Terrorizing a nation is expensive

 Terrorism depends on emotional impact. The 9-11 attacks killed a tiny fraction of the total population of the United States, but drove a precision chisel into divides in the country, starting the fractures that led us to two costly wars and the election disasters of 2016 and 2024.

With an authoritarian government in place in the United States, we now have government forces terrorizing US citizens under the pretext of terrorizing "illegal immigrant criminals." They're on a rampage in Minnesota, focused mainly on the Twin Cities area, after a summer that included a shock raid in Chicago that could have come from a movie script. Remember that Donald Trump comes from reality television, and Steve Bannon made his money in the movie business. It's all show biz to them. Coincidentally, terrorism is all show biz, too.

Terrorism is performance art. It's guerrilla theater. It's improv in the wild, only it's not improvised by its writers. It's only improvised by the unwitting characters in the general public or target population who have the situation sprung on them.

Despite having an enormous budget and now asking for more money, and hiring anyone from 18 to 80 who is willing to buy their own tactical kit and pepper spray old ladies and school kids, ICE can't put big touring companies in more than one or two cities at a time. The expense goes beyond money to personnel. A goon squad needs goons. While humanity seems to produce an endless supply of people who like to be mean to other people, they're still a small enough percentage that the Department of Homeland Security will soon have to hire people who have to get their parents to drop them off at work.

All of this malicious incompetence comes at a cost to taxpayers. You, the average citizen, are paying all of the budget for ICE to commit acts of brutality without fear of penalty or pushback. Their funding was specifically secured in the One Big Bucket of Bullshit reconciliation bill the Republicans managed to shoehorn through last summer.

The Republican members of congress aren't spineless, they're complicit. Republican voters: is this really what you voted for? In some cases, I'm sure it is. But the rest of you: even if you long to live as the privileged class under apartheid, don't you realize that the strategies of xenophobia and isolation are demolishing your precious American exceptionalism? Even without the Toddler-in-Chief stomping his feet because he didn't get a Nobel Prize, the rest of the administration has the foreign policy plans of a 12-year-old. At best they're led by Stephen Miller, who hasn't evolved spiritually and intellectually since high school. He was a nasty piece of work then, and now he has years of experience. They have not mellowed him.

Stephen Miller is another chickenhawk playing toy soldier with other people's lives. Never served a day, but he's all about "might makes right" when it comes to sending other people's kids to pick fights on behalf of white nationalism.

At Davos this week, where America once held considerable influence, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney laid out a plan in which the United States is left to devour itself with petty squabbles while the rest of the world moves on to outgrow the era of superpowers. The US was described as the last superpower in the 1990s, even as a "hyperpower" because it was the apparently victorious survivor of the Cold War. Drunk with power, the country has lurched through the decades since, believing its own hype to the point that ignorant voters were convinced to hollow out and undermine the bipartisan structure created after World War II to facilitate peace and prosperity through diplomacy and global trade.

And now the neo-Nazis who can't get over their side losing the second world war have merged with the white supremacists who couldn't get over losing the American Civil War to throw us back into the hostile and destructive worlds of the 19th and 20th centuries. They'll squander as much of your money as they can to lift up the worst elements of racist government and suppression of labor. Labor is most of us. The myth of upward mobility is that there's always room at the top. The myth of meritocracy is that the best people always rise. The truth is that there's only so much room for middle management. The bulk of us will always be down in the massive pile of the lower part of the pyramid, carrying the load of all of the pretensions of the few rich and powerful manipulators acting out their disparate fantasies of how the world should be to suit themselves

Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia

 Given that the Trump regime has been a joint venture with Russia since the first time around, and it's been even more obvious this time, any political figure or analysts asking whether he's concerned that the kidnapping of Venezuela's president, and stated plans to take over that country's oil fields will embolden Russia and China in their territory grabs is just framing a statement as a question.

Trump has an understanding with Putin. They've divvied up the world. Russia recently deployed intermediate range, nuclear capable missiles to Belarus, putting a gun to Europe's head. China's conducting military exercises off the coast of Taiwan. The deals have been made. Mind you, both China and Russia are assuming that the forces of ignorance and greed that have lifted Donald Trump to the status of most destructive president in American history will blunder so badly in their new playground that China and Russia will be able to close in from either side. The odds are in their favor.

