Tone Contrast: Democratic National Convention 2016, Day One

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To anyone who hasn't understood what tone is, all you have to do is compare the RNC and the first day of the DNC.  Despite the terrible effect of the Wikileaked Emails.  Despite that Bernie galvanized an enormous number of young people who had never participated in politics before, all of whom were disappointed for the first time.  Despite the fact that Hillary Clinton had to scramble hard to address the fact that the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) had been poisoned by various demagogues, including Bernie Sanders, who is the most wonderful demagogue of recent times.

I have struggled hard to see anything positive in the political rhetoric of the last year or so.  Last night, on the very first day of the Democratic National Convention, about half the speakers focused on the disastrous values of the GOP candidate.  But the other half--I would say, even more than half--focused on the positive.  First of all, the fact that in many ways the condition of the country is distinctly better than is reported by the GOP.  Secondly, that Democrats have set their eyes on more noble achievements, that the Democrats have more faith in the good will of its members, and that the representatives of the Democrats are driven by a spirit of service.  The best the GOP can do is to put themselves forward as the ones who will facilitate the self-interest of the individual voter.  Each man, woman and child for himself; that, they say, is America at its best.  The ideological battle the Democrats have faced since the Great Depression is that most of the problems faced by the USA have social solutions, if not socialist solutions.

It is hard to tell whether the Democrats settled on the contrasting battle cry of "Stronger Together" as a response to the GOP, or whether it is a natural outgrowth of Hillary's old motto: "It takes a village," but the expression highlights for me the fundamental difference between conservatives, who are typically skeptics, and often cynics; and liberals, who are occasionally just as cynical, but who are generally more idealistic than conservatives are.  That is the essence of the difference.

Often, striking a higher tone has to do with ignoring details, and going for the Big Picture, at least in terms of aspirations.  A negative tone is the opposite: of squinting at the terrible trees, rather than gazing at the beautiful woods.  This election season, though, the GOP has managed to find doom and gloom in both the trees and the wood.  Repeatedly, Newt Gingrich insisted that crime and violence being down is not important; the fact that people feel that crime and violence is up, and that they feel unsafe, that's what important!  Donald Trump keeps chanting the mantra that things are terrible.  The state of business is terrible.  Family life is terrible.  These are not specifics, these are imaginary woods, completely devoid of any trees based in reality.

Perhaps the Democrats must stop falling back on appealing exclusively to their traditional power base: educated urban folks, accustomed to a multicultural society, aware of the richness of opportunities that are available today.  Typically, Democrats swim in the water that is modern technology, freely available information, the subtleties of modern life.  But it may be time to reach out to the power base that has made Trump so successful: rural, working class older white Americans, who are an easy target for those who want to persuade them that they have been disenfranchised.  Unfortunately, the Democrats really do not have anything to offer them: there are none so blind as they who would not see.  You can tell them that it is a good world, and a great country, and they will insist: no, it isn't, not any more.  Nothing, they will complain, works the way it used to.  (This is something everyone has to get over.  It's not as though Trump is going to replace all the jazzy technology in stores with old-time, American made black and white TVs.)  People don't behave like they used to.  (You can't go around slapping up your spouse anymore; they fight back.  Well, time moves on; it isn't as though Trump will come by and make sure your spouse stays slapped. Kids will continue to text; adults will continue to tweet nonsense.)  Gays and lesbians are getting married.  (The sad thing is that this does not hurt die-hard traditional straight folks at all, except the thought that gays and lesbians are finally enjoying themselves without restriction. It is no longer reasonable to supervise the private lives of consenting adults.)  Anything that society can promise conservative older white males as a way to improve their lives can easily be trivialized (by someone like Trump).  A major step the Democrats are proposing is to allow everyone, 55 years old or older, to get Medicare.  Even that is likely to be seen as a mere nothing; older conservative white males wear their ill health like a badge.  For them, being sick, but out of the clutches of a doctor is fun.

What Trump promised older white conservative rural males is revenge.  Ironically, this is precisely what ISIS is promising its younger conservative religious fanatics.  Trump's followers--despite their hostility toward fanatical Islamic men--have a lot in common with these fanatical Islamists.

Whether or not the Democrats are able to deliver a Congress that can move us a significant distance in the direction of the type of progress that many of us want, at least they hold out the promise that the DNC will be a lot less doom and gloom, despite the frustration of the Bernie Sanders troops, some of whom have never felt political frustration before.  What the Democrats must recognize is that the agenda is not entirely in the hands of Hillary Clinton; it is just as much in the hands of the hundreds of Congressmen up for election in November.  It is just that Hillary will not stand in the way of progress--at least we hope not--but Trump certainly would.

Here is a summary of the speeches that I heard; I'm sure that there were good ones that I missed.

Michelle Obama, First Lady, 2009-2016:
Hers is the speech that most excited the faithful, and to be honest, the one that I cheered for the hardest.  You can probably get a summary of her speech almost anywhere.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts:
Senator Warren listed the actual parts of the platform that she was most interested in, which of course were also the planks that Bernie Sanders was most interested in: controlling Wall Street and the Big Banks, and People's United.

Senator Cory Booker, D-New Jersey:
This was a politician I had never heard of until yesterday.  He is most certainly an orator, and it was both heartening and thrilling to hear old time political rhetoric once again.  However, like Barack Obama himself, it is evident that Senator Booker is a man not only of words, but also of principles.  This was a defining moment for this convention.

State Representative Joe Kennedy, D-Taunton, etc:
I'm not sure whether this is a member of the great Kennedy Dynasty (and I wouldn't be that excited if he were, except that many wonderful leaders have come out of there, and we could certainly use some more), and the part that I watched was simply him introducing Elizabeth Warren.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, D-New York:
This lady is just too blushing and wholesome-looking to be taken seriously as a politician.  Apparently she appeared on the Daily Show (perhaps with Jonathan Stewart), and I should go watch that, to get a feel for what she is like.  She certainly is a refreshing contrast to the likes of Rudy Giuliani, that populated the RNC.

