Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Relaunching the Sea Monster With Much Less Gloom

I hope it does not look like a promotional stunt. Changing the name of this blog is a reflection on my growth as a writer over the past few years. The Gloomy Historian just does not quite fit anymore. Mrs. Kraken rolled her eyes way back in the summer of 2009 when I first mentioned to her that I was starting a blog with that name. I did not really expect it to catch on, some of my friends thought it was okay but but gloomy historian was more a place I was at that time. I am older, wiser (I hope) and ready to more fully embrace my connection to the sea and the giant beasts of myth and legend. That doesn't mean my posts will all of a sudden be nautically-themed or random gifs of Harryhausen monsters will find their way onto this page. Okay maybe just one:


via GIPHY

Oops, wrong one. Here we go


via GIPHY

No, still not right:


via GIPHY
Aha! Yes, that's it.
But I promise that will be the last one.

Anyway, I plan to keep the voter education series going for the near future. And throw a couple of bombs along the way. Just remember, the real monsters wear suits and smile as they pick your pocket through laws.

Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Election 2016: Opening Thoughts

One objective that this blog has developed is to make readers more skeptical and less gullible to the many distractions, misinformation, and outright lies perpetrated by political operatives. Education should be a universal value after all, should it not? You would be surprised how many people are simply not interested in learning more, improving themselves, or challenging information if it agrees with what they already believe. Is this where the dividing line should be drawn in our politics? Between the people who want to know more and improve themselves, versus the people who are content in their limited knowledge and want to force everyone else to freeze intellectually. It is a tragedy that the information superhighway accommodates too easily both of these.

The irony is thick when you consider that the Internet is one of the greatest technological developments of human history and a significant percentage of Americans use it to wall themselves off from anything that would challenge their views. Don't do that. Your computer or smartphone can answer any question you can think of, and most likely direct you to more sources of information where you can figure out new questions to ask. Much of our collected knowledge and wisdom out there waiting to be tapped and harnessed to your command. Sometimes you have to step back from your day to day routine and really consider what a fascinating time it is to be alive. Be curious. Be adventurous. But also, be cautious; and skeptical.

We humans have amazing qualities. We can use tools and remember the past; we can communicate with each other and our offspring, each individual is connected to their neighbors and the future in this way. The internet and all of its myriad portals are new tools that empower us to communicate and remember. But it also amplifies other qualities, such as that of deception, manipulation, domination, intimidation, exclusion, and unthinking obedience that are less useful. 

For example, when the first human tried using a stick to poke holes in the ground and plant food, he (or she) could gather more sustenance than the others who simply gathered nature produce. That person was able to feed themselves better than the others and was consequently able to have more children and live longer. Those children did not have to then spend time figuring out how to use a stick and could instead figure out how to make a better tool. In turn, that knowledge would spread until it was an entire tribe settling down to practice agriculture and take further steps forward in improving their techniques until they produced a surplus of food. When there is a surplus of food, some people can be freed from farming to spend time, energy, thought, and resources on new ways to help the tribe. Once that happens there is a division of labor, society is no longer equal and governing structures arise to regulate the relations of power. This is where politics is born. 

There will always be people who want to keep going, inventing new things, telling new stories, teaching and learning new ways to benefit society. And there will always be others who say "that's far enough," for some people change is just too much to bear. There are many reasons to oppose change or stand in the way of progress, it does not mean the same thing to all people. For another, going back to the idea of "where you sit determines where you stand" from the first post in this series, the division of labor and surplus creates opportunities for privilege, and change often threatens the privileged members of society. Luckily for those elites, many common people fear change out of reflex because of advanced age or lack of sophistication, intellect, curiosity, or imagination. The elite often have little trouble convincing a plurality or even majority of society to keep things the same, or at least change things very slowly and as skewed toward elite interest as possible. In the past the elite often took the form of land-holding warriors or priests and as such their words carried weight with the peasants, who feared for their lives and/or souls. Today, the elite often have power in the form of wealth and control over jobs, development, investment, etc. And especially control over media to sway public opinion towards the interests of that privileged few.

