Even Hitler's power came from the bottom up

Back during the first Trump regime, he supposedly said that we wished he had generals like Hitler had. But what he has really needed, and lacked, is a populace like the German people in the 1930s.

The winners of the Great War were both righteously pissed off and more than a little opportunistic in their punitive attitude toward Germany after what was known at the time simply as The World War, because no one knew at that time that there would be a sequel. It was the most horrific conflict the world had known so far, taking machine guns, artillery, and aircraft to completely obliterate the last vestiges of the 19th Century style of military engagement. Once it started, no participating nation would dishonor itself by stepping back and saying, "Hold on a minute! This is complete bullshit! We need to figure out a better way to solve our problems."

The oversimplified version is that Germany started a fight it couldn't finish, despite doing a really good job for the first half or so. When they lost, the other combatants stuck them with the whole bill. This hobbled Germany's economy and battered their national pride. After the nastiest war in human history (to date), the opposing nations all said, "Good. You have no right to pride after the way you acted!" In that oversimplified version, the decision looks rash, but totally understandable after what Germany put everyone through.

In the book The Origins of the World War, published in 1928, Sidney Bradshaw Fay, professor of modern European history at Smith College, went into great detail about all the ways in which the other world powers of the era played games with each other and set up the calamity through more than the simple "entangling alliances" that supposedly tripped everyone at the last minute, more or less, into having to have this disastrous war. The book can be heavy going, because it backtracks a lot, covering colonialist rivalries, French resentment after the Franco-Prussian War, Balkan politics, and various movements swirling through Europe to try to create shared interests. Entangling alliances barely describes the uppermost surface of the deals and double crosses and shifty shafty shit that the French and British were pulling, in the European land grabs of late stage colonialism. So the Germans had more to resent than just a heavy handed treaty at the end of the war. They were in some sense set up beforehand.

You don't need to know that, but I found it fascinating. I was really bummed when I noticed that the book I had was only Volume I. How will I ever find out how it turned out?

Anyway, Germany was already ripe for a change, and the National Socialists already existed before Adolf dropped in. In many ways it was like Trump jumping to the front of the Republican Party's grievance wing and showing the rest of the party how to really exploit all the anger and paranoia that they had just been stringing along since the 1970s.

The thing is, Germany had a much higher grievance percentage than the United States had, regardless of how obnoxiously those bastards fill the airwaves today. Hitler could really pack a stadium. Trump on his best day couldn't match it.

The media have always helped Trump immensely. If he had not been a reality television star, he would have had no power in the political arena. Once he launched his campaign, the analysts dutifully analyzed him, rating his chances very low on the basis of experience, ability, character, and couth. None of those qualities mattered in the least to the voters who chose him. In many ways those were his best assets. And the cynical plutocrats and ideologues who briefly opposed him before going all in just saw him as a vehicle to their own ascendancy.

The Trump base is committed enough to be good German citizens of the 1930s. But they are a much smaller percentage of the overall population. And Trump lacks another critical element that Hitler had: a world where he could entertain a realistic fantasy of conquest. War was hell, but it was not yet capable of peeling the entire crust off of the earth in one glorious nuclear exchange. So while Hitler riled up his followers about the enemies within, he also fired them up to take revenge on the smug bastards in France and Britain who had done Germany dirt since way before the shooting started in 1914.

The combination of conventional warfare (more or less. Germany did innovate there, to its obvious advantage in the early stages of the war) and a Europe reluctant to get into it again helped him convince his people to throw their support behind the glorious campaign to claim what rightfully should have been theirs. Look outward to the foe! Those decadent people in other countries are soft! Now let's go get 'em!

Hitler's generals were actually good at generalling, unlike the current Secretary of Defense. And Trump and Major Hegseth's obsession with loyalty to the regime is further hollowing out the officer corps. Hitler's generals famously tried to off him more than once as they realized that he could fire up the people but he couldn't strategize worth a crap.

Regardless of whether the Republicans succeed in their decades-long campaign to gerrymander the country and suppress voting so that they always win, the general population is not behind them. It's statistically unlikely that the general population can be coerced into getting behind them, either.

They might be forced to try machine gunning a few public gatherings just to see how that goes. It's a risky gambit, though. The majority of the citizen militia types who stockpiled weapons so that they could fight in a glorious revolution against government tyranny only meant the tyranny of having to be nice to minorities and weirdos, and pay into a universal health care system that actually treats people without a lot of rigamarole. When it comes to actual masked, unidentified quasi-law-enforcement troops dragging people off to prisons without due process, a lot of them have already signed up. I've seen the bumper stickers. This is their dream job. Tyranny is great as long as they get to inflict it. But they're still spread too thin to subdue the entire country.

I said years ago that our enemies would finance our civil war. They may be chipping in a little right now, but the tensions that the right wing has stoked on behalf of the wealthy are so great that we can tear ourselves apart with very little input from outside. If the United States implodes, China and Russia will compete to take over the space and develop it for themselves. My money's on China, but I'd prefer that we didn't come to that at all. How about we reclaim our goal to be a shining example of how a nation can be run by its people, for its people? We need to set aside the politics of selfishness in order to achieve our full potential as a force for good.

There is no great era in our country's past to which we should aspire to return. Our wavering progress has always been linear and, until the last decade or so, generally upward. The only parts of the past that were good were the platforms from which we could build better. Not bigger. Not more posh. Actually, fundamentally better. We squandered our opportunities to correct course with relatively small adjustments, in favor of our experiment in unchained greed. The enemy within is not in slums and trailer parks and drag queen story hour. It's in boardrooms and brokerage houses.

As much fun as it sounds, storming the mansions and office towers of our overlords and putting them to the sword will not provide the lasting value that simply voting for higher taxes and other curbs on them will bring us. Our species needs to outgrow violence before it permanently stunts our growth.

Government is boring. Government should be boring. Pledge to dedicate yourself to plain old boring, effective administration. If your chief executive needs lapdog generals, military parades, a reign of terror over any portion of the country's inhabitants, and a giant ballroom appended to a very modest presidential mansion, that's a very bad sign for the health and well-being of ordinary citizens. I know each of us is extraordinary in our own way. We need to appreciate that about each other. Ya bunch of lovable weirdos.

The Politics of Selfishness in the Land of Opportunity

 As the current regime demolishes our functioning government to make way for dictatorship, they represent the culmination of the politics of selfishness carried out over more than half a century.

We hear a lot about the failure of civics education as if it's a new thing. It was already starting to fail in the 1970s as class sizes overwhelmed the size of school buildings and waves of Boomers were assembly-lined through the system to seek their fortunes after graduation. An awful lot that came at us just merged into a drone. This was on top of the sanitized history that minimized the sins and maximized the glory of each succeeding generation of rich white men who courageously got lots of poor people to work really hard for tiny shares of immense fortunes. In the case of slaves, that share was nil.

Those of us growing up in the 1960s learned in school that competition is what makes our country great. We also learned that any one of us could grow up to be anything we wanted to be. If you didn't happen to live near one of the stress points in the civil rights movement, you could even believe that this opportunity was being extended equally to all strivers of any color or creed.

I never cared if I shared a classroom with Black kids. I saw no reason why I shouldn't. However, I never really did until high school in the Miami, Florida, area. And I was oblivious to the unrest that had only just simmered down, even though my new schoolmates told me about schools being closed during riots. In Annapolis in the late 1960s, the high school saw some upheavals that led to broken windows and light fixtures, but I had been sent to a private school with exactly two Black students, both of them several grades ahead of me. They were well regarded in their class. One of them went on to become a doctor. He also punched out a classmate for using the n-word in casual conversation, while the group around him completely approved of the punitive fist in the face. It seemed downright post-racial, and it was only 1970 or '71. So let's get out there and be all we can be in this great land of opportunity.

The Vietnam War ended just in time to save my older brother from having to choose a branch of the service or a trip to Canada. The draft was suspended in January, 1973. I still had to register in 1974, but military service was no longer a ritual of young manhood unless you wanted it to be. Most of the guys I knew decided to skip it. Everyone I knew was focused on figuring out what they were going to do for a living. That's a universal theme in any generation emerging into adulthood, wherever their society places that threshold, but in the late 1970s the world still seemed hopeful and full of opportunity. It seemed safe enough to major in business and set your sights on earning your first million. You might even be able to buy a $12,000.00 luxury sports car. We would be fine as long as the Russkis didn't nuke us.