State Representative Diane Russell, of Maine:
There were two representatives, one each from the Clinton campaign, and the Sanders campaign, who participated in an offshoot of the Rules Committee to ensure that the process of selecting delegates in future years will be more fair.  Diane Russell, a refreshing breeze just when the disruption of frustrated Bernie supporters was getting obnoxious, was jolliness personified.  She was obviously delighted to be addressing the DNC, and she reported her facts with great enthusiasm, from the Bernie camp.  Most memorably, she quoted Albus Dumbledore (a character created by J. K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series) who said that it took courage to stand up to one's enemies, but even greater courage to stand up to one's friends, a remark that appeared to resonate with the younger Bernie supporters.

Eva Longoria:
The popular actress addressed the Convention as a supporter of Hillary Clinton, but also as a Hispanic native of Texas, among those who were vilified by Trump.  Memorably, she declared that her family never crossed the border, but that the border crossed them; a reference to the fact that Texas was originally a part of Mexico.

Senator Al Franken (D-Minnesota), Sarah Silverman:
Al Franken made the important point that the Convention would certainly result in a lot of motivation and enthusiasm.  But the real work, he reminded his audience, would begin on the Friday after the convention.  Only 102 days of furious canvassing would succeed in getting Hillary Clinton the Presidency.  Sarah Silverman addressed the noisy Bernie Sanders supporters, and told them that they were being ridiculous.  (She had the right to say this, as a Bernie supporter herself.)

Postscript:
What is the deal with Hillary Clinton?  My suspicion about this is that Hillary Clinton was getting ready to try for the Presidency, after paying her dues to the satisfaction of everyone she could imagine.  But Bernie Sanders was becoming utterly frustrated with business as usual in Washington--as we all are--and the increasing income gap and wealth disparity, that he took it upon himself to make one final attempt to bring some sort of  income redistribution, or something on those lines, by running for the Presidency.

Unfortunately, Hillary felt that Bernie was an obstruction, and being as ambitious as she was, and confident in her own qualification for the job (in fact overqualified, as many speakers at the DNC day 1 remarked), Hillary was annoyed and frustrated by the Bernie campaign.  On the third side, the Democratic Party was, to no one's surprise, more eager to get a Democrat in the White House at any cost, and, betting all their money on the Clinton horse, they, too, saw Bernie Sanders's campaign as playing into the GOP's efforts to wrest the Presidency away from the Democrats.  We must realize that, while the Democrat Party, as an entity, has values and a soul, the professionals who are in charge of the day-to-day work of the party side of the campaign is usually completely ruthless and unfeeling, and devoid of political judgment.  As the Wikileaked e-mails show that the strange ideas and suggestions all originated with party officials, and not with either candidate.  Bernie Sanders just got in the way of Hillary Clinton's reasonable, but intense, ambition.

I'm sure most people have arrived at the same conclusion.

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Whoa: Tim Kaine! Who Knew?

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It was only a few minutes ago that I took the time to watch Hillary Clinton introduce Senator Time Kaine as her running mate, in Miami.

Oh my word, what an awesome campaigner!  I finally have the confidence that the Democrats have a winning combination for this election, as well as someone who will give Hillary Clinton the strength to stand up to those special interests that get in the way of giving help to those who are most in need of help, especially among poor, elderly white Americans who have desperately turned to Donald Trump.  Nothing is more desperate than anyone who seeks solace with Donald Trump; if you get the chance to watch this video, you will hear for yourself why this is true.

I am baffled as to why people consider Barack Obama deceitful, untrustworthy or ineffective.  Given the circumstances of someone running for office in this US of ours, I can hardly imagine someone any more honest than Obama.  But this Tim Kaine comes across as possibly even more honest and forthright.  There is absolutely no doubt that they are a winning ticket; what is in doubt is whether they will be given an opportunity to do what they would like to do, to put forward some of the ideals of the Bernie Sanders campaign, and to build upon Obama’s work in immigration reform and health reform.  And finally, whether they will have the guts to push through an act that reverses People’s United; it must not be left to the Supreme Court.

We have to face the fact that Tim Kaine is more of a moderate than Hillary Clinton, though one wonders whether that’s possible.  He could only have made positive changes in Virginia as Governor if he had ways of bringing Republicans on board, which means compromise.  It does not bode well for the sorts of reforms that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have been fighting for.  But at least it seems more likely that it will be a Democratic White House for next year.

In sharp contrast to Trump (in some ways; Trump has not said that he is hostile to Mexicans here legally) Tim Kaine has worked in Honduras, and appears fluent in Spanish.  He even spoke Spanish a half dozen times in his speech.  This is great; it would be tempting to pander to the Hispanicophobia that Trump has set in motion, but Kaine has utterly rejected it.  Truly, the US is greatest when it swallows down its fear of immigrants and embraces them.  But any sort of immigration law is always a compromise between admitting aliens, and keeping them out.  But at least, keeping immigrant families together is something that will be among the least painful choices.  Keeping the border as impervious as possible whilst calling for a moratorium on forced repatriation of parents can be something all sides can agree on.  The question is whether it can be accomplished without appearing to reward Mexicans who manage to successfully sneak across.  (To be honest, we laymen are unlikely to be able to dream up a plan that doesn’t have logical holes in it.)

Well, things certainly look better in the afternoon!

Arch

I sincerely hope that they can get Democrats elected into the House and the Senate.

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Things Are Always Better In the Morning, Most Mornings

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Last week, the Republican National Convention nominated Donald J. Trump to be their candidate for President, a nomination which he —thankfully— accepted.  For those of you who misguidedly get all your news from me, here is a sort of executive summary¹ of the events at the Convention:

On the first day of the Convention, the large component of those opposed to Trump attending the Convention requested that candidates be allowed to vote their conscience, without being bound to vote according to their State primaries.  A voice vote was called, and the chair voted out the changes, to the fury of the “Never Trump!” movement within the GOP, all on National TV.

