To the Vanquished Go the Spoils, Part II: A Tin-Plated Lining

This is the second installment of a series I began way back in October 2022. At that point, the COVID pandemic was just beginning to wane, and the Insurrection of 2021 was also retreating into memory. In my mind, the Politics of Consensus Reality was beginning to turn toward what seemed to me to be the most pressing issue of this millennium: the impending collapse of our precious environment.  That issue is on my mind as I write this second essay.

Donald Hynkel, at your service (NBC and DeviantArt)

But the other track of the current crisis is also on my mind today: History shows that fascist dictatorships begin as fringe groups and rarely impose themselves upon the masses by brute force. Rather, they typically come to power via popular movements that gain legitimacy through electoral means. It is usually the case that people vote for fascism. Only later, once fascists have a foot in the corridors of power and have begun replacing Consensus Reality* with ever more deliciously hateful fictions, only then is the charismatic leader in position to seize the reins of power and begin to exercise extra-legal control over the mechanisms of government. By the time fascists have a claim to legitimacy, it is almost always already too late to stanch the stench and restore Reality to health. 

Bullish on China shops (BBC and DeviantArt)

So now the bull is running amok in the China shop, with the sharp tinkle of humane realities flung to the
ground accompanied by the gentle sucking sound of wealth being slurped up by the elite. Anyone who doesn't lead is a taker, and anyone who opposes the obvious superiority of the Leader is an enemy who must not only be defeated but humiliated as well. All of it for a profit. Not your profit, mind you, but profit nonetheless.

But it was when I got out of the shower today that this thought hit me like a wet washcloth:

Every cloud has a silver lining.

The imagery and basic idea associated with this English aphorism seems to have originated with John Milton in his poem, Comus: a Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, in 1634:

       

John Milton (d. 1674) (Britannica.com)

I see ye visibly, and now believe
        That he, the Supreme Good, to whom all things ill
        Are but as slavish officers of vengeance,
        Would send a glistering guardian, if need were
        To keep my life and honour unassailed.
        Was I deceived, or did a sable cloud
        Turn forth her silver lining on the night?

The modern phrasing, however, apparently was coined by The Dublin Magazine in 1840 in its review of the novel, Marian; or, a Young Maid's Fortunes, by one Mrs. S. Hall. From that point, it became very popular and spread across the Anglo-Saxon world, appearing in print in the US in 1853.** 

The expression of course gives voice to a deep longing of the heart that is not confined to English speakers: However bad a situation is, chin up! There is very often some unexpected benefit or good thing that comes with it.

This idea is found in various forms and many – probably all – languages. In French, one says Chaque malheur a une lueur d'espoir (literally: every misfortune has a glimmer of hope). The Spanish say No hay mal que por bien no venga (i.e.: there is no bad thing that does not come with something good). In Arabic, some say رُبَّ ضارة لها نافعة (many a harmful thing has some benefit), but the same idea is also expresssed in the Qurʾān thus: فَإنَّ مَعَ العُسْرِي يُسْرَى * إنَّ مَعَ العُسْرِي يُسْرَى  (So truly with every difficulty comes relief; truly with every difficulty comes relief. 94:5–6).

So, you know, hope springs eternal in the human breast.***

We are going to need this optimistic approach to the world we live in, going forward.

You see, it dawned on me that the newly reinvigorated Duke of Deceit's program of wrecking the US economy for profit may in fact contain a small, well hidden, long-term benefit – much as it pains me to have to say that.

"Ted" Cruz calls science "woke" (Esquire)

Mind you, to understand how this may be so, we have to step back, way back, and look at a much bigger picture that I am absolutely sure is invisible to the current Denizen of the Honky Château and his poisonously wealthy sidekick, Elon. Greed makes people stupid,**** so it is unlikely that even such towering intellects of the GOP as Marco Rubio, Raphael "Ted" Cruise, and the "cerebral" Jeb Bush, have caught a glimpse of it. Still, nothing surprises me anymore.

