Category Archives: Marketplace of ideas

Read a book. Please. And then go read some more…

There are plenty out there to choose from.

At the end of my previous post, I tried to offer hope in spite of the situation I was describing. I said there are still “plenty of smart people out there,” suggesting that even though I haven’t figured out a fix, some of them might. I could have named names, but as incredible as it may sound, I was restraining myself with all my might, trying to keep the post from being any longer than the 2,899 words I ended up with.

One of the names I might have mentioned is that of David Brooks. But y’all know I admire that guy’s work; I’ve said so often enough.

I mention him now because of his most recent column, which was blessedly shorter than mine, but eloquently addressed an important aspect of what I was on about. The headline is “Producing Something This Stupid Is the Achievement of a Lifetime.”

You should read the whole thing (after all, his point is that kids — and adults — today need to be reading something. I’ve tried to make it available by using the “share full article” link, but I’m still not sure whether that words for everybody if you post it on a blog, or is only meant for sharing by text or email with one or two friends).

If you can’t (or, being a person of the 21st century, simply won’t) read it all, here’s an excerpt from the top:

You might have seen the various data points suggesting that Americans are losing their ability to reason.

The trend starts with the young. The percentage of fourth graders who score below basic in reading skills on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests is the highest it has been in 20 years. The percentage of eighth graders below basic was the highest in the exam’s three-decade history. A fourth grader who is below basic cannot grasp the sequence of events in a story. An eighth grader can’t grasp the main idea of an essay or identify the different sides of a debate.

Tests by the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies tell a similar story, only for older folks. Adult numeracy and literacy skills across the globe have been declining since 2017. Tests from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that test scores in adult literacy have been declining over the past decade…

Later, he quotes from a book by Jim Mattis and Bing West:

If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you…

Amen to that, warrior monk.

He doesn’t get to current news until the end:

What happens when people lose the ability to reason or render good judgments? Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Donald Trump’s tariff policy. I’ve covered a lot of policies over the decades, some of which I supported and some of which I opposed. But I have never seen a policy as stupid as this one. It is based on false assumptions. It rests on no coherent argument in its favor. It relies on no empirical evidence. It has almost no experts on its side — from left, right or center. It is jumble-headedness exemplified. Trump himself personifies stupidity’s essential feature — self-satisfaction, an inability to recognize the flaws in your thinking. And of course when the approach led to absolutely predictable mayhem, Trump, lacking any coherent plan, backtracked, flip-flopped, responding impulsively to the pressures of the moment as his team struggled to keep up.

Producing something this stupid is not the work of a day; it is the achievement of a lifetime — relying on decades of incuriosity, decades of not cracking a book, decades of being impervious to evidence…

But as I say, that comes at the end. As I said in that last post, the larger point isn’t Donald Trump. It’s the rest of us, and our own avoidance of reading, to the point that a majority of us were willing to vote for someone like Trump.

He ends with the words, “Civilization was fun while it lasted.”

Yeah. As I said

So Brooks is one of those smart people I was talking about, and he’s offered a solution: Go out and read a book. And then read  a few hundred more. I would add that they should be history books, but hey, almost anything would be an improvement….

Is this what the end of a great civilization looks like?

As a kid, I thought of societal collapse in terms of the fall of Rome.

As you know, I’ve been fascinated by history my whole life (and I still fail to understand why everyone else isn’t). Not as a profession, more of an avocation. I’m into it the way some people are into football. I earned a second major in it at Memphis State, completely by accident — I just took that many elective courses in the subject. (I had time for them for a number of reasons, including the fact that I didn’t go to football games.)

And ever since I was a kid, I’ve been somewhat morbidly interested in one of history’s most ominous questions: What would it be like to live in a great, thriving civilization that you deeply loved, and you were seeing it falling apart all around you?

I generally framed it in terms of Rome. It ruled the known world for centuries (despite a form of government that seems unstable at every point at which I’ve studied it), and then it was just gone. Suddenly, Rome is in the hands of barbarians, the last legion has pulled out of Britain, and all of Western Europe has sunk into chaotic darkness, ruled by local warlords of one sort or another.

But lately, I’ve gotten interested more in other collapses of great cultures, such as, say, the British Empire. It exceeded the Roman in geographic breadth and possibly global cultural hegemony (the adoption of English as the current lingua franca, for instance), so its collapse from what it was in Victoria’s day is pretty remarkable. But it still isn’t as complete or as crushing as the Roman fall (I was there last summer, and London still seemed to be thriving), and when I was in school my teachers didn’t cover it. Too recent, I suppose. And no barbarians have yet succeeded the Windsors.

At the moment, though, I’ve been fascinated by an earlier event on that sceptered isle. I’ve been listening to a wonderful (not only informative, but entertaining) podcast called The Rest is History, and I’ve been entralled by several episodes dealing with the events of 1066 (“the most important year in English history”), including what led up to it, and the details of the final erasure of real English (that is to say, Anglo-Saxon) rule. The last episode was the denouement, “The Battle of Hastings.” (But wait! I see there’s a fourth episode after that: “The Norman Conquest.” What joy. Unless, of course, you’re a Saxon.)

And remember last year when I suddenly discovered, to my great embarrassment, the Late Bronze Age Collapse? Well, I’m digging deeper into that now by reading a book about it, titled 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. Not that all of it — the attacks of the Sea Peoples, havoc caused by global warming, etc. — happened in that one year. It took awhile. I’m simultaneously studying the same period, or a bit later, from a different angle through James Kugel’s How to Read the Bible. (Turns out those Philistines who keep coming up in the Old Testament were actually Sea People. Who knew?)

You’ll notice I’m looking into collapses a bit more intently recently. You can probably figure out why. I haven’t paid all that much attention lately to stuff that’s happened since about a millennium ago. And considering what’s happening now, I haven’t missed too much that would give me joy.

When I was a kid, past collapses were an idle interest, and not very threatening — compared to, say, nuclear annihilation. In the 1950s and ’60s, I was growing up in a country and a period that was more firmly stable than anything I could see in the past. We were at the peak of an arc that started, as many reckoned it, with the Magna Carta in 1215. Several centuries later the process soared to previously unknown heights with the drafting and adoption of the U.S. Constitution — which was almost immediately a success, but would go through another two centuries of gradual perfection, with particularly big leaps during the presidential tenures of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and yes, Lyndon Johnson. The strains and splits that emerged in the 1960s were to me dramatic demonstrations of how resilient this rational and humane rule of, by and for the people really was. We carried on, and saw our Cold War adversaries do the collapsing.

We didn’t have an empire in the usual historical sense (despite all that nattering you heard in the ’60s), but since 1945 our global influence — and responsibility (that thing that so many on both the left and right now spit upon) — exceeded that of any emperor who ever sat upon a throne. I continue to love those stories of the incomparable Royal Navy in the Napoleonic era, but Lords Nelson and Cochrane, and my fictional hero Jack Aubrey, would have had to cut and run in the face of the Service in which my father served.

I read a lot of Mad magazines in the mid-’60s, and that’s fitting. If anyone had mentioned societal collapse to me in 1965, I’d have said, “What, me worry?

And now, this. All this stuff going on around us, in this beautiful country and throughout the West — in fact, throughout all the developed countries that a reasonable person might have wrongly, but reasonably, assumed were beyond such societal pratfalls as we read about in history books.

Do I have to detail all the evidence of collapse all around us as our liberal republican-democracy just goes “poof” in practically an instant? That shouldn’t be necessary. I take it most of you are paying more attention than I am to the daily nightmare.

Just last week, Donald the Unready destroyed $10 trillion in weath in this country and others, on an idiotic whim (idiotic whims being the only kind for which he possesses a certain genius). A lot of people had voted for him with one of the favorite slogans of people who understand neither government nor business on their lips: “Run Government Like a Business.” I saw a crack about that on social media in recent days. I can’t remember who said it, but it doesn’t matter, because the observation was so obvious that attribution seems unnecessary. (Actually, quite a few said it on Twitter.) Something like “They didn’t know he was going to run it like one of HIS businesses.” Of course, they had no excuse for not knowing, since they’d been warned a million times since 2016 — they just disregarded anyone who told them, because it didn’t fit within the fantasy in which they so fervently believed.

Of course, a few days back, Trump did his Emily Litella routine — “Never mind!” So everything’s OK, right? Well, no. There’s this thing that a functioning society needs leaders not only to project, but embody: stability. In the business world, “uncertainty” is a scary word. It keeps businesses from planning, growing, creating jobs, and all the rest.

Expect more surprise attacks on global financial growth and stability. Just as a garnish on top of his usual shtick of abandoning allies and hugging bad guys abroad, and pouring gasoline on ANY fire that serves to divide us at home.

Now let me pause to say what it’s always necessary to keep in mind, if we can stand to be that depressed: Trump isn’t the problem. The problem is that a majority of people in this country have so lost sight of what has always made America great (not just that — they’ve simply lost common sense) that they would actually vote for someone like that — repeatedly.

And just to make sure I tick off everybody, no one on the left should be nodding smugly at this point. If we had a Democratic Party capable of projecting an image of a strong, unified movement committed to principles and causes with broad appeal, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

I cite that book Sapiens a lot — not because I agree with everything Yuval Noah Harari says, but because when he’s right about something, he explains it well. And one thing he makes plain about what separates humans from other creatures and has enabled us to work together to advance to an extraordinary extent is the ability to coalesce around unifying ideas. We don’t have to all agree, but we need to embrace a consensus about certain basic principles. All successful human endeavors involving groups larger than, say, a troop of chimpanzees (somewhere between a couple of dozen individuals and a hundred) depends on that ability. It is in fact the one major thing that separates us from those other apes.

But quite suddenly, we have lost that special gift. Now we can’t even agree on what facts are, much less work together effectively to change and shape a commonly perceived reality.