At this point, China looks like the least worst as a global overlord. They're  repressive, sure. But Putin and Trump, and the powers aligned with them, are outright sadists. Trump and Putin and their devoted followers actively enjoy causing and watching pain and suffering. It's a major part of the strongman image. I don't welcome our Chinese overlords, I merely observe all the players and make a prediction. Domination by any or all of them will be much worse than bumbling toward some sort of global human understanding would have been. I just wanted to get a time and date stamp on my conjecture.

Trump has already threatened Cuba. Russia used to consider Cuba a tripwire, but I bet now they'd be willing to cut it loose to focus on getting more and more of the contiguous territory of the old USSR back together, and adding Western Europe as at least coerced allies.

Africa presents a problematic prize. South America gets mighty skinny as you go south. Neither Russia nor China would cross an ocean to fight you for it. But Africa is thick and broad and loaded with resources. It's difficult country to hold. A superpower could wield influence, but no outside force would be able to subdue any major percentage of it. China, Russia, and the country formerly known as the United States will continue to compete there, with the US off to the slowest start because of the stupidity, greed, and bigotry of the current regime, whether it's the part led by the senile 1980s real estate failure or the part led by Bible-thumping misogynists.

So: The Big Three have divided the world into general spheres of influence where each will let the other do pretty much anything. Global war will be threatened on a regular basis to keep ordinary citizens on edge expecting Armageddon. Small wars will bleed off young people who have no other job options. Or maybe conscription will return. If you survive your enlistment with all your body parts, and your mind intact, you might go on to finish out your career in the building trades, or trucking. If you're maimed in body and or spirit, die a beggar. No one asked you to be born. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country's wealthy leaders.

How it gets worse before it maybe gets better

 Democratic Congressional representatives are getting a lot of advice from political strategists and voters about whether to cooperate with the Republican majorities in both chambers. 

"Obstruct! Refuse to cooperate with the tools of dictatorship!" 

"Vote with them whenever possible to keep the idea of bipartisanship alive!"

You can make a case either way.  If history is any guide, we'll get a blend of both approaches. Success may look disappointing as we slog through the hard times that the new regime's policies are going to unleash on all but the richest of us, and the fortunate laborers close enough to be trickled on directly. The result will provide many anecdotes to confuse voters.

With the country's divisions referred to as Red (right wing) versus Blue (Democratic, progressive), I  predict that things will get redder before they get better. Purple states will turn completely red in the midterms, as voters there are convinced that their continued tribulations are the fault of the surviving Democrats. The Republicans have had an aggressive strategy of gerrymandering, while corporate donors and right wing think tanks have directed them to take control of state and local offices as well. The messaging is dense and widespread.

Two major factors help the Republicans to prevail. A Democrat who votes in favor of Republican bills, because they might be able to insert amendments to reduce the harm to targeted groups will lose Democratic and allied swing voters who might sit out the next election, even if they won't vote outright for Republicans. Republican-leaning swing voters will use Democratic cooperation as an excuse to vote Republican because the Democrats apparently approve of the policies anyway, so what purpose does an opposing party serve? Republicans have long championed the idea of one-party rule, as long as it is their party.

When I was young, growing up in a sane Republican household, I picked up on the fact that my parents would vote for a Democrat if that candidate had better ideas than the Republican in that particular election. Because my father worked with officials from both parties during his tours of duty in Washington, and because he was not a barking mad partisan, he would examine the policies offered by any candidate and vote accordingly. The Republican Party's degeneration turned him officially into a Democrat in his early 90s, when he finally couldn't take it anymore. 

Gone are the days when conservatives were simply people who wanted to progress at a slower pace, who needed more convincing before signing onto the proposals eagerly touted by progressives. That sort of conservative was always in the minority, but they had some influence. Maybe it was only to secure votes to advance their party's power, but they could choke it down. That's all gone now. Anyone like that has been purged from the party. Voters are encouraged to be angry, and contemptuous of anything "liberal." Politicians who want to lead them have to reflect this vitriol and fervor.