Vietnam veterans began to filter into the higher education system alongside kids who had been young enough to avoid the war. Somehow, they seemed to assimilate with the vapid disco 'droids and other happy materialists who had watched the war come and go on television. We who had not served just figured that they were picking up where they had left off, after a bad interlude of following orders from a misguided government that had now been brought to heel by mass public protests. Now c'mon and have fun! You're home safe! Push those dark thoughts aside!

Most of us are superficial. We deal with the immediate circumstances in front of us and extrapolate a vision of  the future, filled with things that we do want and things that we don't want. "Don't borrow trouble," my father used to say. In a way it's good advice not to leap into someone else's problems or stir things up for your own entertainment. But the same philosophy enables you to look away from genuine injustice while you protect yourself in the interim, ignoring a situation that could conceivably slop back onto you at some point. Here was a man who made his living in part as a professional seafarer. What are preparations and drills but a form of borrowing trouble? A little borrowed trouble can serve as a vaccine against bigger trouble, or a quick, prophylactic dose of antibiotic before an infection gets out of control.

The trouble with aphorisms is that they don't differentiate. There are no universal words of wisdom that can never be interpreted in numerous ways. If the saying in question has an essence, we still lack the discernment to nail down which interpretation expresses it. Oh well. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If you can't fix it, use it as it is.

The 1970s was a period of rapid liberation. As a young dude in a male-dominated culture, I did not have the slightest awareness how new the emerging women's freedom was. To a young horn-dog, the area of greatest interest was that birth control pills had made a lot of women more willing to accept the endless invitations leveled at them to try it and see if they liked it. As it happened, many of them discovered that they did not, for various reasons. Horny dude culture did not then go, "oh, well that's all right then, sorry to have bothered you."

The student government in my senior year in high school was entirely female. I don't know how many of them went on to law school. One of them was majoring in architecture at U of F at the time I graduated and emerged into the welcoming job market of an incipient recession. Other female classmates definitely did pursue law and business degrees. We were all going places.

Whatever one chose to do, personal income was a driving principle. We also looked for job satisfaction, which helps if you are pursuing veterinary medicine, or nursing, for instance. And pure science careers didn't draw students in with the big bucks, but applied sciences sure did. And engineering. One psychology major I knew got hired by an insurance company as a claims adjuster. You can definitely use some psychology in the process of chiseling down someone's financial payout. And she got a company car! 

Computers were still a joke and a futurist fantasy. No one seemed to realize how quickly the future would arrive, regardless of songs and stories harping on how fast time passes ("Well, the cat's in the cradle... etc.) Engineering types gravitated to the field to turn cutting edge technology into obsolete junk as quickly as possible. The aim was improved function, not just consumer enslavement. Consumer enslavement was a happy consequence. First you need the better machine to help you design the even better better machine.

Alongside the high tech future ran the path of the evolved hippies: organic farming, homesteading, hiding out from the government that we couldn't trust. Those philosophies lead both left and right. The "Jesus freaks" of the hippie years begat the evangelicals of today. You take care of your own. The world is doomed, but you don't have to be. On the other hand, sustainable practices are all that will assure us of future survival at all.

The theme of individual liberty ran throughout. And not just liberty but prosperity. You could choose to settle for less, but it was relative to the pursuit of excess that we already saw taking shape. Sales positions always recruited with the line "unlimited earning potential." In an era when $10,000 a year was just about enough to get started with an okay apartment and a beater car, as long as you got regular raises, the goal of "earning your age" set the standard for really making it. "Dude's pulling down 40 grand! Nice!" He's 33 and way ahead of schedule. But that didn't last long. Maybe if you count your age dating from when Homo Sapiens first emerged  almost a million years ago you can settle for that figure.

Wealth and government were seen as separate, monolithic entities, not as the combined result of shared human effort. People might be rivals or marks or useful. Friends and loved ones are nice, but they should either bolster your own pursuit of income or at least be an affordable indulgence.

Even the concept of contributing to society was measured in dollars. If you have a good job -- i.e. one with a healthy paycheck, you're a good citizen and an asset to the community, even if you run a laboratory where animals are tortured to test mascara, or you direct a high-kill animal "shelter." Maybe you manufacture weapons, or cigarettes, or you're an environmental lawyer greenwashing the enterprises of an oil company. Or you work with your hands, on a fracking rig or building oil pipelines across wetlands. If the money's good, you're good. Just throw a little to charity.

If our society wasn't still driven by selfishness, pickup trucks would be a lot smaller and far less numerous. The discussion of social safety nets wouldn't center on "spending my tax dollars on other people's (insert basic need here)."

To earn a billion dollars you would have to make 20 million dollars per year for 50 years. We hear a lot about the rights of the wealthy to keep their "earnings," but absolutely nothing about their responsibilities after capturing so much of the money supply for their own uses. Sure, they have expenses, and many of those expenses involve paying people in various capacities to work for them. But a lot of money just breeds more money in a vacuum, feeding off of the perceived value of stocks, and transaction fees generated by trading them. Companies may employ people, but the stock market itself provides only thousands of jobs in an economy with millions of workers, and their employees don't produce anything.

Transparency laws require that financial services companies disclose their compensation. Trading is regulated although we're seeing more and more how insider trading is common and unpunished. Elected officials have been playing the market with inside information for decades. It's reached a crescendo now, with the executive branch up to the elbows in graft, and members of Congress still profiting off of companies that they regulate. Further proof that the best way to avoid criminal prosecution is to get elected to office. The second best way is simply to be obscenely rich -- too big to fail and too well-lawyered to jail. As Trump has proven, you don't even need good lawyers to do it, as long as you have enough of them to slow the system to a crawl. Go ahead and lose the case. Just take a long time doing it.

As far back as the 1980s one school of sleazebag life coaching laid out how you could go into debt and just keep moving it, moving it, moving it, until you could die and abandon it. As bankruptcy became less a suicide-worthy shame and more just another chess move in the business of life, you could shuck some of your burden that way, too. Hapless failures would set up payment plans that would never discharge the debt, and keep on living. Heck, the minimum payment on any credit card bill will never pay off the balance. As the population grew faster than the economy and environment could support it, harsher standards would have led to legions of starving people in the streets. And now we have that anyway.

While the Baby Boom pursued its indulgences, they started producing the next generation, instilling the same values, but dumping their progeny into a much more competitive landscape. And Gen X begat Millennials, and Millennials begat Gen Z... or something like that. I really dislike generational labels because they try to homogenize people while ignoring the variables that shape individuals within the group. You can analyze statistics, but you need all of the statistics for it to reflect reality. Who has time for that shit?

Indeed, time has been the critical factor helping the wealthy to grow more wealth and pull away from the working hordes. The people in power have taken care of themselves while looking down at the state of the world that they made, and using its crumbling state as their excuse to design private space programs and plan for the extermination of millions because automated production lines and AI data centers don't need them. The working classes are too busy staying housed and fed to critically analyze the political information hosing them down.

Those private rockets don't stay up for long, though. The fantasy that the tech bros have, that they will fly off into space and find new worlds to consume and destroy is not supported by their current success rate. Using far more primitive technology, the United States government put multiple craft onto the moon more than half a century ago.  It was a time of much higher top tax brackets, and much lower CEO compensation.

John F. Kennedy ushered in the 1960s saying, "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." It was a call to civic responsibility. By the mid 1970s, the citizens had decided, "yeah, fck that! The moon was cool and all, but that Vietnam thing was bullshit. We'd rather get rich and have fun." Failing the rich part, we'll settle for the fun. What got progressively buried was the idea that citizen government has a higher purpose. The government we had seemed big enough to take care of itself. We could sneer at it and vote for politicians who said that they would save us from it, but it would always be there, taking care of...business. And that's the problem. It has taken care of business ("the business of America is business") as separate from humanity. Labor is a necessary evil, a cost to be controlled. Calvin Coolidge's original statement from which the popular misquote is distilled was more detailed and nuanced, but it still supported the idea that America is a nation of business people, "profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world."

My high school guidance counselor in 1974 told me "success is money!" Perhaps he was a little bitter over his own life choices, but at least he was trying to save me from wasting my life in pursuit of illusory satisfactions. Get rich or die trying.

The only place where taking better care of the planet and each other might get the smallest toehold in Coolidge's summation is in the word "prospering." Are you "prospering" in a fortified luxury community with sprawling slums for miles outside its gates, under a smog-filled sky, with a view of the lifeless, multicolored chemical stew that used to be the ocean? Some would say that since such a scene is inevitable, it's far better to be in the fort than the slums.

