Why cruelty always wins

 A piece I read recently lamented that when the Democratic Party is in power, they don't exert it to enact the full agenda that their base looks forward to, and when they're out of power, they don't use what leverage they have to restrain the merciless policies of conservative administrations.

The secret, as always, lies with uncommitted voters. Mostly white, mostly conservative, they're often assumed to be moderate. But some of these uncommitted voters might withhold their allegiance from the Republican Party because that party isn't heartless enough. If they swing to a Democratic candidate, it is a temporary protest vote to punish the Republican for some perceived inadequacy. The swinging voter doesn't support the Democratic position. It's strictly a temporary, punitive measure to slap some sense into the more conservative party. The moderate ones swing to the Democrat only if the Democrat promises not to act like a Democrat.

While there are plenty of conservative racists, the underlying principle that unites all conservatives of any color is contempt for the poor. Conservative voters who happen to be on public assistance can formulate some exemption in their minds to excuse their own temporary need. Or maybe they vote against their own interests out of self loathing, or a mistaken belief that if they destroy the support system their own fortunes will miraculously improve in the energized economy now no longer burdened with the dead weight of lazy scumbags who don't want to work.

A person I observed for a time was one of these conservatives temporarily receiving public assistance. She would go to the office to collect her dole. While there, she would point out and disparage other supplicants who were obviously dirtbag losers sucking on the public teat for as long as it will be offered. They could not possibly have mitigating circumstances of their own, because the system itself creates them. It's like poor people didn't exist in any significant numbers until a program was created to feed them. They're like raccoons in your garbage cans. Secure your garbage cans and the raccoons have to go fend for themselves.

I doubt if that particular conservative would ever vote across party lines, even to punish an erring official. But her analysis of her fellow poor people sums up the conservative dehumanization of anyone falling below the poverty line. It has to be their own fault in the vast majority of cases.

I get it. We're all a bit reluctant to get sucked into the sob stories of the disadvantaged. There are bullshitters and chronic losers out there. Is it better to yank the lifeline back from the ones who might deserve it in order to cut off the parasites dangling on the same line? Most uncommitted voters seem to think so. And that's why we can't have nice things.

Compassion Deficit

Although New Hampshire went for Harris in the recent election, her opponent enjoys considerable support from people who have flown his banners continuously since 2015. Because the state population is predominantly white and conservative, with a deep puritanical tradition, most of the residents will feel only the generic ill effects of the incoming administration's economic policies, rather than the targeted persecution promised by the winning party's campaign. Hard to say whether anyone in the protected majority right around here will bother to lash out at marginalized people. I expect few serious personal attacks and atrocities, just slurs and shoves.

Legislatively it's a different story. With a Republican governor and legislative majority, and MAGA still controlling the national Republican brand, women's freedom and health remain at risk, education funding is in peril, and the future of federal funding the state has relied on to keep its parsimonious tax system on life support is questionable. The tourism economy depends on at least the appearance of a clean natural environment, but with the economy likely burning down nationwide, who will have the money to be a tourist? And the ski industry is clearly doomed by the abandonment of any efforts to slow climate change.

We always have our wealthy summer residents. They are buying up more and more of the quaint towns and villages they treasure as theme parks of family memory, which stimulates the incomes of building contractors and maintenance staff to keep everything nice for them in the off season. Anyone outside of these bubbles will be struggling, but then they always have. It's a point of pride to work long hours at a brutal job like logging, and vote against anything that might make your life more comfortable. The risk is too great that it might make someone else's life more comfortable, someone who doesn't deserve it. And that is the root of the compassion deficit that fuels MAGA.

Compassion deficit underlies all conservative political philosophy, but MAGA concentrates it to a high potency drug. If a conservative person isn't experiencing difficulties, anyone else who experiences those difficulties brought it on themselves. Difficulties are a sign of poor character. If your unusual circumstances make you a target for hardship, quit being unusual! Being normal isn't so hard. Just be normal!

If your norm is based on being a white male or a white female under the protection of a white male, how do you expect someone of a darker hue or not in a safe, subservient relationship to normalize themselves to your satisfaction? The country was built on incurable disparities. Slave labor built the Southern economy, and much of the early infrastructure of the federal government. The abolition of slavery didn't miraculously transform the freed population into acceptable citizens. The conflicts of the 1840s and '50s continue today. And the country's embrace of immigrants has added more unrest.

