Klass: Grata and Non-Grata Personae in the New Order

In the chaotic world of the current calendar year, some patterns are emerging.

President Trump's hallmark is apparently inconsistency.  At one time I sincerely believed that it was a signature characteristic that was carefully engineered, but it appears that it emerges naturally; in the Brownian Motion of Trump's responses to media reports, the randomness of the editorial angle on the news of the day is amplified by Trump's irrational understanding of those angles.  But another characteristic property is also emerging: prejudice.

There are blocks of the population that Trump likes, and those he does not like, and he is not shy about being found out.  We know he prefers what he views as Traditional Americans : White, Anglo-Saxon citizens (in contrast to immigrants and blacks).  He prefers men around him in the White House, except for departments that he thinks of as being inessential, such as Education.  In fact, he prefers people who stick to any prejudices similar to his own, and if they do not care to defend those prejudices, so much the better!

But, on second glance, there are a good many Hispanics and other ethnicities not considered traditionally WASP in his circle.  What has qualified these people to work for him?  They're affluent.  So you can be a member of a minority, as long as you're rich.  In a recent statement he said that he preferred to put people with money in charge of social services because they're accustomed to handling money.  Unfortunately, his phrasing of this criterion was somewhat tactless.  It boiled down to: do you want to have someone who's never handled a lot of money being in charge of these things?  Of course you don't!

How can we simplify this sorting of people into two groups: those allowed to take government responsibility, and everybody else?  It appears to be based on his assessment of some kind of class. We all have our own idea of what constitutes class in the sense of "That guy has class."  Of course we're talking about president Trump here, so many of us use the word differently than he does.  He has the class of an oil sheikh making a cash offer for your wife.  "How much?  How about $1000? No?  $10,000?  OK, $100,000, and I'll throw in a Mercedes."  So, if you have money, you automatically have class.  Let's spell it Klass, to distinguish it from the usual kind.

People who need Medicaid, evidently, are of the No Klass kind.  In fact, if you don't have a job, you're Low Klass.  If you had to actually apply for a job, you're probably Lower Klass than if you got one from your dad.

Politicians of the last several decades have tried very hard not to appear to be influenced by class politics (except of course economic class politics, which is impossible to avoid; Reagan and Romney had to dog-whistle-ize economic class politics).  When prejudice becomes an open issue in any campaign, the tone of the campaign goes right through the floor, and we've seen that happen.  Even many of president Trump's supporters are not happy with race politics, which gives me hope.

This is all very confusing to me, because I was brought up Methodist (though I am not one now), and according to our trade union rules, gambling was a sin.  This makes it very hard for me to take any sort of Casino King seriously.  Every time I see Trump in the news, I immediately see a slot machine. But I'm trying; this is serious stuff.

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Practical Suggestions for Improving Things

This post is going to draw together a number of different ideas from a variety of subjects, so it's going to look pretty scattered, but ultimately, it is a common sense way of thinking.  The conclusions are also applicable to many different situations, so stay with us, in case the application that's relevant to you doesn't pop up right away.

Whenever anyone goes into a new job, or undertakes a new task that has to be done repeatedly, such as, for instance, a new teacher who has to teach some low-level class every semester, or a programmer who has been assigned to churn out an entire pile of little programs, all of very similar type, (the similarity aspect is not really pivotal,) there is a tendency to make little adjustments to the task, to make it easier on the worker.

Often, junior employees get assigned the less interesting jobs, because (for obvious reasons) the other jobs have been long desired by more senior workers, and they jump on them the minute they become available.  Initially, the new worker takes on his or her new task with some enthusiasm, but fairly soon the tedium of it sets in, and presently all s/he wants to do is to get the job off his/her desk, get the item off the agenda, get the idiot kids out of his/her classroom.  S/he'll never see them again, and good riddance!

But life is unfair, and one fine day, the employee gets to work on a new task, where the old work, shoddily done, suddenly reappears.  "Who taught you guys Trigonometry?"  You did, teacher.  Or "Who wrote this crappy piece of code?", or Who passed this zoning ordinance?  Or Who set this fracture?  You never expected that shaving that little bit out of the unpleasant task long ago would affect your future performance.

It's not just that shoddy work is, well, shoddy, which is obvious.  But rather that a new employee does not realize that shoddy work is not only bad in principle, but that it is a liability for him or her in an immediate way.  A new teacher might fall back on tweaking the details of a course to make things easier for herself.  But the consequences of the tinkering affect those who inherit the same students in future courses, that is, downstream.