A Big Picture and a Big Picture Frame

The Big Picture escapes these people, but the frame of that Big Picture is not beyond their grasp. So let's begin with the frame:

Rachel Carson (d. 1964) an actual hero
who knew whereof she spoke
(Britannica)

We are destroying the environment we depend upon for survival at an alarming rate. This has been clear to anyone paying attention since at least the 1960s, and even the most blinkered climate denier has to
suspect, deep down inside where those inklings dwell that we only face in the dead of night, that something is up. Certainly the fossil fuel industries have known about it since then and have waged an unrelenting war on the facts – or at least, public perception of the facts – in order to preserve their sweaty grasp on Almighty Dollars.

Greed makes people stupid. Do these clowns really think that all their money will somehow protect them once the ice is all gone and they have to keep the truly hungry people from strangling them in front of their refrigerators?

And as with the patrons, so too for their clients in the government – both R and D – who love their cushy jobs and their sense of privilege, and who are therefore terrified to actually govern. Governing all too often requires taking unpopular decisions. Gone are the days when we were able to elect fearless adults who are capable of leading. Class traitors like the Roosevelts, or race traitors like LBJ. OK such people too often were driven more by crisis than by foresight. But at least when the chips were down, they were capable of doing what needed to be done.

I mean, it's not like the politicians haven't been warned, repeatedly, about what's coming. One of the great unsung heroes of our age has to be NASA climate scientist James Hansen, who testified before the US Senate that

Coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet ... The dirtiest trick the governments play on their citizens is that they are working for "clean coal." ... Trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death. 

An unsung hero singing like a canary in a coal mine.

He has also stated that

Several times in Earth's long history rapid global warming of several degrees occurred ... In each case more than half of plant and animal species went extinct. New species came into being over tens and hundreds of thousands of years. But these are timescales and generations that we cannot imagine. If we drive our fellow species to extinction we will leave a far more desolate planet for our descendants than the world that we inherited from our elders.*****

As someone who has studied these things, he ought to know. But obviously, the Senate was not really listening.

Written in bold, cursive letters across the frame are the words It's not sustainable!

Here I'm going to say what most people must surely realize but cannot bring themselves to admit: If we want our descendants to have something like a pleasant, habitable world to live in, we have to stop doing what we are doing. Right now. Not tomorrow.

The Big Picture itself is the bold fact that we have to completely re-imagine what "the good life" should look like. It has to be simpler, less grotesquely affluent, less encumbered with stuff, and less damaging to the environment. We have to be willing to do without screens. To put up with walking more and being a little less clean and eating less and repairing things instead of tossing them out. We have to start doing without wherever possible.

And here, in the richest, most powerful nation on the planet, we have to take the lead. If we don't do it no one will.

How will that look while we are achieving it, so that once we arrive at the bottom of the slide we land on our feet, not our asses and without banging our heads on the ground?

The entire MAGA universe, starting with the Mango Mussolini and down through the two branches (ultra-rich tech barons vs. the poor suckers in MAGA bling) to the street, is completely incapable of envisioning that big picture. They only know that they have what they have (or don't have what they think they want) and want to protect that at all costs. They are so typically American and so typically selfish in that way.

And this is our predicament, and this is the picture in the frame: If we don't do what's necessary, necessity will be the mother of our demise. We are headed for a very rough landing indeed, one which some of the darker alleyways of science fiction have already envisioned for us. It won't be pretty.

Hmm, does We the People  include me?
Is that why you're pointing a gun at me?

And thus also the other pernicious reality that the Duke has fostered: He has pitted us against ourselves so effectively that a) he gets to be powerful and call all the shots for his own ego's and wallet's fulfillment, and b) we cannot unite to stop him let alone our own impending doom.

But here's where a tin-plated lining appears: Although he and his family and his cronies are robbing us blind, and the net result is likely to be a precipitous overall reduction in the nation's economy, if it goes far enough, that by itself could even actually begin to slow down our grotesque over-consumption. Imagine that! Through a fascist oligarchy we learn to be frugal and survive a massive reduction in our standard of living. Will that itself prove to be the beginning of mankind's salvation?

"Fate, it seems," said Morpheus, "has a sense of humor."

It is simply the case that many people will die because of climate change. That's inevitable. And it is looking more and more like many others will die because of our country's depraved abandonment of its obligation to care for those who cannot care for themselves. Greed makes people stupid. And cruel.

