Category Archives: Random Blogging

The Return Of The Loonies…

Evidently the looney-tune folks are back–or never really went away…What’s that old saying? The more things change, the more they stay the same…

I was a teenager in the 1950s (yes, I’m old), and I still remember my mother fretting about the growing influence of the crazies of the John Birch Society. For those of you too young to remember that organization, allow me to share some lyrics from a satiric Chad Mitchell song of that time…

Oh, we’re meetin’ at the courthouse at eight o’clock tonight
You just come in the door and take the first turn to the right
Be careful when you get there, we hate to be bereft
But we’re takin’ down the names of everybody turnin’ left


Well, you’ve heard about the agents that we’ve already named
Well, MCA has agents that are flatly unashamed
We’re after Rosie Clooney, we’ve gotten Pinkie Lee
And the day we get Red Skelton won’t that be a victory?
We’ll teach you how to spot ’em in the cities or the sticks
For even Jasper Junction is just full of Bolsheviks
The CIA’s subversive, and so’s the FCC
There’s no one left but thee and we, and we’re not sure of thee.


Do you want Justice Warren for your Commissar?
Do you want Mrs. Krushchev in there with the DAR?
You cannot trust your neighbors or even next of kin
If mommie is a commie then you gotta turn her in.

The repeated chorus explained the organization’s mission:
 
Oh, we’re the John Birch Society, the John Birch Society
Here to save our country from a communistic plot
Join the John Birch Society, help us fill the ranks
To get this movement started we need lots of tools and cranks.
 
 
 
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The Cost Of Bureaucracy

Among the opinion writers I read more or less regularly, David Brooks stands out as one of the most annoying. Three times out of five (okay, that’s just a statistical guess), I find him patronizing, preachy and un-self-aware. But then, in those other two columns, he addresses real issues and does so perceptively.

The column that prompted today’s post is one of the latter. In it, Brooks considers what he calls the “growing bureaucratization of America.” His first paragraph sets out his thesis/observation:

Sometimes in this job I have a kernel of a column idea that doesn’t pan out. But other times I begin looking into a topic and find a problem so massive that I can’t believe I’ve ever written about anything else. This latter experience happened as I looked into the growing bureaucratization of American life. It’s not only that growing bureaucracies cost a lot of money; they also enervate American society. They redistribute power from workers to rule makers, and in so doing sap initiative, discretion, creativity and drive.

As regular readers of this blog know, a couple of years ago I retired from a position as a college professor, a cog in what has to be one of the most prominent examples of the trend Brooks is exploring–a university. I still recall a conversation with a colleague who had preceded me in the trip from “real life” job to the groves of academe. She warned me that what would drive me insane was the utter lack of urgency I would encounter. She was right–if an identified problem was considered really urgent, it might get addressed in a year or two. Universities are very bureaucratic.

Brooks proceeds to provide the requisite overview:

Over a third of all health care costs go to administration. As the health care expert David Himmelstein put it in 2020, “The average American is paying more than $2,000 a year for useless bureaucracy.” All of us who have been entangled in the medical system know why administrators are there: to wrangle over coverage for the treatments doctors think patients need.

The growth of bureaucracy costs America over $3 trillion in lost economic output every year, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini estimated in 2016 in The Harvard Business Review. That was about 17 percent of G.D.P. According to their analysis, there is now one administrator or manager for every 4.7 employees, doing things like designing anti-harassment trainings, writing corporate mission statements, collecting data and managing “systems.”

He also acknowledges the pre-eminence of higher education in the bureaucratization of American life. The following paragraph didn’t surprise me:

This situation is especially grave in higher education. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology now has almost eight times as many nonfaculty employees as faculty employees. In the University of California system, the number of managers and senior professionals swelled by 60 percent between 2004 and 2014. The number of tenure-track faculty members grew by just 8 percent.

The rest of the column is devoted to multiple examples of bureaucratic growth and a wide variety of mostly unfortunate and worrisome consequences.

Brooks doesn’t address what is impelling the growth of bureaucracy, or what steps we might take to reverse it. He also doesn’t address what I have long thought to be a glaringly selective response to the phenomenon: Americans are absolutely obsessed with the ways bureaucracy impedes and complicates the work of our various government agencies–but seem not to recognize that the same situation impedes the efficient operation of corporations, large nonprofit organizations and educational institutions.