Whenever there is political conflict, it often takes the form described in the previous paragraph. Reformers, also known as Liberals or Progressives, put forward a new idea or invention and the privileged elite minority who happen to like their position in society thank you very much, resist the change with support among the uncurious and fearful commoners. In the past you would often find the peasants supporting the king against some middle-class force trying to change society. Today, things are far more complicated. But the conservative fear of change persists even in the United States of 2016. Subsequent entries to this series will explore these divisions and conflicts in greater detail. For now, take a look at the next politically-themed meme or article that shows up in your news feed with these ideas in mind. And try not to lose composure over the latest attempt by the cynical to make you afraid, because they want you to be afraid but it is very often in your best interest to remain rational. Until next time, good luck and keep exploring!

Saturday, February 20, 2016

Election 2016: "Course Objectives"

 If this series were a college class, think of this as the syllabus. I'm not a professor in real life so this post will be loose of necessity and subject to revision. However, there are some goals we should be striving for so I will try to get some down.

First, there will be no assigned reading or papers. Though I might suggest some texts for further investigation and some applications or exercises you may want to try. There won't be any grades or credits awarded obviously, by the "end" of this series you should have a better understanding of our government and politics. 

Second, there will probably be a lot of history. I want this series to give you a very large perspective and that will require an understanding of where we came from. I especially want to discuss the intellectual history of the republic. 

Third, ideology. While I stated in the introduction that people have nearly infinite experiences and varied outlooks or expectations for issues and government, we can generally group them under common ideas. This will make parties and elections easier to understand.

Fourth, American government. Checks and balances, divided branches, and staggered elections. The organization of our Federal Government can be challenging but once you understand how and why this is so politics becomes easier to understand.

Fifth, reliable and unreliable sources. For good or ill, media has become very broad in the age of the internet. We will go over examples and guidelines for how to judge the veracity and relevance of a source of information.

Sixth, rhetoric. Politicians and political writers use what can seem like another language at times. We will discuss what certain common words and phrases actually mean.

This list will probably take a good amount of time to cover. It is my sincere hope that when this project is complete it will be of some use to you. 

Friday, February 19, 2016

Election 2016: The Beginning

You may have heard somewhere that there will be an election in the United States to choose a new president. You also may know that you can cast a vote for a candidate for president, in addition you can vote for all sorts of other offices and there may even be issues called initiatives and referendums where you can directly vote for or against the passage of certain laws. No really, I am totally serious.

Now, before you click away because it sounds like I'm insulting your intelligence, hear me out. I'm writing it this way because there are a lot of people out there who have not voted before, or do not understand the extremely daunting system and issues that come with it. You may be considering participating this time and not know where to start. It is nothing to worry about, though they may not admit it, everyone starts from zero when it comes to voting and civic participation. The problem it seems, is who is available when you do want to take that first step? Sure, we are taught in K-12 but it often is not reinforced or taught in a way that actually makes you want to get involved with politics, or even feel that the abstract lessons are applicable to real life. Maybe it wasn't cool enough or you were too focused on preparing for college or other post-high school plans. It is never too late to get involved, to learn, to vote, to reach out to others. Doing something is better than doing nothing, and if you are reading this then it is likely that you want to do something. I can try to help, and I want to help, but in the end it is up to you.

The first thing to try and keep in mind is that this is a very big country with over three hundred million people living in it. Each one has a past and a future, comes from different areas of life, and therefore has different ideas about how this country should be run. "Where you sit goes a long way towards where you stand" as one person I met put it. He meant that if you are in management you should always vote against any measure or candidate who proposes to raise standards of living for working people. In that case it was the battle over the right of government workers in the state of Wisconsin to organize in unions. Does that sound fair to you? Would you support someone who said they were going to make your life harder and your job less secure? Lots of people who stood to gain nothing from it did in fact vote for Scott Walker. And lots of them now are indeed less secure. They were not all in management, so why did they vote against their own interest? Well, this is why American politics is so hard to understand.