But perhaps, just perhaps, the Duke of Deceit will have done America a huge favor ... not by restoring fiscal responsibility and making America great and blah blah blah blah blah. Far from it. The super-wealthy whom he represents are every bit as profligate as the rest of us. But it may turn out that driving us to economic ruin could realistically be the best option for humanity's future in the long run.

You will have to forgive me if I don't thank him, though. It really really didn't have to be this way.

* consensus reality: n. Reality or real events that take place in conditions that are not subject to invention by individuals, but which have actual, measurable, demonstrable impacts on the world and people's lives.

** Garry Martin's Phrase Finder blog is a useful resource for this kind of word sleuthing: www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/every-cloud-has-a-silver-lining.html 

*** Another optimistic English aphorism, this one coined a century later by Alexander Pope in his Essay on Man (1733-1734).

**** Yet another aphorism, one that I myself have coined. You're welcome to spread it around a bit for me? .

***** www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/james-hansen-testified-senate-climate-change/ 

The Cryptocurrency Chimera

So the Duke of Deceit wants to establish a "Strategic Bitcoin Reserve" and a "Digital Asset Stockpile." Since the US government is already one of the largest environmental offenders on Earth, this is completly in character. But it is far from clear exactly what "strategic" benefit will derive from this amassing of climate-busting ones and zeroes, other than boosting the "value" of the holdings of people who already own these cryptocurrencies. And after all, he is the president of that lot. So, again, in character.

The first and most important thing to remember about the current cryptocurrency craze is that all money everywhere has always been a matter of shared fictions. Even when money has been tied to a "precious" metal, still that depends on everyone agreeing on the "value" of that metal. For example, the ancient Egyptians valued silver over gold in some eras of their long history. Or consider silk, which functioned as currency on the ancient Silk Roads for centuries in part because it was simpler than maintaining complex calculations among the relative values of the many currencies traveling the routes. It's all about what people think is valuable.

bbc.co.uk

Fickle fiat currency*

Cryptocurrencies will always be subject to the same human realities as fiat money, because they are fiat currencies themselves, and indeed money itself is a human psychological construct. Do not be fooled by the fantasies of some economists: There is nothing like a “natural law” that governs it all. There is nothing “objectively” valuable. All is governed by the fickle human attribution of importance to things and ideas. As culture changes, so does economy. Consider all the Roman coins made of gold and silver that are today only as valuable as what someone is willing to pay for them. Most of their value lies, not in the gold or silver itself, but in the perceived value of their having been minted two thousand years ago. Otherwise, they are worth almost nothing. 

So let's not cling to illusions: Any currency is only as "good" as people think it is. What makes fiat currency relatively stable is the fact that behind it lie huge economies that people find reliable. The volubility of cryptocurrencies shows this clearly: The failure of one broker — just one — nearly crashed the whole system because there is at present no economy behind it large enough to support a value beyond the very limited reach of the crypto-world itself. Yes, huge profits can be made by people with enough liquid wealth (as valued in traditional currencies, mind you) who can jump in and then jump out in time. But the wealth created always translates into the ability to buy resources evaluated by some number in a traditional fiat currency…which the entire rest of humanity considers valuable. 

            Block chains are not for blockheads **

Moreover, cryptocurrencies come with their own costs — to the environment, for starters — which are very, very substantial. The “computing power” (ultimately, the electrical power) necessary to execute one crypto transaction is around 850 KW, about equal to one US household's electricity use for a month. The total for crypto transactions is staggering — currently estimated to be between 155 TWh and 172 TWh annually, roughly equivalent to the energy consumption of the nation of Poland. Why? Because that is the only way to ensure the privacy (i.e. the security) of the transaction itself. Maybe somehow, some day, an alternative to the elaborate “block chain” technology that makes cryptocurrencies possible will emerge. Maybe. But for the foreseeable future, investment in cryptocurrencies is an investment in massive energy expenditure. So, how do you value that? 

And then there are the social costs. Any economic engine that concentrates wealth at the top of the social ladder exacerbates the already huge disparities between the super-wealthy and everyone else, and that's dangerous. According to one estimate, just 1% of Bitcoin owners own more than 90% of the total Bitcoin supply. That's mostly financial companies and the ultra-wealthy who can afford to speculate at that level. Now, those financial institutions do offer various "products" that lower-level investors can buy, but since middle-income families own just 5% of all investments, it's pretty clear that crypto-finance serves primarily the people who already have a lot of money.