On the second day, Mrs. Melania Trump spoke on behalf of her husband, in a beautifully phrased speech, with at least two paragraphs taken from the speech of Michelle Obama of four years earlier.  This got the nitpickers into a tizzy.  The main thing that I see here is that Melania’s speech contained (in addition to unwarranted praise for, and faith in, her husband) some very universal aspirations; elements of which would have appealed to the more moderate members in the GOP, and many Democrats as well.  But her audience at the Convention was composed of men who weren’t accustomed to taking speeches by women seriously, and women who were more attuned to Melania’s style and delivery rather than her content, and so the speech was a roaring success.  But we have to wonder whether the principles she presented have anything at all to do with Trump’s agenda, or whether even Trump’s usual speeches have anything to do with his agenda.  Or whether he has an agenda at all.

Mayor Rudolf Giuliani gave a speech filled with furious animus against the usual targets of Trump’s speeches, but otherwise completely useless as a basis for serious thinking.

Chris Christie’s speech on Day 2 was a sort of theatrical indictment of Hillary Clinton, using his best law court style.

Other speeches were given, by the mother of a marine killed in Benghazi, the father of a high-school football player killed by a gang, one of whose members was an illegal Mexican immigrant, minor Republicans, Speaker Paul Ryan, and Mike Pence of Indiana.

In other words, nothing said at the Convention really gives us any insight into how the campaign will proceed from now on, except for the Trump women, whose values seem to bridge the differences between the Republican Party and the Democrats.  Ivanka trump declared that she and her father would fight for equal pay for men and women, a principle that has never been popular within the GOP, and Melania Trump expressed an interest in education, something we have not heard from Trump himself.  Whether these ideas have anything to do with what goes on in Trump’s head is anybody’s guess!

A huge problem we have to deal with is the principle that is becoming increasingly current everywhere, namely that any sort of excitement is good.  As many have observed with disapproval, these national conventions have become nothing more than pep rallies.  Adults of all walks of life are reaching back to the excitement they remember from their youth, and are grasping at the pep rallies that preceded important football games.  So that’s what these conventions are deteriorating into: media events to turn out the vote.  And we can anticipate that, in the future, no one will vote without a massive pep rally to encourage them.  Oh, it is not restricted to politics.  Some students in college, for instance, will not pay attention to a lesson unless it is made more exciting by some video.  Other lessons must contain an exciting game.  Sometimes it involves colorful T-shirts that are handed out.  Gold Stars.  Candy.  Some professors can’t get motivated to give a lesson unless there’s something really exciting in it.  If the professors aren’t excited, you can bet that the kids will be bored, too.  Meanwhile, students in numerous poor countries are paying attention at lessons that have zero candy content.  Trump’s infamous short attention span is not remarkable in the least; he represents a huge sector of the population with short attention spans.  This is good, because his speeches are all arranged in tiny snippets of thought.

So we have no idea what Trump stands for at all, except that he wants to take a firm stand about illicit immigration.  Despite the indignation of the Democrats, this is something they want as well; the US policy has always been centered around a sort of Maxwell’s Demon principle: only admit high-quality immigrants.  Some Democrats would prefer a more liberal policy, but they seem to be in the minority.  It is very risky for the US to adopt an open door attitude towards immigration unilaterally, because the consequences would be to place an enormous burden on the already overburdened Social Welfare system here, which was never very robust to begin with.

Is his incendiary rhetoric just window-dressing, or does it reflect what he really wants?  Is it deceitfully intended to attract a racist sector of the population that has so far stayed out of politics, but whom Trump does not intend to support once in office?  Or are the messages from his wife and daughters intended to mollify the more moderate Republicans, with ideas he has absolutely no intention of following up with?  In other words, does Trump cynically believe that he can say and do anything in order to get elected, and then proceed to do something entirely different once he is in office?

Trump’s son (Eric?) said in an interview that Trump was seeking a Vice President who would take charge of both domestic and foreign policy, leaving Trump with the main task of making America great again.  In other words, he wants an apprentice to do all his work for him, whom he can fire, if he (the Apprentice) does not perform according to specification.  I don’t think the Presidency works quite like that, though who can say, since it’s never been tried?  It may work for Trump, but probably not for the rest of us.

Worst of all, the relentless gerrymandering that the GOP State houses have indulged in over the last two decades makes it very difficult to elect anything but a Congress that is highly Republican.  If the GOP were hoping that Congress will restrain any Trumpian excesses, they’ve outsmarted themselves; if the GOP congressmen who get elected on Trump’s coat-tails are Trump disciples, no excesses will be restrained whatsoever.  Gerrymandering is one of the most vile procedures dreamed up by Americans, and its inventors should burn in hell for all eternity.  I sincerely hope that Democrats do not retaliate with counter-gerrymandering.

Now let’s look at Hillary Clinton.  It is possible that she would make a wonderful president, but, again, the Republican advertising machine has systematically worked hard to discredit both the Clintons over the last 25 years.  All the Whitewater, Lewinskigate nonsense was a huge PR stunt to blemish the Clinton brand, so much so that even Democrats have got into the habit of believing that the Clintons are lying, thieving opportunists.  (Jimmy Kimmel performed an experiment on video in which random people declared that they had know about completely fake Hillary Clinton accusations.)  In actual fact, the Clintons are fairly typical of politicians of any persuasion, except for the fact that they are particularly sympathetic to the plight of demographics that are viewed as underdogs.  But they are —or have been— loath to make any moves that would be viewed as hostile to business.  But that could change; the fiasco of 2007 should give them sufficient ammunition to be firm with the banks, if they aren’t scared by their close business friends into believing that an intimidated Wall Street is bad for the economy.  Wall Street has a short attention span.  Not to worry.

So, contrary to popular belief (even among Democrats), Hillary Clinton is likely to make a wonderful president, with possibly an unfortunate tendency to be lenient with Banks and Big Business.  Under her, the initiative to moderate environmental pollution, seek clean energy, protect Social Security and Health care, are likely to inch forward, but more likely to succeed.  I predict that she is more likely to be successful at formulating a robust immigration policy than Trump would be, but we will never know, since both of them aren’t going to be president at the same time.  Unfortunately, ignorant people across the country are likely to be resentful of practically everything she does, and if we get a progressive Congress and Senate, they will have an uphill battle trying to combat the antipathy to Hillary Clinton.

