conservatives even blink with this choice. They have to love everything about Gekko, especially his job-killing corporate raider tactics.

This one should be another no-brainer for the pseudo-conservative crowd: a misfit loner, although a decorated and PTSD afflicted WWII vet, who actually destroyed parking meters or a for-profit prison warden. The warden delivers the line that appears to define the 21st Century, "What we've got here is failure to communicate." I don’t know how conservatives can not love a man who enforces the law without compassion, any sense of justice, or the slightest trace of decency.

I tried to make this one obvious by picking a picture of who I thought was the relative “good guy” with his gun in hand. However, this should be a tough one for conservatives: one guy is a paid assassin with a touch of morals and the other is a crooked sheriff who believes he’s the ruler of “my town” and does anything he feels like doing, including torture, behind the protection of the law.

This last one is the most confusing for me. One is a consistently ethical man with a beautiful family and who has given the country the most honorable government in my lifetime and the other is the living embodiment of Richy Rich and everything you’d think working class people would hate about the ruling elite.

But the election of 2016 proved that I have been viewing life, moves, and everything completely differently from 50-some-percent of the people in this country. It turns out that every movie I’ve ever watched has been interpreted differently by at least half of the theater audience. I should have known, since I attended the first showing of This Is Spinal Tap and discovered that most of the audience thought the film was an actual documentary and not a comedy at all. I didn’t bother trying to confuse you with these picture-pairs. I put the people I thought were the good guys on the left and the bad guys on the right, but I’m suspecting a lot of you thought I’d mixed it up a bit. You can not imagine how incredibly sad that makes me.

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.

Who Are the Job Creators?

Wingnuts want us to think the idle rich, corporate executives, military-industrial companies and the rest of the elite corporate welfare crowd are the "job creators." I don't think so. I came up with a game to test who is really economically important in the country and world. It's called "Who Can We Live Without."

First, let's play this game with the right wing crowd. If some blessed biological catastrophe were to happen to the caviar-eating crowd, everyone Romney and Bush have ever known for instance, what effect would that have on the nation's economy? All of the little rich kids who life on Daddy, Granpa, and Great-Great-Great-Granpa's money come down with a case of the mother-of-all diarrhea. The clowns to inhabit the top floors of the nation's corporate headquarters spend their last hours in the executive bathroom, emptying their money makers. The entire investment banking circus vanishes in a bubble of oily excrement. Most of the entertainment industry does what Hollywood usually does, makes shit, but this time no careers rebound from the disaster and we're left with independent artists for out diversions. Everyone who has eaten caviar (or some other rich asshole staple) in the last month is gone in a few weeks. How does that effect the nation's gross national product?

It's not like it's hard to find another CEO, so the loss of the executive class would result in a momentary burst of business productivity, until the usual assholes filtered to the top of the corporate toilet bowl and everything businesslike returned to "normal." Nobody but the people who serve the idle rich would know the rich douchebags were missing and those servants would probably find something useful to do fairly soon. The South's slaves ended up on the Detroit production lines after a few years of assimilation. George and Ann's butlers, maids, and gardeners can probably find productive work in time. Bankers just beg cheap (free today) money from the public and sell it back to us with interest. We can live without them. The difference between major stars and everyone else who plays an instrument, pretends to be someone else, or chases a ball in clown costumes is . . . not much. They will be replaced faster than we can forget their last performance.

If the right wing elite isn't mission critical to the country, who is?

How about scientists and mathematicians? If exposure to calculus and statistics caused aneurysms, how would that effect the economy? First, all of the rich people in the previous paragraph would be broke overnight if someone didn't manage their money, do their taxes, create tricky investment portfolios to maximize profits and minimize effort, and invent the products  and services that keep the 1% in control of 95% of the country's income. Without scientists and mathematicians, the idle rich would starve and have to find work asking if we "want fries with that?" The rest of us would be in trouble, too; especially if the US was the only country to have lost its scientists and mathematicians. We would go from being a shriveling first world economy to a third world disaster zone in a few months. Most of our productive industries would have seen their last new product and many wouldn't be able to continue producing their current products. The only competent federal government agency, the General Accounting Office, would become as stupid as the military and the military would be in capable of targeting anyone but Canada and Mexico and we'd have to drive the bombs to those places. Anyone but a wingnut can see scientists and mathematicians are job creators.