Having that much wealth concentrated in so few hands creates instability and promotes economic injustice. The super-wealthy are not generally famous for investing in the rest of us. Rather, with a few exceptions, they tend to look to their own interests first, and too often consider the rest of us mainly to be valuable sources of income for themselves. As long as we produce wealth – and not cost – for them, they like us.

Class traitor extraordinaire. (Credit: NPR)

It took a class traitor like FDR to rescue the US economy from the Great Depression, and even then, he could not accomplish that in the face of elite resistance without the help of a global war that forced the super-wealthy to open their wallets. Some classic cases to consider: the end of the Roman Republic, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution. All cases where the super-greed of the elite spurred popular uprisings led by men who promised the people revenge. Sound familiar?

My point: We have to ask ourselves whether the huge investment in resources entailed by any cryptocurrency transaction offsets the vast expenditure of resources involved in the "traditional" fiat money-based economy. Moreover, what does the society at large — the people you will actually be trading/exchanging with — value, and will it value that enough so that you can get the resources you need to survive? Or is it just another sandbox, just another artificial domain for generating “valuable” numbers on some computer somewhere that people who already have a lot of wealth can use to generate more? What is its value to you? And what will it be a year, five years, twenty years from now?

In a very real sense, the marketing of cryptocurrencies is no different than the marketing of any other consumer product: How many new televisions do you need? Do you need that new iPhone? Really? What benefits, real or imagined, do you believe you are buying, and what will the cost to the environment be? And how will that be shaped by changes in the technology that are sure to come?

I don't have an answer for any of these questions — it's up to the individual, I think. But we should be clear that that is what is going on. Cryptocurrencies will always be only as stable as the size of the economy behind them and the capacity for the environment to sustain their use. If one has the luxury of pouring one’s resources into that medium of exchange, at least be clear about what you are doing to the environment in the process. And be prepared for the limits that choice involves; do not be dazzled by the “freedom from the fiat economy” bamboozle used to sell the thing: It’s all fiat. Every last byte of it.

And, perhaps most importantly, it is certainly not free from the exploitative structures that characterize the fiat-currency economy. Because it is itself a fiat currency. Always always always there will be people who have more and consider their wealth to be part of a zero-sum game. Because at bottom, it is: The amount of economic value — wealth — available at any one time is as finite as the imagination of humanity as a whole (which history shows is pretty limited).

 

In a very real sense, at the moment cryptocurrencies are one more vehicle by which the wealthy classes in wealthy countries can exploit the fantasies for profit. Who is creating the value of these currencies? Only the people who invest in them. And should the cryptocurrency market begin to collapse, you can bet that the “big boys” will exit immediately, pocket their profits, and turn to other mechanisms for “earning” wealth by contributing nothing material of their own. And everyone else will be left holding the virtual bag. The cryptocurrency system is no more or less exploitative than the “analog” economy. And it will remain tied to that “analog” economy because the economy behind it is not large and stable enough to support stability outside the traditional economy.

Bottom line, this is all very much a "first-world" issue: Do the people who really need to step away from the exploitative global financial system — the ones most negatively affected by it — have the actual option to do so? Hardly. They don't have the web access (they don't even have the computers) necessary to free themselves. And even if they did somehow develop a local cryptocurrency economy, they would find themselves having to plug back into the global system in any case to obtain most of the resources they need from outside their immediate locations. Despite what is claimed by the cryptocurrency carnival barkers, there is nothing particularly liberating about them. They are only as good — or as bad — as the economic structures they were created as alleged alternatives to.

* Some ancient fourée (“bogus”) coins from CoinWeek.com (https://coinweek.com/bad-money-ancient-counterfeiters-and-their-fake-coins/) Left front: a counterfeit gold semissis from the time of Theodosius II, mid-5^th century CE; center: a tetradrachm from Athens, 5^th century BCE; right front: a “nugget” from ancient Lydia, ca. 7^th century BCE; right rear: an iron die for a Roman denarius, ca. 101 BCE.