The takeaway, I guess, is that everyone should get out and vote.  (I have a big media event planned for just before the election date, where I will be dressed as a cheerleader, and we will give away lots of prizes.  Maybe.  But get out and vote anyway.)  Trump supporters will be voting like mad, because it will be a totally new experience for them.  Never Trump people will be out trying to sabotage Trump, possibly by voting for the Libertarian candidate, who certainly appears to be a little more sane than Trump, or at least intends to approach the Presidency in a more professional way.  So the outcome can be anything from a total Trumpocalypse, which will just be grandiose dysfunctionality, to a sort of lame-duck Hillary Clinton presidency, to a wildly successful Clinton administration, depending on the outcomes of the Congressional and Senatorial races.  Some initiatives will not wait: the environment, clean energy, income inequality, health reform.  Another four years of Democratic administrations will at least be fair, having endured the GOP for so long.  Things are not going to look that good on the morning after the elections, unless at least some of us go to the blessed polls.

Arch

¹ Executive Summary: A brief overview of a report or article for those whose reading skills have declined over the years.
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Dallas: Black Lives and Blue Lives Both Matter

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Whoever the idiot is who came up with this "X Lives Matter", whatever X is, has really not done anyone a service.  As we have learned, it is sometimes understood to imply, rhetorically, that only X lives matter.  The intention of the original slogan is ambiguous, and in this environment of "Dog whistle" political speeches, the slogan may indeed mean different things to different people.  Some sectors probably relish the ambiguity, and the endless opportunity for vilifying certain public figures.

Jon Stewart, of Comedy Central fame, and his successor, Trevor Noah, have both made very eloquent videos that say that being against violence towards Blacks does not imply that one cannot be at the same time against violence towards the Police.

Some of the massacres, of course, are perpetrated by opportunists, who capitalize on strong public feeling to either justify their actions (presumably even terrorists want to be thought well of by certain people), or to make their actions easier.  All terrorists are despicable, and opportunistic, cowardly terrorists are even more despicable.  This issue should be addressed independently of the fact that the availability of assault weapons is a factor.  We must accept that the culprits of yesterday's Dallas shooting carried it out not because they could, but because they wanted to.

More information is needed before we can get really furious against anyone; who were the snipers, and why exactly did they shoot?  Were they African Americans taking revenge on the Police, or were they some other group more interested in making scapegoats of the protesters?  Was it a calculated atrocity, or was it a stupid action by a fringe group not based on a calculated agenda?  My sympathies are definitely with the Dallas Police, in this event, but I would certainly like to have more information.

Meanwhile, we have to look carefully at the assumptions behind various statements we make.  For instance:

We can always trust the police.
This is what I taught my infant daughter.  The alternative, at the time, was too terrible to contemplate.  The police are there to help little girls in trouble, and they are there to protect us.  But the assumption was that the police would never shoot an innocent person.  They are trained to give a person every possible chance to establish their innocence.

The police will never shoot an innocent person.
Behind this assertion is the assumption that a policeman is supremely confident about his own safety.  All civilians will give way to the police, so a policeman never needs to act out of fear.

A policeman or policewoman is never afraid.Well, sure; who else carries a gun?  Well, usually only police carry guns, but we know that anyone can carry a gun, provided they have a license.

Anyone can carry a gun, provided they have a license.
Well, we know all about this assumption.  Most people likely to use a gun on the street are not likely to have a license.  On the other hand, this Orlando kid did appear to have a license.  The licensing process permits all sorts of psychos to own guns.  Half the population is adamant that psychos should not have guns, but the other half is not happy with the inconvenience of having a person establish that he or she is not a psycho.

So, the upshot is that, since a frightened policeman is more likely to shoot an innocent civilian than a policeman who is not afraid of the civilians he is likely to encounter, the killings by policemen, accidental, or unintentional, or whatever, is probably by a police officer scared to death, or, less likely, pretending to be scared to death.  Fear breeds mistakes.  But that's life.  As long as everyone has the right to carry guns, the stakes are now high, high stakes breeds fear, fear breeds mistakes, and prejudice aggravates mistakes and fear.  The gun companies probably do have a vested interest in the fear of the general population.  But, according to the interpretation of the constitution by the late idiot Justice Scalia, this is what the founding fathers wanted, a sort of modern day Wild Wild West.  It's good for business.

I, for one, want to know more before I get really mad.

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OK. That's enough; this has GOT TO STOP

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[You might have guessed this, but the original post was written in a fit of hurried frustration, and many thoughts are hard to follow.  I’m going to try and clarify it as much as I can.]

I know I’m not the first one to notice this, but I’m one more person to get mad at what I’m seeing.  Of course everyone is angry at everything they see, especially when things in Britain go horribly awry.  Why?  Because though US politics is a lot more frustrating, many of us are accustomed to seeing more sanity and reason in Britain. What has happened?  Let’s first take a second to reflect on what we consider to be politeness.  As we understand it, it means that when something unpleasant is seen or heard, we simply keep our immediate negative reactions to it under wraps, and don’t blurt out in horror.  (For instance, in my case, I get really frustrated when I see a pregnant woman smoking.  The way I was brought up —and don’t get me wrong: my upbringing was fairly typical; that that’s the point— I just don’t go and yell at the woman.  Chances are, the woman already knows that smoking while pregnant harms the fetus, but has a compulsion to smoke nevertheless; I would be wasting my breath, and embarrassing the woman.  Evidently smokers consider themselves martyrs to their habit, and already deplore the fact that the occasional quick smoke is a must.)  Part of the deal is that we somehow go on to purge our anger at the distressing incident, and don’t let it fester inside us for a lifetime.  Of all the thought-habits we teach ourselves—and this one is almost definitely something that’s self-taught—this habit of grinding down our anger at whatever upset us, is probably the most important.  There’s a descriptive phrase for it that came out of the movie Frozen: Let It Go.

One writer, Maya Goodfellow, puts it like this:

One of Britain’s national myths is that it’s a tolerant and accepting nation. This simply isn’t true. To buy into that idea is to erase a history of hate: go back to the 1950s and 60s, when signs reading “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs” were stuck up in landlords’ windows, and people of colour were told to go home.

Britain has been an overtly racist and xenophobic country before, and those prejudices were, to some extent, put in a box and left to fester. Now we’re seeing the consequences.

