Month: August 2016

After the election, then what?

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While forty-some percent of the American population — right-wingers, all — are now completely detached from reality and are having a dangerous and terrifying psychotic episode right out in public, those of us with a grip on reality are doing what we always do: We are trying to understand what the devil is going on.

The media — at least the responsible media, the media tethered to, you know, facts and reality — turn out articles on a daily basis, each article a possible piece of the puzzle. As we put the pieces of the puzzle together and try to understand the picture that is emerging, some things are becoming clearer. For one, though it appears that Donald Trump will go down in flames on or before election day and that Hillary Clinton will be the next president of the United States, it also appears clear that we’re going to have to deal with the flaming shrapnel of the disintegrated Republican Party and other delusional right-wing radicals for years to come. The term for the crazies that seems to be emerging is “the alt-right.” Who are they, and how are we going to deal with them?

Here are links to a few recent articles:

At Vox.com, Dylan Matthews traces the roots and branches of the alt-right. The rank and file of the know-nothings, of course, have no intellect and are capable of little more than picking up talking points from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, or web sites such as the Drudge Report or Breitbart. But the intellectuals of the alt-right are much more scary. As Matthews points out, they are overtly anti-democracy. They’re authoritarians, and they dream of an authoritarian, corporatized government with a billionaire such as Elon Musk as king. The article is The alt-right is more than warmed-over white supremacy. It’s that, but way way weirder.

The Washington Post, as usual years behind the curve, has an article today on the prepper movement and the preppers who are moving to the “American redoubt” in the Pacific Northwest. This is old news. The preppers, and Survival.com, go back for years. Still, it’s an important piece of the puzzle, and you’ll find right-wing preppers pretty much everywhere. The article is A Fortress Against Fear: In the Rural Pacific Northwest, Prepping for the Day It Hits the Fan.

At Salon, Andrew O’Hehir sees the televised self-destruction of Karl Rove on election night in 2012 as the moment the last hinge broke (O’Hehir’s hinge metaphor, not mine) on the right wing’s grip on reality, unleashing the barbarians who now support Donald Trump (and who work in his campaign). O’Hehir writes, “Karl Rove kicked open a conceptual window with his micro-rebellion of 2012, a window that had been hanging from one rusty hinge. It took others, more courageous than he, to burst through it into the brave new world of post-reality Trumpian politics on the other side.” The article is: The Year of Dark Magical Thinking: How Karl Rove’s 2012 Fox News humiliation unleashed Trump, Breitbart and the demons of the alt-right.

A big part of what drove the anger of right-wingers during the past eight years, because they are pretty much all racists, was the fact that we had a black President. But for 25 years, they have demonized Hillary Clinton, so it’s clear that right-wing anger is not going to subside just because Hillary Clinton is white. One of the few questions remaining, as far as I can tell, about what right-wingers will do during the next few years is who will win the battle for control of the Republican Party. Will it be establishment Republicans or scorched-earth radicals? If I had to bet, I’d bet on the scorched-earth radicals.

Looking ahead, then, I increasingly believe that Hillary Clinton is uniquely qualified to deal with what is to come. She knows the enemy better than anyone. For 25 years, they have tried to defeat her, and they have failed. President Obama deceived himself into thinking that he could find common ground with scorched earthers, and Obama betrayed many people in his own party to suck up to Republicans. Instead, the scorched earthers ate him alive. Though Hillary Clinton no longer talks about “the vast right-wing conspiracy,” she’s had its number since the day she and Bill first arrived at the White House. The vast right-wing conspiracy has demonized her and tried to get something on her ever since Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992. She has survived them and outsmarted them. The industry that demonized her could never get anything significant to stick to her, but they did damage her favorability ratings. Supporters of Bernie Sanders bought into all that, to their eternal shame. Already, establishment voices are calling on Hillary Clinton to suck up to Republicans and move to the right. But Clinton already is a centrist. I only hope that she is not stupid enough to betray ten hard-working liberal supporters for every fickle right-winger she’d gain. Instead, Hillary Clinton should not flinch in driving a stake through the heart of the Republican Party, the party that deserves oblivion for having brought this country to the state it is in. Unless or until the radical, anti-government right wing comes to its senses, the Republican Party is its only political vehicle for gaining power the old-fashioned democratic way, through elections. As it is, the Republican Party is dangerous, and rather than coddling it, we must assist its suicide.