** One of the bazillion such graphics at Freepik.com.

To the Vanquished Go the Spoils — Part I

In this series of posts, I will explore the State of the Union in the third decade of the 21^st century, with one goal in mind: To make clear to anyone who is listening that, although the one thing that all sides share is the belief that democracy is under threat in this country, the problem is that we have very different understandings of why that is so, what exactly that threat is. There is a theory, grounded in two generations of hooey and hucksterism, and promoted by Bad Actors posing as Patriots...and then there is Consensus Reality, grounded in the clear examination of demonstrable facts. On one side, the willingness to accept anything one is told, as long as it corresponds to one’s selfish desires and fundamental biases, and absolves one from any responsibility for the situation. And on the other, a desire to get to the bottom of the problem through studying the objective facts, wherever they may lead, and a willingness to take the situation in hand by first accepting the part one has played in it.

It is the incompatibility of these two perspectives, these two ways of understanding the world, that lies at the core of America’s troubles today. We are at an inflection point, a moment when the table is turning, but no one knows in which direction it is going. Democracy as it has been understood by the majority over the past two and a half centuries lies there on that table, awaiting its fate. 

If liberal democracy truly has failed, as more and more on the Right would have it (even those who have a very poor understanding of what democracy really means), it is not because it has “gone too far” but because it didn’t go far enough before the corrupting influences of wealth, selfishness and prosperity began to drown it. Historians speak of the "unfortunate success" of the Roman Empire. Much the same can be said of the United States of America.

How it will all work out is really immaterial to me. Truth to tell, I no longer care much, one way or another. America has long since forfeited any serious claim to being the Beacon of Democracy for the world, the City on a Hill defending what is Right and Just. Since the Road Ahead of me is now much shorter than the Road Behind, I am content to watch the show, and laugh and cry along with the protagonists. But ultimately, it is all external phenomena subordinate to the Reality I strive to honor. I am helpless to shape what is happening to this country, and I refuse to lose sleep over it.

Let me not therefore be Jeremiah, but rather Rather — a Dan Rather for the 21st century. I’m simply going to report upon what I see. It’s up to you to decide whether you want to do anything about it.

 

Part I: Bar the Shouting

It’s all over, bar the shouting.

- British aphorism*

If the recent history of the US makes anything abundantly clear, it is that despite the Minority Party’s recent insurgency, conservatives have already lost the Culture War. It’s all over, bar the shouting.

The evidence is plain to see all around you.

Look at American culture of the 1950s and compare it to 2023. In myriad ways, we’ve moved on: 

☞ Women are in the workforce to stay, not just in working-class families but across all social-economic levels. This is not to say that this has ever been on wholly equal terms — far from it — and many times it has come as much from economic necessity as from personal choice. But the idea of a woman working outside the home is no longer a problem of social propriety. Women today have options and visions that were scandalous in “proper” (i.e. whitemiddleclass) American society 70 years ago.

War heroes, all.

A soldier of a different sort.

Unheard-of 70 years ago

I don't mind, do you?

☞ Nobody much cares nowadays how a man wears his hair, nor whether he wears a beard, nor whether a woman wears a skirt or jeans, nor if she cuts her hair short or cuts it off entirely. Nobody is going to “talk” if you do. A few people may quack and gossip, but it doesn’t usually affect your job and needn’t dampen down your social life. Ripped blue jeans and black lipstick don’t shock anyone anymore. Likewise tattoos. If you wear the flag as a garment or as a protest, some people may get irritated and stare, but nobody is going to actually try to stop you, actually pick a fight with you. People have a lot more room for self-expression, freedom of taste, freedom of personality, freedom of orientation, freedom of political beliefs...the marvelous cacophony of individuality is now more on show than it has ever been in our history, despite the continuing efforts of the people who lost the War. This is a very good thing. (Not to mention profitable, which is a subject for another essay.)

☞ Your sexual behavior is no longer anybody’s business but your own. Except where it affects your work performance, you cannot be fired because of whom you have slept with. If that happens, you have legal recourses that simply did not exist in the 1950s. No one is allowed to touch you, make suggestive comments to you, treat you like a piece of meat, with impunity. It still happens, of course, but it is no longer considered acceptable behavior, and there are laws in place to discourage it. There is no longer a severe social stigma attaching to being pregnant “out of wedlock.” Certainly not to the extent it was true in bygone days. People no longer speak of “fallen women,” or your “reputation” as a defining social fact. To grasp how far we have come, contrast that with this quaint, middleclasswhite lyric from the Everly Brothers’ 1957 hit, “Wake Up Little Susie”

            The movie wasn’t so hot

            It didn’t have much of a plot

            We fell asleep, our goose is cooked

            Our reputation is shot

            Wake up little Susie, we gotta go home!