(At this point, I should point out to you that I’ve been thinking about writing this post since sometime last summer but have not for a reason that should by now be evident to you: It just takes too much time, and too many words. After about 1,500 of them, I’m really just getting into the meat of the problem. And I’ve been writing it, in short bursts at a time, for two or three days. I’ll redouble my efforts to get to the end as quickly as possible…)

How do we pull out of this nose dive? I have no idea, which is one reason I haven’t written much on our current plight, and have spent more and more time on the distant past.

As elusive as solutions might be, it’s somewhat easier to diagnose the problem. I refer you back to every post I’ve written in the last couple of years that uses the term “Rabbit Hole.” You should probably start with this one.

Of course, now some of you are warming up your intense objections to the Rabbit Hole thesis. Some of your fave arguments are:

  • That I’m ignoring all the things that led up to the current situation. No, I’m not. I would never. The thing is, every major development has antecedents. The creators of those works I mention above touting 1177 B.C. and 1066, know full well that a great deal led up to those pivotal dates. For instance, England had been invaded successfully by non-Anglo Saxons exactly a half-century before 1066. (Check out King Cnut‘s big takeover in 1016.) But nothing so decisively changed the present and the entire future as what happened at Hastings in October 1066. And it was all quite sudden, as Harold Godwinson would tell you if he could. A similar book or podcast or whatever addressing what I’m talking about in this post would have “2016” in the title. That doesn’t mean a lot of it hadn’t already happened by that time, or that it isn’t still developing now. But that year was pivotal. It’s when some definitive disaster fell — a disaster that would have been impossible at any previous time in this one nation’s history. (Of course, this one nation isn’t the whole story of that year. Remember Brexit? The collapse of the Trans-Pacific Partnership? The election of Duterte in the Philippines?)
  • That Brad has a helluva nerve trying to tell you that the end of newspapers and its replacement by technology that could be (and pretty much always is) programmed to always tell you what you want to hear plays a huge role in the Decline of the West. Does he really think we’re too stupid to see the utter transparency of such self-interested pleading of a has-been career newspaper editor? No, he doesn’t. But he’s still confident in making that assertion, whether you accept it or not, precisely because of his extensive experience communicating all day every day in both eras.

So, those objections having been dealt with, I’ll get back to my premise…

The thing is, evolution grinds slowly — very slowly. It took many tens of thousand of years after humans got clever before they settled down to farm life, which led to the development of cities, kingdoms, empires, money, and writing, along with a gazillion other things. That started about 12,000 years ago, and we haven’t fully adjusted well to the changes. This very recent development is a big reason obesity is such a problem. Any hunter-gatherer with initiative stuffed himself with as many calories as he could, whenever he could. He had to. Now that most folks in developed countries can gorge themselves on sweets and other carbs without limit, our brains still haven’t completely evoved to the point that we understand that we shouldn’t. (Other creatures have to mutate for big things to happen. It is both the great advantage and flaw of humans that we just go ahead and change, and don’t wait around for new hardware and software to be installed.)

So consider what happens if you live in a modern liberal democracy with a deliberative system built to allow people to engage in lively disagreements, but do so in a manner that still allows for, even encourages, effective, amicable solutions. And then, all of a sudden, practically no one seems to believe in the abstractions necessary to such a system — the rule of law, the peaceful transfer of power, pluralism, Voltaire’s “I disagree with what you say…” principle, liberal democracy itself, all of it. They’ve all suddenly gone “poof,” in what amounts to a microsecond in evolutionary terms. (Of course, despite the words that follow, it wasn’t just our beloved technology that did this to us. There’s the classic American attitude that history is, as Henry Ford said, bunk. We are not a grounded people, in terms of internalizing the most important principles we have inherited.)

The internet, and a decade later social media, made it possible for the first time in human history for a sad, maladjusted person (and there are millions who fit this description on the planet; it’s not just that one guy) to communicate instantaneously with thousands (out of billions, a statistical fact in which we once could take comfort) of other people just as deluded as he is, and he and they become instantly convinced that they must not be crazy, because so many people agree! He, and every one of those thousands, now possess greater power to publish their musings than anyone previously in the history of written communication — and to do so instantly, and to the entire planet at once.

Consider the case of RFK Jr. In previous decades, he would simply have been (and I suppose was, up until recently) the embarrassing secret of a great American family. But today, he can in short order find himself leading an army of anti-vaxxers, and eventually become United States Secretary of Health and Human Services. In what previous time, since the U.S. Constitution was drafted, was such a thing possible? (Sure, the sadly lacking, even demented, son of a prince might once have raised an army and taken the throne, but isn’t one of the main points of this country the fact that we’ve put that sort of thing behind us? We had, and now suddenly it’s back.)

As a people, we have by and large simply turned our backs on the great American experiment. We were not overrun by Sea Peoples or other enemies. No Vesuvius went off and buried our cities in ash. We did it as whimsically, and unnecessarily, as Trump erased that $10 trillion in market value. We didn’t even do it consciously, near as I can tell. We just did it. And to the extent we’re conscious of the damage wrought, we’ve blamed it on those other guys (who used to be our fellow Americans).

How long will it take for our species to find its way through this unforeseen shock? How long will it take us to adapt, if we do?

I do not know. When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, it was the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic. Europe would not see another republic for 1,000 years. And that didn’t involve a new technological development that outstripped the human capacity to think clearly.

Am I saying things are hopeless? Nope. I’m not giving up. It’s not in my nature. Remember, I’m the guy who set aside everything he was doing to try to unseat an incumbent white Republican in South Carolina in 2018 — two years after that ominous date mentioned above.

But at the moment, I’m sort of out of ideas as to how we pull out of this. I suppose I’ll come up with something — that is, we’ll come up with something. I’m just describing the situation: that technology and our weaker tendencies have already done something to our cognitive abilities that we were not ready for. And mind you, AI hasn’t even gotten warmed up. Anyway, that’s my diagnosis over the last few months. Beyond that, I’m hearing a paucity of ideas regarding effective remedies.

But I’ll keep listening. There are plenty of smart people out there, even though it’s often hard to tell at the moment. And if I think of something myself, I’ll give you a heads-up. You know me.

In the meantime, maybe some of y’all have an idea, one that has so far escaped notice, for how we can return to building a rational civilization together. But don’t waste your breaths, as some tend to do, telling me I’m wrong. I’m not. Boy, do I wish I were…

Good for you for trying, Jeannie Gaffigan!

Here’s another thing Brad’s been doing (for the last few days, at least) instead of blogging: Trying to get through all that email that has been piling up since we went to Europe last summer.

In fits an starts the last week or so, I’ve managed to get back to Nov. 1. Which is like digging back a thousand years — to a time when at least a few people in our country could still think straight, and a decent human being who was not trying to destroy human civilization was president of the United States.

And that’s how I ran into this piece in America magazine by Jeannie Gaffigan. Y’all remember Jeannie. I wrote, with enthusiastic approval, about a previous column of hers back in 2020. Here’s a snippet from that earlier Gaffigan column:

As much as some of my well-intended fellow Catholics will hate to hear this, it is crystal clear to me that the right thing to do is vote for Joe Biden. I believe it will be impossible to tackle these other issues with a president who is working overtime to sow division and hatred in this county through insults, intimidation, fear and blatant racism. This venomous “us against them” mentality is trickling down, seeping into our churches and poisoning our pulpits. To a culture of life, vipers are deadly….

Amen, amen, amen!, said I.

Of course, Jeannie had more to work with at that time — our fellow Catholic Joe Biden, the only qualified candidate to run for our nation’s highest office in the last two election cycles. And, of course, the aforementioned decent human being, which is probably his most defining characteristic.

Jeannie Gaffigan

But Joe had been hounded into doing something I’d thought he would never do: he quit. Up until then, he was willing to spend his last breath struggling to save our country, and doing a fine job of it. But it became too hard for him to focus on the mission when the whole country — including people who should know better — were screaming “QUIT, JOE, QUIT!!!” 24 hours a day.

This put Jeannie, and me, and many others, into the uncomfortable position of urging people to vote for Kamala Harris, who tried hard — you’ve gotta give her that — but was still what she had been in 2020: unready. (And I don’t use that term lightly.)

The only advantage Kamala Harris — and those who would advance her bid — had was that her opponent was Donald Trump, for whom no one could possibly justify voting. And no one did. Justification was something these folks didn’t even attempt. Having gone substantially madder since 2020, they just voted for him anyway.

They ignored Jeannie. They ignored me, too, but I have no room to complain, because now we see that I also ignored Jeannie.

But not intentionally. Anyway, in case America will let you read it, here’s her column of Nov. 1. And if the Jesuits are wanting you to subscribe, here’s an excerpt:

An appeal to the moms out there: If you think parenting temper-tantrum toddlers or rebellious teenagers is nearly impossible, try letting them run your government! What would that look like? It’s a chilling thought but one that we can’t afford to ignore…

Amen again. And right now, a bunch of people on Wall Street who may have ignored you and me in November are now seeing exactly what you were talking about…

I keep getting these vapid appeals for contributions, alas

I’ve gotten pretty aggressive about responding “STOP” to appeals via text for political contributions, and I think the volume of them has noticeably dropped. But I still get them. And as usual, they generally do little to improve my overall impression as to the perspicacity of Homo sapiens.

This one from yesterday is a good example:

It’s Ro Khanna. I really need you to read this text.

(But if you’re short on time, please kick in $15 to replace the abysmal Republican House before you log off: rokhanna.us/218b?t=JBZO6O )

I don’t need to tell you that Congress is broken. Republicans have done a great job of that.

So instead, I’ll tell you my plan to fix it:

✅ Ban *all* PAC and lobbyist money from Congress
✅ Ban Congress members from trading stocks
✅ Enact term limits for Congress members and SCOTUS Justices
✅ Ban Congressmembers from ever becoming lobbyists

Hear me when I say this: So long as Republicans are in control, my ambitious plan to hold members of Congress accountable is dead in the water.