You bet your life on the course you choose when you are young. Then you bet your children's lives that they will find a path through the world that you prepared for them. The workers have numbers, and immense power if we act together. But we are each entitled to our opinion about the help and harm that we spread, and to whom we spread them. That's the democracy part of our republic. That's the cumulative effect of our lifestyles.

Political Prosecution Part Two

 As the current regime does what it falsely accused the Biden administration of doing, the problem of how to investigate and prosecute elected officials and partisan political appointees joins the clamor in the news cycle.

Political scandals that slop over into criminal behavior are nothing new in this country. Watergate was huge in its day, and has resonance even now. Richard Nixon resigned because his own senators told him that they would convict him after the House impeached him, which would then cut him loose to face criminal prosecution for his part in the actions of his minions.

Those were the good old days, when members of Congress recognized their power and responsibility, and respected their office enough to exert its Constitutional powers even against a member of their own party. Cynically, one might wonder if they would have been as diligent during Nixon's first term, rather than when he was already a lame duck with poll numbers that would reflect badly on the re-election chances of all of them, but regardless of that, they did carry out their duty.

The hyper-partisanship that reasserted itself in the 1980s and ramped up in the '90s has reached the point of complete breakdown. There has always been ugliness, but easy access to ugly opinions via social media has given it vastly more reach. An older Republican acquaintance of mine told me back in the 1990s about a Republican coworker of his who came in right after John F. Kennedy's assassination, saying, "I'm glad that son of a bitch is dead!"

If "the enemy of your enemy is your friend," political violence becomes a convenience. You may say that the assassin should not have committed the murder, but you freely admit that you're glad they did. It's partisan warfare pushed beyond rhetoric.

In that climate, when it comes to criminal investigations of people who happen to be in the opposite political party to the one in power, it ceases to be an earnest search for truth and justice and becomes, "they investigate one of ours, we investigate ten of theirs." A cynical public, saturated in propaganda for decades, doesn't really trust either side. Researching the details seems like more trouble than it's worth.

Unfortunately for the jaded public, one side is right. In this instance, it's the "left." Not to say that the Democratic Party doesn't have its scammy sleazebags like Bob Menendez. But they have not been dealing in a broad campaign of targeted persecution toward an extensive menu of marginalized communities. They haven't engaged in the obvious, persistent collusion with extreme wealth and foreign autocrats that the Republicans have. Not so much lately, anyway.

Because unelected civil servants are members of political parties, and these affiliations are known, their ostensibly nonpartisan actions on behalf of their responsibility to the Constitution get skewed by partisan media outlets as sinister or virtuous depending on the D or the R associated with the lead investigator and the target of the investigation. Long before anything comes to trial -- if ever -- the court of public opinion has heard and reheard the case dozens of times and issued conflicting verdicts. While that should not have an effect on the speed and efficiency of the justice system investigating genuine infractions, the political component looms over the proceedings.

Because power is gained and retained through elections -- at least until the current regime succeeds in turning them into a meaningless piece of theater -- prosecutors know that their actions will have a direct influence in the publicity campaigns leading up to the actual voting. The partisan loyalty of the prosecutor may not influence a jury, but it will influence voters. One of the best ways to hide out from criminal prosecution is to become a political candidate and condemn the "partisan witch hunt" coming after you. Maybe you only get as far as George Santos did*. Maybe you end up dragging a right-wing authoritarian cabal into the executive branch twice. Maybe you serve as the Attorney General of Texas for ten years despite beginning that phase of your career by negotiating away fraud charges and later surviving impeachment for bribery, and go on to be a candidate for US Senate.

The saying goes that power corrupts. Power corrupts the corruptible. It also attracts the already susceptible or criminal. Elections are sales campaigns. The majority of voters are not digging deeply into political philosophy and the myriad details of each candidate in every election presented to them at local, state, and national levels. Who has time? When things are good, the problem doesn't seem acute. When things are bad, average citizens are busy surviving. In either case, they vote from the information that comes easily to them.

Information is everywhere these days. From three broadcast networks and a handful of major newspapers in the late 20th Century, we now have broadcast and cable TV, hundreds (or more) of online journalists, the remnants of print journalism, and the online versions of corporate media. The truth may be out there. You might even see it flit by on one of your devices, but you don't have time to capture and verify it.

People end up in information silos because it's convenient and comforting. Their biases are upheld. The choice is simplified. Even in the old days with less media, you had to buy the newspaper, and the television news only covered what fit into the half-hour slots morning and evening. When longer format news programs emerged, like The Today Show and Good Morning America, the stories often repeated during the news portion, before the show then switched to vapid pap for its second hour. Whatever you got "in depth" was edited for space and time. What got cut would subtly -- or not so subtly -- reflect the bias of the management. The bigger the corporation, the more the bias favors corporate interests. The business side of media overcomes any commitment to journalistic or artistic integrity in the news or entertainment divisions.

In the early days of consumer Internet, those of us with computer geek friends heard that you could knock together a rudimentary website or go to one of the emerging free blog hosting sites like Google's Blogspot, to post your thoughts for anyone in the world to find, read, and pass on, building international readership and perhaps fame and fortune as your previously obscure voice gets lifted worldwide. It's true: in the decades that I have been posting to my blogs, more than a dozen people have seen my work as far away as Australia and Russia, according to my stats.

Today there are many more platforms offering much more sophisticated production values, mostly in the much more popular video format. The basic service may be free to content creators and their audience, but the infrastructure and personnel that allow this to happen are owned by very wealthy people and corporations. Your free, independent web journalism is seen, judged, and managed by a profit-driven corporation. That influence might be more obvious on some sites and less intrusive on others, but it's in the background everywhere, ready to shift the influence to protect its own interests. Any site could go the way of Twitter if the right wrong billionaire takes it that way.

That brings us around again to the primary impediment to prosecution of political figures: for every educated and informed commentator explaining the nature of the crimes and the threat they pose to the basic freedoms promised by the Constitution, there are dozens of presenters insisting that the prosecutors themselves are the threat. Or maybe the prosecutors are the threat, as we're seeing now, and the loud voices of obfuscation are drawing a false equivalency between the unconstitutional abuse of power now and the actual exertion of constitutional power in the previous administration's investigations.

It seems as though the government is tasked with regulating itself, and it's true. So is the watchdog suspect because of who holds the chain and fills the food bowl? It's possible, because the only powerful independent entity to demand decency is a unified American public. So far in history, we have never had that. We've only had temporary majorities -- sometimes significantly large -- that manage to hold power to account through the actions of elected representatives. Movements come together to right wrongs like slavery, improve working conditions and food safety, advance civil rights and women's rights, end the Vietnam War, pay lip service to the environment... and then dissipate when the battle seems won enough, momentum established. It will take care of itself from here. And of course it does not.

*Written before Trump commuted Santos's sentence.

It's scriptural to them...

On the subject of elder care costs today, the shop owner shared that the cost of his father's residence in the veteran's home had surged to more than $10,000 a month since the death of his mother. He was talking to a family friend who currently works as a plumber after selling his family's heating oil business a few years ago. The plumber griped that the government cuts funding for veterans and spends the money on "illegals." He blurted that out without the slightest hesitation. It's as true as God's word.

Therein lies a big problem. Our whole political system runs on public opinion. It's how we, the people, decide who gets our vote. The GOP has managed to make "illegals" the catch-all for the nation's ills. By extension, the Democrats  -- who try to enact humane policies and easier pathways to citizenship -- are evil because they don't vigorously persecute immigrants in general and undocumented ones in particular.

Hard-working people like simple answers. "Democrats spend too much money helping illegals, so our own people get short-changed" places blame instantly for the nation's problems. The solutions is simple: get rid of the illegals. To do that, get rid of Democrats.

Since the vast majority of people right around here are white, and most of them work in practical trades where they identify problems and fix them through straightforward direct action, they gravitate to the idea that you just have to get yourself a good, honest job and work hard at it to extract a decent living from the rich people who own the money supply and kindly share it with us.

Inheriting a well-established family business doesn't hurt, either. The plumber is no billionaire, and he's done more than his share of mucking around in nasty basements and crawl spaces installing and servicing systems, but he also never had to apply for work, especially far from his birthplace and home town.