The Statue of Liberty will probably be melted down now to make ammunition for the Border Patrol.

A progressive attitude depends on people who realize that our entire species will do better once we make it a priority to help our entire species do better. You can't keep exporting your problems, putting dirty industries in seemingly distant lands. Their smokestacks belch poison into the same atmosphere we all use. You can't exploit labor in countries far away and not expect to pay for it in some other way. You can't ignore massacres because no one happens to be massacring you at the moment. If you make your country good for yourselves, expect displaced people from the ruined lands to want to get in here. If you isolate yourselves from the world, your nation still has to hold its place among rivals all too happy to close in if you let your guard down. The alliances with dictators that led to the installation of the one we are going to coronate on January 20, 2025 obligate our dictator to those other ruthless powers. Our dictator is not a fighter. His counselors are not fighters. They're sleazy quislings who will deal away the lives of ordinary citizens to preserve their own comforts in the hateful world they helped create.

We have a few chances to pull the country back from complete submission to the will of tyrants. It's not tyranny when your old racist jokes aren't funny anymore, and people abandon bigoted attitudes. It's not tyranny to tax businesses and individuals that have grown fat on, among other things, government contracts funded by taxpayer dollars. It's not tyranny to release women from second-class citizenship. It's not tyranny to release health care from the grip of insurance and pharmaceutical profiteers. It's tyrannical to deny these things and to codify a tiered society in which some people are more equal than others. That's about to happen.

Cynics will say that we already live in that society, and they're not entirely wrong. However, we still had mechanisms to exert our own leverage, if we had been able to gather enough voters to weigh that plank down. The beneficiaries of our ignorance and distrust have dumped enormous bags of money on the other end of it. They fund all of the information channels that keep us apart. The mechanisms survive, but barely. Mostly dead isn't the same thing as completely dead. But we do have to survive a couple of years, minimum, of whatever chaos the incoming government unleashes on us in their greedy bumbling.

Somehow, we have to get people who don't already understand it to believe that caring about other people and promoting their acceptance doesn't cost most of us a thing. It will undoubtedly chip away portions of the obscene fortunes of a few individuals. That is not a bad thing in the least. Every person alive is a stakeholder in the planet. The few have their fortunes. All we will ever have is each other. We won't agree on everything. We shouldn't agree on everything. But if we don't resuscitate democracy we will lose even the faintest chance to participate in government rather than just submitting to our rulers. Restore the checks and balances. Suffer through the boring slog of learning how government works and why we need one. No one's liberty is absolute, but we can improve everyone's average if we try.

Hogan's Heroes and the Confederacy

Baby Boomers will remember watching Hogan's Heroes on television. It was a comedy about Allied prisoners in a German camp. A comedy. At the same time you could watch the films Stalag 17 or The Great Escape for  more dramatic presentations of the situation, but once a week, for six seasons, our clever heroes outwitted the bumbling Nazis and helped to win the war against fascism.

By the time that show was winding down, Richard Pryor was cranking up. I first heard a Richard Pryor album in the dorm room of a southern white guy who thought it was totally great. Richard seized ownership of the n-word and freely mocked uptight white people. We really were putting all that segregation shit behind us, weren't we?

The answer then was no, but it was well concealed from the white majority, and even from some rising blacks. Now it seems obvious, but back then the vestiges of racism could seem like exactly that: vestiges. We made fun of the South, we made fun of Nazis, starting to feel at ease about mildly confronting the injustices that underpin all of white people dynamics.

Whites don't have an exclusive title to injustice. We just used it very effectively to become a dominant force in the world as we evolved. Injustice is a tool in the arsenal of evil along the continuum that runs from the most sadistic darkness all the way to unachievably pure goodness and light.

Funny how evil is always so much more accessible.

A generation made influential by its sheer numbers got to see these attractive but deceptive portrayals at an impressionable age. I met few openly and aggressively racist people along my path. Only decades later did I figure out how sheltered my life was. Bad stuff might happen in isolated parts of this country and in other parts of the world, but overall we were on a path to potential world peace and good times. It was an easy mistake to make.

