November sunshine

 We're in the part of the year where the sun acts like an ex who ran into you in public and can't get away fast enough. If you see them at all, they're hurrying away, hiding behind anything convenient: a hill, trees, their friends the clouds, who block you. If you do get a clear shot, you'll get stabbed in the eyes just for looking in the general direction.

You knew it was coming months ago. They started sending love notes to that other hemisphere in mid summer. By late September you both knew it was over. They'd been spending less and less time with you, consigning you fully to the darkness of true night, and casting long shadows during their grudging daylight appearances.

Hold on for a few months. In only another month after this one, the notes will start to come your way, easier and easier to read. You have to get used to being a summer romance, year after year for as many years as you get.

The Democratic Party's accidental 4-D chess

 The Democratic Party has been a consistent disappointment at least since Lyndon Johnson buried us balls-deep in the Vietnam War. I mean, they've had their moments, but even after Watergate the party couldn't get the White House back for more than one term between 1972 and 1992. The Democrats did control Congress until the mid 1990s, but that power crumbled as well.

The Vietnam War was very much a bipartisan endeavor, from all the way back when it was our French allies getting forced out of their colony in Indochina. But it became the Republican Party's problem when the Nixon administration viewed it as not a burden but a joy when they took over from the departing Johnson administration. They became the party of war, of the military-industrial complex, of heavy handed reactions to protest under leaders like California governor Ronald Reagan.

The Democratic Party pivoted to an anti-war stance, or at least a portion of it did. It had already stressed itself by passing civil rights legislation. Now it dallied with being "soft on Communism." This was the era when you could buy bumper stickers that had a picture of a peace sign with the caption "footprint of the American chicken." Yep, even then, masculine virtue was linked to fighting in any war assigned to you, to prove that your physical courage -- or the insecure need to project its image -- far outweighed your moral courage.

Regardless of the party in power, our country made social progress on multiple fronts, as well as enacting environmental protections that addressed some of the more obvious pollution and degradation effectively enough to make industry organize politically and economically against government. As elections became more and more just sales campaigns, and society grew more noisy and complicated, voters were easier and easier to distract and divert while powerful financial interests focused on taking control.

A philosophical basis isn't really a detailed plan, but generation after generation of Republican politicians advanced the idea that the rich should be allowed to become richer. Because every American liked the idea of being rich, having seen the freedom, luxury, and leisure that the top tier enjoyed, even on the hippie side of the aisle no one seemed averse to making a pile if they could. During the dark age when a Democrat couldn't get within sniffing distance of the presidency, this embrace of a prosperity gospel seeped in to saturate them. The neoliberal was born.

Mind you, I witnessed most of this as a dipshit kid, and later as a dipshit adult. I always had this vision of a country and a world where everyone had enough, no one had too much, and we were all fine with it. I mean, how stupid is that? It seemed to me then, and still does, that it requires the least wasted effort on cruelty and the artificial suffering of war, for the most return on the true simple pleasures of life. As far as I could tell, I was nearly alone in this belief. There was absolutely no political machinery devoted to something so benign. But if anyone was going to pay it lip service it was probably Democrats. It was a thread in the successful campaign of Bill Clinton to finally unseat the Republican fuddy-duddies who acted like grandparents and made our government smell like mothballs and cordite.

Of course the Democrats couldn't break the Republican hold on the Oval Office without the leverage of corporate money. Someone has to pay for the media saturation. So lip service was all we got, along with incremental tidbits.

The partisan divide is the reason so many voters identify as unaffiliated. Shallow observers identify this as "the middle," where the wishy washy majority loll in contemptible political apathy, but it's more than that. It's a diverse ecosystem of assorted malcontents. We are all afflicted by the same foul forces from above. And here's where the accidental 4-D chess comes in.

There's some chess involved in governing, but what is chess anyway? It's a game with known pieces on a finite board. Seriously, after all these years with so many documented games, why doesn't every game between Grand Masters end in a draw? Any top level player knows where the pieces go and has gamed out every possibility. But in real life, a player blinks, forgets, or is successfully distracted for just long enough. Politics and government take place on an almost infinite board with many more pieces, none of them reliably under direct control. Philosophies that stress obedience to authority have an advantage keeping their pieces moving where the plan requires, so authoritarianism has come to dominate. But the combination of Republican centralized authority and Democratic structural instability may finally have pissed off enough of that reachable rabble of independent minds to get them to mutiny and take control of the one party still up for grabs and publicly devoted to the general welfare. The brilliant, accidental move by establishment Democrats has been finally to demolish themselves and let the next wave climb the rubble to plant a flag and build something better.

Some of us have been waiting a long time for a politically viable number of people to catch up. Maybe they finally have. The party label only matters because branding still matters. The Democrats were the party of slavery in the 1850s and the party of civil rights in the 1960s. The Republicans were the party of abolition in the 1860s and the party of cronyism and corruption in the Gilded Age. But we're comfortable with the names. I don't care what you call it. Just get busy proving that life really will be better when the lowest are lifted and the highest are hauled down a few notches.