The willing labor of these unconscious beneficiaries of privilege genuinely entitles them to more than just flippant dismissal. In a very white state like New Hampshire, nearly every role is filled by a white person, including "impoverished dirtbag." Contempt for the poor is not linked to race here. Interestingly, this does nothing to blunt the racism with which bigots view the problems of those other places where the gangs are awful and the migrants swarm in to rape the women, force drugs on unwilling clients, eat the pets, freeload on the welfare system and still take a lot of good jobs from good Americans.

The great Puritan work ethic can be summed up thusly: misery loves company. The virtuous toilers who have done fine for themselves can't imagine life any other way. Around there, they serve the wealthy with a smile, but they don't become friends. I really don't know if they envy the fortunes of the leisure class, while voting reliably to make sure that the leisure class remains in control. You work in that system and don't complain. If you try to change things, it's because you are lazy and you're looking for a way to slack off at others' expense.

New Hampshire is isolated from the major conflict zones in the United States right now, but it is not isolated from broadcast and internet media. As the former first in the nation presidential primary state, New Hampshire has bred into its population the idea that they are politically astute. The congressional delegation at this time is all Democrats, but the state legislature and many local offices are dominated by Republicans. At the local level, conservative attitudes dominate, shaped by the national information machinery that keeps the right wing unified by the same oversimplifications and distortions.

Work toward a better world while you're hanging around

Nearly everyone thinks they're working for a better world. The conflict arises between values, not intentions. There are nihilists who want to let it die or actively make it die, but the majority of people do try to live their values and think of the world they will leave for their children and grandchildren. It's just that some of those visions are cruel, hostile, exclusionary, and require the deaths of millions to create the future that the specific faction will dominate. The prime example is "the white ethno-state." Christian Nationalism or any theocracy makes for bad neighbors both inside and outside of a nation's borders. And that's hardly a comprehensive list of political philosophies that run on death.

When people gather to chat informally about the world's problems, around the keg, the bong, or in the church of your choice, the concept of monoculture can seem comforting. No more disagreements! How incredibly bland. How fundamentally impossible. You can neither persuade nor kill your way to absolute uniformity of thought and behavior. But it's tempting. At any given time, millions of people are drawn by it. We're being ruled by a cabal of them now in the USA. One of the few things that helps us oppose them is that their visions don't perfectly align. Even on the dark side, so dead set against diversity, their own diversity leads to conflict. And these are not people who handle disagreement productively.

The reason our country has been dragged into a far-right lagoon of manure is that the right in general has been tugging that way for more than 40 years. If you want to get super technical about it, it's been since the 17th Century, with early antecedents in the 16th. Heck, even the 15th. European conquest and colonialism underlies the entire modern civilization of the Western Hemisphere. Looking down on inferior people has made us feel better about ourselves for as long as there have been people. When inferiority centers on skin color or command of a certain language it lumps masses of people into a quaking mat beneath the feet of the people with the "superior" appearance. You might respect some aspect of their skills, but still annihilate them in whatever numbers you have to when a material goal demands it, because they're ultimately inferior overall, and disposable.

Working toward a better world is not inconsistent with reducing human numbers and acknowledging that life is pain and ultimately pointless as far as we can tell. Not everyone should raise kids directly, but many of us grumpy bastards can still be helpful in a variety of ways. Remember I said "self extinction," not "self annihilation." Life can be good, and we can raise the standards of it for nearly everyone. I say nearly because some children are born with congenital diseases that will make their lives painful and short. Other people might get a little further before some built-in defect takes them down. Or a big storm hits, or an earthquake, or wildfires, or you're unlucky enough to live during a pandemic and die before we develop a treatment -- assuming we can -- you know: circumstances beyond our control.  That still leaves a vast array of circumstances that are most definitely within our control, such as how we view and treat each other.

I'm not a sociable person. But I'm not an antisocial person. If people want to gather and have fun, that's great. I prefer if it's not intrusive and destructive, but that still leaves a lot of room for all kinds of activities I find distasteful or boring. Sometimes you have to grit your teeth and put up with shit because it's not your business, it's only temporary, and it's not really hurting anything. Other times, seemingly innocuous acts like leaving your car or truck idling for hours are truly antisocial when you add up all the instances of this selfish behavior that occur in a country of 340 million people, or a planet with 8.2 billion people on it. It's a lot of little things, along with the high profile big things like mass shootings, wars, and economic policies that turn the working class into beggars.

The internet and social media are full of content creators promoting community activism and local involvement. I don't ever talk to my neighbors, and they don't talk to me. It's not hostility. It's New England. I do reflexively avoid people who display symbols of the regime, but they have probably been avoiding people with rainbow flags and touchy-feely bumper stickers already. I display none of that, but I have published a cartoon or two that made me wonder if I was going to get beaten up after a public meeting. Did it do any good? I don't know. Point is, I know I'm a weirdo and not much of a conversationalist, so I keep to myself. If I see a chance to do something in a group that helps the group, I do it and then fade back. Community involvement sounds so positive and friendly and involving, and it intimidates the shit out of me. I would still do my best to pull you out of your burning car, no matter what your bumper stickers say. Then I would run away.

When it comes to voting with your wallet, how you fill it is as important as how you spend. Assuming that the human species will try to continue, our definition of success will control how cruel or benevolent that future will be. We will still need skilled workers in practical trades and in supporting roles. Compensation will depend on how we structure our economy. Arguing or calculating from existing numbers is wildly misleading to say the least, because current numbers are based on suicidally rapid resource depletion and grotesque overpayment to the topmost tier of the ownership/management class.

I tried to train myself to live within a very modest -- not to say meager -- income, but associating with normal people has lured me into the culture of routine luxury that we call a middle class lifestyle in the United States. Restructuring the scale of wealth may mean that I get stripped of what little I have, because I can no longer afford it under fair distribution of the reduced income each generation receives in order to preserve something for the succeeding generations that they create. It's a scary calculation, but the alternative is to assume that we will develop interstellar flight and find a ready supply of new planets we can deplete in our voracious quest for endless growth. Either that or just go out in a gorging, guzzling blaze of glory depleting this one.

Choose your vision and support it, or just live by impulse and let evolution choose for you.

The radical resistance of self extinction

 The statistics are easy to find showing that a handful of billionaires control more wealth than the bottom half of the population in the United States. Extreme wealth generates its own gravity, sucking more and more resources toward itself.

The United States owes much of its prosperity to the stolen labor of slaves. When official slavery was ended, powerful men in the former Confederacy made sure that the Black population would remain subjugated. By the end of the 19th Century, powerful business interests built immense fortunes by suppressing labor -- creating a virtual slave economy -- until reformers in the government heeded the uprisings and broke the power of corporate consolidation and collusion.

Big business kept trying, and had flourished again by the 1920s, setting up economic collapse. A few rich tumbled, but the solid fortunes survived. Let the common folk bear the brunt of the decisions and follies of the powerful. It has been that way throughout history. Power accretes, life is cheap, and you're a slacker and a coward if you don't play along.

While humanity plays out its endless power struggles, we trash the environment. We keep discovering that we removed some key piece that we thought was not important in our haste.

At the moment, we are developing technology that allows the wealthy to keep tabs on us and suppress us better than ever. Any government that we instituted to keep them in check would use the same technology to protect itself. It might be okay as long as the government was staffed by people who would not abuse that power. What are the odds?

The future seems to hold a couple of unpalatable probabilities: the majority of us end up grubbing for sustenance in a global economy run by a few for the benefit of a few, and we end up in constant losing battles with the armed forces and law enforcement of the regime in perpetuity.

We can "vote with our wallets" all we want, boycotting this or that visible head of the multi-headed mega-corporations, but we're just an inconvenience for a single division or two. The major money machine thrives. We can elect progressive champions who will vote for the things that would truly improve our lot in all respects, but they will have to deal politically with the well-funded representatives of the corporatocracy.

Thinking about a real shootin' revolution? Your odds are terrible, given the global reach and vested interest of the wealthy. Forget whether you would win. The war itself would reduce the planet to a smoldering rock. This is not hyperbole based on the power of nuclear weapons. It's a mere fact about war: it pollutes and destroys without restraint. Lots of things will get blown up. Both sides are fighting for their lives with nothing to lose.

I hate to be a downer, but any future generations you produce now will be slave labor or doomed cannon fodder. But it doesn't have to be grim and sad. You've just freed up a lot of disposable income as well as relieving yourself of a moral burden. You don't have to leave, just because you have refused to give the wealthy your children as hostages. Have fun! Eat tasty food. Listen to music. Travel.

