Burdened by the bullshit of Thomas Jefferson

 "When the public fears their government, there is tyranny. When the government fears its people, there is liberty." 

Snappy, right? Punchy. Memorable. And so true. What a genius.

The first premise is true. A government that rules by fear must back it up with violence and repression. But the second part oversimplifies the relationship and validates anarchy and lawlessness in which the people end up fearing each other. Unity is lost. Democracy is lost. Faith in government is lost. The nation defaults to tyranny as the void is filled by ambitious, opportunistic leaders.

The mess we are in now is the direct result of the 1980 Reagan campaign undermining the legitimacy of government. Generations since have been trained to be contemptuous of government.

The Reagan administration was full of shit, using their anti-tax, anti-government rhetoric to round up voters disillusioned by the mistakes of the Vietnam era and constantly paranoid from decades of the Cold War. All they really wanted was to make rich people richer. And they had no strong objection to racism and homophobia as long as those sentiments continued to bring them a reliable voting base. But the main objective was always wealth concentration.

Government that served the people broadly cost too much money that the rich could spend more wisely on more real estate, and whatever gratified them personally. This includes high profile philanthropy as well as gaudy, shameful ostentation like gold toilets. The underlying premise was that rich people were the elite. They deserved all the money they could attract and were free to spend it as they wished. Their expenditures would magically create jobs and prosperity as the money dripped from their fingers with every wave of the hand.

Every young person who gets their first job learns about taxes. They sign on for X-amount per hour, and then their check is a lot smaller than the product of simple multiplication. Stuff gets taken out. Once a year, you have to take a math test to get some or all of what was withheld refunded to you. Often, they get this first job while they're still in school, perhaps struggling with math, as I did. It doesn't seem fair, especially when you learn that the more you earn, the higher percentage of your income goes to taxes. Whaaat? The more I make the more you get? Fuck you! The concept of progressive taxation takes too many words. What do you mean when you say that the businesses that generate income also burden the public and should pay for services? Huh?

Then there are the other deductions. To a young worker, Social Security seems remote. The money deducted for that doesn't get refunded the way overpaid taxes do. The return on it sits too far off to seem justifiable when you could use that money now. It's easy to believe various charlatans who assure you that you could make far more playing the market with private retirement investments. Forget volatility and untimely market corrections. Don't ask how the brokerages make their cut. You'll do great! Just keep the government off of everyone's back. The great Thomas Jefferson said that the government is supposed to fear the people. Keep them on the back foot! They're the enemy.

Bumper sticker philosophy rules public opinion. A popular one says, "Become ungovernable." This glorification of immature oppositional defiance strikes at the foundation of our constitutional system, but it sounds so damn cool. Yeah! Ungovernable! Don't tread on me! I'm a badass!

Jefferson is also credited with saying that the roots of the Tree of Liberty need to be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants from time to time. This was written at a time when the meat on your plate at supper might have been walking around your farm that morning, and you might have slit its throat yourself. Human history is drenched in blood. At least the cause of liberty is a worthy use of the violent death in conflict that you might face anyway at the whim of a king or emperor. It was also written when war on a global scale was held back by the transportation and weapon technology of the time.

After World War II, the survivors of that conflict all seemed to agree that we didn't want to do that again. We've had almost constant warfare since then, but on a smaller scale. Hard to say how the score sits between the tyrants and the patriots. But we do know a lot more about post traumatic stress disorder and how to reconstruct physically maimed people. So there's that.

Regardless of the political labels, elected representatives have to deal with the details when they enact policies that will affect the entire operation of the country. They put lives at risk in the military and intelligence services. They kill or save millions inside and outside of our borders. Every two years, the voters kick the table and open the door to strong winds that blow the papers around. They base their decisions on whatever they can hold in mind about the people they're voting for and the beliefs they represent. A lot of them skip it altogether and hope for the best.

If fear is valued, fear will be cultivated. If the choice is only between a government fearing its people or a people fearing their government, we will only live in a constant climate of fear. That doesn't lead to good decisions.

America, the Petri dish

 Freedom's just another word for evolution unchained.

I believe that the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the framers of the U.S. Constitution believed that they were establishing a rational government model based on logic, to be operated by thoughtful people. Don't all people yearn to be free to learn and grow to the fullest extent of their potential? 

As it happens, no. While the letter of the law allows a person to read whatever they want, and public schools are widely available, nothing compels you to get any more out of this than to remain in some kind of tenuous contact with it up to your late teens. You can go to the schools in your district or you can homeschool. No matter what, you have the right to remain as much of a dumbass as you can get away with.

I say this as a career dumbass. I try to be a reformed dumbass, but I wasted lots of educational opportunities back when it would have done some good, just so you know I'm not kicking down. If I had a time machine, I would spend countless trips going back to smack my stupid self upside the head.

As the United States cuts itself off from the rest of the world, we become a Petri dish of uncontrolled conflict between governing ideas. These range from pure libertarian anarchy to hard-core right wing authoritarianism. There's a hard core left wing as well. It has the least traction, but it does exist. True commies are rare in this country, despite the accusations that fly around social media. Most humans are too selfish for true communism. Anything less than true communism, if you lean that way, tuns into Animal Farm pretty quickly. Witness the Soviet Union, et al.

The United States always was the Petri dish of governmental experimentation. We had our Articles of Confederation, then our Constitution, then our amendments to that document through the years. Between 1776 and the closing of the frontier in 1890, settlers messed around with all kinds of variations in the lands that they entered on the way to a coast to coast nation. Enclaves remain today in places like Amish country and other religious communities, or even whole states heavily identified with a particular religious sect. Pretty much just Utah. Aside from religion there are lots of places ranging from quaintly eccentric to probably evil.

In addition to geographical areas prone to various belief systems, we have national and international belief systems allowed to grow out of control here because our Constitution does not restrict freedom of thought and expression. It's a laudable ideal and a perfect breeding ground for whackadoodlery. Whackadoodlery only begins to encompass how bad it can get when dumbassery combines with imagination and fragmentary knowledge unimpeded by critical thought. It's also a rewarding hunting ground for intellectual predators who might or might not believe their own shit. They'll use varying degrees of technical-sounding language and immense personal confidence to collect financial and social power that eventually leads to political leverage.

The educated men who wrote the founding documents for this country and critical commentary that went with or against it operated under the highest intellectual standards of their day. Time, collective experience, and study have revealed where they were wrong, but they acted under sincere belief at the time. The slave owners sincerely believed that the people they enslaved were on average completely inferior to the white people who owned them. Even some abolitionists held racist beliefs. They just thought that slavery was cruel and economically a bad idea. People used to believe in all kinds of dumb stuff like phrenology, and much more. Much of it served to validate their emotional prejudices, but it was based on observations and attempts to identify meaningful patterns in the world around them.