☞ Birth control of all kinds is readily available everywhere, and a woman does not need her husband’s permission to use it. Does pregnancy come with social and economic consequences? Of course. But for every person who wags a finger, not only are there ten who will support you, there are national organizations devoted to seeing that you have the support you need.

☞ And as with birth control, so too with abortion. It is very, very popular in this country. Depending upon how you ask the question, as many as two-thirds of Americans support the idea that a woman should have the right to control her own body and its functions. The role of the men in her life decisions — her husband, her father, her priest — has been sharply curtailed, both legally and in practice. The Minority Party had to violate accepted governing traditions, the letter of the Constitution, and widespread public opposition, in order to engineer a majority on the Supreme Court that could take this right away. Without cheating, they would never have been able to do it. And they knew it and they did it anyway! And for sure, they aren’t stopping there. 

☞ And while we’re at it, we can talk about protections for vulnerable women in general. A woman’s sexual behavior, or how she dresses, or how she talks, is no longer grounds for overlooking violence done to her. Husbands can be prosecuted for physical abuse, even rape — it’s against the law now, and police cannot simply look away. A woman in a bad situation now has options (in many places, anyway), and she is ever more likely to be viewed sympathetically than to be blamed for the situation. Is it perfect? No. But we’ve moved on from the days when she was universally treated with contempt as the cause of her own misery.

Is there a problem here?

☞ And much of that goes also for non-hetero sexual behavior, as well. It is no longer a crime to sleep with someone of the same sex, nor even the same gender. Society will no longer “look the other way” if you are abused or attacked because of your sexual orientation. And again, there are legal recourses in the event that happens. Is it perfect? No. Are there still pockets of hostility? Places where it is not safe to admit your truth? Certainly. There is still quite a bit of work to do. But the idea that such people deserve legal protection and social acceptance, that who they are is a matter of rights not religion, is now so widespread that the current backlash against them is generally seen for what it is: a desperate backlash, not a central trend in society. 

☞ It is now legal in all 50 states for people of different “races” to marry and have children. I suppose there are places where some people are scandalized by it. Lord knows there are contrarians everywhere. But the law is on your side now, and you cannot be arrested, lose your livelihood, have your marriage canceled, be denied housing, or be denied service in a bar because of it. The vast majority of people nowadays just don’t care that much one way or the other...as long as you’re happy, whose business is it, anyway? And children of such unions are not treated as outcastes by the larger society. I actually had to explain the drama that animates Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? to my 13-year-old daughter. It was outside her experience. And that's a very good thing.

Had something to do with it

☞ Nobody cares what your music sounds like, nor whether it was made by a Black or Brown person. Nobody cares how you dance, nor whom you dance with. In general, people just say, “Whatever. More power to ya.” 

Had a lot more to do with it!

☞ As long as you don’t hurt people or yourself, nobody really cares how you manipulate your brain chemistry. Smoking pot or experimenting with psychedelic substances is no longer regarded as either perversion or subversion. It may be criminalized by the government, but nobody regards it as criminal in and of itself. Most people just say, “Whatever.” And at the same time, being in the throes of addiction is no longer seen simply as a character fault. More and more people are coming to realize the fact that addiction is a terrible illness that needs treatment, rather than character assassination.

☞ Owning The Communist Manifesto or Capital is no longer a sign of being “a subversive.” The works of Henry Miller, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Charles Bukowski, Alan Ginsburg, Maya Angelou, William S. Burroughs, Alice Walker...you name it, you can have it and read it. Occasional, localized fits of book banning these days only underscore this triumph: It is possible today to get your hands on and read literally anything you want, including pornography, if that’s your thing. The days when the USPS would literally burn books it disliked are long gone.

☞ A slew of derogatory or defamatory words have been firmly ejected from public discourse...for the good of all. Racial and gendered slanders that once were common parlance in parts of this country are now seen for what they are: Despicable evidence of a deplorable past.