See, here's the thing: The rich will keep breeding. They'll go on for years before they even notice that we've stopped providing cheap labor. They will produce more of their privileged offspring than the top tier can accommodate. Those kids will filter down into the lower roles. Laws will have to be rewritten to disinherit them, so that they can't rebel and take over the system that their families have maintained for generations.

The wealthy themselves, mostly not expert at anything except keeping a boot on the necks of the people who work for them, will have to develop expertise pretty quickly to keep up the automated systems they paid others to invent so that they could lay off a bunch of workers. Their utopia depends on having just the right number of underlings to keep things humming. If we all refuse to help them meet their staffing needs, they lose their comfy bubble.

Lest you think we could bring about paradise on Earth just by starving out the wealthy and collapsing civilization, remember that violent coercion was one of humanity's first innovations. It isn't going away. The only way to end it is to end us.

Naturally, this is not going to be a popular point of view. I resisted it for decades. Lots of people will continue to feed the voracious appetite of the culture of power. I decided early on not to have children, but I held out the hope that a better future was truly -- though remotely -- possible. However, as years have passed and technology has evolved, life has gotten simultaneously more comfortable for the privileged and more tenuous for the vast majority of us. Many of us down here in the disposable masses enjoy comforts and conveniences that did not exist 20, 30, 50 years ago. My view of a nice world to live in was shaped by childhood observations in the 1960s and '70s. In many ways it has not changed. But generations that followed have completely different baselines and perceptions, and they far outnumber me. I was already outvoted by my own generation in making the first steps toward that better world.

The permaculture crowd seems to have a rough idea of what I had in mind and had no name or platform for, but they're locked in battle with elements in their own age group who want to put medieval religion in charge of government and make racism great again, while driving petroleum fueled vehicles in defiance of repressive science. So what progress have we made? The former "greatest country on Earth" (USA! USA! USA!) is now lurching toward a polluting dictatorship that considers war crimes to be expressions of national might and virtue. Will those forces win? I join with those who say that they will not. But the struggle to stop them delays all other progress as we ally with disillusioned former followers of the regime who are willing to defend democracy at long last, but only so that we can go back to the same stupid arguments that were dooming us before and paved the way for the authoritarian takeover in the first place.

We will beat them. We will unseat them. But they will still be around, seeking another route to power. The struggle doesn't end. A multitude will labor in obscurity so that a minority might feel like they've made a substantial difference. We need warriors, champions, heroes to sacrifice themselves in defense of all that is great and good, but we mock their sacrifice by refusing to learn how to keep it from happening over and over.

We all do better when we all do better. But starting right now, getting the resources to help the lowermost do better means taking a big chunk out of the uppermost. Thus we aren't "all doing better." The great rebalancing may be beyond the will of the sizable percentage who will see their fortunes diminish. "What's in it for me?" will take over as the guiding principle. Take over? It never left. 

A growth mindset has driven humans for at least thousands of years. Why pay for what you can take by force? Why settle for your own little valley when you've produced more sons than your farms can feed, and they're getting restless? 

I have lived my whole life under the threat of World War III. We have avoided it so far, but the threat remains. Fans of the Star Trek universe remind us that the peaceful future of the Federation lies beyond World War III. Like human beings need to teach themselves that dumb lesson one more time, using even more modern and horrific weapons than in the second volume of the trilogy.

With so many people designing their lives around fantasy fiction, whether it's the Bible, Star Trek, DC Comics, or what have you, it's such an ingrained tradition that we have groups of believers trying to bring about specific events described in their texts as stepping stones to the good part. Ironic when it's science fiction blinding people to the open eyed, unprejudiced observations of the actual scientific method, which could show us how to get to the good part now without the firestorms and bloodbath. But no: let's use cautionary tales as an instruction manual instead. Let's get so caught up in fantasy and cosplay that we dance right into the fiery crash that no one in their right mind really wants to go through.

We have yet to produce a complete generation of offspring that say en masse, "Hey! You people are crazy! We're not doing it!" We keep breeding rival teams to fight on in perpetuity while the whole ecosystem crumbles.

Vote with your wallets. Vote with your sperm and eggs. Tell the power-mad bastards no.

Kidney donation

 Kidney donation looks so easy on TV. The long lost or estranged sibling shows up in the last seven minutes of the medical drama and it's off to the operating room.

Kidney donation sounds so easy in urban legend. Just book a holiday at a low-budget  Central American resort, go to the bar that night, and wake up the next morning in a bathtub full of ice cubes and blood.

When my wife was diagnosed with polycystic kidney disease a couple of decades ago, I thought that donation required a very high degree of genetic compatibility. Researchers she was working with said that it wasn't that difficult. Blood type matters, and mumble mumble something didn't quite catch that, but we were years away from having to know. Overall, it seemed like anyone with two kidneys and generally good health should just scoop one out and toss it to someone who needs it.

On the advice of her nephrologist, my wife started looking for a live donor several years ago, when her GFR dropped into the mid teens. Another nephrologist I had consulted after I discovered I had kidney stones by passing one during a long, wild night at home had said that he didn't think I should donate to my wife. Because the situation at the time wasn't acute yet, I did not follow up to ask him what he meant. He retired a couple of years after that, so his notes and memory of my case had been overwritten by other priorities in his life by the time I followed up.

My wife and I have the same blood type, O+. That blood type is a universal donor: anyone can receive our blood. But we can only receive blood or transplants from someone who is also type O. As a starting point, my general appearance of good health and blood type match demanded that I investigate further.

The kidney folks had made the surgery sound pretty low key, at least as far as surrendering a vital organ goes. The preferred method is laparoscopic: the surgical team makes small incisions to insert viewing equipment and the extraction tools themselves, and just slurp that bad daddio right out of ya. In certain circumstances they might have to make an old-fashioned large incision, but most of the time they get away with minimal cutting. That was my general impression.

Recovery calls for a few days in the hospital, a couple of weeks of very limited activity, and then six more weeks or so of increased but still restricted activity, including a weight limit on lifting. This could seriously impact my job, especially now in the age of e-bikes. I put in a block and tackle to hoist them into the work stand, but some of them still need a few good shoves and some extra support to clamp them securely. And the two week initial period includes no driving or travel.

My wife is registered at Penn, the center nearest to where she works during the school year. Our permanent residence is in New Hampshire, where my job is. If I went down to slip her the ol' organ, I would be there for the entire two-week initial recovery. If there were any complications, I would be away from work for even longer. Then on my return to work I would not be at full strength for at least another six weeks. When it's all theoretical, being somewhat breezily described by an expert who knows that it's not imminent and has probably given the talk hundreds of times, it sounds very manageable. When it actually looms, with everyone two decades older (more or less), with a regime in power that threatens even the flimsy social safety nets that our country already put up with before they started swinging a wrecking ball, the prospect seems more precarious.

The transplant folks continue to be encouraging, but as you become more of an actual prospect for them they have to start getting seriously detailed about what you would actually be doing. The basic outline holds, but now you need to consider every ramification: financial, social, mental, emotional, as well as physical. You might have trouble getting health insurance in our system driven by corporate profits. You might have long-shot complications from any point after anaesthesia is administered, all the way down to years later. You get preferred placement on the transplant list should your remaining kidney fail, but the donor pool is far from adequate as it is. Cloning research proceeds way too slowly.

Of course my wife is screwed without a donation, whether live or deceased. Live donation has the best outcomes. If not a transplant, the alternatives are dialysis or death. So my risks as a donor are still far less than the risks to her, even if the transplant is successful. Survival rates are above 90 percent on average for one year, dropping to high 80s to low 90s at the five-year mark. Some recipients have lasted more than 50 years. One recipient told her that the return of vitality was stunning after she got her transplant. It seemed well worth it to see if I could help her feel that way.

So then the real process began. I had to formally register. Then I got the first set of lab tests, just basic blood and urinalysis. Clearing those gates, I had a couple of phone interviews. There is a National Kidney Registry, but no national screening of individual donors. Recipients and donors must register with individual centers. I could have done a remote donation through Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, but that would have meant that the organ would have to travel swiftly to Philadelphia, and that I would not be right there with my intended recipient. I would have had to go through the lengthy screening process at Brigham, and be tied to them for every aspect of the procedure. Being "across the hall" in Philly seemed like a better plan.