Ms. Goodfellow goes on to analyze further, saying that the word tolerance implies putting up with something you don’t like.  It takes a lot more emotional work to grind down the dislike one initially feels to a level of what I would call true tolerance, which requires a significant amount of empathy, and other factors, including our personal experiences, such as becoming familiar with minority individuals and families, actually getting to know them well, and hearing their stories.

The vitriol—even when disguised as reasonable observation—coming out of Donald Trump makes his own constituents angry at the world.  It has the effect of releasing their suppressed feelings out of the “boxes” into which they (the feelings) might or might not have been stuffed.  This is the effect that Donald Trump desires; his strategy is to attract the sort of people who have felt pressured, thus far, not to display their hostility to minorities and blacks.  The remarks also make the rest of us angry, simply to watch Trump undermine in a few short months what decent people have been trying for decades to accomplish: to teach people that ethnicity has very few implications about the quality of a human being.  We’re finding out that the lesson was never learned, as Ms. Goodfellow implies: the resentment was simply driven underground.  So now, the Trump-ites wear their anger on their sleeves, and we’re frustrated at what’s happening.

But then, people who share my opinions and (broadly) my political and social values respond in kind.  You must have seen the vitriol coming out of liberal sources.  One fellow whose fB feed I receive is Brandon Weber, who friended me a couple of months ago.  To my frustration, some of the memes he posts are critical of the Right to the point of viciousness.  Now, of course a vicious post can be taken with some humor, and set aside.  And that’s pretty much what I have had to do.  But this spirit of philosophical fighting back is not the solution.  I’m probably guilty of the same offense, and now’s the time to be careful.  The best way, or rather the only way, to combat escalating rhetoric is systematic, relentless de-escalation.  You can’t fight fire with fire.  You can politely disagree; you don’t have to pretend to agree with whatever is being said.  But joining in a heated argument—certainly at this point in the game—will be counterproductive.  I have had the good example of dozens of people that I admire, who have never taken the bait in a shouting war, and I have missed it.  I made the mistake of thinking that they did not have ready ripostes.  No, they just buttoned their lips for the sole purpose of not alienating those on the other side permanently.

Bernie Sanders was very critical about everyone whom he viewed as opposing his campaign: both Donald Trump, and Hillary Clinton.  He was very angry, and very articulate.  I think he went just about as far as anyone should go, and one reason that I don’t put him in the same category as Donald Trump, in terms of inflammatory rhetoric, is that I agree with most of what he said!  Even the British agree with the thrust of Bernie Sanders’s claims, saying that the ambition of the Big Banks drove the world economy over the edge, and in the case of the Brits, the sector of society that the Big Banks serve—the extremely wealthy—are still trying to ride that cruel train that runs roughshod over the members of the poorer classes.  But I don’t see hate in Bernie’s speech, only indignation and determination.  When he talks about the Supreme Court, and the Congress and the Senate, we see something closer to hate, but it doesn’t quite cross the line.  It is the anger of the prophet.  Unfortunately that’s the problem with Bernie Sanders’s candidacy for President: a prophet seldom makes a good King.

Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, the twin British politicians who whipped up the population into voting for leaving the European Union, have both resigned.  Mercifully, we in the US were not subjected to the rhetoric that they generated, some of which was evidently racial.  If the British need someone at whom to vent their hostility, they’re a good target.  But Jeremy Corbyn, who represents those who are neither racist nor eager to leave the EU, steadfastly sticks to facts.  He criticizes relentlessly, but I’m yet to detect viciousness in his tone.

Hillary Clinton has been the target of an enormous proportion of the voting population.  She, if anyone, could be excused for shooting back.  But if you listen carefully, her speeches are seldom actually hate-inspired.  Obviously, she hates Trump, and criticizes him when she gets a chance.  But in side-by-side viciousness tests, Hillary is the soul of diplomacy compared to Donald.  Her opponents may think that she is spreading hate towards Trump with a honeyed tongue, but I don’t agree.  However, I seem to remember that some of what she said about Bernie Sanders bordered on the unreasonable.  If I were she, I would not have made such remarks.

Some of the memes (pictures circulated on the Internet) we are seeing are truly horrible, comparing Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to zombies.   They presumably suggest that the Libertarians, under the leadership of Gary Johnson, have the best candidate this time around, but I just can’t bring myself to support a party that wants to privatize public education.

To return to my point, we must all teach ourselves and our children not only tolerance, but the wisdom to change our attitudes.  [This thought is so unclear, I cannot even now remember what I meant.  I believe I was thinking about racism and xenophobia specifically, but I may have been thinking about changing combative attitudes towards public debate to more civilized ones.]  Out there, far from the Halls of Education and Reason (which I say with tongue in cheek) are those who have successfully resisted the pressure to accept foreigners in their midst.  They must have said: well, if we have to have African Americans in our country, and now, an African president, too, and god knows whether he is a citizen, well, we’re willing to be civil, temporarily, but we don’t want them doing (x, whatever x is).  But we absolutely draw the line at Mexicans.  No sirree Bob.

I don’t think I have the skills to persuade anyone who is truly xenophobic, or is a died-in-the-wool racist, to give up his or her evil ways.  This post is aimed at those whose values are close to mine.  The big challenge, even before the challenge of clean energy and the environment and education and acceptance of LGBT and open restrooms and transportation and gun violence and narrowing the gap between rich and poor, is the de-escalation of our hate language.  Political discourse is grinding to a halt.  Those we’re electing to Congress and the State Houses, maybe even those who carry our political positions, seem to be also those who are willing to escalate the rhetoric.  Arguably, the young fellows coming forward to hold political office do not even know how to deal with verbal hostility with any sort of class.  The content of education now must have an important new component: How to deal with hate speech of all sorts with civility and reason.  In theory, dealing with hate speech was supposed to be a sort of by-product of the “broadening of the mind” that we all assumed took place in college.  But no; even professors today have such intense political feelings that they, too, indulge in thinly disguised hate speech.