So today, I’m calling on my grassroots supporters to replace the catastrophic Republican Congress with progressive Democrats who will actually do their jobs.

I need 185 gifts before my midnight deadline to stay on track. Can I count on your $15? >> rokhanna.us/218b?t=JBZO6O

Thanks,
Ro

Text STOP to quit

OK, so you start out bemoaning “the abysmal Republican House,” suggesting that’s why you’re running, as a Democrat, for office — that is, for re-election to office. The implication being that you are the answer to the problem.

But you don’t talk about how the Trumpistas are tearing our country and its magnificent constitutional representative democracy apart — which is, you know, the problem with that other side.

No, you trot out a list of hoary alienated-populist proposals that make you sound for all the world like you are one of them:

  • Ban all PAC and lobbyist money from Congress (because we don’t trust people with money)
  • Ban Congress members from trading stocks (because we don’t trust markets or business people in general)
  • Enact term limits for Congress members and SCOTUS Justices (because we don’t trust anyone in power, which doesn’t say much that’s good about you)
  • Ban Congressmembers from ever becoming lobbyists (because we wouldn’t want people who know the system to help groups out there to make their cases to elected representatives)

(Remember my old column from the ’90s about how most of our problems in America wre the result of the decline of trust? Well, now that things are exponentially worse, I regret to say I told you so.)

Admittedly, the first two items would appeal to Democratic populists more than Republican ones, but hey, that’s why I’m not a fan of Bernie Sanders, either. But the third one is right out of the right’s playbook.

But more than that, it’s right out of the playbook of alienated people who don’t trust our system, don’t trust anyone in the system, don’t trust experts, and really don’t have the slightest understanding of any of those things.

Think about it. Those are Trump’s people. I mean, seriously: Do you really believe that the problem with this Republican Congress is that it’s full of the old populist stereotypes who start out all right, but get “corrupted” after any extended period in the system, and no longer care about the will of the people who elected them?

Set aside the fact that’s always been an absurd notion. If there’s a problem with a lot of people who have been in office for multiple terms, it’s that they are so interested in staying in office that they become mindless slaves of polls, which means they’ll do everything they can to do EXACTLY what the folks back home want. And to me, that means they are no longer worthwhile representatives.

A good representative should of course know his constituents, and keep their values in mind. But he should NEVER go to Washington (or Columbia) with a lot of half-baked notions about this and that specific issue held by good (or bad) people who have never studied such issues.

A representative should arrive with wishes and plans, but also humility, because he knows he has yet to study complex issues in any depth, or — and this is critical — engaged in extended debate with smart people who don’t see it the way he or his constituents do, and just may have greater understanding of the details than they do. And that is the rule more than the exception — capital cities are crammed with smart people who actually do know the issues better than the average guy on the street.

People such as lobbyists, to name one category (along with good staff people, academics, etc.).

Yes, all of us can cite cases in which big corporations with deep pockets hire armies of lobbyists that easily overwhelm the scrappy Mr.-Smith-Goes-To- Washington folks opposing them.

But scrappy groups that look out for the interests of the poor, the elderly, children, the environment, and whatever your favorite cause may be, have lobbyists, too. And the interests of the people and causes they represent are well served by their work, even though they may not be (OK, they are NOT) as numerous or well-paid as those who represent Big Pharma. If you don’t think they do good work, follow Sue Berkowitz of SC Appleseed Legal Justice Center, or our own Lynn Teague of League of Women Voters as they make their rounds, and become educated.

But I’m letting myself run off on tangents and pound on some of my personal pet peeves, and failing to explain what’s REALLY wrong with that text:

He calls the Republican Congress abysmal, and he’s absolutely right. But why is it abysmal? It certainly not because of the things he’s proposing to address, particularly not because of staying in office too long. The problem is yahoos who just got there and don’t know squat, and actively hate people who do know squat.

If you could bring back some of the Republicans who served for many years before this new crop of nihilists came along — people like Lamar Alexander, Howard Baker, Bob Inglis, Richard Lugar and on and on — Congress and the nation would be in fine shape today. Any decent Republicans — ones who might have filled the shoes of such as those — who are still around today have either quit running for office, or they tremble in fear of the ignorant, unprincipled yahoos with the torches and pitchforks who could replace them in a skinny minute in the next primary. Especially in the House, thanks to Republicans having succeeded a bit too well at redrawing districts so that the primary IS the election.

And their fear gets even greater when they see what the fear itself can do: Look at what happened in 2023 in the U.S. House itself. The five or so craziest members of the caucus managed to take down the speaker. Why? Because more sensible (to various, modest degrees) Republicans were too terrified to stand up to Matt Gaetz el al. Their own cowardice has since led them to be more afraid than before. The terror snowballs, at an exponentially increasing rate.

Give me people who have managed to stay in office for 30 years or more — since long before Trumpism, or the Tea Party — and while they will inevitably include a healthy share of mediocrities (as a result of too often consulting polls so as to follow popular opinion), I will take them any day before the kind of people who rush in these days to try to take their elders down — and succeed.

I probably haven’t persuaded anyone who didn’t already agree with me. Issues such as these tend to divide people almost as much as abortion, or guns — but with less intensity, of course.

The problem isn’t the system, even as much as it’s been damaged by the real problem — a general electorate that has lost its sense of responsibility as voters.

But I guess it’s hard to come up with a simple four-point plan to address that.

A brief explanation to the reader

In writing, ‘The main thing is to know what to leave out.’ I’m still working on that part…

I like it when writers offer explanatory notes to their readers. For instance, y’all know how obsessively fond I am of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels, and he frequently offers explanations about the history of his period, or about his writing process, before the opening of the work (here’s most of one of those). All add illumination and enjoyment to the story.

But my favorite might be this pair of notices from Huck Finn, facetious as they may be in part:

NOTICE.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
PER G. G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE.

EXPLANATORY

In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary “Pike County” dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.

I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.

THE AUTHOR.

Well, I’m no Twain or O’Brian, but I think it’s nice to pause and explain what I’m doing, if only to head off some of those “What the hell is going on here?” comments. I don’t want y’all developing calluses on your fingertips.

You may have noticed lately, as I’ve gotten rolling again after the holidays, that there’s been a change in what I write about — not a huge change, but noticeable.

I used to blog like a journalist (remember the Virtual Front Page?), and specifically like a journalist who’s dealt over the years with electoral politics more than any other subject. But you’re not going to see as much of that anymore.

There are a number of reasons for this. First, nobody’s paying me to keep people informed anymore. Second, I’ve realized people aren’t that interested in being informed in an era in which we have technology that enables them to be exposed only to what they want to hear. Third, journalism — and particularly political, opinion journalism — is based on the assumption that people are rational and persuadable, and therefore benefit mutually from some civil back-and-forth on the issues of the day, which makes all participants wiser, and better citizens. That is too seldom the case these days.

Then there are the personal reasons. Putting it briefly, I’m not interested in that stuff anymore. Or at least, I’m not interested in engaging with it when everyone’s consciousness is saturated in the ocean of nonsense that they get from media today. And no, I’m not just beefing again about the deleterious intellectual effects of social media. The MSM have in these rough seas lost their own ability to sort out what’s important to talk about.

I’ve told you over the last few years of my growing disgust with what is seen as “news,” and how it is presented, as the field of journalism has rapidly decayed. I am now holding myself back with both hands from offering examples of what’s wrong, because I’m trying to get back to my point (think like Twain! think like Hemingway!)

All of these harmful trends have accelerated in the past year. And for my part, I’ve gotten less patient in my eighth decade, and I prefer to spend what little time I can find to devote to this enterprise on things that interest me, and still seem worth the effort.

That includes such things as history, of course, and offshoots of history such as genealogy. And my love of popular culture (and even occasionally higher culture) has never waned. And there’s evolution, particularly of our own species, even as it seems to be collectively leaping off a developmental cliff.

And religion, of course. That one’s going to really chafe at some of you, both among the faithful and others who just don’t want to hear about it.

And if you don’t like any of this stuff, you can just go elsewhere. On some level you will be missed, but I don’t want to make you miserable, and despite recent developments, this is still a free country. At least until this coming Monday, and possibly beyond.

Note that, as that last sentence hints, current events — even political current events — will sometimes come up. (In keeping with my belief that everything, and I mean everything, is connected.) I’ll just be focusing on it from a different angle — one that interests me more, and perhaps will interest some of you.

As for the rest of you, I wish you not only a good day, but a wonderful life from here on. God bless you.

Hey, y’all, help me check something out

See if you can tune in the signal…

Lately, I’ve heard it said a couple of times on NYT Audio that their content — or some of their content — is free to nonsubscribers.

It might just be the blogs, like “Matter of Opinion,” and “The Ezra Klein Show.” I’m wondering whether it might also apply to the newspaper’s other content (like The Daily and Headlines), and to some of the stuff they carry from other publications, such as The New Yorker.

This matters to me because so much of what I read and hear — and would like to share with you, so we can have a fully informed conversation about the things I’m thinking about. Which is, you know, what a blog is about — unless I just cut off comments and write a “personal journal” that I simply allow others to read. Or not. Which I’ve thought about.

Unfortunately, despite the fact that I include quotes to an extent that some might say goes beyond Fair Use (I would not say that, but we all have our own views, don’t we?), too often the conversations don’t go any deeper than the headlines, which means they don’t go beyond the usual conversations people have about politics or culture or anything in this social media age. And every statement is drawn directly from the current talking points from the two sides — the only two sides too many people perceive.

And if we don’t get beyond that, there’s little point to blogging.

So… let’s see if this works. Here are links to some recent items from NYT Audio. I initially tried to give you something from each category — blogs, opinion and news content from the paper (some read by the writers, some by ersatz voices), and some from other sources.