Though it will be a great pleasure to see Donald Trump permanently politically destroyed on Nov. 8, and though it will be an even greater pleasure to see the Republican Party hack itself to pieces with an ax of its own making, we will not be out of danger. Forty percent of the population will still be angry, psychotic, and unhinged from reality. They have their own media, and that media will continue to feed them anger, delusion, and a never-ending stream of conspiracy theories. New demagogues will soon be stabbing each other in the back to take Donald Trump’s place.

It’s going to be a rough ride. I just hope that Hillary Clinton understands the bigger, truly perilous trends that lie beneath all this. The first is economic injustice. The second is how those who are newly on the losing end of economic injustice — white people — have resorted to destructive rage (including terrorism) and the comfort of lies and deception. They need dark-skin scapegoats for who is eating their lunch, because they can’t be allowed to know that it’s billionaires and the 1 percent who are eating their lunch. Newly lunchless, they are insatiable consumers of propaganda. They are driven by emotion and screwball religion. They’ve created their own alternate reality. Breitbart.com has seen a huge increase in traffic since Stephen Bannon went to work with Trump. The Drudge Report will continue to be the Amazon of retailing right-wing slime. Will we see changes at Fox News now that Roger Ailes is out, perhaps an alliance with the establishment fragment of the Republican Party? But there’s no money to be made in talking about reality with right-wingers, because there’s no demand for reality. There are rumors that Trump and Ailes, after the election, will start a new media business to compete with Fox News. The only business model that could work in a competitive right-wing market would be coming up with the most appealing lies and the most obnoxious shouting heads. Heaven help us.

It’s almost enough to make you want to go hide in the woods somewhere.

Update, August 31, 2016: The Guardian has a nice piece on the possibility of a Trump TV: “Fox was this amazing unifier of all the strands of conservatism together … [Now] it’s kind of a Lord of the Flies situation where everyone’s trying to kill each other.”

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Next year, a total eclipse

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Wikimedia — Click on map for higher resolution

Next year, most of us in the U.S. will have a chance to see a total eclipse of the sun without traveling too far. The eclipse will be Aug. 21, 2017.

Here’s a web site with all the details: eclipse2017.org

I think I’ve already figured out where I’ll want to go to watch the eclipse. The path of totality crosses a magical spot in the mountains of North Carolina, down at the point where the borders of three states meet — Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina. This is Deliverance country. Spooky, no?

A couple of book reports

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The old translation and the new

Plato: The Complete Works. Edited by John M. Cooper, Hackett Publishing, 1997. 1838 pages.

For years, my only volume of Plato was the translation by Benjamin Jowett, first published in 1871. I bought the volume in a used bookstore. It seemed like a good find at the time. From the pencil markings in the front, it appears that I paid $12 for it. Most of my previous reading of Plato was from the Jowett translation. The Phaedrus dialogue, in particular, figures into my Ursa Major novels. One of my two main characters even is named Phaedrus.

Now I know that relying on such an old translation was a huge mistake. An academic friend happened to mention a couple of months ago that the Jowett translation is badly bowdlerized. Instead of Jowett, we now have a new and far superior translation, published in 1997. It’s edited by John Cooper, and it isn’t bowdlerized. It also isn’t cheap. The hardback will cost you over $50.

Benjamin Jowett, by all accounts, was a heck of a scholar. He was at Oxford. But he also was a theologian and a 19th Century evangelical. Do you hear the alarm bells going off? It means that Jowett can’t be trusted not to censor the Greeks. I’ve not spent that much time on side-by-side comparisons of the translations, but it was easy enough to see that where Jowett used the English word “love,” the Cooper translators used the word “sex.” Now that’s a very different thing, isn’t it? And one of the areas in which we most don’t want to misunderstand the Greeks is on the distinction between love and sex. Sex is discussed quite a bit in the Plato dialogues. It’s discussed very casually and without the slightest sign of the squeamishness that is detectable in the Victorian translation. Jowett’s theology prevented him from understanding this. I sometimes wonder how Greek literature even survived the long, dark Christian era. My guess is that it’s only because Christianity required the fetishization of Rome, and along with Rome, Greece. We’re lucky that the squeamish made do with mere bowdlerization, though I have little doubt that some lost texts were lost because it was thought best to copy over something so un-Christian.

There’s another, more subtle, difference in the translations. That is that, in an archaic translation, Plato himself seems archaic. But, in a modern translation, Socrates and his young men seem thoroughly modern. Their wonderful sense of humor seems just the same as ours. Human foibles, it would seem, haven’t changed a bit. And so, reading Plato in a modern translation makes us realize that the distance between (ahem) us smart folk and the Greeks is about a millisecond. They were just like us in a great many ways, and that’s incredibly endearing. There is nothing at all formal about the dialogues. They’re super-casual, just the guys sitting around talking, jesting, and trying their wits against each other. You realize that Socrates was popular not just because he was smart, but also because he was funny, always kind (even to the gym rats with their modest intellects), and fun to be around.