Other countries observed our evolution. Some were inspired. Some were contemptuous. Every nation works its angles in the world in times of peace and war. The United States managed to turn itself into a superpower by the end of the Second World War. We were a military powerhouse that rapidly established itself as a scientific powerhouse. We produced the largest generation of surviving children in human history, and gave them a country to play in that had the highest standard of living in the world. It helped that a lot of the rest of the world had been devastated by the recent war. The width of oceans had protected us from the direct effects of shelling and bombing one last time.

We have no such protection now. We had only our military might and enviable intellectual freedom to make the rest of the world hesitant to launch missiles at us. Now we have neither. We do have an arsenal and military forces, but they will degrade rapidly under the unqualified and insane leadership voted in by dumbasses.

Hitler had some top notch military minds working for his Reich. He was not one of them.  He had been a friggin' corporal. His delusions led to poor decisions that doomed his desire for conquest. Now, today, the United States has equally incompetent people in the presidency and every major cabinet post. There are no highly competent minds to run the country efficiently with a solid goal in mind. Instead we have a coalition of destructive interests at odds with each other as much as with the ideals of the American experiment. Each one pursues its narrow goal, whether it's Christian theocracy, technological dictatorship focused on strip mining the planet, or nihilistic greed focused on strip mining the planet in different ways for mere cash.

It's a literal confederacy of dunces. It was voted in by a bloc of ignorant and greedy people steeped in a cult of individualism brewed in a melting pot of the dregs of free thought. The stupidest ideas of the past century and a half, including a whole lot added since the middle of the 20th Century, are now the guiding principles of the occupying regime with its fists firmly clenched on the levers of power. They're cutting the brake lines and yanking out the control wires wherever they can. All the while they believe that they're making a formidable machine of war and commerce that will take American dominance from its already high level to a pinnacle of untouchability.

What a crock of utter bullshit. With their sledgehammers, torches, and software, they're destroying all of the prestige and power that the country already held, and digging a hole to drop the remains into. Some of them may know it, since culling the population (remember "death panels?" lol) is a major objective. Yes, they want to increase the birth rate of obedient white people who think that they're free, but they also want poor people, sick people, and old people to die. They want brown people to die. They have a truly impossible dream that they will somehow make the USA completely self sufficient and prosperous at the same time. It's the national version of the myth of the rugged individual. We all be rugged individuals, in a rugged individual country that can kick your ass. You can only come into our clubhouse if we invite you. We hate girls and queers and nigras. We're manly men and real women love us.

Most of the rest of the world is rightly appalled. They're pulling back, watching to see how it plays out. When the United States was just a young little country, European powers looked down on the yokels over here. We had to earn respect. With the current regime, all of that is being squandered. We'll soon be back to our image as a nation of buffoons and yokels, unless we can generate a new wave of self respect in our population.

Self respect is not the same thing as self indulgence or self adulation. As a person or as a nation, you have to keep bringing the quality to maintain true respectability. You can't just coast on collective myths and stale achievements. The people who achieved those things are dead. A lot of the stories were made up crap to justify some reprehensible national policies. Learn history. Face the truth. Realize that our fundamental governing documents provide the framework to do better, now and henceforth. Self respect is not purely self serving. It's the basis by which you recognize that you depend on the society that you support and trade with.

A lot of the people who voted for the regime have job skills. They clearly had enough disposable income to take time off to be in truck convoys, and storm the Capitol, as well as buy tons of crappy merch from the Grifter-in-Chief. They have services and products that appeal to the economy. They're also sure that they're onto the sinister plans of whatever enemy has been presented to their cultivated paranoia. The United Nations, the worldwide Jewish conspiracy, the Deep State, the gay agenda, lazy Black folks, socialist hippies, those sneaky trans people, all skulk around them, just out of sight.

The Internet doesn't help. Snappy sayings that actually support bad conclusions have always been a problem for humans, but now they can flash around the world at the speed of light.  I saw one that said, "History is written by people who weren't there." Sounds like a sick burn, doesn't it? It even has a germ of truth in that you can find history books that simply rehash other history books. But you can also find history books based on primary sources -- people who were there -- that overturn long-held myths that generations of people believed were historical facts. This is particularly true of the history of slavery in this country, and of the accomplishments of marginalized people. People who were there chose to tell the story differently to make themselves look better. It took later historians to dig down through the layers to disclose what really happened.

Our view of history changes over time anyway. People with a vested interest in the previously accepted story will fight against changes. Our view of everything changes with further study and reflection. Every generation is born into an argument already in progress. Every faction in the dispute tries to recruit the new people. The young have no experience to help them sort through what's thrown at them. Some learn faster than others. This is a human condition, not just an American one. Eager to figure it out, new minds pick up the flotsam and debris as well as the more carefully researched information.

By equating all sources, our freedom of speech and expression puts all variables onto an equal footing in charting our national course. Everything gets voted on, including whether we will die of formerly treatable and preventable diseases, whether we will stop wasting money on food safety, whether we will destroy what's left of the natural environment, whether we will have a race war, and whether we want our entire government run by incompetent attention whores. The world is watching.

Another Day, Another Constitutional Crisis

 I don't know what people might see in mainstream media, because I don't consume any, but online sources and activist emails seem to call out a constitutional crisis almost daily.

What the heck is a constitutional crisis and why does it matter?

Most adults in this country know that there is a constitution, and that it confers the right to talk shit and the right to carry as many guns as you can strap on, and also some other stuff further down. Varying percentages of people will know specifics about other portions, even going so far as to know about the whole thing end to end. This helps if you're going to try to run things or want to keep tabs on the people who already do.

The country used to be run by people who understood the principles and methods contained in the document. Quite a few of them are still in office though, sadly, not the Oval Office at the moment. And this is the source of constitutional crises, one after another and sometimes piled two or three deep.

Constitutionally, Congress is supposed to have delineated powers and responsibilities, one of which is to defend against a dictatorial president acting like a monarch. In the faster and faster paced arena of international relations from the end of World War II until today, the executive branch has needed to be able to react nimbly to changing circumstances. Congress has ceded power to the executive branch on the basis that the president's people and the departments could be trusted to make good decisions in the national interest. Then the beginning of the 21st Century saw a massive surrender of Congressional oversight as the nation panicked after the 9-11 attacks.

Partisanship made the situation worse, as well as anti-democratic forces in the business sector. Business interests have pumped money into both parties, but really took over in the GOP. They use their elected employees to advance the concept of centralized leadership and limited voting. This puts the Constitution under stress, which has increased steadily since 1981. But only recently did the ideological and financial pressure groups decide that the basic concept of the United States as we had known it wasn't worth supporting anymore.

Wealth is global. Jobs are sent to other countries by corporate titans in this one without a second thought. A rich person's net worth might be described in a US publication in US currency, but it's a multinational fortune. A publication in another country would translate it into the currency with which its readers are familiar, because ultimately it doesn't make that much difference. Filthy rich is filthy rich in any language.