Learning mere historical facts, and scientific methods is easy, compared with the difficulty of responding to absolute nonsense with some class.  In the past, college professors (and, to be sure, many high school teachers) were the one who taught this, without this skill being necessarily a recognized part of the curriculum.  But many faculty have either never realized that this was something they had to model, or have forgotten to model it.  It becomes incumbent, now, on every adult, to transcend the possible limitations of their educational experience, and show how it is done.  And the Internet should probably be one of the first lines of attack.  There is no silver bullet that will bring civil discourse back into the US tomorrow.  If we work at this, civil discourse may return someday in the distant future.

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Rising Chaos in Britain

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The 2016 British referendum whether to leave the European Union seems to have been a great misstep.  British Prime Minister David Cameron (a Conservative thoroughly disliked by all except the most affluent and the most chauvinistic of Brits) suggested the referendum, in response to a general wave of xenophobia among certain sectors of the population.  Neither David Cameron, nor Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party (a Left-er of center party, which was dragged pretty far to the Right in the time of Tony Blair, of Invade Iraq fame) were in favor of leaving the European Union.  They obviously never expected the Brexit referendum to turn out in favor of Leaving.

Britain in the European Union, as far as us casual observers in the rest of the world can see, was in almost every way a good thing: it gave the entire Mediterranean region a sort of stability (stability here means that small external --or even internal-- influences did not upset the EU very much).  It permitted freer flow of people of various national origins and ethnicities throughout the region, encouraging a gradual lessening of the insularity that holds back a lot of the cultural development in any country.

What we are seeing is that, while the upper and middle classes were to some extent comfortable with ethnic diversity increasing in Britain, the poorer sectors of society (encouraged by political troublemakers) were acutely uncomfortable with it.  The same is happening in the USA, where in addition, as some social-historical observers have pointed out, there has been deliberate suspicion created by wealthy landowners about a century and a half ago.  It was convenient for landowners in the mid-1800s and earlier to prevent poor whites and poor blacks joining together against their masters and employers.  This highly successful effort has borne fruit today, in certain working-class whites being deeply suspicious of everyone else.

In Britain, the Labour Party being divided into Pro-Brexit and Anti-Brexit camps, one of the few sane voices in the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, has lost his base of support, which has to be seen as a tragedy from the point of view of liberals in the USA and elsewhere.  For decades, it was the British Labour Party that was the model for any socialists that wanted to hold positions that did not cross the line into Communism.  The British welfare state made life admirably good for the British working class, out of which arose numerous gifted voices, artists, writers and poets.  The upper classes, however, were dissatisfied with the taxes they had to pay.  George Harrison, of the Beatles, complained of having to pay too much tax in his famous song Taxman, where he claimed that he was only permitted to keep 5% of his earnings.  The tax structure that enabled his family to maintain a certain lifestyle while in poverty, was perceived as oppressive when he earned enough to be put in a much higher tax bracket!  So the Labour Party finds itself in a leaderless position.  In a recent blog by Thomas G. Clark, the blogger says:

Jeremy Corbyn was one of the only ones who spoke to the public as if we're adults. He didn't speak in simplistic black and white terms, because things are never black and white. Agree with him or not about the EU, he was one of the only ones who spoke to the public as if we're adults, rather than simple-minded idiots who can be swayed one way or another with fearmongering threats or by a load of spectacularly unrealistic spending pledges.

What people are saying when they criticize Jeremy Corbyn for "not campaigning passionately enough" is that in modern British politics, honesty and rational considerations are rubbish debating tactics. That Jeremy Corbyn was politically naive to try to speak to the electorate like we're adults, and that he should have assumed that we're all a bunch of intellectually lazy halfwits and pushed some crude absolutist propaganda at us.

Meanwhile, the Scottish National Party which represents the Scots --who, incidentally, voted to Remain in the EU-- is the largest party outside the government that has remained largely intact.  They now have demanded to be the official leaders of the Opposition, which brings them certain benefits.  They have considered creating a coalition with the remnants of the Pro-EU Labour Party, and the Green Party (an aggressively pro-Environmental group), which just possibly may become the nucleus of a more vigorous, and philosophically robust, socialist party.

Amusingly, stock brokers and money managers and other Wall Street types, know little beyond investing in good times.  They do not fully understand the implications of political activity anywhere; they only know to panic.  It is laughable that so many hand their financial resources to these jokers, whose real understanding of economic forces is rudimentary, if anything.  After an initial dive, stocks throughout the world sort of settled down.  Every new thing that happens will initially result in a dive of stocks from now on, after which they will crawl back up.  The thing to do is to get your money out of externally managed funds, and just settle on any old stocks you have, and slap away the hands of anyone who tries to "help" your investing.  In an environment where most stocks are falling and rising together, there's nothing really clever you can do that won't make the stocks fall even more.

At the moment, the only political leaders in Britain who are feeling their oats are the least intelligent, ultra-populist, chauvinist troublemakers.  I hear names like Nigel Farage, and Hilary somebody, and of course, the redoubtable Boris Johnson.  I heard rumors that Johnson had resigned.  British politics will be in disarray for a time; the nature of the Parliamentary System is complex, and it takes some time for things to settle down, and they can settle down in surprising ways.  However, the day to day government is managed by a supposedly apolitical civil service (the bureaucracy), in which political interference is somewhat less than in most countries.

We can only wait until things become clearer.  You can read the CNN take on matters here.

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Surviving Among Idiots: The Alarming Rise of Know-Nothings. Reactions to BREXIT 2016

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BREXIT,  ORLANDO, The 2016 ELECTIONS, SCHOOL, GROWING UP

Modern life is complicated, and unfortunately some people are just not mentally equipped to deal with it.  So I may well have to rethink my strategy of throwing all I know at my students; some of their tiny minds are not ready for much more than counting up to twenty-five.  But I have that desperate instinct to push them to counting to twenty-six, which would probably endanger the ability of some of the weaker ones to count as far as they actually do.

What got me thinking about this is the recent (June 2016) vote in Britain (in what follows, I'm going to write "Britain" instead of "The United Kingdom of Britain and Northern Island", or whatever it stands for) to leave the European Union.

The vote took place on Wednesday, June 22, and by the following morning the vote was declared narrowly in favor of Britain Leaving the European Union (hereinafter EU).  [I could be off by one day here.]