So, as a smart folk and as a reader of this blog, you do keep a volume of Plato by your bed for fill-in reading, don’t you? If you have the Jowett translation, slip a card into it with a warning to the next owner about bowdlerization, sell it to a used bookstore, and get yourself the new Cooper translation.

Don’t fret too much over the The Republic. Utopias as a form of literature are interesting, but their shelf life is terrible. Instead, browse the other dialogues according to your mood.

If you’re new to Plato, I would offer a warning. It’s sometimes difficult to tell when Socrates is being serious. He sometimes elaborates on arguments that he doesn’t believe, at all. This is certainly true in The Phaedrus. If we were sitting at Socrates’ feet, no doubt he’d wink at us from time to time, and he’d sometimes be interrupted by laughter that isn’t mentioned in the dialogues. It’s like listening to Mozart. Frequently Mozart wants you to laugh at his music, just as Socrates wants you to laugh at some arguments. So one needs to be very careful about taking snippets of Plato out of context. It’s possible to get him exactly backwards.

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The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. By Matthew B. Crawford, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. 320 pages.

This is a strange book, difficult to review. I’d call it philosophy, but Crawford says that it’s more a polemic. The author wants you to take control of your own attention instead of allowing your attention to be dominated by the many forces that have such clever ways of usurping your attention for their own purposes. The author also wants you to be less abstract, less concerned with representations of the world (the most extreme of which would be virtual reality) and more concerned with the world right under your nose.

Crawford’s philosophical position naturally leads him to a great respect for skilled practice, both for the way it requires our attention and the way it requires us to pay attention to the real world, the world outside our heads. He mentions many skills — cooking, gardening, motorcycle riding, pretty much anything that requires the use of tools. He talks about how quickly you can get killed if your attention lapses while racing a motorcycle. He detests “drive by wire” automobile engineering, in which the brake pedal isn’t truly connected to the brakes, or the steering wheel barely connected to the steering. This, by the way, made me appreciate once again how much I like the honest Mercedes engineering of my Smart car, in which the driver is truly connected to the road. It helped me realize how good design — for example the design of my Nikon professional cameras — makes the camera feel like a natural extension of the body and the body’s visual system.

Having made his case in the first part of the book, he devotes his last chapter to the art of organ building, as an illustration of his message. As an organist, I found this fascinating. If Crawford himself is a musician, he didn’t say so. But the work and time that he put into understanding the craft of organ building made me realize that he is almost certainly equally diligent about whatever else commands his attention.

I’m appending a couple of paragraphs about the organ, not because it summarizes the book but because it’s funny, and it’s a great piece of writing.

“Pipe organs are to the Baroque era what the Apollo moon rockets were to the 1960s: enormously complex machines that focused the gaze of a people upward. Pushing the envelope of the engineering arts, a finished organ stood as a monument of knowledge and cooperation. Installed in the spiritual center of a town, a pipe organ mimics the human voice on a more powerful scale, and summons a congregation to join their voices to it. The point is to praise something glorious that transcends man’s making. Yet the congregants can’t help but notice that this music of praise, like the instrument that carries it aloft, is itself glorious.

“A big pipe organ thus expresses both humble piety and vaunting pride at once. It can be shockingly indiscreet in this later role; the organ often dwarfs the ostensible altar. But perhaps these tendencies get blurred together in the life of a congregation. When the choir is at full song, the stained glass is rattling loose, and the whole house seems ready to launch, what then? Then the organist pulls out all the stops. He shifts his weight to the right. His left foot is poised over the leftmost pedal, the low C, and now he stomps it, sending a thousand cubic feet of air per minute through massive pipes to blast heaven’s favorite pigeons out of the rafters. Now the very pews transmit joy to women’s loins, and the strongest man in the congregation feels himself reduced to a blushing bride of Christ. Now one feels it is God’s own organ that fills the sacred chamber, and when this happens, praise comes naturally: hallelujah!”

Political insanity and religious insanity

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Televangelist Kenneth Copeland

While the 2016 presidential election puts on full display the political insanity of much of the American population — not to mention the insanity of the Republican Party — let’s not fail to point out another insanity that is just as prevalent: religious insanity. Let’s also note how closely the two are connected.

The quote below is attributed to televangelist Kenneth Copeland, in a recent appearance on the Trinity Broadcasting Network:

“If Christians don’t support Trump, they are risking the wrath of God. Trump has been chosen by God, and by rejecting him, they are rejecting God. They could be punished with barrenness, poverty or even having a gay child.”