I’ve also tried to share a variety of topics. But after the first two or three, I ran into a bit of a challenge. Read on:

OK, that was more complicated than I thought. I couldn’t even find links to most of the dozen or so items I wanted you to listen to. And I’m pretty sure that the last of those three goes to the text content, not the audio. NYT Audio doesn’t give, on the app, direct URLs to specific content. So I was trying to grab those from the browser on my Mac. And even then, I couldn’t find links to outside content that appears on the app, such as The New Yorker and Foreign Policy.

Bottom line: You may have to download the app onto your phone or other device. It’s obvious they want everyone to do that. It’s worth the effort if they give you free access, because there’s good stuff there on a wide ranged of topics and interests. Here’s where you download it.

You would be rewarded by being able to listen to some of these other pieces I was originally going to link to here:

  • Carlos Lozada: Stop Pretending Trump is not Who We Are
  • The New Yorker: The Improbably Rise of JD Vance
  • The Culture Desk: Why Was 1999 the Best Movie Year (No, that’s not a typo; the second 9 wasn’t supposed to be a 3. But as silly as the proposition sounds, it’s an interesting listen while walking.)
  • NYT Interview: Al Pacino is Still Going Big
  • Foreign Policy: What a U.K. Labour Win Means for the Global Left
  • Hard Fork: Apple Joins the A.I. Party, Elon’s Wild Week and HatGPT
  • The Daily: A Conversation with President Zelensky

Or maybe you’d be thus rewarded. I can’t tell from my end, since they recognized me as a subscriber. But still, if you have any success with anything I’ve offered above, please let me know. I’d really like this blog to feature deeper and more intelligent discussions about … whatever the subject at hand might be… than are likely to be fueled by free media…

Kristof is right: Don’t demean Trump voters

I didn’t see this Nicholas Kristof column until sometime after it ran at the end of August. I heard about it later, when he did a voice piece on NYT Audio speaking back to readers who had given him unmitigated grief for the column, headlined “Here’s Why We Shouldn’t Demean Trump Voters.”

Nicholas Kristof

You should be able to read it at that link, but if you’re too much of a slacker, I’ll tell you it was a good piece, and Kristof is completely right.

The piece starts with a quote from Bill Clinton speaking at the Democratic National Convention:

“We’ve seen more than one election slip away from us when we thought it couldn’t happen, when people got distracted by phony issues or overconfident…. ”

“I urge you to meet people where they are,” said Clinton, who knows something about winning votes outside of solid blue states. “I urge you not to demean them, but not to pretend you don’t disagree with them if you do. Treat them with respect — just the way you’d like them to treat you.”…

Well, that’s pretty basic, and no one who follows any of the multiple moral codes on this planet that share a version of the Golden Rule should have an argument with it at all. But I know that some will, and they will express themselves vehemently. Including some of y’all — and me.

I know Kristof is right, and I resolve before God and all of you to act accordingly. But I fear I will fail, as I often have before.

The reason, of course, is that I’ve never been able to think of a single reason to support Trump that doesn’t fit into one of two ugly categories. I’ve often raised the question, Which is it? Is Trump evil? Or just stupid? All, or at least most, of the halfway believeable excuses for backing him seem to fit in one of those categories. To overlook the legion of shocking problems with the man, it seems you must be as bent on destroying all the best things about this country I love, or just completely insensible to all evidence, and incapable of reaching a rational conclusion.

Of course, in my struggle to show the love I owe to every brother and sister on the planet, and my frequent failure to do so, I reveal my own evil, and my own stupidity.

I’m probably going to get myself in trouble with the NYT copyright lawyers (even though I’m strongly urging you to read the original, and even subscribe), but here are some excerpts from the Kristof piece:

By all means denounce Trump, but don’t stereotype and belittle the nearly half of Americans who have sided with him….

Since I live in a rural area, many of my old friends are Trump supporters. One, a good and generous woman, backs Trump because she feels betrayed by the Democratic and Republican political establishments, and she has a point. When factories closed and good union jobs left the area, she ended up homeless and addicted; four members of her extended family killed themselves and she once put a gun to her own head. So when a demagogue like Trump speaks to her pain and promises to bring factories back, of course her heart leaps.

Then her resolve strengthens when she hears liberals mock her faith — it was an evangelical church that helped her overcome homelessness — or deride her as “deplorable.”…

Since the Obama presidency, Democrats have increasingly become the party of the educated, and the upshot has often been a whiff of condescension toward working-class voters, especially toward voters of faith. And in a country where 74 percent of Americans report a belief in God, according to Gallup, and only 38 percent over the age of 25 have a four-year college degree, condescension is a losing strategy.

Michael Sandel, the eminent Harvard philosopher, condemns the scorn for people with less education as “the last acceptable prejudice” in America. He’s right…

And so forth. He concludes:

Whatever our politics, Trump brings out the worst in all of us. He nurtures hate on his side that we mirror.

So let’s take a deep breath, summon F.D.R.’s empathy for the forgotten man, follow Clinton’s advice — and, for the sake of winning elections as well as of civility, remember that the best way to get others to listen to us is to first listen to them.

Of course, that requires “them” being willing to listen to us, or even talk to us. Trump’s great triumph is in splitting us further apart. In a way, it’s his whole strategy. An America in which people who disagree speak and listen to each other is the America I grew up in — a place that would laugh a man like Trump right off the stage as he makes promises to hurting people that he has no intention of keeping.

I know how hard all this is for all of us, but we must not give in to Trump’s strategy. We need more of what happened in my yard several weeks ago — a neighbor who is super-involved in local GOP politics and has a Trump sign in his yard (I think — it’s awkwardly placed at the border of his yard and the one next door) came over and struck up a friendly conversation with my wife and me, even though he knew people close to him would think him crazy for doing so.

I appreciated it. We had a very amicable exchange of views, and have had another such talk since then.

It was really kind of wonderful. We all need to have more such talks. And I feel obliged to take the next step myself. And I know how. I used to have a lot of such conversations. It’s just been awfully hard lately…

Let me know if you can read these two good Dionne pieces

OK, I’m going to conduct an experiment here. Please help me out.

The last couple of weeks, E.J. Dionne has had two really excellent columns. There’s nothing unusual about that. But there’s something new — or something that I hadn’t previously noticed — about them. Here’s the first:

Did you see that at the end of the tweet — “my column free access?” I’m asking y’all to try to link and read the column, and let me know if you’re able to do so without being a subscriber. Then, leave your thoughts on the column.

I loved the piece, because E.J. is getting to the heart of my great appreciation of Joe Biden. Because I am both liberal and conservative myself, I see Joe as the only hope left to the country. We had plenty of such people to choose from in the decades after 1945. And we needed them. We need them more than ever now. But now there’s just Joe.

But E.J.’s piece also shames me a bit. I say the same things he’s saying here all the time, but I tend to present them as truth without the careful documentation and explanation. This is possibly because I grow weary of repeatedly explaining how I arrive at conclusions that have taken seven decades of thought and observation to reach. And people shrug it off, because they think it’s just the ranting of an alter cocker.

But I guess it’s also because I don’t get paid anymore to put in the time to dig up all the evidence supporting conclusions I reached long ago. So I don’t. Too much time spent doing what little I do to make a modest living. And doing it around those naps that are the residue of my stroke in 2000. I can do all the things I used to do, but I have less time in which to do them.

In any case, I’m very appreciative to E.J. for taking the time to explain it to his readers, especially since I know he’s busier than I am.

Now, the other column, which features the same “free access:”

First, again, please let me know if you can read it. Beyond that…

Another good piece. There are, of course, many things that, considered alone, tell us “all we need to know about him.” You could compile a lengthy list of things that, considered singly, should cause any voter to run the opposite way. But this should be, if not the top item, at least very close to it.

Anyway, I wanted to share these columns because they’re important, and I’m thinking E.J. gets these points across batter than I do.

Beyond that, though, I really want to know whether those links work for nonsubscribers.

This is one of the things that concerns me most about blogging these days. To me, almost everything worth discussing these days is from things I subscribe to. This was fine 10 or 15 years ago, before everybody got so serious about pay walls. Now, it’s a huge problem — I bring up something, and I want everyone to read it so we can have a discussion with everyone fully informed, but most people can’t open it. Because normal people don’t subscribe to four or five newspapers.

So when I get a chance to share, I seize it. But please let me know if it worked for you…

What has the Deep State ever done for us, eh?

I liked this little coincidence today.

First, while I was working out on the elliptical right after getting up, I watched the above video for about the hundredth time, and once again thoroughly enjoyed it.

Then, going through my email just now, I found one from The New York Times, with the subject line “Opinion Today: How the deep state works for you.”

That linked to this item, which began:

It Turns Out the ‘Deep State’
Is Actually Kind of Awesome

As America closes in on a major election, mistrust is brewing around the mysterious government entity that’s now denounced in scary-sounding terms — “the deep state” and “the swamp.” What do those words even mean? Who exactly do they describe?

We went on a road trip to find out. As we met the Americans who are being dismissed as public enemies, we discovered that they are … us. They like Taylor Swift. They dance bachata. They go to bed at night watching “Star Trek” reruns. They go to work and do their jobs: saving us from Armageddon.

Sure, our tax dollars pay them, but as you’ll see in the video above, what a return on our investment we get!…

I haven’t watched the accompanying video, because I don’t need to. I already know what this piece is trying to communicate to me. These are things I’ve known all my life, which is why I’ve watched in horror as the absurdly childish hostility to government has spread like a plague through our society, and is now threatening to end our republic.

Some people seem to need to have these things explained. And this writer is trying hard to explain it as simply as possible, with such pop-culture silliness as “They like Taylor Swift.” Personally, I think this next paragraph says it a bit better:

When we hear “deep state,” instead of recoiling, we should rally. We should think about the workers otherwise known as our public servants, the everyday superheroes who wake up ready to dedicate their careers and their lives to serving us. These are the Americans we employ. Even though their work is often invisible, it makes our lives better….