I'm fine with all of this, aren't you?

☞ And as with language, so also with images. Depictions of ethnic minorities (even Indians/Native Peoples) are nowadays broadly characterized by complexity, depth, sympathy and respect. Young children are no longer exposed in mass media to heinous stereotypes as if they were reality. Gone are the days when you could hire some white bloke to play a cardboard “Indian chief” or a Kung-fu artist without provoking criticism.**  It ain't perfect, yet, but we’ve moved on, and our culture is much richer because of it.

☞ What church you go to, what religion you belong to, or whether you are religious at all, is now nobody’s business but your own. You don’t have to hide your faith or lack thereof for fear of losing your home or your friends. You cannot be fired because of it. You cannot be denied public services because of it (although, to be honest, you probably cannot be elected POTUS if you do not at least make a show of being Christian). You will not have your character slandered in the Halls of Power because of your spiritual beliefs. No (sane) person seriously entertains ideas that were once common in America: Jews are greedy people who secretly control everything; Muslims are alien, woman-abusing terrorists; Catholics are drunken pagans beholden to the Pope. For every nitwit who espouses such a thing, there are a dozen communities of people who have decided to accept everyone as they are, to live and let live, to honor the social contract among folks of all religious and non-religious orientations.

☞ People care about the environment in ways that they never did before. Communities resist loosening of local ordinances that seek to empower capital to plunder resources for profit — once a hallmark of conservative practice. Such efforts still happen, of course, and especially at the state and national level. But more people than ever recognize that clean water and clean air are essential goods that have to be protected. We’re not doing enough in this area, obviously. Not nearly enough. But environmentalism is no longer a fringe attitude that provokes social umbrage. It’s not just for hippies any more.

A tragically failed comedian

In these and so many other ways, society has become freer, more accepting, more open and liberal and progressive over the past half-century or so. And the vast majority of people want it that way. These values and social orientations are terrifically popular. So popular in fact that people who openly challenge them sound like an out-of-tune flute in an orchestra. For 99% of the country, Margery Taylor Greene is a bad, tasteless joke, an object of justified derision. 

And has any of this progress come about because conservatives wanted it that way? Nope. On the contrary: Conservatives have resisted all the above tooth-and-nail, having to be dragged screaming into the 21^st century. By and large, the only thing that has brought them to heel has been their political candidates’ need to get elected in an increasingly liberal culture. What is so shocking about MTG is not so much that she exists, but that she can be so openly vicious and get away with it. That by itself speaks to the backwardness of the particular community that elected her.

Evidence of a failed agenda

The only reason we are even talking about any of this is because the “conservative party” in this country is also the Minority Party. They understand this very well. In fact, their most recent Occupant of the White House said as much: If Republicans were to tell the truth, they’d never get elected. Instead, they have to play smoke-and-mirrors while stirring up conservative outrage by refighting the Culture War they have already lost. And all that just to gin up enough energy to lose in the polls. In the past thirty years — eight presidential election cycles — the Minority Party has earned a majority of the popular vote exactly once (in 2004, for an incumbent president at the height of two wars he created). They routinely earn millions fewer votes overall for seats in Congress. Even when the Senate is split exactly in the middle as it is today, those 50 senators represent some 41 million fewer Americans.

It should be obvious to anyone who is paying attention: Conservatives still keep shouting about the Culture War, just to retain a grip on their waning power. In Consensus Reality, they have already lost.

 

Next time: A little history of the Big Lie

* The idea probably originated in the UK in the 19^th century. This site offers several examples of “all over except shouting” from horse racing newspapers in the early 1830s.

** The character Tonto in the Lone Ranger stories is rather oddly a contrary example that complicates the issue. The role on radio was voiced by the Irish-American actor, John Todd, between 1933 and 1954. Notably, he was replaced by a Native American actor for public appearances. Between 1949 and 1958, Tonto was played on TV by indigenous Canadian Jay Silverheels, a sign of at least some sensitivity to the racial issues involved. Although he was presented as intelligent and caring on both radio and TV, Tonto spoke with pathetically broken English, a dogwhistle demonstration of his Otherness in the face of white power. The film Little Big Man (1972), widely regarded by film critics as a positive milestone in the evolution of Hollywood's representations of Native Americans, would ideally have spelt the end of Tonto. But no, in 2013 Johnny Depp appeared as the "comically" wise Tonto, broken English and all, in a big-budget resurrection of the story. So, we're not quite there, yet.