Voters ultimately have the power to shape their candidates. Gerrymandering wouldn't work if there weren't enough like-minded voters to weld together into weird-shaped voting districts in the first place. The fact that so many states have right-wing leadership reflects the depth of hostility that has been cultivated in the decades since the 1970s. Lots of factors have contributed, but the worst one was that conservative leaders in politics and business realized that the dark side has way more immediate power than the harder path to "peace, love, and understanding."

Side note here: one reason that the authoritarians are not worried that they will face a successful uprising if they stomp on our heavily armed population too hard is that the armed and dangerous folks will be fighting each other and the kooks and weirdos that they hate, not joining forces with them to tackle the real evil in the seats of power. Up in the seats of power, those folks will just watch the carnage and then hire whoever is left afterwards at subsistence wages.

Voters have the power, at least for a little while longer. It seems like the hardest challenge is to get enough of them to believe it and to want it. Casting a single vote seems undramatic and futile. Rallies and speeches stir up great emotions, but then it just comes down to marking a piece of paper and hoping that enough other  people marked their paper the same way. And after the election you have to wait for  whatever changes you wanted, while they make their way through the legislative process. All the while, a constant argument rages on all media, legacy and modern, to make you angry and doubtful.

Democratic politicians in areas with strong conservative presence face particular challenges between the ends of the political spectrum. Think of Joe Manchin. Now John Fetterman weakens the pure Democratic bloc by looking for ways to balance the pressures he had to overcome to get elected in the first place. Because the Democrats did not manage to gain a solid Congressional majority, they couldn't pile on the programs heavily enough to demonstrate to the public that their methods were undeniably delivering the improvements that voters in both parties said they wanted. Democrats are back to compromising on bills that they should have been able to reject outright. New Hampshire's delegation has similarly made hard political choices that disappoint the "resist at all cost" faction. It still may not be enough to keep them in their seats as each comes up for re-election over time.

It's discouraging to observe how social justice and acceptance of minority and difference are driven by the whims of fashion. In our local schools, our tiny handful of Black students have faced virulent racism from white fellow schoolchildren who think that it's fun and funny to say really horrible things. The little white twerps have never experienced a fully racist society. They have no way to understand all the ways in which a white supremacist society would make life worse for everyone. That doesn't matter when they are willing to add to the voices spreading that crap, making it a factor in political debate. It's the same with any prejudice. It trickles down to idiot kids who spout it to seem tough and cool. Symbols proliferate. Adults who believe similarly feel more and more comfortable spouting the horseshit and pressuring politicians to act on it.

The next couple of elections will give us some idea whether enough voters are tired of fighting about skin color and genitalia and are ready to participate in longer-term planning for the general welfare, and planetary survival.

The stickiness of racism

 Someone posted a picture of Brazil nuts online the other day, as a test of racism, asking whether anyone used a certain term for them. Someone else I know posted a puzzled comment, because she didn't know the term. I, unfortunately, did. I knew right away what the original post was getting at.

I didn't grow up using the term. I was at least in my late 20s before I heard it. But it wedged itself into the jumble of other unnecessarily race-based terminology that had been common and socially acceptable among the people at whom it would never be leveled. A whole bunch of people who disapproved of lynching and would never burn a cross, who might even consider themselves color-blind in their egalitarianism would still chuckle at stereotyping jokes, and allow as how a much more flagrant racist was "entitled to their opinion."

With the expansion of civil rights came a wave of victim blaming that has helped keep racism viable for decades after the advances of the 1960s. "You can vote and go to the good schools now! It's all on you to catch up!" Black people in the media provided highly visible success stories, as well as wry commentary on the white world. Maybe the Black population really was sorting itself out according to its own desires, and we could all joke about our foibles.

Speaking of jokes, have you heard the one about the two Black guys who were told to lie down on top of a load of trash in a truck so it wouldn't blow out on the way to the dump? If you've heard it, it probably just auto-completed in your mind, whether you want it to or not. If you haven't heard it, you have to decide for yourself whether to accept it into your life. It's actually more of a redneck joke than a Black joke, but the punch line has the two rednecks who see the truck using the n-word, and it has the two Black guys in a job where they could be ordered to lie on top of a load of trash.