This reminds me of a regular feature that I inherited when I arrived at The State in 1987. As governmental affairs editor, aside from daily political and government coverage, I had the duty of filling a full page every week in the Sunday viewpoint section. One of the features we ran there each Sunday was something we internally called “Bureaucrat of the Week.” Nobody liked writing this feature — it took them away from keeping up with their own beats — and we spread the pain across the newsroom, beyond that team that actually worked directly for me. The reporter on the schedule for that week would have to go out and find a state employee — preferably one with a job different from others recently featured — who was willing to be profiled in this way.

I liked the idea behind it — let people know what these unsung folks are doing for you. But I thought it was unnecessary. Sure, we’d had several years of Ronald Reagan fanning the embers of anti-government sentiment, but the flames weren’t all that high yet, and I still assumed most grownups understood that their taxes paid for people to do things that were pretty essential to living in a tolerable civilization.

I later realized I was wrong in giving the average voter out there that much credit. That was a good feature. We should have done a lot more of that sort of thing. A few years later, a lot of us realized that, which is where things like “public journalism” came from. That generated a lot of seminar discussions, but not a lot of effective work — probably because even the advocates of the movement didn’t really understand the problem.

The problem was that it was the nature of news people to report what’s wrong. You had to tell people about the airliner that crashed. You didn’t have to tell people about the thousands that did not crash. Apply that principle to covering government, and every day, newspapers were giving people the very strong impression that everybody in government was embezzling, or lying about his resume, or doing something else nasty. Journalists knew better, because every day they dealt with the thousands of honest people in government who were dedicated to public service. Trouble is, they weren’ making news.

And we would never have the resources to cover them the way we covered the scoundrels. (No news organization that ever existed had the people and time to cover all the planes that land safely.) And we also knew people wouldn’t read it if we did. And somehow the less-thoughtful readers — never got the obvious point that we were telling them about the crooks because their behavior was a shocking departure from the norm. So we have the mess we have today.

But I digress. I just thought I’d share the fun video from Monty Python pointing to the absurdity of the kinds of people who go about ranting about things like, well, the “Deep State”…

Do you think Trump is the whole problem? Well, don’t…

I’ve made this point a bunch of times, but having been reminded of it the last two or three days, I thought I’d share it again once or twice.

Over the weekend, my friend Steve Millies in Chicago tweeted this:

What got me going was those last few words, “We should be capable of recognizing him as what he is, never voting for him.” Well, indeed. Anyone who walks into a voting booth should find the idea of voting for him unthinkable. But the problem is, there’s a big difference between should and the way things are. So I responded:

And there you have placed your finger upon the problem with America. Trump isn’t the problem. The problem is that there are actually people who will vote for him. Millions of them. And frankly, I don’t know how we solve that problem…

As regular readers will have noted, I’ve been trying to sort that out since 2016, when something happened that had never even come close to happening in our history. For the first time, American voters were willing to vote for someone as low, crude and grossly unqualified as Trump — enough of them to actually elect him.

Trump had been embarrassing himself on a public stage since sometime in the 1980s. But now, there were all these millions of people who thought he was a great choice to become the most powerful man in the world.

And those same people would do it again.

Anyway, this morning while working out, I got around to listening to Friday’s Matter of Opinion podcast, which was dedicated to the question, “Should Trump Be on the Ballot?” It was provoked, obviously, by the Supreme Court deciding to take up the question after recent developments in Colorado and Maine.

At some point, conservative Catholic columnist Ross Douthat said the following:

A deeper question here is just, do you think that the challenge to American democracy is just all about Donald Trump himself alone, this one guy, this distinctive figure, this reality TV show, proto-fascist, billionaire, whatever. And if we can just make him go away, things will go back to normal.

Do you think that? Because if you think that, then I can see how you start to talk yourself into the idea that this is a good idea, and you say to yourself, look, I’m sure that a majority of the Republicans on the Supreme Court do not want Donald Trump to be president again. So why shouldn’t they just wave a magic wand and get rid of him? Nikki Haley can run the table or maybe DeSantis could make a comeback. One of them will beat Donald Trump. Everything will go back to normal.

And that’s sort of a view that I had for the first year or so of the Trump phenomenon. And I guess, I don’t understand how at this point, with everything we’ve seen in Europe, in North America, around the world, that you could think of Trump as just sort of a force that you can just make go away, and everything will go back to normal. But clearly, there are people who think that. So that’s what I’m interested in, I guess, again, having thought that once myself…

Which brings us again to the question: If Trump goes away, does the problem go away?

I don’t think so. The problem is bigger and more complicated than that. If you want to paint a picture of it, it’s not going to be a portrait of this one weird guy. It’s going to be more like a Bosch painting. Good luck making sense of it…

What’s YOUR Dream Team matchup for POTUS?

My mention of Matter of Opinion earlier reminds me of a podcast from last month that I meant to post about, and forgot.

So here goes, and this time, I’m giving you a link that MAY let you listen to it, or at least read the transcript, without a subscription. Someone please try it and let me know whether it works.

Here’s the link to “The Presidential Fantasy Draft America Needs.”

If you can’t or won’t go listen, here’s the essence of it: Ross Douthat posed a question to the panel:

Since so many voters seem to be so over a Trump-Biden rematch in advance, I want to ask each of you what your ideal match-up would actually be. Who do you wish was going head to head for president in 2024?

He started it off by offering his own picks:

I’m going to say that I would like to see a race between JD Vance of Ohio and my home state senator, Chris Murphy, Democrat, of Connecticut.

Michelle Cottle responded, “I’m going a different way. I’m going Gretchen Whitmer versus Glenn Youngkin.”

Lydia Polgreen said she was going to cheat, which if I recall correctly caused the others to hoot at her, but she went ahead:

I’m interested in the sort of theoretical exercise of what the future might look like, knowing that these matchups will never happen. So the first one is testing how the various inflections of populism will unfold in this country. So I would love to see the representative from New York City, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez against Ross’s candidate, JD Vance, in Ohio….

The other is Rafael Warnock, the senator from Georgia, and Josh Hawley, the senator from Missouri. The reason I chose those two is that I’m very interested in the role of religion in our country….

The only one who came anywhere near my own choices was Carlos Lozada, whom (as I’ve mentioned before) I have come to respect a lot from listening to these podcasts:

…I finally concluded that my dream matchup is, coming out of nowhere, Biden versus Trump.

This is not the matchup you want. It is the matchup we need. More than any other dream matchup that I can dream up, this matchup forces America to decide on first principles on what it is about. Trump is running as an authoritarian candidate who wants to shred the Constitution.

Biden’s campaign, both 2020 and for 2024, are premised almost entirely on preserving American democracy…

I’m with him on Biden, but definitely not on Trump. Any major-party candidate has almost exactly a 50-50 chance of winning — that’s the way America is now. But there must be ZERO chance of Trump winning again. I refuse to advance a “dream” that offers any chance at all of that.

To do what Lozada is trying to do, but without the distinct chance of driving the final nail into America’s (and the world’s) coffin, we need an actual Republican to oppose Joe’s classic Democratic-liberal views. Then you’re offering the country a real choice, but not playing Russian roulette with the country.

So I’d go with Asa Hutchinson. Yeah, I know he has no chance. But he’s running, and he meets the bill as I’ve set it out, and after all this is a “fantasy draft.”

All that said, what I really want is to see whom y’all would pick. And make a good case for it, please…

A conversation I had with a friend this morning

It’s the kind of exchange I think is valuable, so here it is…


You know what? The embed codes are messing up and overlapping each other. I’ll just give you plain text for the rest…

Steve: You’re right that a binary needs 2 to tango but also I’m not willing to bothsides this because there’s a peculiar madness on one side that is more responsible for our polarization than any other factor. I’m so devoted to that point of view that I wrote a book abt it.

Me: The right has gone stark, raving mad. But tragically, the left is weakened by its own embrace of some of the symptoms. Neither side is an appetizing “team” to join. And media have trained everyone to think in binary terms, by covering politics like sports. So we’re lost…

Me again: That probably seemed incoherent. Too many related thoughts, not enough room for the transitions…

Steve: It makes sense. But my conclusion is that madness supersedes weakenedness. The Right no longer is doing politics recognizably at all, they’ve gone so far there aren’t 2 sides anymore for anyone serious abt politics and that’s why we have to overcome the binary framing.

Me: You know that book I keep telling you I want to write, but (unlike you) never do? If I ever write it, I have an idea for another. It’s about politics, and my tentative title is “Consensus.” It’s what we desperately need to work toward, at all times….

Steve: A longtime struggler toward consensus, though, I have to say that you can’t achieve consensus or engage in dialogue with people who don’t accept that consensus and dialogue are legitimate. Our more fundamental problem is that too many people don’t believe in politics at all.

Me: Absolutely. That’s what I meant by “we’re lost.” And one of many reasons is that people don’t understand basic things about our system, which is intended to be deliberative. They think it’s about winning 50%+1, and cramming their will down the throats of the “bad people”…

Both of us could have gone on, but had things to do — especially Steve, who as I mentioned in passing, actually writes books instead of just talking about it, and has busy day jobs as well. He’s a  professor of public theology and director of The Bernardin Center at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.

You see what I did there? Under the guise of finally posting something on the blog (without having to write it from scratch) I snuck in another “ones and zeroes” post. Fair warning: I’m likely to do it again at any time.

The part of the exchange that deals with consensus is another step down the same train of thought that led to this post awhile back

The system they came up with would work if we would accept that it’s designed to be deliberative, and not just about shouting at each other.

Maybe this is why I like David Brooks’ work

I’ve said a lot of positive things about David Brooks over the years. I not only agree with the guy a lot, but I tend to wish I had written what he did. I feel like I should have written it. His thoughts just run that much in sync with my own.

I’ve never thought about why, but maybe this is why. Or part of why…

I’ve been enjoying this new app from The New York Times — NYT Audio. It’s particularly great for my walks around the neighborhood, a sort of supplement to NPR One.

