The Reality Trap

If your goals are entirely realistic, achieving them requires little effort. What then are they worth?

One of my favorite quotes is from a poem by Robert Browning (though the poem itself isn’t really one of my favorites):

“Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?”
 
Robert Browning, Andrea del Sarto

I really wish Hillary Clinton would take this to heart.

(As for the implied sexism that could be read into “...his grasp,” let’s leave that alone, shall we?)

Throughout the campaign, Hillary Clinton has referred to many of Bernie Sanders’ positions as “unrealistic”, saying that he would never be able to accomplish them, that her positions were more attainable and thus more realistic. What she has failed to understand is that a good many of us don’t want a president who is only willing to fight the easy battles, that will only reach for the reachable stars.

One other thing that she hasn’t understood: Constantly modifying your position to suit what the electorate appears to want can undermine your candidacy. Frankly, her positions on many issues have hardly been as constant as the northern star, and deriving her actual beliefs from what she says has often been something of a challenge.

Her stand on the minimum wage is a good case in point. From the outset, her true position on this has been difficult to discern. Nationally, there is a strong effort to bring the minimum wage up to a level at which people can actually live; Hillary, while perhaps not seeking to undermine this ideal has never been entirely clear on her stance on people living above the poverty line, and the fact that she has had to continually “clarify” (change) this stance hasn’t helped.

First she came out against a $15 minimum wage and only supported $12, despite the fact that $12 is still below the poverty level. Then she appeared to support $15. Then she came out with a complicated and unworkable plan in which the minimum wage would be raised to $15 except where it wasn’t (it seems to me that this plan is specifically designed to keep the minimum wage lowest where it is needed most).

Hillary’s supporters all claim that her overly complex plan is more realistic, and that’s the problem; in this context, “realistic” is a trap.

People who settle for what they can get seldom make history; more often, it is made by people demanding what is right. History is not made by people who will only work within their boundaries, but by people who reach beyond them. There is an insidious nature to boundaries; if you accept them as such, then you become willing to settle for what’s within them rather than allowing yourself to hope for what the boundaries have convinced you that you cannot have,

I do not want a president who will stay within the boundaries; I want a president who does not believe in boundaries. I do not want a president who will only demand what’s reasonable; I want a president who will demand what’s right, and “reasonable” be hanged. I want a president who will fight for what the people need in spite of the odds, not one who will only take up a fight that he/she thinks is winnable.

I want a President who is more concerned about my needs than about his/her legacy.

Once upon a time I thought that Barack Obama would be the President I hoped for, and largely he was. If he fell short of my expectations in some areas, perhaps that’s the nature of politics and politicians. We all have to look at the candidate in front of us and judge them based on what we see, on how they present themselves to us, and hope that the president they will become will match what we saw. We hope that their promise matches the reality of their presidency.

I cannot think of a single case where a candidate’s promise fully matched the reality of their presidency, but for me Barack Obama came closer than most and I honor him for this, even though I still complain about his shortcomings as president. I’m just grateful that his shortcomings didn’t turn out to be as short as they might have been.

Hillary Clinton is another matter. The “promise” of her candidacy I see more as a threat to what I believe in, but far less so than the threat of Donald Trump and that’s what is deciding my vote right now. But my “support” for her is tempered by my disregard; in fact it cannot truly be said that I really support her at all.

This then is the tragedy of Hillary Clinton; if she’s going to become the president and succeed in the job, she’s going to need the support of people like me and right now that support is entirely hers to gain, if she just reaches past herself to grab it.

But I don’t see that happening. I don’t see her reaching beyond what’s within her grasp. And this is her tragedy; right now we need a President who will do precisely that. Her chief electoral advantage is that she isn’t Donald Trump, but her chief failing is that she isn’t the president we need.

The Blues Viking
The thoughts expressed here are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.

In the absence of a better option...

Yes, I would vote for Clinton over Trump...but that means that my vote is hers to lose. And she hasn’t done anything to gain it other than not being Donald Trump.

This is what I fear:

Hillary Clinton becomes the Democratic nominee, despite her consistently poling as a weaker Democratic candidate than Bernie Sanders against Donald Trump. Those of us who backed Bernie, most of us anyway, resign ourselves to voting for a candidate we cannot fully support and cast our votes for her, but she proves unable to inspire Sanders supporters to be enthusiastic about her candidacy. She proves unable to inspire the same sort of willingness to evangelize that so defined Bernie Sanders’ campaign. She continues to think that our support, our enthusiasm, our devotion are hers by right. Worse, she builds her campaign on fear, making “If not me, then Trump!” her rallying cry.