How about the joke about Black kids learning the alphabet? Or a commonly used derogatory term for improvised construction or mechanical assembly, which, in New England, might be referred to by the more laudatory "Yankee ingenuity?" Or a racist descriptive for an unhealthy selection of food and beverage from processed foods and soda pop as the morning meal?

My record on discarding and resisting these is scuffed and dented from collisions with their use. My transition has lasted since the 1970s. Prior to that I managed to be oblivious enough to the whole situation, as a dumb schoolkid in a lot of places where there simply wasn't much Black population -- sometimes none -- that it hadn't really come up. As soon as I did know about it, I approved of Black liberation in my little juvenile mind, and never changed that stance, no matter how ineptly I lived it. Meanwhile, the culture around me shifted away from blatant suppression and direct violence while it dished up plenty of separated equality, and terms of differentiation. Less visible to the white majority behind the public facade of Black advancement, separation and calculated inequality hollowed out the gains and kept racism thriving.

Guilt and fear drive white supremacy. They know damn well that this country owes a debt it can hardly repay, to the Black people who labored and the indigenous people who were shoved into undesirable corners, subject to extermination whenever they were deemed too inconvenient, so that the mythic greatness of America might rise. White labor was abused and exploited as well. That has contributed to poor white people resisting acknowledgement of the Black and indigenous claims for compensation, because the poor whites know that the rich will find a way to duck the bill and hand it off to people who can't afford to hire lawyers and buy judges and elected officials. Only through voting solidarity do we have the slightest chance of gaining leverage on government. It seems simple, but the concessions it will require from people who have prospered under the existing conditions almost guarantee that it will never happen.

Prove me wrong. The way will involve a few intermediate steps, but we never get anywhere if we don't all share the vision of where we need to end up.

More likely we go down in chaos and blood, because the defenders of the old ways are wedded to violence and willing to destroy everything if they can no longer control it. I don't prefer that, but I'd be remiss if I did not acknowledge it. It probably won't be the "race war" that some of them yearn for. We are at work on too many methods to destroy ourselves: environmental degradation, nationalist and religious militancy, criminal oligarchy, all of these actively erode the general welfare and domestic tranquility.

Knowing all of this, I still deal with the ugly crowd of racist epithets that pop into my mind whenever I see a Black person. These are terms that I never used in aggression, and never wanted to. They were just in the air, all around, and soaked in the same way repeated song lyrics do, as popular tunes go from Top 40 to Oldies, and never go away.

I often wonder what my thinking would be like if I had never been exposed to racism. What would my own brain come up with if it had not been loaded with terms and attitudes reflecting centuries of prejudice? I was probably in first grade when I started to learn that it was a big deal to see a Black person in a position of some authority and power. Instead of just other kids and adults in different skin tones, there was apparently a reason to differentiate, and I needed to have an opinion about that. On top of the basic academic stuff I had to absorb, and all of the other routine human aspects of growing up, I had to figure out the powers and responsibilities of inherited privilege, without feeling particularly privileged.

Not feeling particularly privileged, struggling white people push back hard and quickly against the concept. Racial identity was created by white people. It would have gone away if white people had been ready to accept Black people as fully equal fellow citizens back in the 1860s. Heck, I bet women still wouldn't have the vote if Black men had been given equal and unchallenged voting rights back then. Sexism crosses all color barriers. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but it's for damn sure a thing. When you imagine all the power that white people would have lost by granting full liberation to Blacks, think about what might have been gained in other precious realms of prejudice.

Lots of blood has been shed and lives have been destroyed trying to convince white men to lighten up. And maybe humans in general are so pig-headed that busting heads really was the only way to move forward. White men might -- for a very limited time -- have represented the least of all evils in our halting evolution into a truly enlightened species. But the iron fist always holds on for too long when a better way emerges. The fingers grip externally and in the mind, and need to be pried loose and melted down.

We don't live in a single-issue world

As any election approaches, I get polling emails asking me to list my priorities for the country. What is most important to me? If I had to pick one or two things, what would they be?

Interesting intellectual exercise, but we don't live in a one-issue world.

Sometimes the poll will ask me to rank a long list of issues in numerical order from most important to least important. This is supposed to provide more detail and nuance, but that's another illusion. I never see a list that I can comfortably organize that way.