Anyway, today’s NYT Audio offered something I haven’t heard before in that format. It was a piece by Brooks, read by himself, headlined “We’re Disconnected and Lonely. David Brooks Has a Solution.”

Early on in the short piece, he says:

My nursery school teacher told my parents, apparently, David doesn’t always play with the other kids. He just observes them, which was great for my life as a journalist, but maybe not great for having strong bonds and intimate connections…

Wow. I really, really identified with that.

Not that I didn’t play with the other children at that age. I did. But there was always that sort of theme in my childhood. Part of it was moving around all the time as a Navy brat. For awhile, I would observe this bunch of kids, and soon I’d move on and observe that bunch of kids, and so forth. And as much as I would enjoy their company, I wasn’t quite… one of them. Not quite.

And yeah, these are characteristics that lend themselves to the profession of journalism. In fact, I’ve noticed that it seems a lot of military brats end up in the trade, and I’ve always thought that characteristic had something to do with it. You know, the habit of observing a community of people rather than feeling fully a part of it.

I’ve also noticed that — it seemed to me (I’ve never tried to quantify it) — it seemed like more journalists were Jewish or Catholic than you would find in the surrounding population. In other words, they were used to looking at things in ways slightly different from the way the majority would. David Brooks isn’t a military brat, but he sorta-kinda fits in both of those other categories.

This tendency to be an observer rather than a participant can be problematic. When you share with other people something you have observed — particularly something outrageous, such as, say, having heard someone else say wildly racist things — they wonder what’s wrong with you that you didn’t react at the time. What did YOU do? they demand. And they have a point. They make me wonder, too.

But I still tend to look at the person asking that rather blankly. Because when confronted with something really wild and strange, I tend to simply observe more intently. I might even think, in frustration, I can’t take notes, however much I want to, without interfering with this phenomenon. Which I wouldn’t want to do, because it would change the nature of what was happening. And not necessarily for the better. Sure, it might make the person act differently, superficially in that moment. But I always want to know what he or she is really thinking.

Way back during my reporting days, I was conscious of that on the job. A lot of reporters feel at home in a press box, or otherwise labeled and sequestered. I never did, because I was conscious of the Observer Effect, which in one thing in physics, but in journalism could be stated as, If the newsmakers are aware that a reporter is present, they will act and speak differently, and the news will change. Sometimes, that can be a salutary thing. But if you really want to know what they’re thinking and doing, it is not.

Anyway, in recent years I have rethought this mode of being, as you have seen. And so has Brooks, and that is the larger point of his little recited essay. It’s not about him. It’s about the fact that just when he started trying to change and engage better with other people, he saw that people in the surrounding, observable world were getting more distant, less engaged and even more hostile toward each other.

Which caused him to resolve:

I’m going to double down on spending as much time as I can, as effectively I can, and seeing another person, in trying to understand their point of view, and trying to make them feel seen, heard, and understood…

The ending is sort of upbeat. On his effort to be more of a full human, “maybe I’ll give myself a B minus.”

Which is better than flunking…

A great extended quote from ‘Matter of Opinion’

Y’all may remember that years ago — like, pre-COVID — I happily shared with y’all the fact that I had finally figured out something painfully obvious: that the best time to listen to podcasts, which I had been meaning to do, was during my long walks each day.

Anyway, at the time, I mentioned that one of my favorites up to that point was “The Argument,” a New York Times podcast. In fact, I linked to a specific episode from those days. That program was very good when it featured David Leonhardt, Ross Douthat and Michelle Goldberg. Then those people started falling away from it, and the topics started to be things that didn’t interest me, and I got out of the habit.

I’m only recently discovered an adequate substitute for it. It’s called “Matter of Opinion,” with Michelle Cottle, Ross Douthat, Carlos Lozada and Lydia Polgreen. It has only one former Argument participant — Douthat — but it very much has the same kind of thoughtfulness and intellectual heft that The Argument once had. And it has one other essential ingredient: civility. Here are people who are about as wide apart as you can get on issue after issue, and yet they not only discuss these differences in a civil manner, but they enjoy each other’s company. It’s rather like another NYT feature in that regard: “The Conversation,” featuring Gail Collins and Bret Stephens.

In other words, it offers the kind of vibe I am determined to have on this blog.

Anyway, the most recent one was headlined, “The Woke Burnout Is Real — and Politics Is Catching Up.” I frankly did not fully understand the phrase “woke burnout” at first, partly because it didn’t start with any sort of formal statement of the topic. Who was burned out? The right? The left? And why? (I very much hoped it would be for good reasons.) But I think what is meant is what is said in the subhed, “It’s time to start asking if the culture wars actually matter to voters.”

Then, when I looked at it on my PC — seeking the transcript — I found this intro:

Classrooms have been a key battleground in the so-called woke wars for years now. But could the debate over how schools teach history, race, gender and sexuality be coming to an end?

That explained it.

And part of it was wonderful. Especially when Carlos Lozada said that:

… for the last couple of days I’ve had this deep dread and despair weighing on me, knowing we were going to talk about this. The discussions over woke, and anti-woke, and culture wars are soul sucking to me. I think it’s good to have specific debates over affirmative action in college admissions, the problems with boys, the way we teach history. I mean, that’s terrific. And we’ve had that on this podcast, and we should continue to have it. But when we talk about the culture war, that’s not about debating issues. The culture war is about joining a side. It is about picking a team. And the problem with picking a team in the culture wars is that you inevitably end up with lunatics on your team. And the craziest ones are often the captains of the team. And they may want to go much further than you might want to go.

Carlos Lozada

But you’re on the team, and you don’t want the other side to win. So you end up supporting what the team is defending. So you end up fighting vociferously over things you may not know a lot about. You end up policing language and dogma with the zeal of the convert.

And you end up speaking not just for yourself, but for this amorphous community that never necessarily granted you the rights to speak for it. There’s so many great writers and thinkers who get baited into this, and then they have difficulty writing about anything else because they’re no longer making an argument or exploring an issue. They are defending turf.

The irony of the culture war is that the purpose of the war is not to win it. It is to continue to wage it. You are never going to hear a culture war activist saying, you know what? The cause is won. The fight is over. Let’s close up shop. I don’t need any more funding. It’s like a business lobbyist saying, our profits are pretty healthy. I don’t need more loopholes in the tax code. That’s not a thing that happens in a culture war. The fight is never over. The stakes are always rising. There’s a new front, a new trench you have to dig, a new hill you have to die on.

And it becomes a reason for being. It becomes your emotional, and your financial, and your intellectual sustenance. And that’s why I limit the amount of time I write about this or think about this because it is incredibly frustrating to me…

I heard all that as I was arriving back at my house from a walk, so I didn’t hear the rest of the podcast. I need to go back and do so, but there are so many things in the world I keep saying that I need to go back and do that I may not.

But before this fades from my memory, I wanted to share with you what Lozada said. Almost every line of it is a view I deeply hold, and it goes to the heart of why I say so many things I say on this blog. In fact, these ideas are pretty central to why the blog exists. So I wanted to make sure I shared them with you, before I move on to the next subject…

A nice read about a nice guy who gave a nice speech…

Well, here I go again — urging you all to read something that you probably can’t see because you don’t subscribe. But I don’t know what else to do.

Once communities across the country were tied together by common narratives. It was cheap to subscribe to the local newspaper (because the cost of producing the paper was born by advertisers, not readers — and that’s gone away). Their local journalists generally weren’t necessarily oracles of wisdom (I just said “generally,” mind you), but they had little trouble agreeing on basic facts of what had happened, and report it. And a calmer reading public accepted that plain reality, and worked from that as citizens.

But then several things happened. First, starting sometime in the 1980s, politics started getting really, really nasty, and partisan divisions started festering to a degree previously unseen in post-1945 America. Meanwhile, local media’s advertising base disappeared, and press and electronic media were reduced to skeleton staffs, increasingly finding it hard to cover anything adequately. Finally, people started more and more being deluged by media that had nothing to do with journalism, and cared more about advancing the fantasies of their respective bitter factions than about dispassionately informing the public. Tsunamis of it.

Even the best journals in the country, the ones that still had adequate, talented staffs, started focusing more and more on the bitter divisions, the things that separated us more than what we held in common as Americans. Why? Because that’s what the world looked like now. They were describing reality, although painfully superficially.

But sometimes, those journals still something thoughtful, something that offers a little hope for sanity, something that might even make you feel OK about the human race, sort of. In recent years, I’ve focused as a reader mostly on that stuff, not the latest shouting over the debt limit or whatever. Unfortunately, those things appeared in the still-healthy journals to which I subscribe. So I write about those things, and try to share them when possible.

To get to my point…

Today, there was a nice piece about a nice guy giving a nice speech. It was headlined, “At Harvard, Tom Hanks offered an increasingly rare moment of grace.” A long excerpt, which I hope the Post‘s legal department will allow me:

The language of the academy is increasingly centered on who or what is centered — what voices, what values — and there wasn’t the least doubt, on a day that also honored a Nobel Prize-winning chemist, a magisterial historian, a groundbreaking biochemist, a media pioneer and a four-star admiral, that Dr. Hanks was the center of attention. It takes an astute understanding of human physics to redirect all those energies and center the students. Over and over, he found ways to send the focus back to them, rising from his seat to kneel in awe before Latin orator Josiah Meadows, hugging Vic Hogg — who recounted a harrowing recovery from gunshot wounds suffered during a carjacking — grace notes and gestures aimed at the musicians and speakers whose names he wove into his own remarks, and at the parents whose pride pulsed across the sea of caps and gowns.