The election comes along, and Donald Trump wins.

And Hillary and her supporters blame Bernie’s supporters for the defeat, saying it’s because we weren’t enthusiastic enough.

Well, if that’s what happens then that’s what happens. She may get my vote just by becoming the Democratic candidate, but my enthusiastic support is hers to earn. Or not. And so far, she hasn’t.

And for that matter, my vote is hers to lose; she still might lose it. Hillary Clinton (IMHO) is the sort of person to take the support of all persons Democratic Party as hers by right, without considering that we, the people who she’s relying upon to vote her into office, might feel differently.

If Hillary Clinton wants the support of the millions of people who invested their hopes, their dreams, and their hard-earned money in Bernie Sanders, millions of people who like me believe (still) that he was the better, stronger candidate, then she’s going to have to work at it. If she expects our support to just fall into her lap then she is going to be disappointed. And so are the millions of people in this country who are forced to rely on her to defeat Donald Trump.

That’s the big flaw in Hillary Clinton’s campaign; to be victorious, she has to depend on the support of legions of people who don’t think she’s the best person for the job. Like me.

Much of my lack of faith in Hillary Clinton comes from her lack of faith in democracy. Throughout the primary process she has seemed to rely on superdelegates and shenanigans to carry her to the nomination; her margin in the popular vote was rather slim, and I am far from convinced that it wouldn’t have been different without the media anointing her as the Heir Apparent and proclaiming her the victor long before she’d won anything (she still hasn’t). If her approach to the “democratic process” has been to keep it from being democratic, what does that say for a Hillary Clinton presidency?

Here’s the thing; though I am unenthusiastic for her now, that could change. I do believe that she is capable of becoming a candidate that I can support unreservedly. I believe that she is capable of not only saying the right things but meaning them. So far, I haven’t seen that anywhere in the primary process. I hope that I will see it if she becomes the nominee.

As things stand now, if Hillary Clinton wins the nomination she’ll have my vote but she’ll have to work to keep it. She’ll have to work at not drifting to the right on issues that I care about. She’ll have to work at not being a paid spokesperson for her corporate sponsors. In short, she’ll have to work at not being the Hillary Clinton that, as things stand now, I do not entirely trust.

And I am not alone. I know a good many Sanders supporters who are prepared to vote for Clinton if it comes down to her or Trump, but who can’t bring themselves to support her beyond what they give her in the voting booth. Until November, we are all going to be keeping a skeptical eye on her; if she shows signs of becoming much less of a progressive, then I’m not the only one who’ll be rethinking that vote.

Let me be clear: I want to be able to support the Democratic nominee. Given what’s at stake and the character (or lack of it) of Donald Trump, I am willing to cast my vote on a lesser-of-two-evils basis, and I honestly believe that a Clinton presidency would be far less disastrous than a Trump presidency. That’s what I believe now, anyway. If she gains the nomination and then begins to drift away from the left, as I fear she may, then I may have to revisit the issue of which evil is actually lesser.

The Blues Viking
The opinions expressed here are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.

A question of rights...

...and of rights and lefts, and of rights and wrongs...and why it’s important that we find an answer.

With all this talk about guns and “gun rights”, it’s time that someone pointed out that the Second Amendment does not mention guns. Not once. “Arms,” yes, but never guns.

Someone with a knife or a pointed stick is “armed.” And so is someone with a gun...but the Bill of Rights is very non-specific about what kind of “arms” it covers. and its no good saying, “Well, that's how people were armed back then!” Remember that in post-revolutionary America, when the Bill of Rights was written, a sword was still something that a solder could be expected to carry and use. Pikes were still issued, and would still be issued as late as the American Civil War.

If we say that this right must cover guns since guns are obviously arms, then what is to prevent private citizens from possessing nuclear weapons (other than the expense)? Then there’s the other side of that coin: If we accept that some restrictions/regulations as to the type of weapons that are acceptable for private ownership, and since there is no specific provision for guns made in the Second Amendment, how can you say that the right to carry firearms is guaranteed by the Constitution?

The “right to bear arms” spelled out in the Second Amendment could thus be interpreted as applying to firearms only at the government’s discretion. As long as you are permitted the right to carry a knife or a stick then it could be legitimately be argued that your “right to bear arms” is still being protected, even as specific types of arms (or the length of your knife) may be restricted for your use or even forbidden to you outright.