It's never going to happen like the flip of a switch. Progressive activists today hiss angrily that the Democrats never really intended to fix anything, because they so seldom succeed. This narrow-minded perpetuation of the blame game betrays a youthful naivete about human nature and the political headwinds that nominal members of the same party face in their highly varied home regions. Democrats have been the less popular party for so long that they are always more worried that a backlash will whisk them out of office or that a "blue wave" will roll back leaving them flopping helplessly on parched sand before they can spawn a new generation. 

Ignorance and malice always move with great confidence. We are by far a country of bystanders when it comes to elected office. Snappy put-downs resonate with us as an audience, because most of us have never had to try to bring together disparate factions to enact large-scale policies against well-funded resistance. The oversimplification gives these darts a sharp point and a sticking barb. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom.

Cynics are disappointed optimists. Don't let the bitterness fool you.

As always, success comes down to gathering the votes. Candidates and their organizations have thousands and millions of cats to herd to get everyone to go to the polls at all and then to make the desired choice. Then the actual legislating starts, with more votes to wrangle from officials gathered together from all across the sprawling country. Each one comes with their own set of leashes and tripwires installed by everyone who had a hand in getting them there. Some of the strings are clearly visible, some are not. Even the ones not obviously owned by some power bloc are answerable to the voters back home, some of them placid, others highly volatile.

Building the resistance movement

 The No Kings demonstrations on October 18th stirred up backlash from the right and left. You can find many examples for yourself in written postings and in videos from the many aspiring and established influencers.

Firebrands on the left want to fulfill the regime's wish for violence. Bullies on the right have been looking forward to violence for decades. Russia and China would be on board. The real losers would be the American people, no matter who "won."

Wiser voices have reinforced that the demonstrations of opposition encourage others who may more quietly oppose the regime to feel more confident and become more active. They energize the already committed. They show the regime and its supporters that their actions and policies are unpopular.

Because the regime has many fascistic qualities, and a visible percentage of their base openly displays Nazi imagery and expresses Nazi sympathies, resistance discourse has looked for parallels in the rise of the National Socialists in Germany, their use of power once they had it, and the opposition they faced within their own country and, ultimately, from the combined military forces.

The sad story of Sophie Scholl and the German anti-Nazi White Rose movement inspires many with her courage and tragic end. She and her older brother Hans, along with Christoph Probst, were beheaded by guillotine after a show trial in 1943. Their heads were cut off. They were young people in their 20s. Shoved into an execution device, and thunk.

Their movement and murder have motivated many in the years afterward to honor their sacrifice, even though it failed at the time. As I read the story, they weren't on a suicide mission when they set out leaflets for their fellow university students to find. It was just bad luck that their littering -- tossing their last 100 leaflets from an upper floor into a large space, just as one of the people charged with keeping that space tidy happened to be passing through -- spurred that person to chase them down and turn them over to the Gestapo.

Human sacrifice is a terrible recruiting tool. Christianity didn't really take off until it became the state religion of Rome instead of a great way to get nailed to a wooden fixture or get to meet a bunch of lions face to face.

As for the ultimate defeat and removal of the Nazis from power, that required years of military action, and the deaths of millions. The time for internal resistance against the Nazis to work was way back in the 1930s, when they seemed like a good bet for Germany. Even Hans Scholl and Christoph Probst were Hitler Youth and served in the German army. Political resistance before it was too late just wasn't going to happen.

The circumstances in Germany were not the same as what we have now in the United States. Political resistance has a very good chance here, without the strong risk of summary execution for those who speak out and act up. So far, anyway... Which leads to the other half of the comparison to de-Nazification in Germany: the world war itself.

Hitler's big mistake was in pushing for more and more territory. If he had stayed more or less within his own borders, he could have committed atrocities to his heart's content. Other nations might condemn, but they wouldn't interfere. It would be like Russia today, where political opposition faces arrest and/or unfortunate accidents, elections are for show, and everyone knows who is and always will be in charge. The German citizens might not be extremely happy, but they would get by.

Even when the United States was finally dragged into the war by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the armed forces didn't magically spring into full size and strength on Dec. 8. Over the course of the war, 61 percent of the people who served were drafted. They served with valor, but they waited to be called, and probably hoped that they would not be needed. That wasn't recruiting. Patriotic films and whatnot served not so much to trigger a flood of volunteers as to take the sting out of inevitable induction.

Moving forward in time to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s, there again the front line people faced injury and death at the hands of adversaries who would in most cases never face punishment or, if they did so, it was so many years later that it was a formal gesture at best.