Sociologists and anthropologists can probably shed light on the reasons for the nation’s increasing bureaucratization. My own hunch–and it’s only a hunch–is that it’s prompted in part by what Brooks calls a desire for “safety first,” a desire to avoid possible dangers. (I also have a sneaking suspicion that it represents a reaction to America’s very litigious society–an effort to avoid the threat of lawsuits by demonstrating the lengths a company or organization has gone to avoid various foreseeable harms.)

Brooks thinks that resentment of the increasingly bureaucratic nature of our society is one of the things motivating MAGA folks. Maybe–although most credible studies attribute pro-Trump MAGA sentiment primarily to racial grievance, not a more generalized impatience with bureaucracy. (MAGA attacks on universities and corporations are focused on that hated DEI, after all, not the number of administrators and managers.)

I tend to think that the growth of bureaucracy is a phase–something that will abate when, and if, civil society sorts itself out and Americans grow up. Think of today’s America as a teenager, needing rules and structure to balance out those raging hormones….

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Anecdotes Are Not Data

An often repeated mantra in academia is a reminder: anecdotes are not data. Your run-in with a devotee of the Second Amendment isn’t reflective of majority opinion on the subject of guns; the sermon your pastor delivered about abortion isn’t evidence of a monolithic religious position on reproductive choice…etc. etc.

I know that. I really do.

But anecdotes can be intriguing, even if they don’t amount to statistical evidence. And I’ve been involved in recent conversations that have me mulling over their possible larger meaning–especially since they have displayed an unexpected similarity. I am filing them under “possible omens for November.”

Here’s the context.

As regular readers of this blog know, I have been working as a volunteer on Marc Carmichael’s campaign for Indiana’s open U.S. Senate seat. Marc is running against Jim Banks, who may be the most odious example of MAGA Republicanism running for public office this year, and yes, I know that is really saying something. Among the tasks I’ve taken on is an effort to recruit Republicans willing to identify as “Republicans for Carmichael.” Banks is so extreme (and, from all reports, personally unpleasant) that even many Republican voters detest him, so I figured my odds were good.

I spent 35 years as an active Republican, and most of the people I worked with in what was then still a political party are still alive, so I thought I was an ideal person to make the ask. I began calling former colleagues who I had found to be reasonable, “good government” partisans.

And one after another, I got virtually the same response: I’m no longer a Republican.

A lawyer friend who was a long-serving Republican ward chairman told me he’d not only left the GOP, he’d also cooled relations with friends who’d remained.

A Republican who formerly served as Mayor of a northern Indiana city said he’d love to help, but he was now a Democrat.

A friend who was a former Republican Speaker of the Indiana House said he was no longer a Republican, and didn’t understand how any thinking person could embrace the party’s transformation into MAGA extremism or consider putting Donald Trump back in the Oval Office.

A friend who served two terms as a Republican county-level office holder told me “Sorry, I ‘came out” as a Democrat on Facebook last year.”

Over half of the people I called had similar responses. A couple volunteered to help the Carmichael campaign, but pointed out that it would be incorrect–even fraudulent– to include them in a list of Republican supporters. As one of them said, they are now “proud to be ex-members of the GOP.”

Most of the individuals I have thus far managed to recruit (a list will be announced by the campaign in due course) expressed extreme distaste not just for Banks and Trump, but for the current iteration of a political party they had worked for and supported financially for many years. But they are hanging in, hoping for a turn back to sanity.

I draw two conclusions from these conversations. One is obvious: when so many former party workers and elected officials have left, expressing disapproval and anger at today’s iteration of the GOP, it’s a reasonable assumption that membership in the Grand Old Party is shrinking. Admittedly there is no way of knowing or estimating the size of the cohort represented by these “high information” individuals. It’s possible that the people I talked to don’t represent significant numbers who have disaffiliated. It’s equally possible, however, that there are hundreds more who–for similar reasons– no longer consider themselves Republican.

My second “take-away” is more a theory than a firm conclusion. I have often shared my bewilderment that any sentient American can support Donald Trump, who–in addition to lacking any redeeming personal, ethical or intellectual qualities– is clearly, deeply, and increasingly mentally ill. My inability to get my head around support for Trump extends to my reaction to MAGA folks, who are opposed to every value that really does make America great.