Ideology is global. Religious zealots who want to claim the planet for their One True God® might assign a value to a particular nation as crucial to whatever piece of their mythology that they're trying to enact, but the goal overall is world domination, same as it ever was. Business leaders and religious leaders just use people. Some of the religious ones might mean well, but at some point the needs of an abstract god will take precedence over any individual or group that seems to be impeding progress toward the Grand and Glorious Day of whatever the fck.

So: the most powerful influences on the current regime are greed and coercive religion. The founders wrote extensively against both of these, but they acknowledged that the only real defense against them was an educated and informed populace.

Greed and ideology have infected Congress and the Judicial Branch. The federal courts were supposed to act as the referee when it came to both executive overreach and Congress passing laws that conflicted with the Constitution. However, between ambitious judges who can be bought for a few luxury vacations and a motor home, and religious hardliners on the bench with them, the Supreme Court, and quite a bit of the rest of the judiciary has become a tool of corporate and religious interests under the umbrella of the Republican Party. At the same time, Republicans in the House and Senate don't act as a check on executive power, they act as willing and energetic enablers. They have no pride and no sense of their own power, bowing instead to the mighty president.

On the Democratic side, the stark division between two opposing teams rather than "loyal opposition" has led them to have to defend their own occupants of the White House perhaps more than they might have when the branches of government were more distinct and feeling their own power. That being said, they are much more likely than the Republicans to consign one of their own members for discipline and penalties, which usually blows up in their faces as they lose a seat once their erring colleague has been ousted. We do the right thing and no one is inspired. At the same time, Republicans behave in openly corrupt ways and everyone just shrugs. The public is steeped in the notion that absolutely all politicians are completely scummy, and the Republicans know that the system is so broken from their sabotage that no one can really hurt them. This is especially true now that they control so much of the courts.

So what's a constitutional crisis? The whole damn thing is a constitutional crisis. But out on the street the sun doesn't suddenly darken, or the earth rumble and shake every time corrupt scumbags take away a little more freedom, hurt marginalized groups, start fights with our allies and cozy up to our global rivals. Life seems basically unchanged. Did anyone notice a sudden drastic difference in their lives this summer, when the Supreme Court made the president an untouchable king? No.

No regular person will be motivated by the words "constitutional crisis" any more than they are motivated by the words "climate change" or "mass extinction event." Nothing hits like a massive asteroid impact, so it goes virtually unnoticed. We just keep getting up and going to work each day, hoping to stay housed and fed, and afraid of having to pay for medical care.

The consequences show up off to the side, happening to "other people." The reactions from those unaffected range from, "It sucks to be you," to "thoughts and prayers."

I'm sure there were Germans who managed to be just the right age and in just the right place to go through the entire loss of World War II without missing a meal or facing an enemy directly. The same thing is true here. Lots and lots of people will experience only the basic economic challenges of late stage capitalism on an overpopulated planet and never believe that they could have made anything better by so simple and stupid a thing as voting. Maybe they're right, since really adjusting our course away from collapse would require levels of sensitivity that our species has never exhibited in all of history. Oddly, it is possible to make a great destructive difference with your silly little vote. We are where we are because of a combination of people who voted directly for it and people who didn't vote at all.

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.

There is no Davos for workers

It's a lot easier to organize a small number of rich people than a large population of workers. The rich have the advantage of not having to work. They may put in long hours, but those hours are devoted to  consolidating and exerting their power. The actual workers have to put in their hours at toil they mostly did not choose. Then they have to be their own servants to maintain whatever sort of home they have.

There is no Davos for workers. Organized labor needs preparations as if for nuclear war, or a famine, or a catastrophic storm: shelter and sustenance for all, ready to deploy on short notice when a collective action cuts off everyone's income.

We don't have massive strikes and demonstrations in this country because our population is so dispersed. People would have to get to the nation's capital to swarm it. We've had a few, but they require extreme provocation. Movements are hard to sustain. Swarming in your own area is only as effective as the media coverage of it. And a mess in any major city is only a mild curiosity to anyone 15 miles away. Simultaneous actions in many cities might draw notice, but would further alienate the rural populations that control the US Senate. And before too long you have to get back to gainful employment: that thing we call work.

From the standpoint of the wealthy, our greatest age was the Gilded Age, when we emerged as a global power. Only when a member of the privileged class finally came down with an advanced case of noblesse oblige did we manage to get FDR's New Deal, and its struggling descendants into the 1960s. The 1970s were the neutral moment in the swing of the pendulum, as its return began almost imperceptibly. It has been sweeping back as a wrecking ball since 1980.

Social movements develop their own internal logic. The movement back toward centralized authority controlled by the wealthy will not stop until that status is achieved. And the pendulum may stop right there as the petty kings of corporatocracy metaphorically stop the rotation of the Earth. They will have vastly more advanced weapon and surveillance technology than their ancestors had, with which to quell uprisings. Good, obedient citizens will applaud the mass murder of dissenters. Because the internal logic for this has been building for decades, we can't vote it away. Its supporters will vote their beliefs, their feelings, their desires for a strong hand. Sure, they want a small government, but that government will still have the job of crushing dissidents. Among the free and armed citizens, the plutocrats will smile indulgently as their unofficial enforcers do the wet work. Freedom is for those who conform.

This could be stopped by peaceful means if enough swing voters would realize -- and care -- where things are headed, but they don't.

The occupant of the Oval Office from January, 2017 to January, 2021 was the greatest thing to happen to the right wing since Ronald Reagan. Indeed, he is the logical heir. Along the way have been many contributors to the rise of the right. Listeners to right-wing talk radio can feel like badasses without having to do anything. The minority who do want to do things can join militias and maybe some day get to shoot some people or blow something up. But the movement is mostly supported by chickenshits who want to make lots of money, pay little in taxes, and take no real risks.

You want common ground to build a coalition? That's it right there. Those same desires have fueled corporate Democrats now labeled as neoliberal. Make lots of money. Don't get shot at.

I'm with you when it comes to not getting shot at. But we diverge over the money. The pursuit of wealth automatically destroys the environment and the well-being of the ecosystem. It tramples on the rights of indigenous peoples to live in their environmentally balanced ways. You may destroy slowly, thoughtfully, and with a measure of regret, but you will destroy. And competition -- a cornerstone of the capitalist philosophy -- guarantees that the destruction will be neither slow nor regretful. Too many people will be shoving and grabbing to get their pile.

I'll still dangle the hope that a slim majority will vote together to put the brakes on what looks like a killer avalanche. Even then, that alliance will have to hold its ground and defend its perimeter long enough for the benefits to become obvious to a more reliable majority. And every generation will have to have the same arguments over and over.

Ruthlessness is bliss

A recent on line article in Texas Monthly reported how great it was that a man living off-grid in the Scottish highlands was rescued after a distress signal he sent out was received by a response center in Houston, Texas and relayed to Scottish authorities.

I pointed out that the man's happy tale of rescue and support owed a lot to Scotland's universal health care system. This observation received a lot of "likes," but also the predictable flamethrowers from people who take pride in their freedom to pay too much to a system that is designed to profit by denying them health care here in the United States.