I made arrangements for a full day of screening appointments at Penn. This included collecting my urine for 24 hours prior to the first appointment in the morning, as well as fasting for blood draws. The blood work included a glucose tolerance test because of some family history of relatives with diabetes, so I had to fast for two more hours. That left a small window in which I could have grabbed a quick breakfast and coffee before fasting for two hours prior to a CT scan. Instead, other appointments in the middle of the day closed out that opportunity. By the time I got to radiology in the late afternoon I was about ready to have mystic visions.

In addition to the medical screening, I met with a financial counselor and a social worker about those social and financial factors. I also had to get blood drawn for infectious disease analysis because I had lived in south Texas as a small child and might still be harboring one fungal infection and one parasite known to lie dormant for decades, but that might hop over in the kidney to the immune-suppressed recipient. It's a deep, deep dive into your entire life and as much of the lives of your forebears as you can dig up.

The results started popping up on my patient portal by the next day. They mostly indicated that I am in good health, but the CT scan disclosed that I have cooked up another little stone in the left kidney. The one I passed about seven years ago was 3mm. The pain ramped up from back spasms around 5 p.m. to side pain, abdominal pain, wave upon wave stronger and stronger to a crescendo that made me think I might puke, shit, and pass out all at once. That was the transit through the ureter to the bladder. After that, the urethra was almost casual. I managed to catch the stone -- if indeed there was only one -- in the bottom of the toilet. I hadn't been thinking about collecting it, only getting it the fck out of my body, but then I realized that it might have diagnostic and scientific value. I fished it out and put it in a little plastic vial.

The 2mm stone discovered by the CT scan was described as "non obstructive." Even so, I don't want the little bastard growing big and strong before it eventually decides that it wants to go see the world. I'd been drinking water like it was a second job for all the years since I'd passed the first stone, because my nephrologist friend had told me that stone formation goes down 85 percent if you can pass 1.8 liters of water a day, and down to ZERO if you can pass 2.5 liters a day. Sign me up! But sometimes it's not possible to drink -- and pee -- as much as you have to. Road trips, public events, or sweaty bike rides on hot days all cut into that target volume. I guess accreting a 2mm stone over seven or eight years isn't too bad. But now I'm back to really watching my sodium and oxalate intake.

That little 2mm piece of crap also figured in the transplant board's decision to decline me as a donor. I got that word yesterday. There were other factors, including my isolated lifestyle up here. Also some other family history elements that don't present an immediate threat, but too much of one for them to advise a guy nearly 70 years old to yank out a kidney.

An altruistic donor with the wrong blood type had already offered a kidney to my wife as I began the screening process. I just believe that I couldn't ask anyone to do something that I wasn't willing to do myself, and if my O+ kidney turned out to be the bestest match ever, then it was hers for the asking. So now the other donor can pursue the paired or voucher donation option, and my wife might just get a few more years feeling more like her old self. She's still working, because that's where health insurance comes from in our capitalist hellscape, and because she really does like her work (even when her job pisses her off).

Soft secession is concession

 As the Trump administration cripples the power of the federal government, some Democratically controlled states have floated the idea of "soft secession." They hope to take up the slack for the rescission of federal funds and the gutting of federal agencies that provide essential services to all Americans by instituting state programs and creating interstate compacts to achieve what they can of the abandoned beneficial goals.

Soft secession acquiesces to the concept of "states' rights." It also echoes state initiatives that formed the basis for the progressive reforms at the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries, but the concept of states' rights has been a rallying point for the political forces that have sought to demolish the federal government since the New Deal was enacted. Before that, of course, it was used to justify the spread of slavery in the expanding nation, leading to the Civil War.

Increasingly through the latter half of the 20th Century, and exponentially in the age of the Internet, states' rights has been used as cover for repressive laws enacted at the state level as federal oversight has been crippled. Voting rights,civil rights, women's rights, public health, infrastructure, energy modernization, and more have been demonized by well funded institutions pretending to be about personal freedom while exploiting bigotry and religious zealotry to advance a narrow view of what freedom is and who gets to exercise it.

Soft secession initiatives legitimize the idea that states' rights can be a viable method of organizing the country. The primacy of states' rights completely undermines the concept of the United States as a single nation. The Constitution was supposed to advance the concept of one nation with a set of undeniable universal rights of citizenship, replacing the unwieldy confederation that had been falling apart as the national government after the Revolutionary War. The confederation would have broken into a bunch of little nations, separately easy prey to the larger, powerful, established nations from which the colonies had broken philosophically.

We can hope that soft secession efforts succeed in the interim to navigate through the constant crises brought on us by the corruption and incompetence of the Trump regime, but we must be sure that they are temporary, lest they lead to the fragmentation that the misguided ideologues of the far right have longed for.

The federal government failed in many ways in the latter half of the 20th Century. This led to the distrust that the right wing has turned to its advantage after the liberals abandoned it once the Vietnam War was over. Between leftover lefties who don't trust The Man, and rebellious righties bent on unlimited individual liberty even if it kills us all, the clever institutions seeking control have plenty of handles with which to steer paranoid voters. But we have to look at when, why, and how the federal government failed. Those failures were a product of their era. They also reflect basic realities of the conduct of a nation dealing with other nations. All nations have common and competing interests. All nations present varying levels of threat and opportunity to the other nations.

Life is simple, but foreign policy is a tangled mess. There's no way to have absolute transparency, and you will never satisfy every citizen in a large population in a democratic republic. You'll be lucky to satisfy a majority with what you can say in public. It all factors into the biennial popularity contests that sweep the country with regularly scheduled, mostly bloodless revolutions.

More than foreign policy will require a degree of confidentiality. But most legitimate government secrets relate in some way to managing the relationship with other nations. There are things we don't want them to know in full detail. Make them at least conduct some espionage to find out. It creates jobs in the spy community.

Full and permanent secession -- a reversion to confederation -- would require each little nation-state and sub-confederation to supply its own military and intelligence capability, funded by whatever economic resources the state or confederacy controls. Who gets the former federal military assets in a given state when the breakup occurs?

When the Soviet Union broke up, the United States and NATO stood as a bastion of stability and arbiter of standards. The "free world" and rising Asian powers oversaw the distribution of hardware. Now that Russia seeks to reclaim its imperial glory with the help of a puppet government in the United States, our breakup would be supervised by a rival nation that has sought our downfall for 80 years. At the same time, an ever more powerful China watches and maneuvers to counter both the sabotaged and crumbling United States and the wily chess players of Russia on the global game board.

Nuclear war seems like the big nasty. It serves as the monster under the bed to frighten citizens in every country, while the real horror is that conventional warfare has never ceased. The lives of the general population are expended by governments controlled by rich egotists who feel no shame or horror at maiming and death of thousands. It's good business and great domestic policy to give people the blood sport of war on just the right scale.

Because nuclear weapons exist, the deterrent of mutually assured destruction will probably always be with us. In the name of avoiding it, we are encouraged to accept the heroic sacrifices of brave service members in conflicts below that threshold. We will need those for as long as humanity separates itself into territories and conflicting ideologies.

Small nations will always be vulnerable to the ambitions of the leaders of larger nations. Breaking up the United States does not serve any American well. It only serves the interests of the powers arrayed against what was once our steady march to better express our stated founding ideals of liberty and justice for all. We had much work still to do. Our worst enemies in that work live among us. Don't let their longstanding advocacy for states' rights carry out its true purpose of curtailing individual liberty and dismantling the United States. Your constitutional rights will mean nothing when there is no longer a federal government to act on your behalf.

Like gerrymandering, soft secession should only be considered as a drastic temporary measure to regain our footing as a unified, representative democracy. You can't claim to be a patriot while undermining the principle that our diverse nation draws its strength from the collection of individual citizens into a unified national entity.

It's the economy, stupid. But fixing things is expensive.

 Bill Clinton sailed into office in 1992 on a well-timed wave of hope that his administration would pull us out of the Reagan-Bush recession. It was the first Baby Boomer presidency, and we were the generation that could have whatever it wanted. Our parents had told us so, and the economy of the 1960s and much of the 1970s had revolved around indulging us.

Clinton's campaign promised us, among other things, universal healthcare. Still waiting on that, Billy. And I know it isn't Bill's fault per se, but the Clinton administration's party bus ran into a serious roadblock with the corporate elements that had bought into his campaign based on...I'm not sure what. Maybe they just sensed that the electorate was ready to kick the old fogies out, so they rolled with the change, confident that they could tighten the screws financially the way they always had. And they were right.