My repeated discussions with individuals who have fled the GOP, as well as my conversations with those who are struggling with their choice to remain, suggests to me that people who clearly see the danger posed by an explicitly racist and fascist movement are largely drawn from the ranks of more informed citizens–people who not only follow political news but who possess the knowledge and experience to understand the nature and extent of the threat posed by the MAGA cult.

Perhaps neither of my conclusions is correct. After all, my evidence is anecdotal.

In the meantime, if anyone reading this still identifies as Republican and is willing to join Republicans for Carmichael–shoot me an email.

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And Now For Something Cool…

As the hysteria over the belief that pot was a “gateway” drug finally began to abate, and states slowly moved to legalize its medical and recreational uses, discussions about the benefits of marijuana have tended to focus on CBD and similar semi-medicinal uses. But the real benefit of a more sane approach to the plant is in the rediscovery of the multiple uses of hemp.

As Wikipedia reports, industrial hemp– a botanical class of Cannabis sativa cultivars grown specifically for industrial and consumable use– can be used to make a wide range of products. Along with bamboo, hemp is among the fastest growing plants on Earth. It was also one of the first plants to be spun into usable fiber 50,000 years ago. It can be refined into a variety of commercial items, including paper, rope, textiles, clothing, biodegradable plastics, paint, insulation, biofuel, food, and animal feed.

Pretty impressive!

It always seemed insane to me that disapproval of the more “recreational” use of marijuana plants had effectively prohibited the growth of hemp for these multiple benign purposes. (As I understand it–and I probably don’t– plants grown for industrial purposes lack the “recreational” element, but because the varieties look so much alike in the field, neither could be grown in jurisdictions that outlawed pot. In other words, most jurisdictions.)

Now it appears that hemp is being used in yet another promising way: as a climate-friendly building material. As the Guardian reports,

Cannabis sativa, the plant of the thousand and one molecules, has a long and expansive reputation – as a folk medicine, a source of textile fibre for clothes, for making rope or plugging holes in ships.

But now cannabis – or specifically its non-psychoactive variant, hemp – is being touted for something greater still: building blocks for housing that may avoid some of the environmental, logistic and economic downsides of concrete.

The cement industry is responsible for about 8% of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions, alongside problems created by unyielding surfaces and low insulation, or R-value, properties. The search for large-scale alternatives has so far yielded few results, but on a small scale there are intriguing possibilities, including the use of hemp mixed with lime to create low-carbon, more climate healthy building materials.

“There’s an enormous growth potential in the US for hemp fibre used for building and insulation,” said Kaja Kühl, an urban designer and the founder of youarethecity, a design and building practice based in Brooklyn, New York. “Hemp was only legalised in 2018, but now industrial hemp is following the first wave of CBD and cannabis.”

The Guardian reports that there is a “fledgling network of advocates, designers and fabricators” who are working to enlarge the use of bio-based building materials, which they see as a way to dramatically reduce the upfront carbon footprint of materials that can account for some 80% of a building’s carbon lifecycle.

But more recently its ability to capture more than twice its own weight in carbon – twice as fast as traditional forestry – has come into focus. By some estimates, hemp can capture up to 15 tonnes of CO2 per hectare, through photosynthesis. Hemp cultivation taking up only 25% of the world’s agricultural land used for dairy and livestock would close the UN emissions gap of 23 gigatons of CO2 annually.

“Choosing materials that sequester a lot of carbon before they become construction materials can be very beneficial in this quest to get to carbon-neutral by 2050,” Kühl said, pointing out that the hemp that is used is the hurd, from the inner stem, and not the bark that is used for paper or rope.

This is so cool!

It is so easy to become discouraged about the current state of the world we inhabit. Listening to the daily reports of idiocy emanating from our various legislative chambers, cringing from the reports of devastation in Ukraine and the Middle East, scanning the reports of all-too-frequent episodes of mass gun violence…The bad news tends to overwhelm and drown out the good.

We need to remember–as I report here too infrequently–there are a lot of good people in the world doing a lot of very good things. They are making cool discoveries, inventing marvelous things and figuring out new ways to help those who need that help.