If you turn on the news or pick up a newspaper, or more likely see an article shared by a friend or coworker on social media you are likely to be catching a story in the middle of it. And just like catching a movie in the middle, it can be really confusing. Also unfortunate is that most political writers, whether bloggers like me up to the often grossly overpaid elites on TV or in print, are writing for an audience "in the know." There is very little space dedicated to helping people understand politics and government. Lots of words get thrown around that are unfamiliar to someone just starting out. It can be a huge turn off, and I totally understand. I was there too once and grew awfully frustrated on several occasions, but I can be really stubborn when I want to figure something out so I kept at it. By the time I went to college I could at least say I knew what questions I wanted to ask.

I am a lot more interested in building better citizens than simply persuading you to vote a certain way. You could just google up a government website telling you how to register to vote. Or visit your local Democratic or Republican Party office. The volunteers or workers there will probably be happy to help you vote, but voting is not all there is to good citizenship. We live in crazy times, dangerous and exciting. We have more than eight months to figure things out. Let's get started!

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Where Does History Begin?

He who controls the past, controls the future, and he who controls the present, controls the past.-Orwell

I keep asking myself, 'why study history?' And keep coming back to this line from Nineteen Eighty Four. Along with Santayana's also relevant line that those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it and Twain's remark that history does not repeat but it rhymes. Unfortunately, quotations are a kind of blunt tool and professional historians try not to use them. Aspiring academics will often deride quotations as an amateur's crutch once they reach a certain level of proficiency in a given discipline. But quotations from famous thinkers often contain strong ideas that can be conveyed without elaborating with great detail. It may be a fallacy, appealing to authority, but it also serves as a kind of shorthand to cut to the chase in this format. So I hope you can pardon me this indulgence as I get to the point.

It has been a real issue, to decide where to begin any narrative about history that has bearing on the present. Most books about WWI for example, treat Woodrow Wilson's administration as though it were completely normal and not in fact the unique product of a three way race for president in the US. To tell that story though, a writer would have to trudge back to 1860 and discuss the rise of the Republican Party to convey why having a northern Democrat holding the office was an anomaly. Taken from one point of view, the Wilson administration was schizophrenic, at first promising to uphold the nonpartisan Progressive worldview of modernizing the economy and government, then promising to keep the country out of the war. Events forced the president to reluctantly declare war, then going full throttle not only to physically prepare the armed forces for that war but aggressively proselytizing the largely pacifist population into anti-German anger and hysteria. Then finally falling apart after the equally aggressive campaign to force the US to join the League of Nations.

Arguably, the Democrats running the country from 1912-1920 could have done better. Would WWI have turned out differently if William H. Taft had won reelection? It is likely he would have if Teddy Roosevelt had not run a third party campaign and split the GOP. But Wilson is what happened, maybe he should never have been president, but an uncommon set of circumstances arose to make it seem like Progressive Democratic governance was the norm in most portrayals of WWI in media of all sorts. While WWI is not as popular as the sequel among "historians" in the tavern, this may be where the myth about not trusting Democrats in foreign policy began. The outcome of WWI on world history is monumental but other actions of the "Progressive" Wilson administration are arguably more consequential for domestic policy. Things like the Red Scare, mass deportations of recent immigrants, the prosecution of socialists and pacifists for disagreeing with the war, the first government propaganda machine to manipulate public opinion, the crushing of unions and unrest after prematurely abandoning economic controls and leaving everyone to fend for themselves in the chaotic market.

Events like these are still with us, most recently with George W. Bush's administration, which also talked up idealism in the abstract about military intervention bringing about a democratic transformation in the Middle East. The bushies also demonized opponents, unleashed a massive propaganda campaign against domestic enemies, crushed unions and working people, enriched all the wrong people through cronyism, and left office after collapsing the economy. Woodrow Wilson let loose a torrent of anti-democratic (note small "d") government action that has been repeated since, but all people want to talk about him today is his virulent racism. We do a disservice to history if we delegate the past to Hollywood or the History Channel and not stand up to the pea-brained historians at the tavern, and say "no, you do not get to preach to me or others when you have no clue what you're talking about." The same is true of being too conscious of identity politics and write off a complex episode of our history by saying that the president was a racist and that is all you need to know.