The same principle holds, even if the tinkering is a well-meant improvement.  In actual fact, the phenomenon is part of a larger picture and a larger problem: How can one improve an entire multi-step process, without precipitating a domino-effect serial catastrophe?

Most people are not familiar with the idea of computer programming, except in the most general way, but, you know, it is such a useful concept that it should interest everybody.  Just a few examples will get the idea across.

A central idea of a program is the sequence of steps.  Not every segment of code proceeds sequentially (one step, followed by the next step); sometimes the sequence has to be changed in response to some situation that crops up, and a good program anticipates these, and has these responses built-in.  But ultimately, sequential code is the backbone of programming.  Here below is an image of a pseudocode program that does something symbolic, I believe.  (Many programming languages have a somewhat common design, so that generic programs in a sort of fictitious language can represent a solution to a programming problem.  This language is called pseudocode.)

As you can see, the program proceeds in steps, though some steps are compound instructions that require repetition (such as Step 6, for instance), and other steps are also repetition steps, where that loop has been manually set up with jumps, such as Step 5 through Step 12.  (It could have been done with a FOR instruction, as you might have guessed.)

A junior programmer might only need to dash off a short program, and never see it again.  But depending on various circumstances, the program may need to be tweaked.  In fact, most experienced programmers will tell you: tweaking is almost all there is.  By this they mean that the vast majority of programs need to be adjusted, either to improve efficiency, or handle outmoded hardware being replaced with new hardware, or obscure faults in the code that were never revealed for years (or many days, anyway).

Imagine a programmer staring moodily at a long program, which has to be modified to do the same job in a slightly different way.  As you can easily see, changing the last few steps of the program is much easier than changing the first few steps.  The downstream steps can be more easily changed, and in fact the code can be trial-run.

[Note: we are not advocating just changing the last few steps only.  If the changing is to be done a little at a time, changing the last few steps first, and then checking that the whole program works, makes sure that at least that last segment is fault-free, after which you can go on to look at the earlier steps, incrementally, working backwards to the beginning of the program, or block of code.]

Another analogy.  Suppose a school or college has decided to do away with a certain course.  Before the course is actually removed from the catalog, it is best to modify the most downstream courses to respond to the planned removal.  If you start at the lowest-level courses that depend on the course that is planned to go away (the upstream courses), the downstream courses must respond not only to the course targeted for axing, but the other altered courses as well!  Particularly, if the changes are to be made one course at a time, you have to start at the highest level course.  In fact, the highest-level courses can be changed without any domino effect, as is obvious.  (Changing the highest-level course, the last course in that stream that a student is likely to take, could certainly change the overall effectiveness of the curriculum, but it will probably not interfere with the preceding courses.)

Now for something slightly different.  A decision can be made on either theoretical grounds, or based on experience.  Experience, of course, is the greatest teacher.  If you lie down on the railway tracks, just for fun, and get run over, you're obviously never going to do that again.  But we can be taught to avoid risky behavior, and that is what we call education.  Education gives us a tool chest of theoretical principles that obviates the need for experience.  Unfortunately, when it comes to making changes, the experienced worker is in a better position to figure out in what sequence changes can be safely made, because the theoretical analysis of the situation can only work if every possible factor is taken into account, something that an inexperienced worker will find very, very difficult.

An area in which it is very difficult to see all the factors that impinge on a decision is, surprise: local government.  In fact, any sort of government.  Suppose it is desired to save money by reducing the services provided to abused women.  (Presently, at least in Pennsylvania, many counties provide temporary housing for abused women and their infants, until arrangements can be made for them to find secure homes for themselves.)  If the number of shelters are gradually reduced, abused women in the future will need to live in the abusive relationship for lack of a place to go to, and if the abuse escalates (as it often does), firstly, police officers will be called upon, to defend the victims; secondly, hospital emergency rooms will see an increase in the incidence of battered women needing treatment, thirdly, school truancy officers will need to investigate whether children are not attending school for truancy or for a parent unable to get them ready for school.  So it is very possible that a change intended to save money, actually results in an overall increase in costs, possibly placing more of a burden on other departments somewhere else.  (Some politicians are perfectly satisfied with this Moving Expenses To Other Departments game, but it is foolish and immature, and such politicians must be removed speedily.)