It becomes increasingly obvious now that humanity's dark side can't be laughed off. Humor seems to make sense as a countermeasure, but evil notoriously lacks a sense of humor. That's why control freaks hate to be laughed at. If everyone laughed, it could stop totalitarian shenanigans like a punch in the face with an inflated pig bladder. Maybe fascists make everyone stand up at their rallies so that no one can put whoopee cushions on every chair.

Humorless leaders can always find humorless followers to carry out their unfunny wishes. They are joined by people with sadistic senses of humor, who see slapstick entertainment in bloody dismemberment. Laughter may be the best medicine, but power is the strongest intoxicant. An underling in a dominant group enjoys the power of their collective cruelty.

Righteousness sounds good. By the dictionary definition, it describes being "morally right or justifiable." Morality is whatever we say it is, but thousands of years of collected writings have yielded a few common principles that seem to emphasize respect for each other.

Self righteousness is invariably wrong and a gateway to evil. If you sincerely believe that you are living exactly the way everyone should live, you are mistaken, and you shouldn't let it go to your head. It's an easy trap, especially for young adults. From the late teens through the twenties, humans are looking for meaning. We're told that we're adults at that point, fully responsible for our actions and deserving of our rights and privileges. We feel physically strong. This happens to coincide with a period of emotional uncertainty as we leave our homes and childhood behind. Things that feel right and good seem very right and good.

Research that indicates that our brains are hard wired will make your head spin. You can soothe your insomnia and melt the battery in your laptop watching lecture after lecture to help you understand your behavior and other people's. Of course you are drawing your own conclusions through your hardwired circuitry. Maybe you're hardwired to be open minded. Maybe you're hardwired to put up walls and fences topped with razor wire. This makes it an evolutionary question. There are winners and losers in evolution, but evolution does not recognize concepts of good and evil. There is no right or wrong. There is only existence and nonexistence.

Health insurance makes me sick

Whenever enrollment opens for the so-called Affordable Care Act's health "care" marketplace, I get numerous emails urging me to sign up for the great coverage secured at horrendous political cost back when Congress sold us all into bondage to the health insurance companies. Every year since the trap finally snapped shut on all of us, I have run the numbers and figured out that the penalty is noticeably cheaper than the premium for a policy with a huge copay and deductible. But it's not about the money.

The ACA penalty definitely impacts my life. But there's a larger issue here. A health insurance premium goes directly to an insurance company in an industry that profits most by denying care, not by facilitating it. It's like being forced to buy bullets for the firing squad that is going to kill you. The perky little article on Obamacare Facts -- that explains the mechanics of the penalty and how it is spent -- never addresses the predatory nature of profit-driven health insurance and health care, but at least indicates that the money is used to help people in need. It's still filtered through the profit-sucking filter of insurance companies, for the most part, but at least it is not directly from my hand to their insatiable gullet.

I won't deny that I am frightened, living outside the illusion of protection. But illusion it is. The longer we keep feeding the beast, the longer the beast will live, regardless of how it shortens individual life spans in its customer base. Customer survival is not important. When you die, some other poor frightened bastard will already be there to keep paying into the system and getting little in return.

My advice to anyone, young or old, is to find something you really enjoy doing, that is likely to kill you. It can be anything: picking fights in bars, heroin, cocaine, unroped rock and ice climbing, driving a motorcycle really fast, BASE jumping, open water swimming, taunting sharks, being a mercenary, joining a doomsday cult, jaywalking without looking, Russian roulette, find it, find whatever it is, and go at it hard. Your fellow citizens want you dead. The publicity machine that tears down the idea of socialized medicine is based on the simple principle that the moneyed interests have very little use for you and are sick of supporting your worthless ass. When insurance companies can't make bank off of frightened sick people anymore, they'll take their fat investment portfolios somewhere else. It's just money to them. You are just money. And you're only good money as long as you pay in more than you take out.

Health service providers feel the same way. They're not going to come right out and say they don't care whether you live or die, because they're in a somewhat competitive marketing situation. But no one can survive in that business if they start caring too much about individual patients. Even with the best of intentions and the best of care, some of the patients are going to die, and all of the patients die eventually. So that wall of detachment goes up. Away from the clinic floor, up where accounting decisions are made, that wall never comes down. It's bricks thick and yards tall. And you're on the other side of it. You are just money. When the money stops, you'd better be gone already. By the way, your bills are still due, even if you don't make it.