People are not binary creatures but complex mixtures of good and bad. And yes, this is all relative. It is a sign of maturity to see beyond the simple good or evil and look for the shades of moral ambiguity or complexity. To take our example further, Woodrow Wilson was certainly a racist, but he also held genuinely idealistic principles of expanding democracy, reducing armed conflict, diplomacy over war, modernizing the state, and so on. The "vision thing" was good but the methods used in pursuing it were terrible. However, bush had no idealistic principles, everything he did was for the selfish pursuit of power and plunder. It has rarely been so easy to spot evil as it has been since 2000.

But again, where did that evil begin? If you work backwards it is very hard to spot where the republicans went crazy. There was no indication of how far Woodrow Wilson would approximate the authoritarian empires he ultimately defeated. But is there any doubt that any republican seeking the office of the president today would gleefully pursue authoritarianism? This year, looking at Presidents Day and thinking about how insane the presidential campaign is already, we should be prepared to examine everything we can from history and speak up when something smells bad.

Monday, February 15, 2016

Show Me The Corpse.

This morning Driftglass wrote a great piece for his usual Sunday Morning Comin' Down column. He normally discusses the lousy quality of guests and discourse on the network Sunday morning news shows. But this time he went into great detail about how Trump has forced the issue of just how bad Dubya's occupation of the presidency was, how Bush was on his way to deification in the mold of Ronald Reagan until...
Dubya started to lose.  And lose badly. He lost two wars,  He lost the economy,  He lost a major American city,  He lost the Congress.  And he lost all those things and so many more in a way that showed the world that the Dirty Hippies had been right about Dubya all along  He really was a criminally incompetent dry-drunk halfwit.  He really did appoint politically-connected idiots to run vitally important parts of the government.   He really was in the thrall of genuinely evil men who operated him like a marionette and made themselves fabulously wealthy thereby.  The base of his party really were raving lunatics, bigots and imbeciles.
All absolutely true. And all absolutely meaningless. If the failures of their god-appointed prophets were somehow enough to shake the faithful, then how could 58,343,671 Americans actually pull the lever for McCain/Palin? You know the answer. Fascists and Authoritarians can always define themselves by what they hate, and what they are against. So why would it matter that one king failed? A mere two years later enough of these 58 million Republicans that went undercover as the tea party showed up to retake the House of Representatives and put villains like Scott Walker into the governors' mansions around the country. Thus ending the tiny two years of Republican exile.

A token truth and reconciliation debate within the GOP primary where the actual, real world crimes and incompetence of Dubya's administration are discussed, solely in terms of which faction of the party will lead the faithful back to power, will not end the Republican Party.

This is the part that confuses me. Driftglass makes this assertion:
The Republican Party is dead, dead, dead and it's various factions have Balkanized into a clutch of squabbling tribes each with its own code of conduct, elaborate rituals and taboos, each laying claim to be the One True Conservative and ransacking the rubble of the Party of Lincoln for the Reagan Arkenstone, and each denying any knowledge of or responsibility for That Which Came Before. (Emphasis mine)
 How does a political party die? I know the causes of death for the empirical, historical political parties in America; the Federalists attempted to be an aristocratic party representing the propertied classes in one section of the country (the Northeast) and as the country grew beyond the coasts there was no way for them to expand, and the Whigs could not face the slavery question and actually did balkanize into know-nothings and free soilers etc. But what would death look like for the GOP today? After the scrum of the primaries is over, every single fox news robot is willing to crawl through broken glass to vote for their nominee. Hundreds of millions of dollars will be raised and spent by super PACs, not to define the "conservative" message but to demonize Democrats and Liberals. Disgraced reptilian party figures will still be gleefully invited onto the news programs to spew lies and slander. The Democratic Party's messaging machine will still be a fart in the wind. The Democratic nominees will still try to get the media to fight their battles for them. The voter suppression measures that Republicans put in place to specifically stop Democrats from voting will still be in place, and no one will say anything meaningful about it. It will simply be "the will of the voters" and Democrats will still offer concession speeches with faith in their hearts that the system works.