(One other observation about the Second Amendment: To some people the Second Amendment is forthright and unambiguous. To others its meaning is as clear as mud at midnight. To my thinking, the fact that there are two so widely divergent opinions on the Second Amendment, both of them widely held and vociferously defended, belies the idea of the amendment being at all unambiguous.)

Now, I am not advocating such a radical change in how the Second Amendment is interpreted. (Though is it really all that radical?) What I AM saying is that the “clear-cut language of the Constitution” (as I have heard it called) isn’t all that clear-cut, and what is needed RIGHT NOW is a national dialog on what the Second Amendment actually means. Because in the end it means as much, or as little, as we all agree that it means...and right now, there’s not a lot of agreement on this issue. And there needs to be.

These then are the two extremes, mutually exclusive and mutually antagonistic, neither of which I find all that appealing:

Position One: Since guns are not specifically mentioned in the Bill of Rights then the right to bear them is not guaranteed.

Position Two: The right to own and carry guns is covered under the definition of “arms” and every other type of weapon, from bolas to battleships, should be permitted without let or hindrance.

Obviously there must be some middle ground somewhere, and somewhere there must be a position that most of us can agree to defend; but the power of the gun industry, wielded through the NRA, is preventing us from finding it. Or even looking for it. As desperately as a national dialog on this issue is needed, the NRA and its allies are dedicated to preventing that from happening, and keep trying to force society to one extreme while liberals and progressives (and, admittedly, this group usually includes me) keep trying to force society to the other extreme.

What we’ve done is replace the search for common ground with extremism, and every day that we’re prevented from searching for that common ground we become more accustomed to the extremes being the only positions available to us. And when one extreme position fails us then we rush headlong to the other side, ignoring the fact that we’d all really rather be somewhere in the middle if we gave it any thought. But extremism discourages thought, even as it discourages centrist opinions.

I don’t like extremes or extremists, and I really hate being forced to one extreme because I find the other abhorrent. I hate being told that gun control (or, indeed, any issue) is a “you’re either with us or against us” proposition, and I hate being prevented from exploring solutions that don’t entirely mesh with one or the other extreme. I hate being in the middle of a battlefield, with each side telling me that I need to run to their trenches and help them defend their position if I want to be safe. And I hate that as long as you’re in the trenches for one side or the other then you’re not looking for a way to stop the fighting.

As far as I’m concerned, the extremists can hang by their extremities until the damned things fall off.  The truth is, neither side can defend their entrenched positions unless a lot of us are willing to help them do it. The more of us who are willing to seek solutions, the fewer there will be to defend entrenched orthodoxy. And obviously, the more of us looking for solutions the better our chances of finding them.

The safety of the trenches is illusory; you’re forced to defend a position you did not choose, perpetuating a fight that cannot be won without great loss, gaining some protection from the enemy by defending a fixed position on which the opposition can train all of their guns.

Which I’m no longer sure they have a Constitutional right to.

The Blues Viking
The opinions expressed here are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.

Trump vs. Clinton vs. Us

In the wake of Donald Trump’s latest racist comments, everyone is talking about him. Which is kind of what both parties want, so that everyone will ignore the monster that’s about to eat them.

June 7, 2016

”In recent days, Trump has been accusing U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is overseeing a lawsuit against Trump University, of being biased because of his Mexican heritage. The judge was born in Indiana” (Bloomberg Politics)

I find it interesting that Paul Ryan would publicly disavow Donald Trump’s statement...

"Claiming a person can’t do their job because of their race is certainly the textbook definition of a racist comment." (Paul Ryan, June 7, 2016)

...and I entirely agree with that, but at the same time Ryan declared his continued support for Trump.

“But Ryan quickly added that Trump would give Republicans a better chance of getting their legislative agenda enacted than would his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.”
(Bloomberg Politics, ibid.)

What fascinates me is that such an obviously racist statement as Trump made would, in previous elections, all but disqualify him from the Presidency; in this election, however, even conservative politicians who strongly and publicly disagree with this racism are more than willing to continue supporting Donald Trump.

This speaks more to the Republican Party’s inherent racism than it speaks to Trump’s.

But perhaps more importantly, it speaks to the deeply felt Republican hatred of Hillary Clinton that they would continue to embrace such a man just because he now represents their best chance of keeping her out of the White House.