Those of us who have no occasion to be familiar with these matters have no inkling of how, for example, issuance of zoning variances could affect the noise level in a neighborhood (of course, the plutocrats who can afford homes far from the industrial zone do not care, and they expend great effort to ensure that they control the decisions of whose consequences they are immune), or how industrial effluent can hurt fishing streams, unless it is carefully treated, or how rural roads can be degraded by heavy trucks going to and from the industry.  The big picture is important.  But some big pictures are really too big, because the smaller pictures are more complicated, but the big-picture dreamers are very intolerant of complexity.  Some of the "small stuff" does need to be sweated.

Lots of things to think about.

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Wonder Woman: Multiple Thumbs Up [Note: A Few Tiny Spoilers]

Yes, we went to see Wonder Woman last night, and had a spanking good time.

Don’t get me wrong: I could see spots here and there that I felt could have been done differently, and better.  But man, it was just a lot of fun!

I’m not going to spill a whole pile of spoilers, but I need a little something on which to base my explanation of the features of the movie.

Firstly, the star of the movie is Gal Gadot, who has already played Wonder Woman in an earlier movie, Batman vs. Superman, or something like that.  The interesting point is that she has a slight Israeli accent, but she exaggerated it a little for the role, and all the actresses who played Amazons (a legendary —or mythical— tribe of women) adopted a slightly exotic accent, which made beautiful sense, because the one thing we could say with confidence is that Wonder Woman would not have an accent from the American Midwest!

Gal Gadot, secondly, is a beautiful woman, neither annoyingly slim nor dreadfully muscle-bound.  She did not look like a body-builder, nor an athlete (which would probably have been fine), but rather like a dancer.  She was supposed to look like a typical woman, who was of course a trained fighter, without any obvious physical peculiarities.  She had medium-short hair, the bright eyes you find in someone who is confident and aware and curious about the world around her.  But you discover very soon that she is not a genius.

Mini Spoiler No. 1:  The Amazons live in an island (or cluster of islands; traditionally Atlantis, but I think they changed its name for the movie) which is magically hidden away from the rest of the world.  After Zeus, father of the Gods, created the world, and mankind, and his fellow-gods, in the course of time, apparently, mankind and the other gods unleashed destruction on the Earth, the chief agent of which was War, the god of which was Ares (which they pronounce “Aries” in the movie).  Ares was unstoppable, and, says the narrator, things got so bad that Zeus had to create a tribe of women with special powers, to guard against the eventuality that Ares would arrange for the destruction of Mankind through cataclysmic wars.  (Of course, just as the Amazons were hidden from the rest of the world, the World was hidden from them, so it was unclear how they would find out what that bastard Ares was up to.  But they do . . .)

Mini Spoiler No. 2:  The story is set in the last weeks of World War I, which was called “The War to End All Wars” at that time.  A plane crashes into the water just offshore from where the Amazons lived, and our girl Diana is, as always, prowling around, exploring in the night, and sees the crash, and that there is a person entangled in the wreckage.  Unable to get free, the occupant and the remnants of the plane sink into the water, and Diana  fearlessly dives in to rescue the pilot.

Mini Spoiler No. 3:  Against the wishes of the Queen of the Amazons (Hippolyta), Diana’s mother, Diana sets out to escort the rescued airman to his people.  She is clothed in typical Amazonian gear, basically boiled leather armor (or perhaps some magical armor), the golden lasso, a magical sword, called the God-Slayer, and a headband, which Hippolyta gives Diana at the last minute.  On this journey, the airman explains to Diana what is going on: some bad guys are unleashing death and destruction on vast numbers of innocent people.
Wide-eyed Diana gasps, and says that this has to be the work of Ares.  “You must take me to him,” she says seriously, and declares that she will fix matters right up.

This is the charm of this movie.  There is a minor clash of cultures: the bronze age environment that still pervades the island of the Amazons, versus the machine-gun, airship culture of World War I.  Rather than the tribal wars that ravaged the world of the ancient Greeks, ostensibly orchestrated by Ares, there is modern warfare with huge collateral damage and civilian casualties, with groups of nations arrayed together against other groups, with fighting forces on each side numbering a thousand times the entire population of the Greek world.

Diana blinks, but she clings to the belief that the principle is the same.  People would not fight if Ares would not incite them to violence.  Ares is still orchestrating the war.  If Diana destroys Ares, the war will fizzle out.