"You certainly love to spend my money," one of them commented. Another one tried to say that universal care systems only work in smaller populations, which is the dead opposite of how risk pools work. Managing one database centered on patient care rather than profitability would have to be cheaper for the consumer than the current overlapping bureaucracies of care providers, drug companies, and insurance companies, all trying to protect as much as possible of their profit margin.

On another page, trying to combat the malignant growth that has already obliterated most of Annapolis, Maryland, I mentioned that transportation cycling could be very helpful to reduce traffic congestion. I no longer live in Annapolis, because of the malignant growth and the ridiculously high cost of housing, but I have friends who are still fighting the battle there. It used to be a nice place.

An angry commenter snapped that I must be in favor of the ridiculous waste of tax dollars on a bike lane that no one uses. I admit that my response was not the most level headed and charitable. When someone automatically equates support for alternative transportation with "a waste of tax dollars," it tells me a lot about their world view. So I said, "you sound pretty hot under the collar. You should either loosen your shirt or tighten it the rest of the way and end your suffering." He responded by calling me a libtard, thus confirming my first impression of him. I replied that he sounded like a typical money-obsessed conservative, to which he volleyed back that he wanted to keep the money he makes and leave a nice inheritance for his kids.

Here's the thing about a nice inheritance: unless you're bequeathing a billion, and sticking your kids in the right schools to meet the right people, they're going to have to go out and lick boots and grub for cash like most of the rest of us. The boots they lick might be more expensive and walk the halls of the executive suite, but the model of moneyed power is inescapably hierarchical. And a financial cushion might make them decadent, rather than provide them with a platform from which to reach higher.

As the argument escalated, his closing screed called me a cuck (a cherished pet insult of fascists and racists) and a beta male, and described in detail the kind of anal sex I should be subjected to.

A search on the guy's name disclosed very little. I found a Linkedin profile that seemed to match his name, location, and personality type, listing his occupation as "military professional." If he's active duty military, we all pay his salary through taxation. If he's a defense contractor/mercenary, we still pay his salary through our tax dollars, with less accountability. So of course his posturing about being a lone individual profiting from his own intelligence in a hostile world is a crock of shit. But he and people like him will never acknowledge the interconnectedness of all things, because they feel disconnected and oppressed. That religious tenet underlies all of their thinking. They're blissful in their unhappiness, because they're sure they know what's wrong and who is responsible. They take pride in their strength and ruthlessness. The ones with the most integrity really will accept death if they're unable to maintain life under the harsh terms they have endorsed. But most of your "live free or die" types have already agreed to be a little less free and live a bit longer. You will hardly ever get one to admit it, though.

Collectivists exhibit a similar religious devotion to the virtues of their view. The better future leans more to collective efforts that will improve the average for everyone. Yes, that will make the super-wealthy obsolete, but the super wealthy don't provide much value in return for our investment. The hell of it is that nearly every actual religion has some good principles along with their heavy component of destructive bullshit. You choose a way forward based on what you expect the future to look like.

The ruthless future is full of fire and blood, conflict and conquest, the rise and fall of empires. It unleashes the most ambitious passions, granting freedom to the strong and trampling the weak. For those who fancy themselves strong, it sounds like heaven. However you end up, if you gave it your absolute best shot, you ended up where you deserved to end up. It cannot be a peaceful future, because the super ambitious and greedy will take everything they can get, and hold it until someone more powerful blasts them out of the top spot. Armies will clash over and over across the trampled and scorched fields of endless battle. If too many people refuse to fight, the power structure will freeze in place, leaving most of the population to toil as underlings while a tiny minority controls the wealth and enjoys the leisure.

The United States Constitution accidentally provided a mechanism for citizen government that would make the actual bloody warfare unnecessary, if enough citizens could agree on what to demand from their government, and what limits to set on the private sector to keep it from becoming the de facto government. Just as our environmental neglect is at a crisis point, so is our civic neglect at the last intersection before the doors close against us and we have to accept slavery or bloody revolution.

I don't give the bloody revolution very good odds, because the environmental crisis will go all to hell while we're trying to hold off a professional military with our AR-15s and pipe bombs. We can die gloriously on principle, but that's about it. Meanwhile, if we'd gotten our shit together and been a bit more collective, we could have straightened out both the environmental issues and the governmental issues.

James Madison was an idealistic dipshit

I'll admit that during the years when I was supposed to be getting an education I was much more concerned with looking cool and getting laid. Everyone who was around me at the time can attest to my failure at both of those, but they were still my preoccupations. Otherwise I would have come to this opinion much sooner.

To be fair to all the boneheads like me, and all of the others who accepted the world as they found it and got on with their personal ambitions, the country was turning 200 years old when we were in our school years. We'd beaten the Nazis and were holding the Commies at bay. We were growing up in the greatest country that had ever existed, and it had nowhere to go but up. Wasn't everything worked out already? Sure, there had been slavery, but the Civil War stomped that out. Sure, there had been civil rights problems, but that was getting sorted out, too. Cynics could say what they wanted about corruption and incompetence, but the country was fundamentally great.

My nearsighted eyes scanned the world through prescription rose-colored glasses.

Now here we are with it all falling apart. And I come to find out, from this handy article in The Atlantic, that the defects were all built in purposely, by our revered Founding Fathers, who turn out to be a bunch of idealistic dreamers. This country badly needed some cynics back while there was still time for the cure to work.

Lots of things leaped off the page at me, but this one was especially poignant:

"The best way of promoting a return to Madisonian principles, however, may be one Madison himself identified: constitutional education. In recent years, calls for more civic education have become something of a national refrain. But the Framers themselves believed that the fate of the republic depended on an educated citizenry. Drawing again on his studies of ancient republics, which taught that broad education of citizens was the best security against “crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty,” Madison insisted that the rich should subsidize the education of the poor."

The poor bastard had no idea that the crafty and dangerous encroachments on public liberty would be the absolute aim of the rich. The rich had no need for democracy and individual liberty. The term globalism might not have been coined yet, but rich people everywhere share one unifying philosophy: become richer.  Once the war of independence was done and dusted, the rich could get back to commerce. The nation itself was just a vehicle for ensuring that power remained concentrated in the right hands. Sure, the concept of liberty meant that a commoner could join their ranks through the right combination of education, experience, acquaintances, and luck. But no one had to take seriously the opinions of tradespeople and farmers unless they had managed to make their commercial endeavors sufficiently lucrative.

Or maybe he wrote the whole thing with a twinkle in his eye, as a sop to any among the rabble who might be able to read and reason a little bit. Many of our public documents scan really well. But then the Soviet Union had a nice constitution, too. And the very same US Constitution was used to justify racism and to combat it. It brought us Roe v Wade and might take it away as well. It's all subject to interpretation. Laws are only as good as their enforcement. If it was all cut and dried, no one would bother to become a lawyer.