The Republican Party is obviously prepared to embrace any extremism in order to defeat Hillary Clinton in the general election. But (and I say this as a Bernie Sanders supporter) I find it even more disturbing that this attitude and its emphasis on defeating Hillary Clinton at any cost, lionizing Trump as Donald the Hillary Slayer, has had the effect of further strengthening her campaign and causing her to be seen even more as Hillary the Trump Slayer.

And it bothers me that I see this same “her-or-him uber alles” attitude occurring on both sides of the aisle. I see Democrats willing to compromise their positions on things like Citizens United, which once upon a time was universally and vehemently opposed by the entire left, becoming tolerated by a more corporate-friendly Hillary Clinton. I hear the statements she has made regarding her willingness to compromise on abortion rights, and it sends shivers down my spine.

And I hear once-proud Progressives making excuses for her, willing to support her no matter how far she strays from their ideals, because they feel that she’s their best hope against Trump.

(To be fair, that’s not the only reason Clinton supporters have for being Clinton supporters, and I will admit that some of their reasons for being so are good ones. But I more often hear that “it’s her turn!” or “it’s time a woman was President!” and these are poor reasons for supporting any candidate, in my view.)

I see opposition to either candidate from within their respective parties being squelched by the parties themselves. I see opposition to either of their favored candidates being treated as party disloyalty. And I see these attitudes as being destructive to their parties.

I think we need to get beyond thinking about this election as one candidate vs. the other, or as one party vs. the other. I think that this election has become more of a clash of personalities than a clash if ideas, that we are choosing a leader without regard to what that person actually represents, solely on the basis of how much we like them.

I realize that this isn’t the first national election that could be described thus, but never more so. I realize that this is something we have allowed to happen gradually, and now the monster is loose.

I think that the harm that these two people may do to their respective parties is potentially immeasurable. For this reason I can respect the Republican establishment for their efforts to stop the Trump juggernaut, even if they have soiled themselves while trying to embrace the monster that is devouring them. I cannot respect the Democratic Party for its unashamed efforts to enshrine Hillary Clinton so far in advance of its own nomination process being complete; they have their own monster devouring them, but they’ve been more than willing all along to feed it their own flesh just to guarantee its victory.

I can’t speak to the Republican Party’s problems other than to point to them and say, “Hey...you’ve got a problem!” I’m more involved with the Democratic Party, even if it’s only as one of its lowliest supporters, the very sort that the party is trying so desperately to ignore. Not only can I point at the problem, I can give my opinion as to what’s causing it, and perhaps what might be done about it.

To that point I will only say this: Perhaps we, as Democrats, liberals, and progressives, need to realize that it’s not Donald Trump that we need fear will cost us the Presidency...it’s Hillary Clinton, whether she wins or loses, that may cost us everything we have.

The Blues Viking
The opinions expressed here are mine and if you don't like them you can get your own damn blog.

A Great Republican Hope?

The problem is that none of them are all that great.

I’ve put this off as long as I can. I’d hoped to hold out until after the conventions, but events demand that I break my silence sooner than that. It’s a Presidential election year, and it’s time for me to get all political again. So here I go.

(Just to let everyone know where I’m coming from, I’ve been a Democrat for decades but these days I am unlikely to identify with either party. Politically, I am a die-hard Progressive.)

So as long as I’m jumping into the pool, I might as well throw myself into the deep end and start right in with Republican politics. Because the Republicans, as you may have noticed, are in a bit of trouble. Several different kinds of trouble, actually, and said troubles bear the names of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Paul Ryan.

And somewhere in the vast Republican cemetery, grave robbers are even now digging up the political corpse of Mitt Romney, hoping to play Frankenstein and resurrect his long-dead career.

Trump Card, or Joker?

The biggest, most glaringly obvious problem that the Republicans face is Donald Trump, the New York financial wannabe-wizard (his financial dealings haven’t really been all that successful, but he’s something of a genius at self-promotion) who has decided that he really wants to be President. At least, it appears that he wants to be President; before his run at the White House, it’s never been entirely obvious what Trump was really after, not in politics and certainly not in business.

Early in Trump’s run for the Presidency it was widely predicted that he wouldn’t last, that he never intended to stay the course, that he never had a real chance at the nomination. Not just political nothings like me; I’m talkin’ real people with political insider credentials, people with their own shows on CNN and Fox and MSNBC (more traditional networks seldom bother with news anymore...for that matter, CNN/Fox/MSNBC are more  concerned with commentary than news).

