Let's Talk About It

    There's an old joke about racism.  How does every racist joke start?  Then the person who intends to tell the joke gets up and looks around to make sure there are no people who might be offended, meaning minorities. That, of course, doesn't take into account an awful lot of white folks are offended by racism and racist jokes. It does take into account the teller knows what he's about to say is offensive to his neighbors and even his friends. It's a joke. Sometimes we're not bad people,  just thoughtless. Some people are just bad.  Rotted to the core for whatever reason.
    Earl Butz was a Secretary of Agriculture.  In 1976, he told an incredibly offensive racist joke while aboard a commercial flight with other officials.  He was surprised to find out some in his audience were offended.  After all, he'd taken a long look around before he told the joke.  It took overcoming 246 years of slavery and another hundred years of Jim Crow to make it no real surprise Butz was immediately fired and fired by a Republican President in the final month of a campaign.
    Let's talk about that overcoming and human progress.  To be sure, there were heroic and extremely articulate figures among the oppressed races. So many come to mind. But Dr King always stays in mind.  He admonished us that not only should we be judged on the content of our character but we most certainly always are so judged in the end.       
    It's that content of character that's made all the difference.  It's what makes the idiot with his racist joke look around.  I'm sure it's what made Butz, in his tightly laced brogans, look around.
    Content of character.  None of the slow, incremental progress made in race relations over the long years would have been possible without informing and strengthening good character on all sides. It is well we study and are informed by the minority members of our society.  It is good to hold dear and honor their contributions to the common good.  However, we can't ignore the fact that none of the progress could have been made without people of good character on all sides.
    Now, as white people, we are confronted by people in positions of leadership who don't bother to look around before they say or do something offensive.  These people seem delighted they can display and employ elements of their lesser character.  As Earl Butz illustrates,  people of lesser character have always been with us, limited only by social convention; that pressure that makes them look around before doing or saying something even they know is offensive.  We can't allow that kind of backsliding; that kind of coarsening of our society and our future as neighbors and friends. We have to always respond.  It's our duty to ourselves, our future and our past.

Terms of Endearment

    That movie is coming on again, in just a few minutes.  I really like that movie.  I saw it, in the theater, when it came out.  I always sit down-front in theaters.  Not sure why.  I can see and hear fine.  I just do.
    I remember being embarrassed to get up to leave when that movie was over because I was bawling like a baby. So was my date and the 75 or so other people in the theater.  Buncha tough guys.
    I don't think, after 36 years, I'm givin much away.  You sit there for 2 hours or so and are thoroughly entertained.  It's funny, emotionally affecting, all that stuff but you do begin to wonder where they're going with this.  Then they show you exactly what they had in mind.
    Then, of course, the stand-ins for the cast of the "Road Warrior" leave in tears.  I don't plan to watch it again.
    Two years after my initial viewing,  I noticed "Terms of Endearment" was being shown on HBO.  I was living with a wonderful girl and my best friend was there.  The movie is just as good on a TV as it is in a theater.
    It was being shown about 3 in the afternoon.  We sat down to watch what I had assured them was a movie not to be missed.  They trusted my judgment and I think I even made popcorn. We settled in.        After about an hour and 3/4s,  I said, " Oh, I forgot, I have to meet a guy about a job. I've seen this before and it'll be on again."  I left.
     I went over to a local bar,  where I knew anything would be on the TV other than the end of that movie.  I had a beer and a little bullshit and looked at my watch and went home.
    " You son of a bitch!  You left on purpose.!"
    Yes, I did.

    My love to you, Aurora.
 
 

Migration

    I was reading about how the first humans developed in Africa and proceeded to travel to  Asia Minor, Asia, Europe.  Eventually populating the most remote of the Pacific islands and even the Arctic Circle.  I think Antartica was missed only because it isn't on the way to somewhere.
    I read about the travels of the Vidic Aryans and the rampages of the Golden Horde.  The Huns becoming Hungarians and some Romans becoming Romanians. Caesars becoming Tzars.  I thought about some Chinese becoming Japanese and Korean,  becoming the various tribes of the Asian South East. I wondered, along with everyone else, how the Abos got to Australia in a past so removed and dim no one remembers. The same is true of the Polynesians.  They don't know how they got there.  They found it so pleasant they didn't bother to remember?  Maybe.  Maybe when we (academics with a mania for such questions) asked, we dismissed the answers or garbled the intent. That happens often enough.
    That got me to thinking of Thor Hyerdahl and the Kon Tiki and the almost bizarre connection of Jacquline Beer and "77 Sunset Strip".  A pulled thread that begins in the Great Rift Valley and ends with  Edd (Kookie) Byrnes?  The spread and interconnectivity of people, ideas and concepts.  That brings up Salman Rushdie and "The Satanic Verses"  as a thorough examination of that cultural phenomenon and idea.
    Tribal migration as a continuous condition of the human experience. Endless comingling.  It's interesting that in the case of the Americas, the north was primarily resettled by the restless, northern European tribes and the south by the tribes of the Iberian peninsula. Settlement determined by the Atlantic Trade Winds  The fascinating introduction of dominant language and ethnic groups and pushing aside the discovered, established societies of an earlier wave of migration.
    I could go on and on. Believe me, if I had more whiskey, I would.  Rushdie pushed it to over 500 pages just examining a few aspects, mainly culture and religion but there is always that one underlying concept:  Migration. We can talk about the migration of concepts, ideas and values but ultimately people are the carriers of these conditions. We find that the underlying feature is endless movement. It's fundamental and as a result, migration is a fundamental human right.  As such, attempts to oppose that right are useless and doomed to ultimate failure. We've seen that failure over the last four years.