Why do 88 percent of uninsured patients fail to pay their bills? Could it be that the inflated prices have been out of control for so many decades that we're in a death spiral, nearing impact? Any observer of the health care situation as it evolved could have told you that a system based on profit-driven insurance and profit-driven care providers would continue to drive inflated prices and force ordinary working people over the brink. Even with insurance, Americans have trouble paying medical bills. Meanwhile, health insurers and clinics, even cancer treatment centers, are finding the money to donate to public broadcasting. Don't get me wrong, I love public broadcasting. But if I'm giving you money to treat and cure cancer, I want all of that money to go toward treating and finding cures for cancer.

So another year goes by and I appear to slap away that helping hand. "Look, we're giving you hundreds of dollars a month." Yes, but the insurance company has set the premium well over a grand, so the remainder is still going to wipe out every penny I can scrape together. And that's before my out of pocket costs for anything I do need.

I repeat: America is the land where you must pursue happiness with all your energy, and find the good death at the end of a short, glorious run. Get out there and grab it. The 20th Century fantasy of a middle class with a reasonable work load, a pleasurable personal life, and a comfortable retirement was never going to work. Those countries where it seems to work are a beautiful beacon, as unreachable as heaven. Like a favorite TV show where the characters are all friendly and lovable but the actual actors turn out to hate each other, it's probably just a facade. In reality, we are all here to find our deadly pleasure and run to it.

I'll advocate and vote for something more sociable and compassionate. But I expect fierce resistance from many of my fellow Americans who are fighting their own battles and can't see how all of our battles relate to each other. The accounting department stands against us all. And money always wins. Prove me wrong, people. Prove me wrong.

Civilization: Humanity's Greatest Blunder

Civilization is the mechanism for concentrating and exerting power. Offspring of the lust for power, civilization has created all the problems that compassion seeks to cure. Without consolidated power, evil can only work piecemeal. Without consolidated power, there is no prize. No prize, no contest. No contest, no cheating.

Civilization started innocently enough. Some geniuses figured out that plants and animals people eat would be easier to find if we kept them together in one place conducive to their proliferation. Some places were better than others. Crops and herds grew in those places more than in others. The people stuck in the less comfortable environments organized themselves to see how they could improve their circumstances in various ways, through trade, conquest, or assimilation.

Without question, civilization has gradually made life more comfortable. I wouldn't want to give up the creature comforts. But since no one can be trusted to run things, and thousands of years of resentments keep grievances fresh through generations, we've probably hit our peak as far as attaining a peaceful and happy world.

When altruism reaches the point where people kill themselves almost daily for the sake of killing other people they see as opponents to their ideology, you see how far the lust for power has come. Murder-suicide is always a problem, because the knowledge of inevitable mortality makes some people unstable. Add the allure of a heroic contribution to a better future, and people who might be teetering, wrestling with the decision whether to embrace suicide, get a new incentive to choose flamboyant death. Political manipulators will encourage the tendency. Manipulators always know how to get the most out of other people's emotions. Political manipulators use these controls to advance grand plans.

Civilization helped the human population surge, and life spans increase. Civilization nurtured technology. Technology advanced civilization. Industrialization increased the speed and efficiency with which natural resources could be gouged out of the Earth and turned into useful objects. The byproducts of these processes have been wealth, filth, and disregard for each other and for nature.

Civilization could have been good. If you're a hopeful sort, you probably believe it still could be. Past performance does not guarantee future results, as the investment shills like to warn us before we hand them the check. The greedy, the angry and the far-too-clever stand in ranks between us and that brighter future.

Immunization and reduced susceptibility

When I went for a flu shot today, the young woman who attended to the initial paperwork saw my address and remarked that she knew the road well. She said she also works for the Green Mountain Shooting Preserve. That's the place that moved in and took over what was once a beautiful area in which to take little walks, ski jaunts and mountain bike rides. It was where I used to be able to nip over for a quick dose of rising sun long before that light would reach my house. It has been barred to me since the early 1990s when the present owner posted it with warning signs about the gunfire that rakes it whenever the guys are practicing or the clients are actually there for a nice killing spree.