Trump has a history of almost running for President, and at first everyone thought that this time it would be the same. I remember hearing pundits saying that Trump would “definitely” drop out well before he got to the convention. He didn’t. In fact, he’s the runaway success of the party, the current frontrunner by a wide margin. That has become something of an embarrassment to the Republican establishment. He has been racist, sexist, and anti-immigrant, so much so that his current politics could be mistaken for the Know Nothings of the 1850s.

This makes him dangerous to the Republican Party, which as long ago as 2012 acknowledged that they would need minorities and women if they were ever going to win theWhite House again. His popularity among Latinos is incredibly poor (following his racist and inaccurate statements about Mexicans) as is his support among women, though it should be said that he stands better among Republican women though even those numbers are falling. His support among African Americans is also astonishingly low.

And while it has to be admitted that the party hasn’t done nearly enough to court these groups, Trump has been actively driving them away.

When questioned about these deficiencies, his standard response is to proclaim “Oh, they’ll love me!” (or some variation of that theme). In the political realities of the electorate today, it’s hard to see how the Republicans can hope to win the Presidency without the support of, or at least the lack of opposition from, minorities and women.

Trump is consistently, and handily, beaten in the polls by both likely Democratic contenders, Clinton and Sanders. To say that this has the Republican party nervous is a serious understatement. With Trump’s astonishing popularity and his commanding lead among Republicans, the GOP is desperate to find a way of denying him the nomination and is casting about for another candidate to support; if you will, a new Great White Hope.

The Ted Cruz Blues

Currently, the GOP is pinning all of its Stop Trump hopes on Ted Cruz. I find it fascinating that the Republican party, so many of whom went collectively delusional and declared Obama to be ineligible to be President because of his African father, is now happy to accept Canadian-born and Cuban-fathered Cruz. But that’s their business.

Ultra-Conservative Ted Cruz is not the best liked man in the GOP. In fact, it would be accurate to say that he’s one of the least liked Republican leaders, and that’s by his own party. Nevertheless, with the more reactionary elements of the party stirred up by Trump it is taking an ultra-Conservative to cut into his lead, and to defeat Trump the party is willing to ignore Cruz’ unpopularity.

Cruz has been actively—and not entirely honestly, though not much less so than others in this race—campaigning for the Presidency, and it would be fair to say that he has the nomination within his sights if not his grasp. He’s currently running behind Trump in the delegate count, but he’s well ahead of anyone else.  Moreover, by being the most likely Trumpslayer actually running he’s the party’s fair-haired boy.

Ryan’s Hope?

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan isn’t even running for President. Well, not officially, but he’s certainly acting a lot like a Presidential candidate lately.

Before Ryan was Speaker he said flat-out that he didn’t want to be Speaker. Then they asked him to be Speaker, and he took the job with (IMHO) a faux-reluctance that was nauseating to behold. I always thought (and still think) that the job was what he wanted all along, and his obvious and public denial of the fact was his way of gaining the position after clearing out the competition, and without actually having to stand against anyone else in the party.

I think Ryan is playing that same game with the Presidency that he played with the Speakership. I think that if someone at the convention taps him for the nomination he’ll sigh, “Well, if I must...for the party...” while at the same moment he’s rapturously creaming his jeans.

This tactic allows him to appear to be a more reasonable, moderate candidate in the general election without having to live down a truckload of hard Right rhetoric spewed during the primaries, which if you’ll remember is one of the things that torpedoed Mitt Romney in 2012 (but more about Mitt later).

The problem with Ryan, from the Republican standpoint, is that he isn’t polling well against either Clinton or Sanders; around fifteen or sixteen points behind either of them, according to the last polls I read.

There’s a problem with the Republican Party as a whole that’s related to Ryan: with all of them so focused on sidelining Trump, not enough attention is being paid to the general election.

Like I said, I think Ryan is being deliberately disingenuous about the nomination, just waiting for the right moment to jump up and save the nation. Focusing on Ryan still won’t get them where they need to be; as Great White Hopes go, Paul Ryan isn’t all that great.

But maybe I’m wrong about Ryan. Maybe he really is the reluctant politician he pretends to be. And maybe my pickup will sprout wings and turn into a DC3.

Romney...The Mild Card

Former 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney is another name that’s been put forward as a potential candidate, but given his dismal showing against Barack Obama back then I’m really not sure why.