The very concept of a republic unabashedly favors elitism. Those are your choices: the mob rule of direct democracy, or the elitism of a republic. The idealists who penned our owner's manual at the end of the 18th Century believed that an enlightened elite existed and would continue to exist. They believed that some concept of inclusive, socially responsible virtue would naturally accrue through education and good breeding. They had faith that the concept of the republic of free men would have such eternal appeal that the rich and powerful would revere it for generations.

Perhaps the fact that it was a republic of free men made its odds seem much better. Viewed through that lens, it becomes a joint business venture in which all the major shareholders get a voice unlimited by hereditary aristocracy or an overbearing monarch. The United States of the founders' vision was a nice private club. Too bad they didn't have the wit to write their charter a bit more exclusively from the outset. It would have saved us a lot of grief. Of course if you happened to be a slave or a woman or a native, things would have stayed as bad as they ever were. Careless writing set the stage for centuries of bloodshed. I blame the pot. You know those plantation owners grew hemp and wacky weed. I can just see a group of them, sitting around in a cloud of smoke. One of them, holding in a cough, says:

"Gentlemen: Imagine a country in which the only limits on a man are his own initiative and the gifts God has given him." Coughs through his nose, loses it, the whole room breaks up laughing.

I'm sure they meant well. But every concept can be twisted, and some concepts lend themselves much more easily to it than others. The United States was designed to depend on the good faith and intentions of its most powerful and influential people. And yet what do they say of power? It corrupts. Even the desire for it corrupts. We have no fail safe mechanism to filter out the greedy and the grandiose from the truly selfless and dedicated. And why should we have to depend on our leaders being saintly? If that sort of behavior wasn't rare, we wouldn't have saints. We would just have people, being routinely good.

The America of the modern ideal, say the fantasy we held in the1960s, depended on a sense of shared struggle and shared reward. That supposedly drove the country during the Second World War, and evolved into the antiwar and social justice fashions of the 1960s and '70s. But it was crumbling by the end of the 1970s, and took fatal blows in the 1980s. 

I used to believe that human nature was fundamentally good. Then I started to believe that maybe some people were fundamentally bad. Now I believe that the concepts of good and bad depend entirely on your point of view. I know what I think is good and bad, but the world has demonstrated time and again that it doesn't care what anyone thinks. Evolution merely tallies the totals from every category and spits out a result.

I hate the government

Here in the United States we have citizen government. As much as it has become a tool of the wealthy to impose their priorities on the rest of us, it does reflect the values of Americans. United we stand, in squabbling disunity.

Ordinary citizens could take control if we could agree on common values and insist that they be promoted. Unfortunately, the majority values its freedom not to pay attention, and to dislike each other factionally more than it wants to overthrow the influence of concentrated wealth. The problem is not the government. It is us.

I hate the government. I hate how the need to keep an eye on it intrudes on my pleasures. I hate how it has evolved to be hostile to oversight as much as I hate having to be that oversight. I'm terrible at paying attention to what elected representatives and government agencies are doing. But we do have access -- for now -- to those who govern.

The yellow vest protests in France are presented as an example of what committed, bold citizen action can accomplish. True, they pressed the Macron government for concessions, but two questions arise. How did it get that bad in the first place? And will there be meaningful change after the two sides stand down and the news cycle needs to move on to other things?

We have representative government to free up the majority of citizens to do other necessary work. It also provides a filter between the whims of a sometimes volatile majority and the actual implementation of long-term policy. But representatives have power as well as responsibility, which makes them susceptible to corruption. Some are truly incorruptible. Others arrive pre-corrupted. Voters have to decide who is worth keeping. Detailed information can be hard to get. The information itself can be tainted by an underlying agenda.

I hate it. But it's human nature. Even government by a computer system would only be as good as its programmed parameters. And it might be very hard to overthrow. You can pull the plug, but only if you can get to the plug.

The show ponies who run for office are well suited to their roles in show biz. Some of them are as stupid as a box of rocks, but they've all managed to win the reality show contests we call elections. The best ideas in the world do no good if they can't find a champion who can actually get elected. The process is most visible at levels high enough to attract mass media coverage. But it's happening all the way down to little dinky towns scraping together a budget to keep a handful of roads paved, and send their kids to school. Down where most of us actually live, decisions are made at public meetings by people we know, if we happen to be able to take the time to attend.

Time. Citizen government demands your time. As an ordinary voter, you have to dig out the information you need to make what seems like a good choice. As an actual official, you have to perform the duties of your office. In some places, you're expected to do it for free, so you still have to grub for money in the outside world while paying proper attention to the people's business in your governmental capacity. In a country that glorifies wealth for its own sake, that means a constant battle against inflation, and against competitors who would be all too happy to sink you.

Many hands make light work. If a really solid majority of citizens wanted to get involved and take turns doing the mundane, tedious bullshit of governing, it would become a communal activity instead of turning "the government" into this alien overlord run by idiots and scoundrels. How likely is that? No one wants to be in the handful of suckers who get stuck having to sacrifice their time for an ungrateful populace that automatically assumes they're up to no good. And we're all either too busy working or too busy looking for work to devote our best attention to the needs of government. That's how you end up with independently wealthy people and energetic profiteers holding office. No one else can afford to. So back we come to oversight.

Take a short time as soon as possible to jot down a list of what you would like from your government. Brainstorm it. Write down everything that your ideal society would have. If the list is "no government," write down what you're going to have to get from other sources: roads, energy, health care, defense... Then figure out who is going to provide it and how you all are going to pay for it.

Deep inside all of us in the modern world lives a hunter gatherer wondering what the hell happened. What happened was evolution. As much as we still get the desire to roam as happy nomads across a relatively pristine environment, the only way to get back to that is to destroy all that came after it. And it was other parts of our own nature that made us evolve into our current condition, simultaneously pampered and stressed out. We can't go back. We can only go forward, trying to improve.

In appreciation of those who govern

Everyone complains about the government, but how many of you really want to do that job?

Especially at the local level, willing talent can be hard to find. While the corrupt local boss is a stock character, the benevolent wise village elder is as much so. Both of them provide security by perennial consistency. They free up the other citizens to do other work.

In more than one social media comment thread, contributors have said that they believe elected officials should receive little or no compensation, "to keep them from becoming professional politicians." Who among you is willing to run for office and take that deal? How good a job would you do when you have to spend most of your time earning your actual living at something else?

If your actual living is related to the needs of government, you can blend your efforts, but you will frequently cross the line into conflicts of interest. This is true of developers on zoning and planning boards, lawyers in legislatures, and business people in any elected position. You may think that you are bringing your informed perspective to the discussion, but how often does that informed perspective willingly accept a disadvantage in a proposed policy?

There's no way to sift out all of the personal interests from everyone  -- or anyone -- who stands for public office. The synergy of those personal interests is supposed to yield the best result. It fails when the personal interests do not include things we call intangible because they can't be valued monetarily, but the fault lies with the participants, not the process.

