Random Blogging – Page 112

An Inflection Point

I just watched one of those “viral” videos of people protesting–almost rioting–against a mandate that they wear a mask. If I were being kind, I would say that their complaints were uninformed. More accurately, their commentaries ranged from stupid to selfish to deranged.

If protesting the wearing of masks to prevent transmission of a virus was the only symptom of American irrational behavior these days, that would be concerning enough, but these people are also, clearly, Trump voters. And for the past four years, I have struggled to understand the psychology of people who can look at this aggressively ignorant President with his pathetic make-up, listen to his inarticulate word-salads, read his childish and ungrammatical tweets, and think “Yes! That’s someone who should represent my country abroad, and control the nuclear codes.”

The United States is at an inflection point. Where we go from here will depend upon how we respond to the pandemic, to climate change, and to unacceptable levels of economic inequality, among other challenges–and whether those responses improve our society or further debase it will depend upon whether we decisively eject Trump, his appalling administration and his GOP enablers.

That, in turn, will depend upon the number of voters who think wearing a mask deprives them of “freedom” and believe the ludicrous buffoon in the White House is doing a great job.

Political science research has convincingly tied Trump support to racism, and that relationship has become quite clear–but when you think about it, the persistence of so much virulent racism despite some 50 years in which society has (slowly) changed, and during which Black and White Americans have increasingly come to know each other as individuals is a puzzle of its own.

Why are these people so angry and hateful? Why does the loss of unearned social dominance enrage them? What do they fear?

It’s true that bigotry increases in tough economic times, but many of these people are financially comfortable. It’s also true that these attitudes are more prevalent among the uneducated, but I know a lot of people who never went to college who are “salt of the earth” and I have also encountered plenty of racists with advanced degrees.

One of Paul Krugman’s email letters (I don’t have a link) suggested to me that the answer may lie in an inability to live with ambiguity. Krugman was discussing Trump’s dismissal of science in general and climate change in particular, and noted that epidemiology, climatology and economics all require the modeling of complex systems in which no prediction ends up being exactly right. Certainty eludes us.

Science and technology have created a world of constant change and multiple shades of gray.

The scientific method rests on consistent efforts to falsify prior results. Political ideologies and economic theories inform legislation that in practice often generates unintended consequences and sends us back to the drawing board. Religious diversity challenges fundamentalism. Technology continually upends everything from transportation to communication. All of these influences combine to open new intellectual vistas and cast doubt on the old– and that process inevitably changes the culture.

As I tell my students, the two phrases I hope they use more often after leaving my class are “it depends” and “it’s more complicated than that.”

A significant percentage of humans evidently cannot deal with an environment characterized by ambiguity and change, with a lack of “bright lines” and universally-accepted certainties–and as a result, they reject the possibility that people who look, love or worship differently from themselves have as much claim to humanity and respect as they do.

In November, I guess we’ll find out how numerous they are.

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COVID, The Arts And Bryan Fonseca

When I went online yesterday, I learned that COVID had killed Bryan Fonseca–for many years one of the most consequential people in our city’s arts community, and a wonderful friend to so many of us.

Bryan was the founder–and for 35 years, the producing director–of the Phoenix Theatre. The Phoenix was the first local professional theater to produce cutting-edge new plays and emerging playwrights, and to focus on issues of inclusion and social justice while maintaining professional and technical excellence. The Phoenix was a major factor both in the revitalization of the downtown Indianapolis neighborhood in which it located in 1988 and in the enormous growth of the performing arts in our city.

When Bryan left the Phoenix, he established the Fonseca Theatre on Indianapolis’ west side, offering classes and performances and generating community and excitement in previously neglected, predominantly low-income neighborhoods. His essential mission remained the same: social justice. He was a persistent advocate for intergroup understanding, and the inclusion of people of color, women and the LGBTQ+ communities–and his steadfast commitment to that mission often made fundraising incredibly difficult.

City leaders talk a lot about the importance of science and technology to economic and community development, but a flourishing arts community is equally important. Bryan understood that a vibrant arts community–galleries, theaters, festivals, poetry readings, Fringe festivals–is essential to the forging of genuine community and to the quality of community life.