Meanwhile, I've long had my own theories about why the economy improved when it did, none of which hinge on the Clinton administration's vast economic acumen. I think it was going to happen anyway: Consumers like to consume, and they'd finally freed up their credit enough after the 1980s binge to start doing it again. So Bill: right place, right time, right message, happy accident. It was the economy. And it was stupid. But it was fun for a while.

If Al Gore had prevailed in 2000, he would probably have presided over the economic belly flop, because that was a product of consumer exuberance and technological hubris uncontrollable by the Fed or any business regulation. Also, the Republican Congress under Gingrich was energetically undermining stability and social cohesion.

Social cohesion is important for a sustainable economy and environment, but it is not profitable in the short term. Certain ideologies object to it as well, because of principles of philosophical purity. They can't let us all get along, because not all of us deserve to get what they claim for themselves.

We will never address the fundamental problems facing humanity if we keep going from election to election looking just at grocery, fuel, childcare, and rent/mortgage prices. But you can't neglect those if you want to get elected. Sure, the Republicans in particular have exploited fear issues, mostly related to race mixing and crime by furriners. But we're seeing now how the economic stuff is getting ready to gnaw on their posteriors, even as they're thrilling their xenophobic base with immigrant roundups, concentration camps, and deportations.

The big trick after getting elected is staying elected. Any administration that tries to start working on essential issues like climate change and environmental protection in general will take heat from the right wing media, and some on the left as well. A subset of people are not driven by simple economics, but the majority feel better when things seem to be improving. Nearly everyone succumbs to normalcy bias when things are going outright well. So there's an ideal level of diminishing discomfort that promotes a willingness to embrace change. Unfortunately, the benefits of some of what needs to be done will not fit neatly into a two-year election cycle.

The House of Representatives and the President are more closely linked than the Senate is to either one. Because there will be a midterm election in each presidential term as well as the ones in which the presidency is up for grabs itself, it destabilizes the power of the executive. And a shaky president can loosen the grip of representatives who get bounced by disgruntled voters who want to whack somebody for how they're feeling.

Try enacting higher taxes on the wealthy, or pushing through real health care reform that sidelines the insurance companies and centers patient care and doctors' integrity within less than a two-year window, because the campaigning starts within months after the last election. You not only have to get it in place, it needs to show clear benefits, while corporate media and right wing influencers are telling everyone that it won't work and will destroy their entire way of life.

After trying to breathe in the deluge of conflicting information dumped on them, voters wind up settling for the promise of cheaper gas and groceries. Life may be long or short, but it's always one day at a time. But we're running out of days for the thornier issues.

The problem of political prisoners

 The crimes of the first Trump administration involved not only the occupant of the Oval Office himself, but many others inside the Executive Branch and scattered through Congress and across the country.

Before Trump even lost the 2020 election and began to lie about it, he was impeached for misdeeds in his first campaign and while in office. Some of the offenses in the Mueller Report could have led to criminal prosecution. Certainly his retention and mishandling of classified information would have led to charges. And let's not forget his 34 felony convictions for fraud, and the judgment against him for improperly reporting expenditures related to paying off Stormy Daniels.

Then there's the unresolved matter of the Epstein files. Who knows what's under that scab.

Some small fry were tried and convicted as a result of his crimes, including more than 1,500 people who had taken part in the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Only a handful remain in custody after the mob boss in chief issued blanket pardons to the rioters and individual pardons to favored minions he could spring from federal charges.

A majority of Americans seemed to be okay with the convictions of the January 6th rioters. The criminal behavior was plain to see on national television and all over the Internet. However, the acceptance that MAGA operatives had attacked the mechanisms of government at the strong suggestion of their leader was not enough to discourage voters from putting the criminal back into office in 2024.

As Americans we reject political prosecutions. The current criminal regime has taken advantage of this by generating doubt -- not reasonable doubt, just doubt -- among enough Americans to allow genuinely bad elements to take power and remain viable.

The Constitution describes how to get a bad official out of office, but the framers never imagined that Congress would be controlled by a corrupt president's allies, who would prevent any action to remove him. And one person's corruption is another person's ruthless politics. The First Amendment gives wide latitude to political opinion blending with religious freedom. Yes, there are election laws and supposedly guardrails around the proper roles and functions of government, but the infractions can be hard to explain to ordinary citizens. With a powerful propaganda machine pumping right wing messaging into every media channel like a toxic gas, the intellectual atmosphere is foggy and mind-numbing.

Voting out the Republicans at every level is only step one of the national detox from authoritarianism. The second, vital component is prosecution, conviction, and imprisonment of individuals who have been trying to replace representatives with rulers.

Prosecution of the people who have broken government will elicit howls from the people who relished the authoritarian crackdown on the elements of society that they hate. Many of them used to squawk at length about heavy handed government stepping on the little guy, when what they really hated was not being able to kick down themselves. Once the jackboots were aimed the right way, those brave rebels grew docile and smug.

While we are finding out what it was like to live in Germany during the 1930s, we are also finding out why Reconstruction failed after the Civil War. There were no extensive  trials of Confederates. The South did rise again. They bitched and grumbled about having to extend any measure of respect to their former slaves, but they got things mostly their way. It will be even worse this time, because we have the examples of repressive regimes from the early 20th Century onward demonstrating political retribution. Fascist and Communist/Socialist governments as well as independent dictators have shown over and over the dangers of political prosecution. 

In a country where government is "of the people, by the people," a politician has to be very obviously extremely criminally corrupt to avoid the accusation of political prosecution. We've had such figures. Right now we have a bunch of them. But the case has to be carefully made. That was one reason that the current occupant of the Oval Office is where he is instead of in prison: the case was being carefully and thoroughly made, and his lawyers threw enough speed bumps in to get him to the 2024 election. A rush to judgment would have failed. The careful walk failed anyway. And then the voters failed massively.

We don't know if we'll get out of the present mess in any kind of shape to seek legal action against the officials who have dragged us here. We don't know what form the MAGA movement will take after the inevitable demise of its god-king. Recovery, if it happens at all, will come in stages and could fail at any time, like recovery from addiction. For that matter, life is full of addictions. The challenge is to get hooked on beneficial things instead of destructive ones. I don't know if we can even control our predilections enough to choose which path we take. Psychology and physics both offer bleak prospects there. But there is dissent in both disciplines. I'm holding out for the things I like. I have slowly learned to be less of a dick to people, so it's apparently possible, but I guarantee that I have relapses, so maybe it's just chrome on a turd. I hope not. For any of you out there trying, keep at it. For any of you blessed to be be perfect by nature, congrats.

Gavin Newsom's advantage

 California governor Gavin Newsom has delighted the anti-Trump forces in this country by brilliantly mocking the dictator on social media and leading his state in counterattacking GOP efforts to rig the electoral maps in Texas and other Republican-controlled states. He is hailed as the champion we need: not perfect by any stretch, but the guy to face down the bully in the Oval Office and lead Democratic efforts to skew their own electoral maps wherever they can.

Let's ignore the concept that to beat a cheater you need to cheat better yourself. It's fun in the movies when it's a high stakes card game, but when it's an entire country and millions of people's livelihoods it's no longer a game and entertainment. If slithering through loopholes and cherry picking voters becomes the accepted norm, we have won nothing. Newsom is winning another game that does help us all in the moment.

By trolling the dictator on social media, Newsom undermines the image of power and control craved by the weak and failing figurehead of the once-proud Republican Party. He might even be swaying some of the fickle and elusive swing voters, but I wouldn't count on it. He has spotlighted the absurdity of Trump's self image and the image Trump's followers want to project. 

Public image is everything in American politics. It's crucial in all politics, but vastly more so when there is a democratic component. You can be tough, scrappy, knowledgeable, and still lose elections if enough people don't take to you.

Many people have been trolling Trump and MAGA for years without generating the buzz that Newsom has. What gives him the advantage? It's not Newsom as a person. It's Newsom as governor of the third largest state in the country, with the fourth largest economy in the world. Just Newsom himself as a movie-star-lookin' egotist would go nowhere.