If we drop down the social ladder to the fastest vanishing career in the United States, farming, how does that play out if farmers and their support industries get Mad Cow and Corn disease and spend their last hours clawing at their skulls? The US food reserves are already lower than they have been for decades and fuel costs are likely to drive them lower. Doing stupid things like converting farm land to energy production (ethanol) will push this safety margin even closer to disaster. Even without killing off farmers and the ag industry, we might see the effect of these producers going away in the near future. Disregarding reality, if the food producers of the country vanished, so would most of us. With food reserves in the near-non-existent territory, most Americans would starve in a week. Grocery stores would empty on the first day and we'd eat our way through our personal reserves in a few days, those of us who have any. The streets would be on fire and the rioting would make the Civil War look like a block party. Obviously, farmers are job creators and life sustainers.

You can, hopefully, think of a few other occupations that are actually important to the country; medical providers, fire departments (especially forestry fire fighters), teachers, and the list of underpaid, overworked, unappreciated economy-critical jobs goes on. The ruling elite are not among that group. We can get along without them under any conditions.

A Nation of Assholes

This weekend, I'm polishing off a book titled, The No Asshole Rule by Robert Sutton. The book reinforces a lot of the arguments I've made in the past on my old Rat's Eye View website from the days when that collection of essays was mostly about business practices and management/mismanagement.

However, toward the end Sutton has a chapter titled "The Virtues of Assholes" where he attempts to explain the success of so many certifiable assholes (one prime asshole he constantly returns to is Apple's Steve Jobs). After describing how some assholes manage to become rich and powerful, he lists three "blind spots" successful assholes often have. One of those blind spots is that "experienced victims use [defensive measures) to protect themselves from cruel and vindictive actions, measures that have the side effect of shielding assholes from realizing the damage they inflict . . . victims avoid their oppressor's wrath by reporting only good news and remaining silent about, and even hiding, bad news." Sound familiar?

In 1816, the north eastern United States went through a catastrophic "year without a summer." The prevailing theory describing the reasons for that "last great subsistence crisis in the Western world" is that a record low solar activity and the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora caused record world-wide crop failures at least 200,000 deaths in Europe and similar devastation in North America and China. 200 years later, science is in a position to be able to predict the results of this kind of event and, even, allow for planning that could moderate the effects.

The real question is, are scientists likely to provide that information? I'm betting the answer is no.

The hostility aimed at scientists who have made predictions about global ocean and climate changes most likely has an effect similar to the distortion of reality created by asshole bosses. First, scientists will be inclined to keep their cultural heads low to prevent the anti-scientific "community" (read "Republicans" and pseudo-conservatives) from going ballistic with their loony counter-arguments. Unfortunately, going loony isn't all that the Republican drone crowd does. They attack scientific institution funding, eliminate critical national and state research facilities, and go after state university research funding. Since they can't understand the data, they attack the messengers. Our primitive citizens aren't the first monkey-people to use these tactics, failed empires liter history with their foolish ancestors. However, it's possible that the costs of allowing these idiots to speak in public might be a lot higher than it was in pre-industrial times.

Imagine yourself as a climate scientist, an astrophysicist, or a biologist. Your research finds that something international corporations is doing is likely to cause a worldwide disaster. Or your data tells you that our society's inability to wean itself from its excesses will cause climate change, famine, and war. Or your observations spotted a fast moving asteroid heading in our direction. The problem is, you're doing science not something simple like banking or something idiotic like pretending to know the minds of the gods. Science allows for predictions with tolerances. In the case of the asteroid, maybe the odds are 2:1 that the asteroid will strike the planet somewhere and the odds are, if the strike occurs, the same 2:1 odds exist that the strike will cause a world-wide disaster. What do you do, if you're one of those scientists? Do you tell an ignorant, superstitious world about the problem and the cure or do you keep it to yourself knowing that your fellow humans are too stupid to do the right thing even with the right information?

Based on what we've seen over the last 25 years of the global warming crisis, I'd suspect that any scientist with a lick of sense would keep quiet and let nature (human and global) take its course. Especially in the superstitious US, we're too dumb to care about our children or their planet. We're too greedy to be concerned with the welfare of any generation beyond our own. We're willing to burn up the world's natural resources in a single generation, leaving future generations to suffer for our greed. Who would step into the political cesspool for a species as foolish as that? A nation of assholes, led by a pack of corrupt and vicious corporate assholes who are as psychopathic as the worst serial killers in history.