And the quote below is attributed to Anne Graham Lotz, on the air with right-wing radio host Steve Deace:

“Our nation seems to be shaking its fist in God’s face and telling him to get out of our politics, get out of our schools, get out of our businesses, get out of our marketplace, get off the streets. It’s just stunning to me the way we are basically abandoning God as a culture and as a nation. … I think that’s why God allows bad things to happen. I think that’s why he would allow 9/11 to happen, or the dreadful attack in San Bernardino, or some of these other places, to show us that we need him. We’re desperate without him.”

What a nice god! Though he must be incredibly busy running the universe, he also has time to punish earthlings for not voting Republican. That god also kills people — or at least allows people to be killed — to remind us how much we need such a violent, vindictive god.

As the philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris has pointed out, this kind of religious delusion and narcissism are prevalent among plenty of people who might see Kenneth Copeland and Anne Graham Lotz as a bit extreme. Harris has beautifully pointed out the narcissism of people who think that God is intimately involved in the details of their lives. Not only does God actually tell them what he’s thinking, it’s remarkable how much these people and their god are alike: pure nasty. While your God was finding you a parking space, Harris says, or answering your prayers for enough money to pay your credit card bill, how many children did that same God allow to die in Africa while their helpless parents watched and prayed? That’s narcissism on top of the nasty.

I’m fully on board with freedom of religion and freedom of speech. But those freedoms also mean that the rest of us are free to tell these people that they’re vile and sickening, and that their god is even worse.

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Anne Graham Lotz

Tomato sandwiches, all home made

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The garden is producing beautiful tomatoes in generous quantities. Who can resist tomato sandwiches? Though I bought a loaf of bread for the ceremonial first tomato sandwich of the summer, I just couldn’t eat any more bad bread. This is organic sandwich bread made from a recipe in Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, the best book on breadmaking I’ve ever seen.

Home-grown organic tomatoes, homemade bread, and homemade pickles. You can’t go wrong.

The penalty for stealing eggs: Move down to the river

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Every summer, black snakes stake out the territory near the chicken house and steal eggs. When Ken is here, they don’t get away with it. This snake was the second egg-stealing snake that Ken has caught this summer and moved to the river. He catches ’em, puts ’em in a bucket, and releases them down near the Dan River.

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The crazy is bottom up, not top down

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Charlotte Observer

I have no idea what Fox-watchers and Limbaugh listeners are being told — probably the usual stuff about Benghazi and whatever it takes at the moment to keep Republicans angry, disinformed, and motivated to vote. But it’s pretty clear now that the mainstream media have fully realized that Donald Trump is a dangerous madman and that the possibility of his being elected president is an existential threat to the United States (if not to the world, if Trump gets his hand on the button).

All that is true. But there is one very important thing that the mainstream media and its pundits still are not acknowledging. That is that Donald Trump is not the source of the political insanity that has long been evident in this country, not just during this campaign. The political insanity is in the Republican Party itself and in the media that feed, inflame, and constantly deceive Republican voters. When you understand that this is bottom up, not top down, then it’s clear that only a crazy man like Trump could have gotten the Republican nomination in the first place. It’s also clear that the implosion of Trump’s campaign, though it will head off the present emergency, will not solve the problem that makes this country half insane and almost ungovernable.

We might hope that the younger sons of Rupert Murdoch might have plans for Fox News that would bring an end to the 24/7 paranoia and deception that has been fed to Republican voters for the past 18 years under Roger Ailes and which has made many, if not most, Republican voters delusional and driven by rage and paranoia. But we can’t count on it. Rush Limbaugh’s career will eventually end. But we have no idea when.

With the Dumpster fire of Donald Trump’s campaign safely behind us, we might imagine that we’d be out of the woods. But we would not be out of the woods. Nothing but the destruction of the Republican Party as it is today, a total reform of its pundits, mass firings at right wing “think tanks,” and calling out the meanness of some churches and theologies would ensure that we’re really out of the woods.

Below: Just one day’s worth of Trump headlines from the Washington Post.

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Also:

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Update 6:30 p.m. Aug. 4:

For some graphic evidence that the crazy is bottom up, have a look at this New York Times video from Trump rallies. If you’ve ever been verbally assaulted by a right-winger, you know that they get their words from the right-wing media, because they don’t have the knowledge or intellect to come up with their own. But the crazy, and the hatred, were already there before someone like Trump or Limbaugh put words in their mouths.

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