Maybe Driftglass is working from a three dimensional chess perspective and I'm missing something. And I do not want this post to sound like I'm criticizing him, as Mulder would say "I want to believe." If someone could explain to me how the whole, writhing mess falls over the cliff and we are finally rid of the "conservative movement" and its husk, I am all ears. After all, even Herbert Hoover has had his reputation repaired. You already have certain individuals on the left saying ridiculous things like "even George W. Bush" as in even George W. Bush refused to demonize the religion of Islam. No, we need to keep fighting or someday apologists will be rehabilitating President Cruz' image as the strong man who purged the rot from our system and bring God back into public life.

Wednesday, February 3, 2016

No More Naders

I just admitted in my last post that I was one of the three million odd voters who made it possible for George W Bush to steal the presidency in 2000. We are so close to the same scenario in 2016 that I am really scared. I really felt like the way to build on the peace and prosperity at the end of the Clinton administration was to get behind a genuine liberal like Ralph Nader. While I fantasized a little about him actually winning and what that would look like in reality, my main goal was to make a protest kind of statement that the Democratic Party cannot take "us" for granted. It was cringe-worthy watching Al Gore capitulate to his campaign consultants. First he was all wooden and passive aggressive with the smirking chimp, refusing to actually attack back and more importantly just "me tooing" all the right wing frames about taxes and immigration, etc. Then he picked Lieberman as his running mate and refused to campaign on the successes of the administration he was part of. Gore did not take advantage of having Bill Clinton stump for him, and ran against his boss by making his infinitesimally small contribution to the election narrative all about morals and his supposed superior family values. In short Gore played to the right wing's perception and did not look at the really existing state of the union.

Obviously the Clinton years were not perfect, but there was enough good there to build on in a Gore administration. The alternative was just unbelievable. But I, and many people like me who voted Green based on hope and an imperfect understanding of that really existing state of the union, did not have the cautionary tales of the past in living memory that could have given me perspective. I was only barely aware of Reagan's October surprise and Nixon's ratfucking skulduggery. I did not even understand the horrible implications of George H. W. Bush's "Willie Horton" campaign. Clinton's indiscretions did not bother me, but his violation of the war powers act in the Balkans and his continued pursuit of "free trade" that threatened my livelihood did. Gore's seemingly obsessive and puritanical drive to exorcise all the moral demons of his boss while not addressing the economic and social issues I cared about was a real turn off.

Okay, that was sixteen years ago. Today we have Bernie Sanders playing the role, however obliquely, of Ralph Nader. By 2004, it was clear that Nader's subsequent run for president was all about Ralph and the movement I thought I was a part of was dead. Now it was a matter of saving the republic and I enthusiastically supported John Kerry after he won the nomination. A common trope I heard from supposedly serious people was that you don't switch horses mid-stream. When I would answer "even if the horse jumped in that stream against your will and was trying to drown you in it?" The reply would generally be some sort of ad hominem about my intelligence, maturity, or liberalism. Such high thinkers my pals.

Nader was third party from the beginning, it was all about showing the Democratic Party that they couldn't take us for granted and we weren't going to accept republican lite. "They aren't entitled to anyone's votes" was the common refrain from Naderites, meaning the Democrats. Now, you had to be a political junkie to realize just how awful George W. Bush was before he stole the presidency. This time around there is no question that any republican winning the presidency would be an absolute disaster. And the left candidate is a long-time elected official who caucused with the Democrats for his entire tenure in congress but was never dependent on or beholden to them as Clinton style DLC triangulation tried to co-opt the republicans. Sanders is running for the nomination of the Democratic Party and has not threatened to go the third party route if he doesn't win. Therefore anyone is free to vote for him now and still have time to support Hillary Clinton if she wins instead. No problem right?