It’s not that he didn’t do well in the election, though he really didn’t do well in the election; it’s that he didn’t campaign at all well. He kept getting caught in obvious falsehoods and misstatements and was never able to rise above the perception that he was a candidate for the 1%. He had to move so far to the Right to secure the nomination that when he tried to backtrack on those previously-stated Right-wing positions in order to broaden his appeal for the national electorate, no one bought it. It gave Mitt a credibility problem that he never overcame.

Frankly, if Romney were the 2016 nominee I see him facing most of the same difficulties as in 2012 and unlikely to overcome any of them. But I don’t see Romney being foolish enough to run again, nor the Republican Party being desperate enough to draft him. But then again, my pickup could sprout wings...

Kasich – Honorable Mention

Ohio Governor John Kasich actually is running, but not doing too well; he finishes far below Trump and Cruz in nearly all of the primaries. Which, from a Republican point of view, should be regarded as a shame, since he’s the only one doing tolerably well against Clinton or Sanders in the polls; he leads Clinton, just, in most polls, and a few of them have him marginally beating Sanders (though well within the margins of error).

Given that he’s the Republican candidate with the best chance against Clinton or Sanders, its mystifying that he’s doing so poorly in the primaries; he has less than 150 delegates, against Cruz’ 500+ and Trump’s 700+.

If the GOP were being terribly rational of late, Kasich would be the obvious choice. But the GOP has not been all that rational of late. By and large, Republicans voters would apparently rather shoot themselves in the foot than run someone who actually has a chance of victory in the fall.

That foot-shooting is going to take a lot of guns. Good thing the NRA has worked so tirelessly to keep them all armed.

In Conclusion

I’m not a pollster or a politician, nor am I particularly good at interpreting their work, though I can read when one number is larger than another. I’m not a Republican either, but I know a party in trouble when I see one.

I’m not a railroad engineer but I know enough to get the hell off the tracks when a train is coming.

I’ve always found something inherently untrustworthy in polls. I realize that they seldom tell the whole story, and I know how easily a poll can be slanted to favor one candidate over another.

But here’s the thing: Polls, while imperfect, are generally accurate, broadly speaking and taken as a whole. If all of the polls, as a group, are telling you something then you should probably give them a listen. Make up your own mind, by all means, but you should at least hear what they’re trying to tell you.

We’re more than three months from the Republican National Convention and that’s plenty of time for almost anything to happen. As it stands right now, it doesn’t look like any Republican candidate is likely to bag enough delegates in advance of the convention to secure the nomination. That means that the final nominee could be either Trump or Cruz, or Ryan or Romney may swoop in at the last minute and “rescue” the party from itself. I’m not sure that such a rescue would be better than the peril.

Then again, my truck may fly. Hey, it could happen...

The Blues Viking
The opinions expressed here are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.




GOP Ryan Loses to Clinton, Sanders (Rassmussen Reports) 4-7-2016

2016 Presidential Race Polls (Real Clear Politics)

Federal 'birther' lawsuit challenges Canadian-born Ted Cruz's eligibility to be president (Daily Mail) 2-12-2016

Poll numbers: What women voters think of Donald Trump (CNN) 3-31-2016

Wikipedia on the "Know-Nothing" Party

Donald Trump and White House bids: a long history of not running (USA Today) 6-15-2015

Romney/Ryan Wouldn't be GOP Salvation Against Clinton (Public Policy Polling) 3-31-2016

Fragmentary thoughts

It's truly astonishing how much I leave unfinished.

I may not write as much for this blog as I one did (though you can expect that to pick up a bit as the election draws closer) but I still occasionally try.  My problem is that I often begin writing articles that I never actually finish, for various reasons.

Sometimes I lose my direction and leave off writing. Sometimes I get frustrated trying to keep to a particular topic, and I finally bale entirely. Sometimes I get interrupted, or more often interrupt myself to cook or eat or watch something on TV, or to play n the Internet for a while. Whatever the reason, sometimes I take a break from writing then get distracted, and simply forget to return to whatever I was writing.

And often when I do return to a previous document, I cannot for the life of me remember what the hell I was trying to say.

So my computer’s desktop gets cluttered with partial documents that I am unable to finish, whatever the reason. Eventually I have to get rid of them, but often I simply cannot bear to just trash something I’ve spent time writing, so rather than try to keep the files occupying hard disk space (even though computer memory is really cheap right now) I’ll write an article like this one and include all of the accumulated crap that I just can’t bring myself to delete.

Here’s a few of them.