In times like these, when Americans are so divided, theatrical performance becomes particularly important, because it is through stories that we advance human understanding and self-awareness. I have previously noted that it was recognition of the importance of stories and how they are told that led to the establishment of Summit Performance, a new, woman-centered theater company in Indianapolis that tells universal stories through a female lens. What I hadn’t previously reported was that Bryan’s effort to create a artistic “collaborative” at the Phoenix was a major impetus to Summit’s formation.

I posted earlier this year about a play I had just seen at the Fonseca. It was called “The Cake,” and it was quintessential Bryan. “The Cake” was described as a play about a same-sex wedding and a bakery. I had expected a theatrical presentation of the legal challenges that have been in the news–the baker who refuses to lend his craft to an event he considers inconsistent with his religious beliefs, and the clash between civil rights and claims of religious liberty.

What I saw, instead, was a superbly acted, deeply affecting story about good people who were–inescapably– products of their upbringing, and how they reacted when forced to respond to a changing world, especially when people they dearly love are part of that change. No legal arguments, no easy villains, no preachy morals–just people trying to reconcile their own contending beliefs.

One of the many reasons that the arts are so important– not just as outlets for human creativity and communication– is that they provide the necessary “threads” that very different people use to stitch together a social fabric. Plays, movies, well-done television presentations and the like allow us to travel to places we otherwise wouldn’t visit –some geographic, but others interior and highly personal–and to understand the issues that divide us in new and more nuanced ways.

In its statement on Bryan’s death, The Phoenix quoted something he’d said in an interview:

“We are still on the precipice of revolution and revolutionary change. We have to keep pushing. We can’t retreat. Not budge. Not give an inch. Once again, don’t be placated too soon or at all by small change. Demand more. Vote. Get involved on the local level. Everything grows from the ground up. Change is grassroots.”

It will be much harder to grow and nurture those grass roots without him.

I can’t help thinking that if it weren’t for the utter lack of national leadership in combatting this virus, and the coddling and encouragement of the self-centered jerks who don’t want to wear masks, Bryan and many others might still be with us.

Vote. Your life and the lives of your friends and neighbors depend on it.

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Herd Mentality

Sometimes, you just don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Our Buffoon-in-Chief recently ventured out of his MAGA rally cocoon to participate in a Pennsylvania town hall. His performance was more bizarre than usual–and that, as all sentient Americans know, is really saying something. The linked article from Talking Points Memo characterized the event as a “fire hose of lying,” but I actually disagree–lying requires intent, and I think Trump is no longer able to distinguish between what is real and what he wants to believe at any particular moment. He has always been loosely tethered to reality, and I think that under the pressure of the campaign–not to mention the various ongoing criminal investigations– the tether is slipping. Badly.

Besides somehow blaming his Democratic rival Joe Biden for not enacting a national mask mandate, Trump spent the town hall claiming that a “herd mentality” would stop COVID-19 (he was presumably referring to the herd immunity method, which health experts have largely rejected as a solution to the pandemic), falsely denying that he wasn’t trying to kill preexisting conditions protections in the Affordable Care Act, and bragging about endorsements from the police when asked about systemic racism in the criminal justice system.

Several observers noted that the first debate is fast approaching and the president pretty clearly isn’t ready for that debate. Chris Hayes of MSNBC tweeted something along the lines of “And this is the guy who wants the campaign to focus on mental fitness?!” Someone else tweeted a concise and accurate summary of the performance:

Trump thought he could BS his way through this town hall because he overestimates his intelligence, underestimates Americans and has relied on soft ball media coverage, wealth and privilege to protect him from all his failures all his life. He’s crumbling. Didn’t take much.

Trump presumably agreed to the Town Hall format for the same reason he agreed to 18 conversations with Bob Woodward–he has a wildly exaggerated belief in his ability to “snow” people (okay–bullshit his way through situations), and an obvious inability to recognize his own deficits–to know what he doesn’t know. He is a walking, talking example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

He also lacks an adult vocabulary. Hence “herd mentality” for “herd immunity.”