Credits: time.com; rexfeatures; Jay Godwin, flickr.com; vocal.media.com; nationalgeographic.com; thewritelife61.com; hairstylefeed.com; fa_ellen; forbes.com; firewireblog.com; beat.co.au; YouTube via Pinterest; cardinalnews.org; vietnamartwork.files.wordpress.com; Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters; the Reverend Connie Tuttle.

Consensus Reality as an American Crisis

Note: I started this post way back in January of this year, a year after the insurrection that seemed to transform the political realities in this country. I abandoned it at that time when other circumstances in my life demanded attention. Also, I had begun to run out of steam for maintaining this blog. The weight of the rampant foolishness and patent disingenuousness in my country had become a burden to think about — not to mention live with.

But with Election Season in full swing once more, and with Consensus Reality once again on the ballot, I thought I'd crawl back to this and present it for your inspection. It ain't pretty, perhaps. But it is honest and, I hope, thought-provoking.

Here goes...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/04/next-us-civil-war-already-here-we-refuse-to-see-it

Well, that was alarming. 

 

But then again, so much of modern life, whether here or abroad, is alarming. It’s based on unrealistic and unsustainable understandings of the world. I have been saying for the last two years, in the face of the pandemic, that we are at a civilizational moment, a moment of reckoning for all the grotesquely unsustainable ways we in the developed world have tried to live our lives. More recent events, both here and abroad have only reinforced this in my mind.

We are indeed facing a national crisis of unprecedented implications, but it is rather different than what many, even most, American recognize.

 

What good is vaccinating 80% or 100% of American people, when there are a billion and a half human Petri dishes in Africa, victims of colonially produced and post-colonially maintained systems of inefficiency and inequality? The US has donated around 1 billion doses of vaccine. Well, that’s about 1/3 of the solution, but the real problem is getting those shots in people’s arms. Before they spoil. Do you wanna talk about a broken system?

 

And as with the pandemic, so too with the environment as a whole. It’s one big problem. Beside it, everything else pales. In the end, both fascist and progressive alike will have to bow before it, sooner or later. The only question is: How will we face the challenge of living with it?

 

While some Americans wring their hands about the possibility of a second civil war, and others openly cheerlead for it, and a few others actively prepare to initiate it, we are being called to reimagine human civilization itself, based not necessarily on technology and technological solutions (which seem at times to be feeding the cycle, not breaking it), but upon recognizing the supreme importance of the planet upon which we depend, and therefore upon the communities which we build. 

America, beside this, all our troubles and mutual hostilities pale.

 

It doesn’t seem to me that enough people on this side of the Atlantic are really, really listening. Am I worried about America's political future? Yeah, sure. What happens here always has an impact elsewhere. But I’m even more worried about the world that my daughter will live in.

 

To me the unreality of American life in all its forms — economic, political, cultural — is of a piece with the reckoning of which the pandemic is only the most obvious bellwether. This article may be correct: The US is probably facing a crisis of massive political proportions.

But to my mind that’s an epiphenomenon. One more way in which Americans are striving to live the American dream of exceptionalism. We don’t want the rules to apply to us.

 

Well guess what: the rules apply to everybody.

 

The author of this article, as perceptive as it is, calls for the left to get their act together and make changes that will repair the system. Fair enough.

But what changes are proposed here, except changes within the system? The only changes that will really make any difference for the long term to the planet, not simply to our nation, have to take place in the minds of the people. Only then can the Consensus Reality possibly penetrate beyond the jingoistic noise that dominates contemporary American public discourse.

 

Until that happens, whether or not we have a Second Civil War, whether or not we remain a single country or break up into four or six or 50, won’t really matter in the long term. Consensus Reality transcends left and right, woke and racist. And the outlook is looking pretty grim. Do I want freedom and a liberal democracy? Of course. But on what terms?

 

Another way to put it: While we’re busy fixing America's broken system, why don’t we really fix it?