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Leadership

    Some time ago I wrote an essay about some of the origins of self-government.  That should probably be read as a preamble to these thoughts  https://stillpittsburgh.blogspot.com/2017/02/walk-like-athenian.
    There are a lot of terms for the system we have but it is not a pure democracy.  I prefer 'Representative Democracy'.  No matter: Here's what we try to do.  The issues our government faces on a day to day basis are complex.  No one with work or professional responsibilities could be expected to keep up with all of those issues in any kind of detail.  Looks like a job for the hired help to me.  The idea is to select outstanding members of our communities to go to the seat of government and inform themselves in our stead in order to make proper decisions for us, in our name.  In other words,  the guy is supposed to know more than you.  I have to think in the most egregious examples these guys actually do know more than the constituents they've chosen to appeal to and instead of trying to lead they've decided to drive these constituents. Our political process is designed to weed out the stupid, not turn them into a voting block.  That borders on evil.
    Trying to appeal to and motivate the lowest common denominator is not leadership, it's demagoguery and in the end, it never works. It always ends in dislocation, suffering of the innocent and great expense.  We will never adopt the system of the Athenians, more's the pity but we should work to make this system better.  That's up to us.
    Well, that's not very optimistic, is it?  Placing responsibility on our collective, narrow shoulders?  There is good news.  We no longer hear, " Johnny can't read."  You may not have to be able to spell but you do have to be able to read to text nonsense on the endless stream of social media.
    The truth is, change and progress are slow, incremental and very often, occur seemingly by accident.  Here's our accident.  Johnny can read and he carries in his hand the ready portal to all the world's information.  It's up to Johnny to divine wisdom from that mountain of information and he has a better chance than history has ever presented.  I sure ain't gonna bet against him.
    To tell the truth  I think we're witnessing something spiritual, affirming and amazing.  If you look at the emergence of people like David Hogg, Emma Gonzalez, Malala Yousafzia, Greta Thunberg, on and on thru the kids being given multiple scholarships at very young ages and the new crop of "mean girls" in Congress,  we're looking at the worldwide emergence of Tathagathas.  To quote Flounder in "Animal House", "This is gonna be great!"  In my opinion, it's an awakening and expansion of the human spirit and we have a front-row seat.
    People always talk about going back in time and having a chance to relive their lives, change one thing or another.  I never think that.  There's no reason to believe, if I had it to do over again, I'd be any smarter.  I would like to be born today though, so I could witness the next 60 years.  Oh Boy!  This is gonna be Great!


 

There Is A Solution

    Every day hundreds of thousands of decent police officers report for work.  Every day their lives, reputations and characters are challenged by a few bad actors.  They are as embarrassed by this as every citizen who pays their wages.  The mistake they make that embarrasses their safety is failing to police their colleagues.  They are intimidated by personal association and shared experience.  Perhaps even shared fear.  That has to stop.
    Here is the solution.  Every damage award should come from police retirement funds, reducing payouts of retirement benefits in the future and in the present.  That means every time officers let bad apples bring liabilities to their communities their retirement and those already receiving benefits should see those benefits reduced until the penalty is paid.  The police would immediately begin policing themselves.
   If you have concerns about that explain that to a nine-year-old tackled to the ground and cuffed or a fifteen-year-old having his head smashed into the pavement or maybe you want to explain it to someone shot 21 times for having a cell phone, maybe a fourteen-year-old shot in the back on Christmas morning.
    Maybe you want to explain it to the children of an officer shot out of hand because someone is frightened and radicalized by the misbehavior of other, unchecked officers.
    This is the real world. Malefactors should be checked.  Blue, black or purple let's make it actually matter in that real world.