Perhaps the best reaction to this train wreck, however, came from satirist Andy Borowitz. Borowitz has been on a roll the past four years. (Say what you will about this nightmare Presidency, it has been great for comedy and satire…) The Borowitz Report’s headline read “Scientists Believe Congressional Republicans Have Developed Herd Mentality,” and the lede expanded on the theme.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota believe that Republican members of Congress have obtained “extremely high” levels of herd mentality, a new study shows.

According to the study, the researchers found that, in obtaining herd mentality, the G.O.P. lawmakers have developed “near-total immunity” to damning books, news reports, and audio tapes.

Herd mentality is, as Borowitz wrote, the dominant characteristic of all congressional Republicans, irrespective of the state they represent, “with the exception of one senator from Utah, Mitt Romney, who was deemed an outlier and therefore statistically insignificant.”

Davis Logsdon, the scientist who supervised the study, said that Republicans were exhibiting herd mentality to a degree never before observed in humans.

“Herd mentality at these levels historically has appeared only in other mammal species, like lemmings,” the researcher said.

Borowitz’ “take” on the Town Hall reminds us that the problem really isn’t that we have a corrupt, embarrassing, mentally-ill President. The problem is his GOP enablers–the lemmings who are blindly pandering to the racist cult that is Trump’s base.

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Let Me Count The Ways…

There are all sorts of tactics that have been employed over the years to suppress the votes of “the other guys.” Recently, those efforts have mostly come from the GOP, but historically, both parties have engaged in them–just as both parties do (and continue to) gerrymander when they control a state legislative chamber.

I’ve recently noted that the efforts to cast doubt on voting by mail are partly motivated by the fact that vote-by-mail defeats many of the time-honored ways to suppress minority votes–and provides a paper trail.

One of the least commented methods of suppressing minority votes–and one of the most effective–is felon disenfranchisement. It is widespread–a number of states forbid ex-offenders from casting ballots–and superficially, at least, it’s race-neutral. For citizens unaware of the over-incarceration of African-Americans during America’s drug war (laid out in indisputable terms by Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow), felon disenfranchisement is simply a lingering, perhaps overly-harsh “law and order” punishment of those who have broken the law.

Two recent court decisions–one honorable, one definitely not–make the implicit, explicit.

In North Carolina, a court struck down an effort to keep ex-offenders from casting ballots, holding that the state could not disenfranchise citizens who owe fines, fees, and other debts from a felony conviction. As the linked article about the ruling noted,

Many felon disenfranchisement rules, including North Carolina’s, are rooted in overt white supremacy. After Reconstruction, racist Democrats in the state sought to revoke Black citizens’ suffrage. They accomplished this task, in part, through vague criminal laws that stripped convicted felons of their civil rights—then enforced these laws disproportionately against Black people. North Carolina’s current statute is rooted in an 1877 law spearheaded by a representative who later presided over the lynching of three Black men. At the time, Democrats argued that felon disenfranchisement was necessary to stop “the honest vote of a white man” from being “off-set by the vote of some negro.” Its purpose, alongside other Jim Crow measures like the literacy test, was to “secure white supremacy.”

The law continues to work as intended, as documented in an expert report by University of North Carolina professor Frank R. Baumgartner. Today, Black North Carolinians represent 22 percent of adults and 42 percent of the disenfranchised. Black residents are denied the right to vote at three times the rate of white residents in 44 counties. The state’s disenfranchisement regime targets two groups of people: those on probation or parole, and those who’ve completed their full sentence but still owe court debt. Notably, judges may extend an individual’s probation or send them back to prison because they haven’t paid off these fines and fees.

Meanwhile, in Florida, immediately after a majority of citizens voted to overturn that state’s felony disenfranchisement law, Republican legislators passed a measure that limited that disenfranchisement to those who had managed to pay off all court costs. A federal judge ruled that the restriction was an unconstitutional poll tax. But last Friday, an appeals court narrowly overturned that decision.