A guy showed up on our zoning board several years ago and immediately irritated one of our longest-serving members. The new guy was outgoing and inquisitive. He went to training sessions offered at the state level, and researched town matters. The older board member had also taken training courses, and was familiar with town issues from long residence here. The enmity got pretty thick for a while, but both of them are still involved in town government. The new guy has gone on to the board of selectmen. That's a tippy throne in this town. For a small place, we have some strong political divides. Elections really do come down to one or two votes. For now, he seems to be trying to modernize our standards for maintaining infrastructure, which is the town's biggest expense. The other guy has returned to the zoning board after recovering from a stroke. He continues to provide a reliable conservative pillar around which to build our decisions, whether we agree with him or not.

I have never wanted to be in charge of anything. I don't even want the positions I hold in town government. But I have never been opposed in an election for the zoning board, and the conservation commission is appointed gratefully from among whoever shows up to volunteer. I do not have the broad vision and deep curiosity that makes a good leader. I have no urge to schmooze. I do not socialize. So I am really grateful for the people who do. I recognize their value in keeping us connected.

If everyone was an introvert, we would never have had a war, because no one would want to get together to form an army. But we would never have gotten together to form anything else, either. While that might be better for the environment, we passed that exit a long time ago. Our species has these divergent personality traits, for better or for worse. Our challenge is to try to maximize the better and eliminate the worse. "Accentuate the positive..."

When I see the eager beavers of government, I wonder if they were like that in school. Are these the kids who were on the student council? Class president? The new selectman admitted that he was. But his working career was not in law or government. He was middle management in a manufacturing corporation. He's more of a working guy than a boardroom guy. But he did have that interest in how things work. Me, I never did. I'm much more likely to bushwhack up a stream to find out where it came from than to dig into rules and regulations and shake a lot of hands and talk to a lot of people to find out how all that works. So I really appreciate the people who like that stuff and do it well. Do their decisions always please me? Hardly. But I'm glad that they're willing and able to engage in the personal and public interaction necessary to govern at all.

Positions of responsibility are also positions of power, so they attract applicants whose motives are not helpful. Money and power are usually conjoined. Because it's always more comfortable to be rich than poor, especially in a failing society, corrupt leaders whose focus is money will do little to keep a government from degenerating, as long as their own wealth, and that of their benefactors, remains secure. We're in the advanced stages of this at the national level. Because any set of characteristics can be used for good or ill, the same energy and social ability that makes a good government entity works just as well to facilitate the connections and operations of a bad one. The major difference would probably be the dark side's willingness to double cross anyone they have to, if it brings them more money or power.

Treachery is the dark side's strength and weakness. The ruthless ability to destroy things without remorse gives evil a short term edge that can last a long time. Evil forces good to play the game on evil's terms when the violence and destruction get so far advanced that they can only be met with countervailing destructive force. But you don't want to stop a strip mine by dropping bombs on it. You can't protect the environment while you are blowing it up. A minefield and razor wire would protect a wetland, but they're hardly the best methods for it. A lot of things can't be settled by a contest of force.

At the local level, in tiny rural towns like the one I live in, things are seldom that dramatic. But because we are working from a smaller bag of money, issues like a six-figure bridge and road contract, or standards for environmental protection have much more visible personal consequences. If anyone ever figures out how to get outright rich off of government corruption in this town, we will all be simultaneously outraged and impressed. But we're not immune to cronyism. Human nature resides in the individual human. People play favorites. It may not be right, but it's common. That's why we have to make a point to critique -- not just bash and disparage -- decisions our representatives claim to be making on our behalf. It can be hard, especially when some blockhead proposes  -- or the elected body of blockheads enacts -- what we see as a stupid decision.

It's enough to make you give up on government entirely. But some form of government would reassert itself because the personalities that created it in the first place would still exist. The only way to get rid of government would be for a relentless corps of introverted assassins to hunt down those chirpy extroverts and kill them off until the genes were eliminated forever. First of all, that's impossible. Secondly, we would no doubt discover what we missed about them. Third, would a species entirely of introverts even be able to sustain itself? No one would ever ask for a date, let alone take it any further.

We're stuck with government until artificial intelligence takes over and turns us into a herd of domesticated animals kept in line by robot guards. So we have that to look forward to as we muddle along, trying to find good people to run things while most of us do our best to avoid being one of them.

A drunken preppy snot on the Supreme Court

Only the people in the room at the time know the absolute truth about what happened between Christine Blasey (Ford) and Brett Kavanaugh. Each side has its adherents. One side is wrong. There is no debate.

Setting aside that specific issue, the crisis served as a pressure test that the nominee failed. He demonstrated that he is not impartial or dignified or resistant to stressful confrontation. Perhaps that explains why he was comfortable as a law clerk and then on the bench, because in neither case does he have to face adversaries in argument. He was doing research, running errands, and then, after he was appointed to his first judicial position by George W. Bush, he got to sit up there in the black robe and preside over the lowly combatants presenting their arguments before him.

The expensive incubators of the leadership class in this country can't help but foster a climate of unquestioned entitlement to rule. Your Type A achievers already have more than a little of the psychopath in their makeup, just to have a strong enough ego to play to win all the time. You will sometimes win in spite of yourself, but if you want to make a habit of it you must feel that you deserve to prevail. You have to convince yourself that you are at least as good as everyone in the field. When that field has been distilled from the most powerful families, over multiple generations, your ego has to be that much more aggressive. You hope that they're driven to do things society finds beneficial, because they're going to do them anyway.

My own experience as a preppy snot was limited to two years in a fairly minor boys' school in Maryland, after two years in the school just down the road from it, that was coed through sixth grade, and girls-only through 12th. That school was trying to go coed, so they added boys to a grade at a time going up. I could have attended with the first class of boys that went on to graduate from there. Instead, I did as the boys had done in prior years: I went up the road to the one that bolstered the masculine image.

It sucked. I hated it. But it was a good experience to have had. The entire student body seemed to fit itself into a bullying hierarchy. That was educational.

Abused people become abusers. No doubt some of my later actions through the years, the ones I look back on with the most shame and chagrin, stemmed from trained responses I had to the world view created by a culture of bullies and their subjects -- not to say victims. Victim is a very specific role defined by the amount of helplessness and degree of damage suffered. I was miserable, and suffered a lot of symptoms of stress, but most of the immediate oppression went away when I finally snapped and punched somebody in the face. That sums up the boy/man view of interpersonal relations completely. Punch somebody. Repeat as necessary for the relief of whatever is bugging you.

My older brother attended that boys' school for four years, graduating in 1971. He told me about how the boys in his class who lived nearby would go home and drink alcohol at lunch. Their weekend and vacation parties were legendary. We didn't hear anything about gang rape or contrived ways to get young women to have sex with them, only that young women did. The Sexual Revolution was intensifying rapidly from 1967-'71 (and beyond), so a lot of young women were up for more adventure than might hitherto have been the case. It's the alcohol that stands out, given the role of that liquid in the recent shameful circus in the Senate.