Educating Gunny

One piece I was working in dealt with education, or at least started out dealing with education. But it started getting awfully biographical, uncomfortably so perhaps, and I stopped writing. But it made a couple of points that I’d still like to make, so here’s the half-finished article.

“Education doesn’t exactly fuel our society, but it is necessary for our society to keep running. I suppose it’s like motor oil; it  doesn’t fuel a car but you won’t get far without it. (I know; I’ve tried.)

“That said, my own educational background is dismal.  I went to high school in rural Michigan then on to the local junior college, where I went full-time for a semester and part-time for a semester after that; for about a year after that I took an occasional class but mostly just hung out in the library.

“This might strike the odd hippie as romantically Bohemian (depending, of course, on how odd the hippie is and how badly you want to strike him) but trust me...it ain’t romantic. And while I’d have to confess that the major part of my college education was gained in that library I would also have to confess that that sort of unstructured education leaves you with a sort of unstructured education.

“My own haphazard education has given me a genuine appreciation for the process, when it’s approached properly. All too often, it isn’t.

“Once upon a time, back in the dim dark age when I was in high school (and my politics were well to the left of where they are now, if you can fathom that), I was convinced that the primary purpose of the American system of education was to prepare young minds for a future of mindless labor. School imposed a structure that I, as a liberal child of the ‘70s, felt compelled to rebel against. You were trained (I then felt) to jump at the sound of a bell, and to sit in your place and only speak when the person with direct authority over you requested that you do so. Your schedule, your diet, your attire, your recreational activities even your bodily functions were controlled, regulated, scheduled, and supervised. Or so I felt.

“I felt that education was being used to further stratify an already stratified society, to set that stratification in concrete, to prevent the changes that I thought the American educational system so desperately needed.

“That was a time of rebellion, a time of experimentation, in nearly all facets of American society. Education was no different. All manner of “alternative” educational idea were given a try; schools without an authoritarian structure, without classes, without defined subjects; no tests, no quizzes, no books (at least no traditional subject-specific textbooks). All of the old trappings of education were experimentally axed.”

And that’s where I stopped writing. Today I have no idea where I was going with this, or at least where I intended to go before my detour down Memory Lane. I don’t much like Memory Lane; it’s dark and scary and there are monsters.


...and that’s the truth

One complete sentence and a partial one; I have no idea where, if anywhere, it was going. Nor do I recall why I stopped.

“People are always quick to ascribe all manner of virtues to ‘The Truth’ that I’m not sure it actually possesses. The English language is littered with sayings like ‘The Truth will set you free!’ and...”

“And...?” And what? I have no idea, and that’s the truth.


Penn, and ink

For reasons I cannot now remember, I was writing an article about William Penn. I suspect that this was something that was unfinished due to interruption, something that I fully expected to finish but for whatever reason was unable to get back to before forgetting where the hell I was going with it. So it doesn’t actually go anywhere.

“It may seem the height of hubris for me to compare myself to William Penn; nevertheless, that’s what I’m going to do.

“William Penn believed that it was impossible for good men to govern badly. But I’m no William Penn; I believe that good people govern badly every day. But Penn would say that there are no good people in a bad government; that a bad government must either be made by corrupt people, or else it must itself corrupt them.

“Though he was clearly the better of the two, William Penn was, in his way, as much of an absolutist as Ayn Rand.

“I do not believe that all people in government are either corrupt or corruptible, or that all government necessarily corrupts. Nor do I believe that all government is corrupt. Though I must admit that the available evidence does not fully support these views; in this, I am more a man of faith than William Penn.

“Perhaps the real difference between Penn and myself is in where we ultimately place our faith. Penn was a Quaker and a man with an unwavering belief in the Divine; I am not. I do not believe that faith must make men and women good. I believe that faith can corrupt a person as thoroughly as any government, or any amount of money. I believe that faith is tempered by what the believer brings to the table; that  a person cannot be made good by faith or made bad by a lack of it, that it is their character that makes them good or bad, and that anything that would redeem them or condemn them must be there from the start for faith (or its lack) to work upon

“My own beliefs are as logically unsupportable as William Penn’s (though I doubt he would have seen his as such). But it’s not just where we place our faith that makes the difference, Penn in divinity and I in the character of people. My faith in character is far from absolute; not so Penn’s faith in the divine.

“Penn’s faith deserves a closer look. He was a Quaker from the age of twenty-two, and suffered religious and legal persecution for it. He founded the colony of Pennsylvania on his Quaker principles (he owned all of it)...”