Our public square suffers an acute shortage of such acts of grace. Leaders find power and profit in crassness and cruelty, and signal that virtue is for suckers. It’s a cliché that Tom Hanks is “the nicest guy in Hollywood,” that he and his wife of 35 years, Rita Wilson, somehow manage to represent decency at a time when the country is so divided we can’t even agree on who is worth admiring. On a brisk spring day, watching the radioactive level of attention on him, and his ability to refract it into pure joy and shared humanity, was a healing energy in a sorry time. You can imagine that normal comes naturally to some people; but how often do people who are treated as being bigger, better, more special than everyone else resist the temptation to believe it?

And when it was time for Hanks to deliver his formal message, the script, while occasionally overwritten, rhymed with the mission. Flapping banners exalted the university motto, “Veritas,” and Hanks took up the battle cry. “The truth, to some, is no longer empirical. It’s no longer based on data nor common sense nor even common decency,” he said. “Truth is now considered malleable by opinion and by zero-sum endgames. Imagery is manufactured with audacity and with purpose to achieve the primal task of marring the truth with mock logic, to achieve with fake expertise, with false sincerity, with phrases like, ‘I’m just saying. Well, I’m just asking. I’m just wondering.’”

The opposite of love is not hate, Elie Wiesel said, but indifference, and Hanks put the challenge before his audience of rising leaders and explorers, artists and environmentalists, teachers and technologists. “Every day, every year, and for every graduating class, there is a choice to be made. It’s the same option for all grown-ups, who have to decide to be one of three types of Americans,” Hanks said. “Those who embrace liberty and freedom for all, those who won’t, or those who are indifferent.” Bracing as the words were, the actions spoke louder. For those of us in the truth business — which is to say, all of us — it was an actor who never finished college who set a standard we can work to live up to.

This is not a big-deal story. Just a writer — Nancy Gibbs, a former editor in chief of Time magazine — witnessing an incident in which a famous person was given a forum and used it to show respect to other people and to say a few words that made some sense. I thank her for sharing that, and the Post for running it, and I wanted to share it with you to the best of my ability…

Stop trying to oversimplify things, people! It doesn’t help.

Above, you see my results from an exercise offered today by The Washington Post that promised to show me “what kind of budgeter you are.” It was offered, of course, within the context of the debt ceiling “debate” going on in Washington.

It is laughable. Apparently, since I’m not, I don’t know, a member of AOC’s “squad” or something, I “believe that the national debt is the foremost crisis.”

It says that, even though I said a flat no to “Cut Defense Spending.” So go figure. I also, by the way, said no to “Enact House GOP debt ceiling bill.”

“Play our budget game,” the headline that led to the above brilliant conclusion. As though I were a child to be entertained. But at least they admitted that it was a game, and didn’t claim it bore any resemblance to real budgeting on the federal level — which, like everything else in government, is a tangled web of conflicting priorities.

Bottom line, as a more-or-less rational person, I believe we should reduce the debt. And I don’t see any way we get there without doing both of the following:

  1. Cutting some spending.
  2. Raising some taxes.

In fact, it will involve both cutting more spending, and raising more taxes, than most people even want to think about. Still, note the “some” in each case. Only a fool would cut all spending in sight or raise every tax suggested. The decisions to be made along the way are staggeringly complicated, and neither ideology nor simple rule of thumb will not guide you to anything that could remotely be recognized as wise governance. The process requires discernment and deliberation.

And putting silly labels on yourself or others — especially simplistic ones assigned by such a “game” as this — doesn’t help you acquire those qualities…

The Kamala Harris problem

Doug Ross, earlier today, put it more harshly than I would have. But yeah, having Kamala Harris in line for the presidency is not a pleasant thought. I mean, it’s light years better than having a Donald Trump, but it’s still far from being a good thing.

It’s about… I guess it’s about in the same ballpark as having Nikki Haley as president, in terms of qualifications, temperament and so forth.

Which is not a pleasant thought, as I said. You know me. I’ve got this thing about qualifications. A bit of a fetish, really. And neither of these ladies has them at the level I expect for this particular job. Unless you call “being a woman” or “being black” to be qualifications, which I don’t, any more than I would consider being a man or white to be relevant credentials. I mean, let’s face it: Most white guys don’t measure up to this job. Most other people don’t, either. And Nikki and Kamala are in the “most people” category.

Before I abandon my Kamala/Nikki comparison, though, I will say this in the veep’s favor: She’d probably retain a huge portion of Joe’s administration if he were gone, whereas I have no confidence at all in the random newbies Nikki would be likely to bring in. If you doubt me, ask Darla Moore about Nikki’s judgment on appointments.

Anyway, Matt Bai came closer than Doug to my view on Kamala Harris, in a column the other day headlined, “How Joe Biden should solve the Kamala Harris Conundrum.” It was a good piece, and I wish you could read it without a subscription. Here’s an excerpt… he said Joe’s biggest handicap is “the uncomfortable question of whether voters can get their heads around Biden’s vice president as a potential president — a question that is probably more pressing for Biden, who would be 82 if he takes the oath for a second time, than it has been for any nominee since Franklin D. Roosevelt sought a fourth term.”

And it’s a tough topic, especially for Democrats…

Because to understand the root of Biden’s Kamala Harris Conundrum now, you have to understand his thinking in 2020 — which means touching on fraught subjects of race and gender. (This is a thankless task in the current environment, but let’s do it anyway.)

Having publicly promised to choose a woman during his primary campaign with Bernie Sanders, and then wanting to hold his party together during an agonizing summer of racial unrest, Biden determined that his running mate should be a Black woman. It was the right call at the time, morally and politically — although I would argue that by publicly crowing about his criteria, Biden’s campaign did his eventual running mate a disservice, ensuring that whomever he chose would be seen as the best Black female candidate rather than the best candidate, period.

Given the country’s long struggle with inclusivity at the highest levels of politics, however, the list of Black women with obvious credentials wasn’t long, and most of the candidates were untested….

That’s probably all I dare lift directly from the column, but it’s all very much on point, in my view.

Y’all know I really like Joe, but that doesn’t mean I always think he does the right thing (abortion, Afghanistan, just to talk about the A’s). And I don’t think he should have promised to pick a woman, for the reasons Bai points out.

Of course, once he did, I didn’t think it was too bad, since I thought Amy Klobuchar was the best of his rivals during the primaries. Although, she deserved to be seen as the best candidate, not merely, as Bai points out, the best of a certain gender.

I was a lot more concerned when he said she also had to be black, because as Bai is also correct in noting, while we have more black women in politics than we used to, there’s a great lack of black women with “obvious” presidential credentials.

But I kept my eyes peeled, and ended up praising Karen Bass, who is now mayor of Los Angeles. (See “I think I like Karen Bass. As always, I’d like to know more.“)

But Joe went with the black woman who was one of the three black women I would least have wanted him to pick. Obviously, I think he was looking at different things from what I was looking at. And no, I don’t mean what President Obama was looking at in 2013 (although it was hard to argue with the president at the time, unless you were an ardent feminist).

I think he saw her as politically helpful, perhaps even politically necessary. And maybe he was right. Maybe it was close enough that he’d have lost without whatever portion of the electorate she helped turn out. And that would have been disastrous for the country. So Joe picked her, despite the way she had unforgettably stabbed him in the back the year before. He didn’t care about that as much as I did.

Anyway, he picked her, and I tried to be optimistic. But I have to say that in the last three years, I haven’t seen her take on any qualities that would increase my confidence in her. Of course, admittedly, I don’t spend a lot of time scrutinizing what veeps do.

And now, Joe’s stuck with her. And while Matt Bai’s diagnosis of the problem was really good, he didn’t really come up with what I would call a solution to the conundrum.

What he suggested seemed kind of fatalistic, really. But I admit I don’t have any better ideas. And neither does anyone else. As long as there are no acceptable alternatives to my man Joe for the top job — and there aren’t ANY — it may just be a problem we have to live with. Which is kind of what Bai said…

I liked one thing Nikki said the other day

This story, by our own Meg Kinnard, was one of several that featured the word…

The day that I posted that item about Joe Biden, I had meant also to post a good word about Nikki Haley. Or to be more specific, a good word about an even better word she used.

Having anyone use such a word, especially in such a context, is a rare thing, and one that deserves to be encouraged when such an occasion arises.

So, a few days late, here you go. I’m referring to something she had to say on the subject of abortion. See if you can find the word:

Haley said Tuesday that she does “believe there is a federal role on abortion.” She added: “I want to save as many babies and help as many moms as possible. That is my goal. To do that at the federal level, the next president must find national consensus.”…

Yeah, the word is “consensus.” I would fully explain why that word is key if I had time. And it would take a lot of time, because the reasons it appeals to me are so alien in this ones-and-zeroes age in which we live. It would take so many words that lately I’ve been thinking about writing a book about it. But if I were a betting man, I’d lay heavy odds against that book being written. I don’t know when I’d find the time, between the commitments I have at the moment. Especially since I have another book sketched out in my head that I would write first. I don’t know when I’m going to get to that one, much less the consensus one, which is far less fully formed.

But it’s there. And I thank Nikki for reminding me of it.

Perhaps I should explain that I don’t see consensus as key to solving our abortion problem alone. Consensus is something we need on many, many issues, from guns to the national debt limit.

But abortion does provide a particularly stark example. The challenge is, how on Earth do we get from this small thing of an otherwise unimpressive candidate using the word in a speech — in this case, to try to recapture some of the moderate appeal that taking down the flag won her several years ago — to the point at which we have the consensus to which she refers?

I don’t know. Which is a good reason why if I get time to write a book, the other one is coming first. I’ve got that other one pretty well mapped out.

But I’m increasingly sure it’s what we need. And abortion is a good example of why we need it. I don’t see any other way of approaching it that gets us to where that issue — and others — stop tearing our country apart.

I don’t know how else even I, personally, can get to where I feel that we’re on the right track.

You folks who’ve argued vehemently with me over the abortion issue for years probably think ol’ Brad is pretty pleased now that Roe is gone. But I’m not. You see, while I am most definitely and clearly opposed to legalized abortion on demand — to human lives being made subordinate to other individuals’ “personal autonomy” — I’ve never been able to feel at home with the way folks on “my side” approach the issue, either.