The court’s 6-4 ruling dealt a significant blow to civil rights groups that have fought to expand the voter rolls with hundreds of thousands of people who had completed prison time and parole for felony convictions. It also undermined what had seemed like a major referendum victory in 2018 and served as another reminder of the decisive role that a slew of legal cases could play before the presidential election.

There are lessons here, for those of us willing to learn them.

First, racial animus dies hard, and it lurks in places we seldom think to look. Second, the competence and integrity of the men and women who occupy the nation’s bench–who act as custodians of the Constitution and defenders of the Rule of Law–is critically important.

And third, the future of both that bench and this nation depends upon massive turnout for “blue no matter who” on (or preferably before) November 3d.

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Distraction

Note: Apologies for the extra and misleading email yesterday. The blog referenced (to which the link would not work) will post on the 16th. (I sometimes work ahead–and in those cases, obviously don’t know what I’m doing…)

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I know that many of you who read this blog also subscribe to Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American. That almost-daily letter is particularly valuable for those who are trying to just keep up with the daily outrages and indignities coming from the White House, since she tends to focus on updating readers to the fire hose of improprieties that exhaust so many of us.

The other day provided an example: from continued fallout over Trump’s “suckers and losers” insult to America’s soldiers, to documentation of his continuing buildup and corruption of the Military-Industrial Complex, to not-so-surprising revelations in Michael Cohen’s new book, to the absolutely unprecedented, legally-appalling effort of Bill Barr’s version of a Justice Department to assume Trump’s defense against Jean Carroll’s defamation suit, it was just another day in TrumpLand.

On the off-chance that you missed that last offense, here’s a brief background: Carroll is one of the many women who have accused Trump of sexual assault. She alleged that he raped her some 20 years ago, and when he responded in true Trumpian fashion that he’d never even met her (as usual, there are contemporaneous photographs to the contrary) and she “wasn’t his type,” she sued him for defamation.The courts have thus far refused to dismiss or halt that lawsuit.

Now, lawyers with the Department of Justice (presumably with straight faces) are arguing that Trump was acting in his official capacity as president when he denied knowing her and thus should be defended by the DOJ, which is funded by taxpayer dollars. As Richardson reported,

CNN legal analyst Elie Honig called this “a wild stretch by DOJ…. I can’t remotely conceive how DOJ can argue with a straight face that it is somehow within the official duties of the President to deny a claim that he committed sexual assault years before he took office.” He continued: “This is very much consistent with Barr’s well-established pattern of distorting fact and law to protect Trump and his allies.”

(I am at a loss to understand Barr, who–unlike Trump– is not stupid. My operating theories since he began acting like the President’s consiglieri vacillate between mental illness and blackmail, since he clearly knows that history will not be kind…)

All this is, in a fashion, beside the point.

Much has been made of Trump’s ability to distract—to point to the “shiny object” (squirrel!!), to create a new outrage in order to distract attention and media from his most recent crimes and misdemeanors. It’s true that the media turns its attention to the most recent example of norm-and-rule breaking, but what makes this constant misbehavior a really effective distraction is simply the “fire hose” rate of discoveries of the administration’s corruption and incompetence.

It becomes impossible to keep up–and it exhausts those of us who continue to try.

The sheer volume of the misbehavior prevents the sort of continued, in-depth reporting of a single incident of unethical or criminal behavior–the sort of ongoing media attention that would be paid to such incidents occurring in past administrations. Think of the amount and duration of reporting on Clinton’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, or the Watergate break-in. Substantial research has shown that it takes numerous repetitions of news items before they “sink in” and become common knowledge.

Historians will undoubtedly have a field day with the literally hundreds of examples of this administration’s criminal, unethical and deeply disturbing behaviors, but the rapidity with which these incidents come to our attention and then vanish means that they barely have time to make an impression on the significant number of citizens who do not follow political issues closely.

There’s an analogy here to that old joke to the effect that, if you have run over someone with your car and maimed them, you’d do well to back up and finish them off. A few corrupt transactions will attract sustained attention, but the daily trashing of laws and norms will simply wear us out.

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