It's become a cliche that "everything is connected," but everything is connected. We can't solve one problem at a time. We can't half-solve a problem and call it good enough. Numerous philosophies have tried to blunt the human predilection for selfishness and violence. Not one of them has yet found the balance between permissible self interest and complete submission to the group. The philosophies read well. The basic principles usually include something like "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." But what if you're a masochist?

The destruction of our environment is not just an aesthetic question. It's become a matter of survival. But we can be personally odious in a pristine environment. We can be greedy, racist, misogynist, bigoted assholes who shoot each other over a petty insult. We can have a profit-driven system of health care services designed to enrich the management and stockholders of a few corporations. So maybe we solve the environmental threat to basic survival and still kill each other off in plenty of other ways. We can produce plenty of carcinogenic chemicals in carefully isolated areas and still maintain just enough natural environment to keep the planet's life support system basically functional. Sound good to you?

All human conflict comes back to well-documented items on the naughty list. We can chip away at those behaviors while the atmosphere rapidly becomes toxic with the untreated exhaust gases of industrial society. Maybe we will enjoy one glorious moment of global unity just before we asphyxiate.

It all seems overwhelming if you look at it all at once, but we've avoided looking at it at all for so long that we can't look away any longer. Immigration and refugee displacement is a problem because the places they live have been made uninhabitable by human policy decisions. Humans decided to make messes that drive other humans to seek safety elsewhere. Humans implement the policies. Humans justify their indifference and hostility to each other just to get from one day to the next.

Political reality is not reality. An elected official has to get into office by appealing to enough voters to get elected, and then fulfill the duties of office under a different set of pressures from ordinary citizens and from information that might not have been available to them before. Sometimes they just lie. Sometimes they are forced to change a position because circumstances change. Government is where the fantasy life of voters comes up against the thorny tangle of real problems. What gets a person elected and re-elected might nurture the fantasy life while letting the tangle grow out of control.

Hogan's Heroes and the Confederacy

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

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

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

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

Funny how evil is always so much more accessible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The future of opportunistic scavengers

Modern media have made it possible to worry about the future far beyond the lifespan of any human currently alive. We can use our concern for future generations to support arguments in favor of everything from environmental stewardship to ethnic cleansing.

Various cultures considered less evolved by the technology-obsessed Europeans had a sense of generational responsibility and a reverence for the land that gave them life. Whether their practices actually worked we cannot say, since the Europeans sprawled across so much of the globe and smashed the balance those cultures had maintained. That's a part of history and a reality from which the life of our species must go forward. Technologically advanced science may manage to put measurable numbers on the things that older cultures handled intuitively, so it could net out as a gain overall.

Our ancestors did hunt species to extinction. You have to eat, after all, and they were only human. On the rise to become human, plenty of them probably became meals for other predators. This engrained a sense that humans can do anything they feel they need to do, in order to survive and proliferate.

In reality, in any era, a person will do whatever looks like a good idea at the time, to get ahead. This may mean just staying one jump ahead of starvation or it could mean acquiring another million dollars to bolster an already immense fortune. Most people are wired to seek a sense of security. If a little is good, more is better. While many things may be normal, their effects can still be pathological. In other words, everybody feels a certain way, so it is widely accepted, but its long-term effect is detrimental. Think of fossil fuel consumption, or the presumption that wealth is good.

The idea that one individual's actions can do no harm grows directly from the sense that a person can and should do whatever is necessary to survive and proliferate. When survival itself is no longer in doubt, the perception extends to mere wants that loom in stature to seem like needs.

Humans have eaten carrion and each other in the course of our often unappetizing history. Someone, somewhere, has tried to eat just about everything. And when we learned to exploit more difficult resources, we developed more and more efficient implements to extract and refine everything from trees to minerals to sea creatures.

We are really just opportunistic scavengers. While some of us have figured out that we need to set limits on this tendency, the vast majority of people live by the old rules: if you need something, take it. If you no longer need something, drop it by the wayside, or throw it somewhere far from your house, if you don't want it stinking up the neighborhood. That may be in someone else's back yard, but we can deal with that later if they complain.