Those of us who prefer helping the good guys to feeding the resentments and insecurities of those who are barriers to progress have a job that is both difficult and disarmingly simple: we need to elect lawmakers who want to make it easier–not harder– for the good guys to move humanity to a better place.

At the very least, we need to vote out the MAGAs who want to take us back to a past that never was.

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Defining Our Terms

A recent headline asked the wrong question. The TIMES headline read “America’s Becoming Less Religious. Is Politics to Blame?”

The correct question is: has politics become religion?

The article begins with statistics. It quotes results from Gallup, Pew, and PRRI, showing that the percentage of Americans who identify with any religion is in steady decline, “as are those who believe in God, the devil, Heaven, Hell, or angels; who say religion is a very important part of their life; maintain membership in a church or synagogue; or attend church regularly.”

The article proceeds to examine the possible causes of that decline.

Economic prosperity and functional governance (both wonderful things) can weaken our felt need for religious resources. For example, much of what religious institutions historically provided America’s citizens—education; counseling; support for the needy; marriage options; entertainment; and explanations for how the world works—are increasingly provided by the state and the market. Church participation has become more optional, just one more activity middle-class families do in the suburbs—or not.

Another factor is simply the inevitable consequence of living in an increasingly cosmopolitan, multiracial democracy where liberal values of tolerance are celebrated. Diverse neighborhoods, schools, and civic institutions force us to confront the reality that there are wonderful people out there who don’t share our religious beliefs. Our children will be friends with one another, maybe even spouses. Rising generations find the divisive dogma of many religious groups increasingly strange, if not offensive.

There is another explanation that the article explores: politics.

For the past few decades, sociologists and political scientists have demonstrated across multiple studies that as Christianity has become increasingly aligned with right-wing conservatism and the Republican Party, Americans who might have otherwise identified as Christians on surveys are now identifying as “nothing in particular” or “none.” The conclusion many seem to be drawing is “If this is what it means to be religious, count me out.”

We see quite a bit of that reaction on this site. And as the article notes, that reaction is mirrored by political conservatives, who have become increasingly likely to identify with religion because they see it identifying them as Trump supporters–actually (although the article doesn’t explicitly acknowledge it) as White Nationalists. White Americans identifying as “White Evangelical,” see the label itself as meaning “pro-Trump MAGA conservative.”

The article assumes that “This is another way that politics has driven secularization”– that the association between right-wing politics and religion driving young progressives away from religion is also secularizing religious folks. It compares the former phenomenon to the resurgence of Russian Orthodoxy in Putin’s Russia, where the number of Russians who identify with Russian Orthodoxy has grown, but the growth doesn’t reflect a rise in religious practices like church attendance and prayer. Instead, it reflects a rise in nationalistic fervor, ethnocentrism, and a fondness for the old Soviet Union and Stalin.

And that brings me back to my long-ago interpretation of Soviet Communism, which I saw not as an economic theory–at least, not primarily–but as a religion, a belief system.

The linked article is interesting, and as far as it goes, informative and factual. But it doesn’t grapple with what I see as the most important question, namely what is religion? I’d define it as a belief system based in faith rather than on demonstrable fact– a belief system that elevates certain values and behaviors on the basis of convictions that are simply not subject to empirical confirmation.

How is a belief that White Christians are superior beings entitled to pre-eminence in American life any less “religious” than a belief in the existence of heaven or hell?

You can undoubtedly come up with numerous examples of what we usually call “ideological” beliefs. What the studies cited in the linked article really demonstrate is that–at least in today’s contentious culture– “religion” and “ideology” have become virtually indistinguishable. And that’s a problem, because what we have come to call “culture war” is really a debate about whose belief system should be imposed on everyone else.

Political scientists tell us that laws are legitimate when they are agreed to by majorities of citizens holding very different world-views: for example, Americans of virtually all beliefs agree that murder, robbery and rape are wrong, and should be punished. (Although we still debate the definitions of even those terms.)

Americans aren’t really getting “less religious,” but they are admittedly getting less traditionally religious. Political ideologies have morphed into a different kind of religion. One is grounded in respect for pluralism and equal liberty of conscience. The other is intent upon protecting what they believe to be their god-given superior social status.

Compromise seems unlikely.

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