Now the joke of "don't switch horses mid-stream" is on us. As in, we either do the almost impossible task of electing a Democrat to succeed the Democratic President or we all drown. There has been so much talk about supposed Berniebros who trash Hillary Clinton all the time and refuse to vote for her under any circumstances. I have yet to witness one myself, all the Sanders supporters I have encountered seem passionate but reasonable and share my goal of keeping the republicans out at all costs. The only person I know personally to make the "I won't vote for Hillary no matter what" speech was a middle-aged woman who as far as I know is a life long true socialist radical, not a "bro." I suspect that a good percentage of these "bros" are paid or unpaid GOP trolls posing as democratic socialists and making loud noises for purity. And in the age of social media this kind of fraud is extremely plausible, it only takes a few articulate trolls making tirades to convince the weak-minded to follow them.

I for one am not going to make the same mistake in 2000. Here's my unfortunately titled post on Bernie Sanders from last May, I still believe in it. Now if we can all just act like grownups and not make hissy fits and tantrums while debating who should be the leader of the free world we might not wake up the morning after the election to PRESIDENT CRUZ.

Monday, February 1, 2016

Caution

The Iowa caucuses are finally here and I am gloomier than ever. There are going to be a lot of angry people by the end of the day. There will be gloating, there will be smugness, there will be threats, and there will be nonstop chatter from the news networks about horse races and momentum as our quadrennial contest for the chief executive of this land finally gets real. For a serious person, there are a few choices you can make. One involves reading the results of this older form of democracy and being happy that your candidate won. Or perhaps  disappointed that your candidate lost. But not forgetting that we are on the same team. Another is to get the results and immediately take to social media and go on a tirade against the other side no matter what the outcome. Either way, being a serious and responsible person means not voting for Republicans for president at any level.

I have been hearing for a while now about the people that supposedly will not support the eventual nominee of the Democratic Party if it is not their preferred candidate and really brushed it off as hearsay. I mean who is that stupid that they could make that claim and stick to it? Then I remembered that my first time voting for president I drew a little line across the optical scan card for Ralph Nader and put it in the box. Oops. So all I ask, as always is some humility and understanding. We are all so different in who we are and where we came from and where we are going that judging or scolding or other crap is just pointless. Counterproductive too. The more people tried to convince me that voting for Nader was bad, the more I dug in my heels. I rationalized that one, I had never voted before so taking a chance on a third party candidate wasn't going to shift a formerly reliable Democratic vote away from the Democratic nominee. Two, America was doing pretty well at the end of Bill Clinton's administration, there's no way people will want to take a chance on the dink from Texas. Three, Wisconsin is a pretty solidly Democratic state so Al Gore will get the electoral votes even if I don't vote for him. And finally, I was in a punk state of mind and got all my news from Jello Biafra, or at least my ideology. 

Jello taught me a lot about politics and though I have left most of the radical ideas behind, punk rock leftism was part of my political socialization. I grew up learning a little from my union member father and grandfather that the Democratic Party represented the working man. Even my foreman at the factory told me that the republicans would burn the poor to keep warm in winter. But I had served in Clintons army and was not happy with the way it was being downsized. Our commanders seemed obsessed with throwing out as many soldiers as possible, sometimes really messing up their lives in the process. And since I worked in manufacturing I was not a fan of NAFTA either. So I was going to protest by voting for the greens, that'll show 'em. 

We all know how that worked out. So please, spare everyone the tantrums. And keep in mind that despite being the minority party the GOP controls congress, the Supreme Court, and most states. The presidency is the last holdout of non-crazy and if we don't get out the vote for whoever the Democratic presidential candidate ends up being it could be the last election we ever have. There are no elections or loyal opposition in the kind of America trump or Cruz have planned.