Sure, we have Earth Day and a lot of public awareness. But then a guy I know who seems quite environmentally aware shows up with the lunch his wife packed, with every single item in an individual plastic bag, and he tosses all the bags into the trash after he extracts the food. These bags get used for a total of three or four hours to contain this guy's food before they go into the waste stream. And we're talking sturdy zippered sandwich bags. Opportunistic scavenging supersedes education even in someone who appears to care. Lunch comes to him in these bags, and he consumes it without a critical thought.

As we revert to divisiveness and distrust, as we embrace insular religions and draw up teams for a future of conflict, our children's children could end up eating carrion and each other once again. Will we be honest enough to admit that we don't really care how they live? Evolution moves forward on a broad front, never stopping. Whatever is alive at any given time figures out how to manage conditions as they find them. There is no real need for long life, or happiness. Planetarily speaking, there is no need for life at all. We who are alive at this moment will do whatever makes us feel happy.  If you want to cloak it with some glorious embroidery about the future, go ahead. We're all just taking our best guess, and hoping we remain comfortable up to the point of our individual deaths.

Our species will only have the future that enough of us collectively turn out to want.

The Flipside of The Greatest Generation

Never underestimate the value of a good bad example.

Well-deserved praise has been heaped on those who answered the call of duty to defeat militarily the Axis powers in World War II. If you ignore the fact that we couldn't have done it without our own ally, that sweetheart Joseph Stalin, it really was a clash between Good and Evil.

The Nazis in particular did future generations a favor by being so categorically and undeniably evil. Of course they didn't view it as evil. They considered it an admirable rigidity of principle, and the iron will to carry out a ruthless plan to impose a virtuous monoculture across the globe. The urge itself is evil, but it has its adherents even now.

Because World War II came along when humans had developed film, broadcast, and recording technology, and because the Nazis were so stuck on themselves that they kept meticulous records, we have a lot of detailed history about who did what when. We can rapidly draw parallels to current events and show without a doubt what can happen when the logic of a hateful ideology is drawn out to its grimmest conclusion.

Mass killing is a human tradition. Some instinct impels us to try to wipe out rival DNA, to compete for global domination, starting right in our own back yards. It doesn't happen everywhere, all the time, but it recurs enough throughout history to show that we have a chronic problem. Returning to the bloodbaths of the mid 20th Century, we find plenty of historical records related to every theater of war and land under occupation.  Other examples than the aggressive Nazi regime haven't had the great marketing that makes the Third Reich such a strong brand, but the idea of killing people who don't agree with you needs no introduction, wherever it arrives.

It is this very archive of evil that gives us the graphic rebuttal to plans put forward now in countries that once considered themselves bastions of freedom. The hypocrisy of the United States is unfortunately evident in the persistence of official and unofficial racial segregation after the Second World War, but at least some efforts were made to acknowledge the rights of more than just white guys as the 20th Century passed the half. Those very efforts solidified the core of evil that predated the Nazis by a couple of centuries in our great country, and that sympathized with the actual Nazis in their rise to power.

Recognizing an evil does not automatically cure it, but it is the vital first step. Parallels to the Nazis are too freely drawn, but the sensitivity to Nazi-like encroachments is an early warning system for the advancement of a truly free and inclusive society.

The monoculturists consider the desire for a free and inclusive society to be the evil. They despise the weakness of accommodation. They pride themselves on their admirable rigidity of principle and iron will. That's why we keep having this argument. They must be refuted on principle, not just bested on the field of combat. In fact, combat merely obscures the real issues in a cloud of smoke and a spray of blood. That's why hardasses would rather fight a war than lose an argument. War is exciting, and some day they might win. Until then, they'll take whatever beating they have to, and retire, grumbling, if it goes against them again.

The real Greatest Generation will be the one that confronts and vanquishes its own evil in quiet meditation, and never inflicts its misery on the rest of the world. While I would welcome that at any time, I'm not holding my breath. Every generation has to interpret the world they find, and choose a way through it.