Every murderer gets away with the crime. Even if the killer is caught, tried, convicted, and serves a sentence, the victim is still dead. This unfortunate inequity is even worse when the killer has gotten to live a long and prosperous life. In the case of unrepentant racists, their legacy is the continuing culture of bigotry that shows no sign of just dying out on its own. Younger generations aren't born at the highest level of enlightenment. They're born empty, blank, to be filled in by whoever is around them.

Humanity faces a huge challenge now, as every neglected area of concern reaches a crisis at the same time. Economic disparity, gender bias, racism, environmental disregard, and general paranoia all need to be addressed. They can't be addressed by one single thread of appeal, because not enough people connect the dots to get the picture. All are related, but have been treated as separate for eons. Our species needs group therapy, but avoid getting homogenized into a bland blend or forced into a mold under restrictive authority. On the other hand, restrictive authority has the power to act quickly to respond to the crises that can't wait for the slowest students to reach consensus. Like, the planet is baking right now. Resources are being devoured right now. At least two factions of super wealthy power mongers have different -- but both unpleasant -- visions of the future that they are poised to impose on the rest of us.

How much should one person or one generation worry about the generalized future? You live, you die, you're gone. Maybe you think you care about your children and grandchildren, but once you're dead you can't hear them complain anymore. The planet itself doesn't care whether we're here, or even how we treat it. What reason does anyone have not to live completely selfishly to the fullest extent of their skills and budget? That logic exists at some level inside every human mind. "Why should I care?" You have to make a damn good case. Find out what motivates each individual with whom you interact. Not too many of them will be very enthusiastic about getting their head smashed like John Lewis, or get murdered by racists just for trying to sign up voters, or guillotined for a principled stand against one of the most evil regimes that ever rose.

Peace is most definitely possible, a productive peace with a high degree of personal freedom of expression and movement. All it requires is universal acceptance that it is the greatest good. Sacrifice in a case like that consists of mild things like forgoing seconds on dessert rather than submitting to lynching or state execution. A simple concept but a surprisingly hard sell.

Edited petition to Brooke Rollins

You probably get these too: emails asking you to contact various government officials to ask them to be decent human beings or good stewards of the environment or some crap like that. If they were either of those things, we wouldn't have to petition them. So in the part that I can edit I usually try to reach them where they are rather than call them to where the petition sponsor thinks they should be.

The most recent example is a petition to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, asking her to release the contingency funds to cover SNAP benefits during the government shutdown. The suggested language was conciliatory and deferential to human rights and values of which this regime has not demonstrated a single scrap. So I took my usual approach.

To: Brooke Rollins, Secretary of Agriculture

 At some point, your party's top-down approach to ruling has to become obvious, as it does now in this cold move to use Americans in need as hostages to coerce the Democratic Party to surrender to your party's overall plan to make life more precarious for the working class.

Your party's policies will increase mortality among children, the elderly, and the disabled, three groups that represent little value to a wealthy elite. Children have some utility as future workers, but only if they are sturdy enough to do the work required of them before they are discarded by your system when they get too old or injured. A good example here is how the Republicans pay lip service to military personnel and veterans, while cutting funding for support systems after their service. As for the elderly, just die already, am I right? And the disabled... they never had anything to contribute in the first place. Life ain't the Special Olympics. Eventually, it will be legal to just leave a defective baby out on a frozen hillside to die, won't it? Or maybe part it out for useful organs first. Just because some parts don't work doesn't mean that no parts work. All that lies a little further down the road, but we're at a critical fork right now.

Preventing 42 million Americans—including about 16 million children and nearly 7 million pregnant and postpartum women, infants, and young children—from being able to buy groceries seems unnecessarily cruel and dangerous until you consider that it's a first step toward necessary culling of useless people. The tough will survive. Anyone not tough enough to endure the test is just dead weight on society anyway. Am I getting this right? You know I am.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has an emergency contingency fund, and experts indicate that the US Department of Agriculture is able to use this or other funds to keep food on people’s tables. Or you can siphon off the funds to pay for CBP officers, golf trips, and Gatsby parties. Maybe pay to ship senior military commanders in for another pep talk by Major Hegseth over at the Pentagon.

According to your own shutdown contingency plan, the agency has a reserve of funds, which can be used to pay SNAP benefits directly. In fact, the SNAP Appropriation law’s own language makes the contingency reserve broadly available for program operations. Even in President Trump’s first administration, SNAP benefits were paid out during the government shutdown in late 2018 through early 2019—the longest recorded shutdown in American history—without interruption. You can come through again or admit that was a mistake, a moment of weakness you won't repeat.

I now return you to the earnest entreaty that assumes that you have a core of humanity that can be appealed to. Who knows? Maybe they're right. Surprise me.

I call on you to do the right thing for the American people and put politics aside to fund SNAP benefits so that millions of families can eat. You have the power to stop needless suffering and children going hungry. Please use it.

Sincerely,

(Your information here)

Even Hitler's power came from the bottom up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Politics of Selfishness in the Land of Opportunity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Political Prosecution Part Two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Written before Trump commuted Santos's sentence.