So that my readers, both of them, are on the same page as me, The membership of Britain in the European Union means a lot of things.  Economically, all the members of the EU are considered to constitute one entity, which means that no customs or other tariffs are charged for goods transported between the countries.  Demographically, because all the members of the EU are considered one entity, anyone in the EU can move freely between the countries without being held up at borders for immigration barriers.  It also meant that people, regardless of where in the EU they were born or naturalized, are free to take up employment in any EU country.

Some Brits who haven't thought things out clearly, especially those in the parts of Britain where "foreigners" from the EU have entered the employment market (and begun to put pressure on the availability of jobs), have got into the habit of blaming the EU for the rising unemployment among their younger compatriots.  Other Brits simply resent having to learn the social skills needed for interacting with "foreigners" (form the EU) with their crazy speech and strange habits.

As always, a class of leaders has risen up in response to the needs of the people.  In this case, they came forward to champion the cause of the xenophobes, and the "culprit" they have settled on is the EU.  It is the EU, they say, that has got us into this mess.  (In actual fact, it is the Conservative Party, which now leads the government, that has impoverished the national coffers, putting pressure on those at the lower end of the economic spectrum.  There is something called "Austerity" that has been going on in Britain, which means that the poor have to make do with less Government support.)  They pointed out that the cost of membership was several million British Pounds per year, which Britain (like every member nation) had to pay to the EU.  But they ignore the fact that the membership gives Britain some benefits in terms of reduced tariffs, and so on, which reduces the net cost a good deal.  The cost of EU membership pales in comparison to other actions the Brit Parliament has taken, namely massive reductions in taxes for their wealthiest citizens and corporations.  Scores of reports of individuals and corporations (such as Netflix) have emerged that suggests that friends of the Conservative Party have received favored tax treatment.

What happened soon after BREXIT?
The "Leavers" rejoiced when the votes were counted.  They had won the referendum 52% to 48% (or with an even narrower margin), and the British government was now saddled with the task of following through on the decision to leave the EU.

Pretty soon, stocks around the world began to lose value.  Why?  Because stockholders assume that businesses with resources in either Britain or the other EU countries would not be able to deliver the volume of goods, or the quality of goods, that other businesses required, or that the goods would cost more.  Why?  Because a lot of the production in Britain depends of resources from the EU, and vice versa.  The British Pound began to lose value relative to the dollar, because (presumably) currency dealers expected that Pounds would not be useful to carry.  (In the currency world, if enough people think a particular currency has little value, it actually begins to have little value.)  Foreign nationals in Britain began to panic, thinking that they would have to leave soon.  British nationals in Europe began to panic, thinking that they would be forced to return to cold, damp Britain.  The political leadership of Britain began to panic, wondering how to proceed with the process of renegotiating their economic and diplomatic relations with the EU.  The EU government began to panic, wondering how to handle the exit of Britain, how to settle on the least messy arrangement with the Brits, and whether other EU countries would also want to poll their populations with referenda about Leaving.

Finally, actual Pro-BREXIT voters saw the economic turmoil, and began to panic, seeing that it was a silly idea to vote to Leave rather than Stay.  Clearly, many of them had simply voted to Leave for frivolous reasons, and now regretted it.  These folks are called RegrEXIT, and they (and others), nearly 3 million strong, have signed a petition to vote again.  Many of those in the Remain camp are now demanding to know what the plan for leaving the EU had been.  Was there a plan?  OK, what is it?

Regrets
Obviously, you can't vote on leaving the EU multiple times.  It has to be a once in a generation vote, otherwise it becomes a joke.  The important thing is that everyone should vote; repeated votes run the risk of disgusted voters simply staying away from the polls.  Every time a referendum is second-guessed, it puts all future referenda, on any question whatsoever, at risk of being disregarded as frivolous.

[Added later] There is a strong body of opinion that the Referendum (on BREXIT) was only advisory, in other words, it was just to let the Government know what the people wanted.  Interestingly enough, democracy does not mean that the majority get what they want.  The way that popular sentiment is factored through to the decision-making body is intended to safeguard minority interests, expert knowledge, and legal requirements, before it is made into law.  This could be viewed as interference with the will of the people, but it is also a safeguard against ill-advised ideas of various kinds.  So, though in this case it looks like a bad idea, technically the British Parliament can simply refuse to implement what the BREXIT vote indicated that they should do.  The vote was not the clincher of an existing act of Parliament; it merely pointed to a Bill that subsequently had to be voted on anyway.  The Bill may not pass, which simply means that Parliament had decided that Leaving was not in the best interests of the UK (an expert view; after all, Parliament has slightly greater insight into the issues than the population at large does).

Bafflement
Shortly after the vote, the questions that were most often asked on Google, by Brits, were: What is the EU?  What are the other countries in the EU?  (If you want the whole list, send me an email, and I will Google it for you.)  We have to think: how does it happen that Brits don't know these things?

Modern life is complicated.  There are many approaches to dealing with complication.
Ignore.  One school believes in ignoring complication.  If you ignore it, it will probably go away.  There is a danger in generalizing limited experience; some things you ignore do actually go away, like a minor headache.  You can't do a lot about a headache, and often they do go away.  Other things don't, like a pedophilic priest, or a ignorant member of the school board.
Oversimplify.  This is a related strategy, and many well-meaning people adopt it.  Simplification is clearly a good thing; to call something oversimplification is actually a judgment.  It means that an explanation or an analysis has been deemed simplified to the point where essential properties or information has been lost.  Obviously, most often the determination of "oversimplification" is after the fact, and represents a lost opportunity.

[Complication and Complexity are actually two significantly different things.  Complexity describes a thing that has many parts.  Complication describes a thing that has been made difficult by some extra thing(s).  Both words described some system with multiple parts, but the word "complicated" suggests that the complexity is a hindrance to dealing with the thing.]