Health insurance is an enemy of freedom

In a comment on Senator Jeanne Shaheen's Facebook page, I reported that I could not afford insurance under the ACA:

Senator Jeanne, due to peculiarities in my circumstances, I am unable to afford coverage under the ACA. Health insurance is not health care. And at this point I have neither one anyway. Last month, I had to pass a kidney stone alone at home and then go to work the next day, business as usual. My retirement plan consists of various scenarios for suicide when I can no longer take care of myself. I guess this makes me the ideal citizen, as far as the conservatives are concerned. Work 'em 'til they drop.

Another commenter suggested this:

Really maybe you need to find a better job. personally I have never had a job that didn't offer insur(ance). (Actual post had a typo in the last word.)

I answered:

Forcing people's career choices in search of insurance is not freedom. It indicates a country run for the benefit of insurance companies.

Isn't that pretty obvious? Along with getting people to use the terms health insurance and health care interchangeably, we've conditioned ourselves to seek "benefits" as a survival need, in a wilderness where we have to grub for every resource. Those who control the wealth determine how it is doled out, even if that means working for the destructive economy or choosing to live at risk for the sake of what you believe in. We are all soldiers facing death for a cause, even if we conscientiously avoid using combat for conflict resolution. I happen to have ended up in a place where the job that suited many of my abilities and needs only briefly provided "benefits," regardless of my usefulness to the business or that business's service to the community. Society at large benefits from the unheralded life and death of numerous benefactors for whom no public buildings are ever named.

With a system of universal care, rather than profiteering schemes of insurance, freedom of movement, choice, and work will make our society more innovative and our citizens more free. By making health insurance a marketed commodity, we actually hurt many other aspects of the free market economy. If you want unfettered freedom, live in anarchy now and take whatever happens to you. If you want a reasonably free society with well-maintained infrastructure and civilized amenities, accept that some things cannot be turned to profit. Some things are autonomic functions of society, that need to run quietly in the background. These include health care and energy production. If either of those intrudes on the peace and progress of the human species, we're doing something wrong. Right now, those intrusions make up most of the news. The rest of it hinges on inanities like what color we want our neighbors to be.

What would you do? Way beyond Quinones

As we enter what could be a period of violent upheaval in this country, you might want to think about how you would react in various scenarios.

The ABC show "What Would You Do?" plays with light versions of social issues, but the legitimization of white nationalism, sexism, LGBTQ-phobia and strong-arm tactics in general coming out of the recent presidential campaign has already spawned incidents of violence.

The wonderful Women's Marches all over the country and in the world in general made a commendable display of peaceful protest. However, the climate in authoritarian circles, and in the right wing, is not at all receptive to protest demonstrations.

What would you do if law enforcement covering a demonstration opened fire with automatic weapons? Would you back down immediately, take cover, and run? Or would you march forward to be mowed down, as a rebuke to the vestiges of conscience left in the world? If you fled on the first day, would you come back for a second day? If you fled on the first day, would you begin to organize for civil war?

What would you do if you saw a group of white people beating up a brown person? A non-heterosexual person? A Jewish person? What would you do? How would you intervene, if at all?

What would you do if Jewish businesses were vandalized and ransacked in your town? What about Muslim businesses?

What would you do if lynching began again, law enforcement did not investigate, and district attorneys did not prosecute? What would you do if perpetrators who did face token trials always went free?

The current administration drew heavily on the influence of paranoia and hatred to build momentum for their campaign. They used voters disenfranchised by corporate influence, economically burdened by overpopulation and by technological advancement, feeding the popular myths about poor people, dark people, unfamiliar religions, and government conspiracies to advance the real conspiracy, which is corporate dominance of political, social, and economic life.

What would you do if oligarchy took over your country and you still had to look the word up every time you heard it, or just ignore it and hope it goes away?

It will start so slowly that you can easily tell yourself it's going nowhere. And it may really simmer down. But if it doesn't, you should have some idea what you would do.

Republican nominee Trump

If Donald Drumpf ends up as the Republican nominee, America will have a referendum on hatred. So, if you are afraid of a Drumpf candidacy, you have already given up on America. He IS rallying angry, bigoted people. He's bringing them out, not creating them. They need to be repudiated at the polls. If they can't be, then this country was lost a long time ago. The truth may turn out to be sad and scary. That will make it no less true. At least then it will be out in the open and we can prepare for the rest of the world to decide whether to appease the real America or eradicate it.