"Have you met Dave?" she asked. "He's such a nice guy."

I knew she meant the owner. I did not say, "Has anyone asked what the birds think?" I did say I had not made his acquaintance.

The nice young woman said she takes care of the birds. I assumed that she meant this was before the clients "take care" of them in the manner of Guido the hit man.

When I got home and went out back with the cats, we met a refugee from the shooting preserve's recreational death factory. I don't know enough about game birds to know the species of this particular survivor. It was speckled, seemed taller than a quail, and not terribly afraid of humans. I was able to walk quite close to it, talking quietly. It blended so well with its background that I could not get a clear photograph even from a few feet away.

These birds are unrescuable. They don't live in this climate naturally. They become easy meals for local predators or the winter kills them. I suppose I could build a nice chicken house for them and call it the Real Green Mountain Preserve (where we actually preserve something), but that could turn into a pretty big operation. Probably better to let the foxes, weasels, coyotes and bobcats clean up after the wasteful humans.

The Green Mountain Shooting Preserve website is full of happy talk about bonding with your fellow humans, and -- get this -- "enjoying the solace of nature." I'm sure nature enjoys the solace of a rain of hot lead.

In another context I wrote something about hunters salivating over a picture of a deer. I was told reprovingly that hunters don't do it for the enjoyment of the kill. If the people who line up to blast a flock of pen-raised birds aren't enjoying the process of killing, what exactly are they doing it for? Be honest. It only takes a minute to explain to critics that humans are predators and that killing things is fun. Hell, I've even heard that killing people is fun. I don't advocate it, but I understand it. Once you suppress your susceptibility to the plight of your target it just becomes a game. See how many you can blast. It's cool. Everything dies eventually. Why not have some fun with it?

Hunters have referred to the clean death they offer their victims, as opposed to getting shredded alive by a pack of predators, or dying of disease, or starvation. That holds up as long as the hunter does not merely wound quarry that then escapes to finish its agony, or, as happens with many of the shooting preserve's birds, misses entirely, leaving confused and unready creatures to fan out through the woods to suffer various fates. In no case does that life amount to much of a "happily ever after."

Right before getting jabbed with a needle did not seem to be the time to fire up a controversy at the pharmacy window. I don't want to make this woman hate her job and I probably wouldn't be able to make her see her employer for what he is in the few short minutes I would have had to crap in her pool. Maybe Dave really is a sweet guy who simply hasn't connected the dots in his lifestyle. I will say I doubt it. He's selling a death sport and sugar coating it to attract clients and deflect critics. Since he's kept the place going for about 20 years now, I'd say he has plenty of customers who enjoy snuffing out baffled featherbrains. You can't argue with success, right?

Bob: A Story of Immigration.

In 2005 the Western Conifer Seed Bug (Leptoglossus Occidentalis) arrived at our house with a large extended family. Suddenly the place was crawling with these weird-looking bugs:

We named them Bob. The reason isn't important. It's a lot quicker to say, "there's a Bob" than to use either of the bug's official names.

Bob's story parallels the progression of most immigrant groups. At first we feared and disliked Bob. He looked different. He smelled funny. He had disturbing habits like flying ineptly at us or getting on our pillows or bath towels so that we inadvertently applied him roughly to our faces or bodies. We don't use bug spray and we wouldn't squish anything that gives off such a uniquely pungent odor when disturbed or injured, but we did capture and evict any that we found. The colder the day or night the better, as far as we were concerned. So you could say we started deportation: go back where you came from, Bob.

The Bobs don't quit. They keep crossing our borders, looking for a better life. We've gotten used to their appearance, their odors and their attempts at flight. They don't chew things, suck blood or poison our pets. They're just different. We see their struggle to survive the winter when their search for a hibernation niche accidentally led them to our warm lair. Now when they would be dormant they need water. Maybe they need food, I don't know. They feed on the sap in conifer cones. They won't ever find that in our house.

We've developed sympathy for Bob. No longer is he a lousy stinkin' bug. He's an Insect American.

The Bobs seem just as eager to go back out when the weather warms as they were to crawl in when it froze. We just have to learn to get along while we're sharing the same shanty.