Straightening this out is the sub-plot of the movie, or perhaps the main plot.  The airman brings Diana to London, which is the center of civilization as far as he is concerned, and Diana must deal with the cultural dislocation head on.  It begins with having to equip Diana with late Victorian clothing that is appropriate for a woman of her rank and habits, a way of covering up the enormous long-sword that she tends to constantly brandish, and the magical gauntlets that go up her forearm.  (The movie manages this with style, though the calf-length dress skirt is very innovative for the times, outside a playing field.)

It is fascinating to watch Diana’s expression closely as the Origins of the Amazons is drilled into her.  She looks frankly a little skeptical, I think, and even a little amused.  But when she sees the horrors of the front line first hand, her dismay is absolutely unfeigned.  That alone, I believe, qualifies the acting in this movie as either brilliant acting, or the directing as brilliant directing.  Diana is not a fool.  But the audience is always a couple of steps ahead of her, as it should always be in good drama.

The airman, Steve Trevor, puts together a team of specialists to get them to the front, where Steve wants to destroy an armaments factory, and, of course, Diana wants to confront Ares, whom she is confident about finding where the fighting is thickest.  While they lie and cheat their way to no-man’s land, the men browbeat her into doing it their way, but once they get close enough, Diana is not having any more of these namby-pamby war conventions.  She wants to get in there and have a confrontation with the real problem boys.

Ultimately she must conclude that war is a human thing.  The tales of the Greek Gods are ponderous attempts to anthropomorphize human tendencies, strengths and failings, and Diana must confront the fact that even if she destroys the embodiment-of-war-of-the-moment, war continues.  Steve tries to explain that fighting for peace is a lifetime commitment, but he does not have the time.

However, even when she is kicking serious butt, Diana is all fluid grace, even if it is very determined fluid grace.  Perhaps real wars cannot be fought like that, but man, if we had a choice, and if the cameras are on, that would certainly be the way I would like to kick butt.  Whoo!

If there is going to be a sequel, sell me a ticket.

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Another Two Cents' Worth

It is annoying to face each day beginning with a deluge of vitriol about the Trump Administration.  Not that they don't deserve a lot of vitriol, but that it is saddening to realize that those who feel obliged to give us this information and opinion do not realize how wearying it is.

There are many lessons to be learned from the events of this most recent (leading up to November 2017) campaign season, but we must be careful that we learn the right lessons.

1. Electoral College.  Some disgruntled (or any similar word; pick your own) liberals and / or Democrats are thinking that the Electoral College should be dumped.  I, for one, am not sure that this is a good thing.  If the Democrats had come out and voted, it would not have been an issue.

2. Some disgruntled liberals and Democrats (SDLD) blame the fact that the Democrats lost the election on picking the wrong horse; in other words, if Bernie had won the nomination, they feel, Trump would never have won.  On one hand, this could be true, because younger liberals are not happy with the path the Democrats have taken since Bill Clinton; there seems to be too much compromise with Business, Wall Street, and Big Banks.  But remember: any choice by the Democrats that removes the private sector as a source of employment will see problems.  Unfortunately, the private sector, by its very nature, hates to increase employment, which they think we don't know.  So this is a problem, without a ready solution.  It is hard to see how Bernie Sanders would have handled the employment problem quickly or efficiently.

3. If anyone thought that a typical business mogul would find running Washington D. C. a piece of cake, we now know the answer.  It does not help that Donald Trump was not the smartest businessman who ever lived; he was just good at winning by intimidation in his chosen area.  The presidency does not respond to that sort of approach.  On the other hand, the constant stream of disinformation pouring out on Twitter and Fox News does have a disruptive effect.  We must wonder: can laws be passed to limit the amount of fake news that can be put out, or are we stuck with disrupting media stories for henceforth?  This is a serious problem, because if lies cannot be battled with truth, it is almost impossible to arrive at valid conclusions.

4. One of Trump's biggest failings, (taking him, for a moment, seriously as a President) is his propensity--with a lot of his like-minded followers--for demanding a simplified view of the world.  Of course, it is natural to want to simplify the messy world we live in.  But it can't be simplified to the level that Trump likes, without losing lots of essential properties that need to be looked at.  The same is true of everybody.  We're surrounded with unreasonable demands for simplification, and we just can't deliver.

[To be continued.]