We here in the USA tend to think that Brits are all more intelligent and wise than we are.  That is because they talk with that funny accent, and they have years of practice sounding bright, whether or not they really are.  But this BREXIT referendum has clearly revealed that the vast majority of those who voted for Leaving had only the slightest inkling of the benefits of being in the EU.  For months they had suffered an onslaught of Leave propaganda, I suspect from certain xenophobic and chauvinistic leaders who exaggerated the liabilities of remaining in the EU, and suppressed the benefits of it.  The benefits are subtle, and difficult to persuade people about.  (Presumably the Leave leaders themselves were not bright enough to completely understand the issues.)  After a brief period in which these Leave gurus will enjoy their victory to the hilt, they could be saddled with having to take the leadership in creating a New Britain that attempts to retain most of the desirable features of the Britain that they knew, when it was in the EU.  One wonders whether these Leave leaders have the intellectual equipment for the task.  When Remainers ask them: What is the Plan, it could be a genuine request for information, but more likely it is a pointed reproach for thoughtlessly going into a process in which the outcomes --either way-- would not be pleasant.

Well.  That's all water under the bridge.  But, among these infrabridgeal waters are the following:

(1) Before the Referendum, the public had to be educated by ALL their trusted leaders, in words of one syllable, what the benefits of Remaining are, as well as the drawbacks.
(2) The public had to be told, in broad terms, what would happen if Leaving was ratified.  (The temptation to make this eventuality more dire than it really was had to be resisted, though, in hindsight, it does appear to be pretty dire.)
(3) Given the difficulty of carrying out the procedure for Leaving, the Referendum should have been called with the proviso that unless there was at least a 2/3 vote for Leaving, BREXIT would have been considered to have failed.  It's all very well to vote to Leave, but it puts a severe burden on those tasked with renegotiating to establish a post-BREXIT Britain.  It makes perfect sense that Leaving should not have taken place without a sizable majority in favor.  (Again, in hindsight, this seems the most glaring omission from the preparation for the vote.)

Now that BREXIT is a fact of history --and it seems silly to plan on a Redo, as if the British public was a bunch of irresponsible children-- the question is how to negotiate a new relationship with the EU that (A) gives the British people the least number of penalties for leaving, and (B) still has some penalties, otherwise other EU nations, especially the wealthiest, e.g. Germany, will also seek to Leave.  But, (B) might not actually work, nor would it be necessary, because the penalties Britain is suffering, simply by having voted to leave, are already staggering.

College Education
A post-high-school education is invariably about complexity.  Many of the information, attitudes and beliefs that kids in high school need to be taught, are significantly more complex than they used to be a few decades ago (but not so much more complex as some baffled adults believe).  So some high-school teachers --perhaps because they themselves were taught an oversimplified version of the facts-- tend to deliver an oversimplified version of the facts: historical, political, or scientific, to their students.  So in the face of this systematic dumbing down of the information conveyed to students at every level, half the population is accustomed to resisting any sort of complexity.  (Some readers will not allow that last sentence to register unless it is italicized.  So: half the population is accustomed to resisting any sort of complexity.)

The hordes of Brits who blithely voted to Leave the EU did so with only the vaguest idea as to what the EU was, and what the other issues were: the economic repercussions, and the impacts to the standard of living of Brits of various economic classes.  Why would Brits live in ignorance of what exactly the EU was?  Resistance to complexity.  If you want to live far from any sort of complexity, good luck; that's all I can say.

Certain populist politicians in Britain, and certain populist politicians in the USA actively encourage this predilection for shunning complexity, and embracing habitual, and prejudiced patterns of thinking, established in their youth, from beliefs absorbed during grade-school days.  Schoolboy prejudices are not a robust basis for making decisions in adult life, in the environment of Britain, a signatory to the European Union.  That's a complex world, and needs cautious and informed decisions.  That's not what we saw on Wednesday.

In the USA, citizens of all levels of sophistication are faced with electing representatives in a set of circumstances that the word complex is barely competent to describe.
(1) Because of the resistance of large corporations to forgo the economic lubrication of low-cost, fossil-fuel generated energy, the temperatures are truly rising throughout the globe.
(2) Because the tax structure has been altered over the last few decades to favor the accumulation of wealth and resources by the wealthiest individuals in the land, extreme poverty is running rampant.
(3) There are difficult decisions to be made to deal with the steady flow of illegal immigrants across the Mexican border.  This is a complex issue, that has a lot to do with social justice at a trans-national level.

Concerning the last problem, on the face of it, we elect representatives to represent us: those of us of the electorate.  But these representatives are also charged with ultimately speaking to the welfare of people in other countries as well, on our behalf.  This looks like a conflict of interests, but for example, many of us are also concerned with the welfare of young children of illegal immigrants.  Though it may appear that elected representatives need not act in the interest of foreign nationals, Making good  and humane decisions about them (on our behalf) requires a broad education in a variety of disciplines, an intellectual background that many eager young bloods who enter the political arena do not have.

To many of these issues, Donald Trump has simple answers, based on the prejudices of the most ignorant, back-country illiterates.  At one time, I thought that Trump put these thoughts forward cynically, in order to appeal to voters of that description.  But it becomes increasingly clear that this is how Trump actually thinks.  He has become the poster boy for those who shun complexity.  Recently visiting Scotland, he did not realize that Scots had voted overwhelmingly to Remain.  Trump blithely announced to the Scottish audience, "Your people have taken your country back, which is a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful thing."  The few dazed Scots who had gathered to endure Trump's blathering had simply blinked, while the majority of Scots had watched over Television.  The response was immediately and stunned.  They called Trump various colorful Scottish terms for blithering idiot.

One thing a candidate for President of the USA must have is a competent team to supply him or her with reliable facts.  Trump, shooting from an unreliable hip, antagonized at least 60% of Scots, without having the facts on call, and revealed to the World his foolishness.  When John Kennedy declared in Berlin that he was a doughnut, it might have been a joke.  But in the case of Donald Trump's casual remarks at his golf course, it was very clear that it was no joke.  (Trump's jokes are very obvious; this was not one of them.)

A word about complexity.  Simply shunning complexity doesn't get you anywhere.  There are ways to deal with it; from creative language, to using complex data structures (a concept from computer science), to divide-and-conquer strategies, to study groups --I know; it sounds like a silly idea, but it works sometimes-- complexity can be dealt with successfully.  But trying the Gordian Knot approach to complexity is as bad an idea as invading Iraq to grab some oil.