And I’ve always seen it as destructive to think of the issue in the terms in which it has been framed in our politics for the last five decades, with both sides embracing the notion that “if we can just elect a president who will change the court so that a majority of justices vote our way, the problem is solved because then we can just cram it down the throats of those bastards on the other side.” Excuse the language, but a big part of the problem is that too many of us now view those who disagree with us in that way.

Consequently, I’ve never made an electoral decision based on such thinking, but millions of others have, and I’ve watched our representative democracy — which is supposed to be based on the deliberative process — crumble away as they have done so.

So what do I mean by “consensus?” Well, that’s hard to explain, especially since most people who read my words have been conditioned to think in ways that preclude understanding it. One thing it is not is numbers. You don’t think in terms of, If I can get five votes for my side and the other side only has four, I win. Consensus is about getting the group to think, Is this something all of us can live with?

It’s the way we got through our morning meetings every day when I editorial page editor at The State. My goal was always to guide discussion of each issue to a position that respected, to varying degrees, the views of everyone in the room. That may sound like a recipe for incoherence, but it wasn’t. We took very clear and strong positions. We just didn’t leave dissenters figuratively bleeding on the floor in defeat. The advantages of this approach ranged from enabling us to move on amicably to the next difficult issue — not a small thing when you have so many issues to consider — to helping us arrive at solutions that were more practical because they might appeal to a broader range of readers.

I didn’t invent this approach. I had actually first encountered it when I served on the parish council of the church we were attending in Tennessee in the early 80s. Our priest didn’t want us to vote on issues. He urged us to seek consensus instead. A lot of us thought this was kind of nuts, but I ended up being impressed with how well it worked.

This idea will engender all kinds of strong objections, and I’ve heard most of them thousands of times. Hearing them again will likely just persuade me even more that I’m on the right track here. Most of the objections — such as, “You just want to force everyone to think just like you!” — will be wildly off-base. But I know what I’m saying is a little hard to follow, in the America of the 21st century. Which is why so many people will reject the premise of this post entirely. Not everyone, but probably most people.

I grew up in what was probably the most consensus-rich time in American history. My favorite examples, which I often cite, tend to include that stunning series of accomplishments when LBJ was president — the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, and so forth. Sure, LBJ was a masterful politician, but he was blessed with a country that, for all its differences, was open to a good argument.

There were still vestiges of this in evidence in the later decades of the century, showing up in Reagan’s amnesty on immigration, and the all-too-temporary banning of assault weapons. But try accomplishing such things in an era in which, for far too many in our country, “amnesty” is a cussword.

Of course, it’s more than a process or a strategy. It’s more an attitude among the population involved in the process. And how do you get people to have that attitude? How do we get from here to there?

Well, I don’t know. And Nikki Haley doesn’t know, either, which I suppose is why she didn’t take questions after that speech. But I appreciate her using the word…

Coinherence

Detail from the Book of Kells.

I have another another word to try to learn about more deeply, the way I did more than 30 years ago with “subsidiarity,” before driving my friends nuts over it.

It’s “coinherence.” I learned it today — or began learning it today — from Bishop Barron‘s reflection on the Gospel reading of 3/31/23:

Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus declares, “The Father is in me and I am in the Father.”

Charles Williams stated that the master idea of Christianity is “coinherence,” mutual indwelling. If you want to see this idea concretely displayed, look to the pages of the Book of Kells, that masterpiece of early Christian illumination. Lines interwoven, designs turning in and around on each other, plays of plants, animals, planets, human beings, angels, and saints. The Germans call it Ineinander (one in the other).

How do we identify ourselves? Almost exclusively through the naming of relationships: we are sons, brothers, daughters, mothers, fathers, members of organizations, members of the Church, etc. We might want to be alone, but no one and nothing is finally an island. Coinherence is indeed the name of the game, at all levels of reality.

And God—the ultimate reality—is a family of coinherent relations, each marked by the capacity for self-emptying. Though Father and Son are really distinct, they are utterly implicated in each other by a mutual act of love.

The impossibly good news is that Jesus and the Father have invited us to enter fully into their divine coinherence. The love between the Father and the Son—which is called “the Holy Spirit”—can be participated in.

I suspect that there’s a simpler way to say it, just as I keep saying the Church should go back to “one in being with the Father” in the Nicene Creed, rather than the new phrase adopted in 2011 — “consubstantial with the Father” — which, as much as I love and respect Latin-derived terms, was not a good move.

But while there may be better words for getting the concept across, there’s nothing simple about the idea itself. I really need to understand it better.

But it appeals to me greatly so far, “at all levels of reality” as the bishop says, for a wide variety of reasons, including:

  • I believe salvation (if even that is the right term, given the way so many use it), is achieved with and through others. It’s not about the I; it’s about the we. (Which is another problem with the new version of the Creed). It’s why there’s a Church. It’s why there are families. It’s why there is such a thing as love.
  • I believe in communitarianism, and most assuredly not libertarianism.
  • I love John Donne’s most famous work, to which the bishop alludes.
  • One of my favorite clichés is, “We’re all in this together.” I mean, if we must have clichés, and apparently we must.
  • It’s a big reason I’m Catholic.
  • It’s why I’ve confused so many people when they ask why I’m Catholic, and I refer them to the last sentence of Joyce’s masterpiece “The Dead.” But read the rest of it first. If it’s still not clear, and I admit it may not be, I’ll try to explain further. Maybe I’ll work in “coinherence.”
  • It’s why, back in my newsroom days, I used to talk about my dream of someday putting out a newspaper that is just one story that has everything that happened in it. Because it’s all connected, and there’s something deeply artificial about presenting the news as separate stories with different headlines. Of course, it might take a year — or at least a week — to write such a “daily” newspaper, but it would be worth it, if the laws of space and time could be suspended.

Now I realize that, except for the Donne reference, the bishop didn’t say exactly any of those things, and I may be mistaking the meaning of coinherence entirely. But it made me think of all those things, and I like thinking about those things.

And I’m just getting started with trying to understand it…

Living the fantasy…

If only this creature could evolve a LOT more quickly…

No, this isn’t about something starring Stormy Daniels. (That would be the grand jury case I haven’t bothered to comment on this far…)

No, this fantasy is less lurid, but probably more important in the long run. Basically, this post was originally a comment I wrote in reaction to one of bud and Doug’s usual arguments over public vs. private.

Then I started riffing a bit, and it led to something that was really more involved than a comment should be, so I’m raising it to post level.

Here’s what I wrote, in response to this and previous comments:

Well, bud already cited ONE example of something that was done right. I’ll leave it to him to answer your question further. I’m not going to take a couple of years off from life to become someone capable of parsing road contracts and passing judgment on their efficacy.

It’s a silly argument, anyway, talking public vs. private on a function that will only EVER be undertaken by government. The private sector isn’t going to build highways — except as contractors working for the government. That’s the way it is. I’d be fascinated to hear your alternative plan for providing the infrastructure that makes it possible to have an economy in which private businesses can thrive WITHOUT these danged, pesky governments….

It raises some interesting dystopian scenarios. If we ever do get to a scenario in which it economically feasible for a private entity to provide general infrastructure, that private entity will essentially BE the government, at least within that area. You know, like in the Middle Ages, when the local lord of the manor was over everything. The society in which we live is the product of several centuries of Europeans striving to disengage from that sort of system, and try to build a system in which the things upon which we all depend are controlled, at least indirectly, by all citizens.

Not that we haven’t moved that way a number of times as technology has progressed. In the 19th century, it was the railroads. And eventually, government stepped in to control the freewheeling mastery of the environment that the railroad barons wielded. Over time, other technologies have asserted similar societal dominance. (Anyone ever see “The President’s Analyst,” in which — SPOILER ALERT — the power behind everything was the Phone Company?)

Today, we’re engaged in debates about technology that plays a bigger, wider role in our lives than railroads ever did — dominating and reshaping not only how we communicate, but how we think (ones and zeroes). And of course, all that’s in private hands.

So maybe I should take back my comment about it being dystopian fantasy. We’re dealing with the fantasy now…

I was teetering there on the cusp of busting out on a bunch of topics that are as habitual to me as public vs. private are to bud and Doug, things that are all affected profoundly by the things that have been coming out of Silicon Valley:

  • The Rabbit Hole.
  • The way technology has exponentially increased the problem of political polarization in our society. It had been a problem for decades, but in the years since the development of “social” media and broader technology that makes everyone on the planet more powerful (in terms of ability to instantly communicate with every other person on the planet, without editors or fact checkers or any other sort of mediation) than any newspaper publisher in history ever dreamed of being, humans have been trained to think like computers, in binary terms — ones and zeroes. Everything is black and white (words that newspapers now capitalize, by the way). There are no degrees of gray; there are no subtleties or nuances. There is no tolerance of those who disagree.
  • Of course, I include traditional media in this failure to cope with the problem. The new technology, having reshaped brains, distorts political events so that this madness is what the MSM have to cover, and tragically, they fall back on their old, comfortable love of conflict, covering politics like sports. And I don’t mean multilateral sports like golf or marathon running. I mean contests in which there are only two teams, and therefore only two ways of looking at anything. The deepest questions that get asked are: Who’s winning? Who’s losing? Which is profoundly tragic.
  • The inability of Western-style liberal democracies to deal with such polarizing forces, causing elements of the public to turn, over and over, to more oppressive, far less liberal, figures and imagined solutions. (The latest victim being Israel, trailing behind the U.S., of course.)
  • On a much deeper level than any of the above, the inability of Homo Sapiens to effectively cope with the change, since evolution takes millions of years longer than technological development.
  • That last point alone, of course, is one we could worry over for the rest of our lives, and still not get anywhere close to a helpful answer.

Seeing all of it as too much for a comment, I brought it here…

In “The President’s Analyst,” The Phone Company was Behind It All…