My father had been a scholarship student at Browning from 1939 to about 1943. He has never told me stories of underage drinking there -- he saw more of that from fellow Eagle Scouts when he worked for the Boy Scouts of America in New York. He did recount visits to the homes and Long Island "cottages" of some of his classmates who extended some degree of friendliness -- but never equal status -- to this funny little guy from Paris, who got in not because he was connected, but because he was merely smart. Smart doesn't get you shit unless you can convince the privileged people that you can do something to make them more so. He was unable to do this. Classmates of his went on to do things like inherit the New York Times.

In my own teen years in public school, I knew that some of the kids were having very wild parties and going to bars with fake IDs. It's a teen thing, not just a preppie thing. What sets the prep culture apart is their assumption of superiority. Even if an exlusive school requires community service, it's reaching down to help, not pitching in on a struggle that they share in any way.

People can and do learn from their past mistakes and become better people as a result. Or they settle in and become better at being the kind of jerk they were then, only with more experience.

The newest addition to the Supreme Court destroys forever our longstanding illusion of an impartial judiciary. Law is about interpretation. No jurist can be impartial, because the very act of deciding depends on point of view. A result may run counter to expectations, but always for an interpretive reason ultimately formed by ideology. No matter how convoluted the connection may be, any decision they hand down has to satisfy their philosophy. Everything that this young man passes judgment on will pass through the filters of his education, experience, mentors, and vision for the world. There's no longer any point in trying to guess how he will fulfill his duties. From now on we have to deal with how he actually does.

First they came for the...

History repeats itself because it is a product of a species that is generally slow-witted, irritable, and hates change.

The oft-quoted words of Martin Niemöller about the sequential suppression of groups deemed undesirable by the Nazis stir no anxiety in the Nazis themselves. Granted, in a paranoid, authoritarian regime there will be internal strains from time to time. You want to watch your back and try to be sensitive to shifts in power, but that's upper echelon stuff. Down in the middle and lower ranks, you'll be fine if you just don't think for yourself. 

Here in America, the happy followers of rising authoritarianism still talk about freedom, but they've actually given up on the idea of personal advancement. They know that the game has been rigged against them. Now they're just begging for sustenance in return for obedience, and protection in return for nationalism.

What changes as history is added? The population of humans steadily rises. Technology becomes more sophisticated. These should not be brushed off. They're critical variables. Denser populations mean we are forced into contact with each other. Technological advancements mean that people in power can exert control far more easily than control can be wrested from them. You can neither run nor hide. Back in the 1930s, you could still do both.

Because technology can't be rolled back without a pretty widespread catastrophe, our only check on its power is our own will to control it. It can't be made idiot proof. You can't set it and forget it.

I can see why hardworking people are ready to let go of democracy. I learned a few months ago that you have to contact your legislators all the time, even if you are confident that they will vote your way on an upcoming issue, because they need to be able to show supporting numbers when they're arguing for their point of view. So a voter really needs to follow every issue and ring in for or against, just to be sure that representative government is as accurately representative as possible. All this is on top of your virtuous toil in service to the economy. Day off? No such thing. You're either part of the problem or you're part of the solution. The issues never rest. Nor should you.

The realization that the work never ends feeds the desire for Utopian solutions. If everyone believed the same thing, we could all relax, because the natural flow of decision making would support the greater good. Now listen to my beliefs...

Reality is always messier than even our most chaotic imagination. Everything could be destroyed in the competition between Utopian visions. But if it doesn't feel Utopian to you, then it isn't really The One. When, oh lord, will we ever truly be able to set it and forget it?

If freedom isn't free, but nothing else is free either, what's worth the trouble at all? Freedom requires such constant maintenance that it becomes a kind of enslavement all its own. Someone sneaky or overbearing will always try to bend things for personal gain or factional advancement. It's mentally and emotionally exhausting. The simple pressure of tyranny feels like a relief. Then you know who's stepping on you, and you can focus on building up your tolerance to it. As a citizen, you no longer have the constant pressure to make the right decision. You're free to devote yourself to simple survival and pointless griping. You're absolved of guilt.

Thoughts, prayers, and argument

Another lone gunman has raised the bar yet again for mass shootings in the USA.

My employer's son was at Virginia Tech in 2007. He just missed being in one of the classrooms where that shooter struck. Ten years later, he lives and works in Las Vegas. He dodged these bullets, too. But I wonder how the world looks to a young person whose life has already been closely invaded by unhinged murderers not once but twice.

Along with normalizing virulent bigotry in the name of free speech, we have normalized personal violence. America was settled at gunpoint. The wave of white people moved westward, hunting, gathering, and subduing the natives as it went. A gun was a tool, like an ax or a plow. The gun was woven into our national identity here far more than anywhere else. It is as American as the flag, and more widely worshipped.

Popular fiction has long celebrated heroes who can handle a shootin' iron. From tall tales around the camp fire to pulp fiction to radio, movies, and television, we admire the man who says little while his gun barks a sharp response to the impertinence of evil. And our super villains push the arms race. Deadly combat is the ultimate test of a person's skill and courage.

Actually, singing solo, unaccompanied, on a stage in front of a large audience is the ultimate test of a person's skill and courage. This probably explains the greater popularity of gunplay.

I'm sure that watching people drop before your hail of lead is very satisfying. Many of these killers have already accepted that this will be the last thing they do. Good luck figuring out how to detect those tendencies in a free-range population.

Here in the Land of the Free, we must be careful when we tell people what they cannot do or own. But how many times do we have to see someone misuse a high-capacity weapon before we acknowledge that the tool itself is part of the problem?

When I first got a handgun, I had the weirdest flood of thoughts. I looked at it and saw all the ways in which it could inflict suffering. I could shoot someone else. I could shoot myself. I could shoot an animal. I could put a bullet hole in anything I could hit. I did not buy the gun. My first wife already owned it. It was never enough gun for her, it was just the gun she could afford at the time. She left it behind when she left me.

The idea of inflicting suffering repelled me, I'm happy to say. But we are primitive creatures who have killed since before the invention of language. In all those years, some of us have clearly enjoyed it more than others. That willingness to push things to the ultimate extreme lives inside all of us. It's controlled in some, and unbridled in others.

My gun-worshipping friends repeat over and over that humans are dangerous creatures, and that access to weapons is all that will save the good ones from the bad ones. Sometimes, people get killed who don't deserve it. That's an unfortunate side effect. To the gun believer, it reinforces their contention that everyone should be armed, in order to participate fully in the exchange of lead when it inevitably breaks out.

That sounds incredibly bleak to me. It may be true, but it's sad. Any family picnic in a park, any public entertainment, any convergence of people whatsoever, may be interrupted by a murderer. Get used to it. It's the will of the people and the intent of our founders.