The Deep End

    I'm watching my friends in the Democratic Party wadding in for the 2020 Presidential race and they are all wrong.  It's the wrong way to go about it and it doesn't address the most serious issue we face.  They need to wade into the deep end. The key is national security and foreign affairs.  That sounds odd for a Democrat. Our concerns are almost always domestic but we and the other western democracies are under serious attack and we have to respond.  In case you have missed it, historically, when we're faced with a legitimate threat, liberal democrats respond quite well albeit a little overwhelmingly violent.  You can debate whether the Japanese should have been A-bombed all you want but the fact is we did build the thing and we did use it.  Now we have about 12 thousand of them just waiting to go anywhere in the world we choose.  That's violence.
    Our republican friends have never won a real war and don't seem to have the first clue how to wage one.  Don't bother telling me about the American Civil War or the Spanish American War. Try to stay in the last 100 years.
    The current administration is unconcerned with the ongoing extensive attack on our society and is unwilling to do the simplest things to oppose it.  Any serious candidate for President should hammer that fact home at every opportunity.  It certainly should be emphasized the current people refuse to oppose attacks on our society.  It should be pointed out that is evidence of disloyalty and driven home relentlessly. Supporters of the current administration should unfailingly be belittled as disloyal by choice or by ignorance but belittled nonetheless.
    We are under attack by the Russians.  We know they are ramping up another disinformation campaign to confuse and confound our national debate and elections. We know this administration is disinterested in responding in any realistic way. Those facts are matters of public record.  More importantly, we know that the Trump people jumped at every chance they were offered to coordinate with and cooperate with those foreign attacks.  There is no doubt about that.  It is firmly on the public record.  The juvenile attempts to explain away these myriad contacts have only confirmed they did happen and seem to continue to happen. The willing acceptance of foreign cash into our political system should be portrayed as the crime it is.
    This might sound wrong or contradictory on it's face but the second prong of the Democratic Party's approach to 2020 should be to totally ignore Trump.  The eventual candidate should never acknowledge Trump's existence while his or her's surrogates should hammer his disloyalty and ineptitude.  The hallmark of that effort should be a refusal to debate on the grounds the republicans have failed to advance a legitimate candidate.  It was Clinton's response to Trump as though he wasn't inept and totally unfit that gave him legitimacy. We can all see that was a mistake.
    Any question about Trump should be met by the candidate with an articulation of some policy addressing the future.  It should always be left to surrogates to hammer Trump for disloyalty, first and ineptitude second. Always those two themes.
    It's simple: Hammer disloyalty and ineptitude and never acknowledge anything that would lend legitimacy to a Trump candidacy.  Those things have the virtue of being true and important.

We're Falling Short

    When I went to college one of the first survey courses I took was Philosophy 101.  In that course, they discussed the actual definition of the word, 'rhetoric" and how rhetoric is employed to advance public discourse and problem-solving.  It's an area of thought that goes back, at least, to the ancient Greeks.  I realized then and I still believe, not understanding rhetoric and linguistic forensics was a major hole in my education.  We should learn these things right along with learning our ABCs.  This knowledge is critical for any citizen of any country and is essential to rational thought.
    There is a good reason why public schools don't teach recent history.  Public events are vociferously debated for decades after the fact, as they should be.  It's almost impossible to relate recent historical events without advancing one side or the other in that debate. That's what family discussion and Sunday School are for.
    However, teaching the nuts and bolts of discourse isn't partisan.  It's becoming more and more obvious it's essential.  We are confronted with people who speak in an endless stream of fallacies. Some do so to deliberately mislead.  Others do so because they actually think in an endless stream of fallacy.  For some, it's a failure of morality.  For others, it's a failure of education.
    It's hard to sell bullshit as a bouquet of roses to someone who has been educated to know what bullshit smells like. These things should be part of all, elementary education. The thing to remember is; they are an important part of any law school education.  If someone trained as an attorney mouths a fallacy you know he's being deliberately dishonest.  Most politicians are attorneys.
    There are several listings of these illogical tactics, some less obscure than others. I think they should be published every day, in a box, on every editorial page.  Doing so would reduce a lot of opinion columns to farce.
    By far the most common is 'setting up a strawman'.  That's where you mischaracterize what's been said or done and then criticize your own mischaracterization.  The second most common is probably 'poisoning the well'. Familiarly illustrated by, " When did you stop beating your wife."  I don't think that needs more explanation.
    I judge politicians by how often they employ fallacies for the simple reason it means they are either poor thinkers or dishonest.  I do remember the only time I saw Jimmy Carter employ a rhetorical fallacy. He couldn't do it without smiling because he knew what he was doing.  LOL. To my mind that excused it.  The educated people who employ fallacies consciously to deceive will never be excused.
    The point is: Educate yourself.  If you know these things the fallacies clang a warning like a broken bell.