Then again, perhaps I abandoned this article because it was a bit more autobiographical than I was comfortable with.


The long dark brainfart of the soul...

And then there’s this. I was writing freely (and rather darkly) and beyond that I’m not going to preface it.

“It’s 9 AM and I haven’t slept and there’s nothing on TV and there’s nothing for breakfast except oatmeal and my foot hurts and my back hurts and my elbow and shoulder hurt and and and...

“If there’s a point to all of this, I missed it.”
(edited; WAY too personal – MSR)

“I have spent the last several nights trying to write something—anything—that will make people think I possess a modicum of wisdom. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that I have failed miserably.

“I have never been overly impressed with my own talent with the written word, but in the last few nights whatever talent I may have had appears to have deserted me entirely. I sit here hunched over my computer’s keyboard, typing away without plan or direction, hoping that something reasonably creative will come out of it.

“In the past, this trick has actually worked. Several times. I have always been able to distill my random thoughts into something coherent, something publishable (at least as a meme or a blog post).”
In this case, I stopped writing because I actually thought of something to write. I forget what...but as I recall I did wind up publishing it (whether as a blog post or a meme, I cannot now recall).


In conclusion (finally)

It there’s anything to be gained from all of this, it’s the realization that my creative process appears to involve a great deal of introspection. But that’s a two-edged sword, and I’m gripping it by the blade; said introspection often leads me down roads I’d rather not continue down, and ultimately the trip goes nowhere. (Is that a mixed metaphor? I can never tell.)

Though I really don’t think of myself as a writer, in this case perhaps there’s something to the old adage about a writer stabbing himself with a pen and bleeding onto the page. I must confess that it’s a relief to have this bloody article over and done with.

The Blues Viking
The opinions expressed here are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.

Political Robots

The Three Laws of Political Parties

Decades ago, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov created his famous “Three Laws of Robotics” that he believed should govern the behavior of robots in their interaction with humanity. Those laws were:

One: A robot must never cause a human harm, or through inaction allow a human to come to harm.

Two: A robot must obey all orders given it, except where to do so would violate the first law.

Three: A robot must protect itself, except where to do so would violate the first or second law.

In Asimov’s fictional universe, these laws were universal and were hardwired into every robot by the people who designed and built them, acting under the constraints of the laws of their society, the regulations of their profession, and the accepted morality of that fictional society.

In the real world, the world you and I live in, it would be naive to expect anything, real or artificial, to obey such civilized restrictions on their behavior. 

Political parties, for example, They seem to obey something similar to Asimov’s three laws, but with reversed priorities. These “Three Laws of Political Parties” can, I believe, be stated thusly;

One: A political party will protect its own existence, and its hold on power, first and foremost.

Two: A political party will obey the will its membership, except when to do so would violate the first law.

Three: A political party must act for the general welfare, except where to do so would violate the first or second law.

Political parties, like Asimov’s robots, are artificial constructs intended to service us. But unlike them, political parties have no built-in morality, no pre-programed constraints on their behavior that forces them to behave at all times in our best interest rather than their own.

It is hard to deny the fact that the two dominant political parties in America, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, have taken on an existence beyond anything intended by their founders. They appear to be working toward the preservation of their own power, their own hold on the people, rather than working for the benefit of those people.

I think that that is the reason that this is such an interesting year, politically. There are candidates in both major parties who are running very much against the established political order in their respective parties, and one of them (Donald Trump) appears to have all but locked down his party’s nomination. On the other side, it’s a two-candidate race between outsider Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, with Clinton representing the established order in her party (and make no mistake...there is an “Establishment” in the Democratic Party, no matter what Hillary would have you believe).

There’s one more point I’d like to make about my hypothetical Three Laws of Political Parties...parties that follow such laws ultimately fail. A political party cannot exist without a loyal membership, and a party that places its own existence above the welfare of its membership will eventually lose that loyalty and ultimately its membership.

That’s what we’re seeing in this political year; the people are deserting the established order in both parties in favor of outsiders who challenge said order. The very rules by which parties have always operated have failed them in the face of candidates who simply will not play the game according to established, though largely unwritten, rules and codes of conduct.

It is perhaps naive of us to expect our political creations to be anything but a reflection of our own values; whatever else political parties may be they are creations of human frailty and cannot help but reflect that frailty back at us. If they are ultimately self-destructive, what then of us?

The Blues Viking
The opinions expressed here are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.