Newsom works now against the bloated vulgarian desecrating the White House and devaluing every aspect of American intellectual life, history, and culture. But Trump could die tomorrow, and the forces that welcomed him as a champion in 2016 and have been pushing forward behind him ever since will still be there. Newsom has no such magic power against them. They will take him apart on all of the seams and fissures in his own public image. He may help with 2026. Don't count on anything for 2028 unless Trump is miraculously alive and able to pursue that third term he keeps talking about. And at that point the Constitution would just be a scuffed up throw rug, so the election itself would probably be about as meaningful as it would be in Russia.

Corporations gonna corporate

 Corporations are people. More than that, corporations are completely amoral people with no loyalty except to themselves.

Upper management forms the brains of the beast, but they are programmed to maximize corporate income in the reality of the moment. If they try to exert influence on the future, it will invariably seek to improve the stock price of the company. This may be by increasing income and profits, or through stock buybacks, and always through favorable laws and regulations. It will never be to improve environmental quality or the well-being of the population in general, unless they can see a clear financial benefit from it. If major shareholders are happy, CEO keeps his cushy job. If they expel him (it's almost always a him), he will have arranged for a severance package that would finance most small towns in America for a year or more.

Tim Cook's golden tribute to the current occupant of the Oval Office fits this model of corporations looking out for their own interests while the country at large suffers greatly. Altruistic bullshit like liberty and justice for all makes nifty patriotic commercials to keep the rabble from storming your offices and burning your mansions, but corporations can thrive in totalitarian regimes. Just ask Audi, Bayer, BMW, IBM, Volkswagen, Standard Oil, and many others that either existed in Nazi Germany or did business with the Nazis for some portion of the runup or even the duration of World War II. Look at the American corporations that operate their production facilities in China and other countries vilified by the right wing, but patronized heavily by their top donors.

The bottom line is all that matters to them. Your interests are buried far below that.

For a few decades, the rich played along with the idea that paying the help better turned them from serfs into customers. Henry Ford famously staved off unionization in his plants by paying the help enough to be able to afford one of his cars. He also priced the Model T so that ordinary working folks could enjoy the blessings of motorized transportation, increasing not only his own corporate income, but that of his pals in the oil companies, rubber companies, and a host of other ancillary industries. The surge in middle class lifestyle masked the downsides of increased petroleum consumption, tailpipe emissions, and sprawl development. A privileged lifestyle became the norm. National euphoria after World War II supercharged it for about 30 years

By the late 1990s, the top one percent had figured out that they did not need a thriving middle class. They've been chopping away at the ladder ever since.

What happens next could play out in either of two ways. And actually the second way kind of grows out of the first one.  Corporations that have decided to stop funding the American middle class because it's increasingly expensive to feed will shift to more grateful consumers among the rising economies financed by the jobs exported from here. Lifestyles will improve in the countries that have received the jobs, as they deteriorate in the country laid off en masse by Corporate America.

 Because people keep making more people, the population will continue to rise here, creating a conveniently desperate labor pool willing to work itself to death for the mirage of a better life for their kids. This would create a de facto standard of affordable labor pricing for corporations worldwide. Big money will still occupy the top spot, as always. Income inequality will become a global norm. The range will probably stabilize with little to no upward mobility. A few scions of the wealthy will always tumble from the nest to crash on the rocks below. But a well managed corporation lives forever.

Even people who live outside of the corporate consumerist economy as much as they can are herded by it. Only its complete collapse would allow society to reinvent itself. This is not only unlikely, but what follows might not be any more humane than anything was before. "Peak humane" probably hit somewhere between the late 1970s and the mid 1990s. After September 11, 2001, tolerance for diversity in the United States started diving steeply. Legislation advanced rights and freedoms, but the backlash in general society grew exponentially stronger. Corporations see this as neither good nor bad, only as something to exploit for profit or manage to reduce loss. Profit is defended by kissing up and kicking down.

Duelling gerrymanders

 The recent move by Texas Republicans to draw up new election districts for Congress and Democratic proposals to counterattack in states where they have the power to do so shines yet another bright light on the damage done by the "team spirit" mentality in our politics.

The paradox of the House of Representatives is that the members are supposed to advocate for their fellow citizens in their districts, but their partisan affiliation gives national advantage and international influence to one party over the other. Personal political ambition and perceived usefulness to the national party can turn a measly little district representative into a national celebrity and party darling overnight. Party needs advance to the detriment of the people the House is supposed to represent.

One party may "win" the gerrymandering war, but ordinary people will lose.

Democratically elected government exists to meet the needs and wants of citizens. Congressional districts were supposed to represent a manageable number of citizens living in similar enough circumstances to be able to select an individual to go to the national government to reconcile localized wishes with national needs. The representatives would get together to compose legislation and make appropriations that a majority of them would support. The senate was meant to be the more deliberative body considering matters on a statewide basis merged with the priorities of the nation as a whole.

Congressional representation is based on population, but the total size of the House of Representatives was capped at 435 members in 1929. The more people there are in the country, the less personal the representation can be. But increasing House membership would lead to an unmanageably large legislative body.

As news media increased their reach from the late 19th Century onwards, they have had a stronger and stronger influence on local politics. National media today, mostly broadcast, can reinforce prejudices, creating division between factions by bolstering loyalty within them. Party loyalists tend to be insanely loyal, making them attractive to political campaigns. Partisan districting allows politicians to choose their voters rather than voters choosing their representatives. Districts become echo chambers, leading to more and more radicalization.

Because right wing values are so much more militant and simple-minded, right wing districting is easier to accomplish. The elusive swing voter may have an open and intellectual mind, wanting to weigh issues on their merits, but a bunch of them just seem to be paranoid and suspicious, both traits that skew to the right. Paranoid and suspicious tends to favor being armed and dangerous, both poses embraced by the right. Don't tread on me, God, Guns and (insert third item here), and so forth.

 Lots of things make people paranoid and suspicious, not the least of which is the popular mythology about our outlaw past. It's funny how we honor both the smugglers and rebels defying authority and the fast-shooting sheriffs and hanging judges of summary frontier justice. The only difference between a lynching and a lawful execution is who happens to be holding the rope. Too often it was the same people at different times of day.

Out of all of this and more -- slavery, genocide of the natives, civil war, robber barons, labor organizers, et al -- has come a system of bizarre and meandering electoral maps, shifting with every census. It's front and center now. Could this be the final affront to get voters to insist on non-partisan redistricting in every state?

The Constitution screws us a bit here by leaving the conduct of elections up to the individual states. A law passed by Congress might not make it past the Supreme Court, leaving us either to pursue a constitutional amendment or campaign for laws in every state, perhaps amending their constitutions. It's a cumbersome process in any case, requiring great unity among disparate voters. When will we start to recognize common interests again in this country?

I have heard people wonder how we got to the current state of polarized distaste slopping over into hatred. It's simple, really. The tensions created by the emerging acceptance of one marginalized group after another have exhausted the patience of hard core opponents who waited at first for the inevitable failure and reset that never came. The limits of people's tolerance vary from person to person, but most people do have limits. Once they reach them, they seek allegiance with anyone who will help them put the brakes on what they perceive as excesses. If that means throwing in with authoritarian goons, so be it. It's hard to come back from that, but people dragged beyond their comfort zone tell themselves that they can sort out the differences later.

Campaign finance reform and neutral election districts will do a lot to lower the heat. Make the candidates explain their policies fully rather than relying on in-group signals.

Really effective government is very boring and detailed. It's hard to turn that into catchy election slogan. It's so much easier to manipulate emotions, with fear very near the surface in all of us. A social media post glibly stated that you should not vote for a party that wants you to live in fear, but choose one that calls for you to proceed with courage. But there is no courage without fear. Courage is the strong person's response to a frightening challenge. Courage without fear is just being foolhardy.

The future will always be scary if you think about it that way. We could get slammed today by an asteroid that NASA overlooked. Any one of us could have a stroke in the next few seconds. Your body could be growing cancer undetected until it's too late. You could get hit by a truck. A terrorist could sneak a nuke or a bioweapon into your city. Has your area had an earthquake lately? Is it overdue? Could a senile, self-centered old man order a nuclear strike on Russia and have loyalists in the Navy carry out the doomsday command? Could people who are overly serious about their weird religion warp your country so that you no longer recognize it? Oh wait, that one's happening.

We the people have a number of common interests that have been buried under the propaganda generated by the wealthiest to strengthen their hold on the nation's resources. Demanding and getting nonpartisan congressional -- and state legislature -- districts can go a long way toward making government more responsive to people as people, not party pawns.