Winston Churchill famously said that democracy was the worst form of government except for all the other forms that had been tried. Granted, a majority could vote to give their government strong police powers, and agree that only trained professionals in the government's service should be allowed to have the most powerful weapons. But we already voted to let the wealthy have all the money, and now they're using it to crush ordinary citizens. In other words, a free society needs to pay attention and stay in control of the people's government to keep the power from being misused.

I wonder if it can be done. How do you keep everyone informed at all times about the actions of all the public officials at all levels of government, in real time? The internet? That hacker-infested, troll-plagued repository of convincing disinformation? What else ya got?

I wish I had an answer. A lie can go halfway around the world while the truth is still getting its shoes tied. That concept has been attributed to a number of famous people, but its origin matters far less than its validity. Especially now, a lie can travel at the speed of light. So can the truth, but a good lie sounds convincing, and a great lie can cast doubt on the truth.

And then there's opinion. An opinion may turn out to be true. It may sound so attractive that its supporters treat it as true, regardless. All this competes for attention in a busy world where increasing numbers of strivers struggle to stay alive and feel like it's worth something. We are asked to make quick decisions about policies with far-reaching consequences. We are represented by elected officials that most of us don't fully trust, because we don't have time to keep track of all the influences  on them.

Broad-brush government haters and conspiracy theorists simplify their lives by condemning the whole thing. It's rotten, they all stink, destroy it all. Maybe they scale it back to certain departments and party affiliations, but a nihilist view of government in general is the foundation of both anarchy and tyranny.

By now I'm sure that someone has already posted the opinion that the tragedy in Las Vegas could have been contained with much lower losses if trained individuals in the crowd, openly and legally carrying their own automatic weapons, had been allowed to identify the target and pin him down with return fire. If we really live in a land where outbreaks of gunplay need to be tolerated, we all need not just weapons, but combat training as well. The best remedy for bad speech is more speech. The best remedy for bad gun use is super-precise, heroically competent, instant retaliation. That would obviate the need for heavily armed police forces and eliminate the lag time between calling 911 and the actual arrival of help.

When you're writing the script, you get to pick who wins. Reality is seldom so courteous.

Police misconduct further complicates any simplistic prescription. Armored vehicles and extensive arsenals present quite a temptation. As we learn from many reports of misbehavior ranging from mildly questionable to outright heinous in both law enforcement and the armed forces, some who serve are gratifying a personal urge to dominate more than a lofty calling to protect. Anarchy or tyranny will serve their purposes equally well.

Anyone with a heart feels wounded when we hear of a murder, mass or otherwise. Naturally, those inclined to care will offer warm words at the very least. Those inclined to celebrate violence will exult. There will be a lot of opinions and statistics back and forth. Thoughts, prayers, and argument will create a jumble of noise that will fade to the usual grumble until the next time.

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.

The cost of government

Why do people who chronically complain about the money consumed by government have so little to say about the billions of dollars spent to put politicians into office?

Election debt is analogous to student loan debt. Of course the office holder will look for a quick way to discharge that financial obligation. And office holders have to incur this debt every election cycle.

Term limits won't cure this. It's attached to the elections themselves, because of the way we've let them become absurdly expensive sales campaigns. Whoever is running will need to drum up the cash.

Outside spending is hard to limit, because the government should not be allowed to tell some rich idiot not to spend money on ads supporting a specific candidate or point of view. The only way to control political advertising would be to ban it. While that would be unbelievably wonderful esthetically, it presents an ominous restriction on freedom of expression. Certainly an ad-free election process would force candidates to deal in more substance, or at least better illusions of it. It's worth discussing.

Another reason men like fighting

The action hero is often a man of few words. Granite jawed, taciturn, he lets his fists or his weapons speak for him.

I keep getting activist emails asking me to call various government officials on the phone to advocate urgently for some desirable course of action. I never do, because I really hate pestering strangers. I'll send them something they can read, or not read, but I hate actually speaking to them. I'm sure a lot of guys would rather shoot someone than talk. You know, shoot first, ask questions later. Questioning a dead opponent, you get to provide responses that suit your viewpoint.

Not that I'm itching to shoot anyone. I prefer to avoid them entirely, after offering suggestions that might help them decide to abandon undesirable behaviors on their own. But that's just me. More aggressive types will grab their weapon of choice and go try to settle things.

Slave owners shape our history

The yet-to-be United States declared its independence from Great Britain only after southern plantation owners were assured that all this freedom and equality would not apply to the brown people they owned or the lifestyle and economy based on slavery.

The fledgling United States needed a constitution. Southern plantation owners signed on only when assured that the slavery question would at least be pushed way down on the calendar.

In 1861 the slavery issue's heated tensions came to actual warfare. As a result of that war, slavery was abolished. Segregation and suppression continued, aided by laws and beliefs based on principles of racial inequality.

By the end of the 19th Century, a few people had amassed vast fortunes that depended largely on cheap labor and favorable legislation. While the workers were technically free and compensated for their efforts, institutions like the company store and payment in scrip were just a couple of factors contributing to income inequality, insecurity and poverty among workers. The wealthy enjoyed a very close relationship with the elected government.

During the 20th Century, American society showed some signs of improvement in the treatment of workers and minorities. By the end of the century, however, those trends were beginning to reverse. It has only become more obvious as the 21st Century has advanced. A few people control most of the money. The world is their plantation. Their purchased legislators and judges solidify their gains. Restive populations are turned on each other, told that the threat comes not from the concentration of wealth but from the differences of the people around them.

Wealth is measured in dollars. Dollars are measured in numbers. Numbers have no empathy.

Humans have emotions. They measure in feelings, and can be steered by them. In fact, they can be steered by little else. Even supposedly rational people are only rational because they like how it makes them feel.

When wealth is the ultimate good, decisions are made by the numbers to increase wealth. If a bunch of poor people have to take a hit for it, they're a necessary loss, the same as the killed or broken heroes we sent to war to defend our way of doing business. We praise you, valiant warriors. Now get lost.

The wealthy feel better when they're getting more wealth. The impersonal numbers click higher, incapable of feeling the euphoria they inspire in the humans who get to claim them. The owners control society, while the vast majority who make up that society get shoved around by forces they don't have time to understand.

If you have a fantasy of dropping out and setting up a homestead where you can live off the grid and let the whole mess of civilization fall apart, think again. You will go down fighting to defend your little chunk of arable land and potable water from the thousands of desperate people who would want a piece of it for themselves. If that sounds glorious to you, or even doable, you're an idiot.

Like all the ills of human society, the problems of economy could be solved by cooperative effort. So, like all the problems of human society, they will remain unsolved while we argue and let evolution decide for us. It's worked for millions of years. Why stop now?

Civilization was the result of evolution. The collapse of civilization can certainly be the result of further evolution. Here's the thing about evolution: it doesn't care if you live or die. It doesn't care if anything lives or dies. So if we choose to let ourselves slump into a mucky pit of industrial waste, blood and feces, evolution will log that decision and reflect those changes as impersonally as a corporate ledger shows an uptick in profits when thousands of workers are laid off.