Category: Psychology

Blasphemy

A link showed up in my email this morning: There’s No Hate Like Christian Love. Provocative, I thought, but damned if it isn’t bang-on, and something that I’ve been thinking (if not actually saying) for decades. Curious, I clicked. The tone was a bit harsh and strident, the language blunt, and the generalizations sweeping and overstated. But I don’t think he’s wrong: I think he’s dead right.

My friends of faith (and I have at least a few) will not, I think, argue with the essential message there: Bible-thumping makes good street theatre, but it’s a crap basis for public policy and not “religion” — as a person of faith might understand it — at all. It stands principle on its head, so that “Love thy neighbor” becomes, “My neighbor must love me.” If Jake next door doesn’t love me as I love myself: well, that’s intolerable.

Someone recently said to me that religion is what’s left when God has left the building. I think that’s about as perfect a distillation as there can be. “Moreover,” she said, “God was never in a building.”

I could go on about this but I don’t see the need, except to say this: It’s not all people of faith, by any means; it is (and here my own generalization sweeps wide) the ones who proclaim their faith most loudly. There is no zealot like a convert; and the fanatic is always harboring a secret doubt. They should listen more, most of all to their secret inner voices that they work so hard to suppress.

Dialog (like charity, I suppose) begins at home.

Waiting for the End of the World

When we were young
we lived in fear: 
the Russians — no, the USSR --
were coming for us.
We held our breath
and cowered under our desks
waiting for the end of the world.
Then the enemy collapsed
which every house of cards must do.
In its place rose 
another illusion
a succession of threats and poses
poses and threats
from a man who would be king.

This new enemy is
smaller
with a small man’s bluster,
a pufferfish
with warheads to poison the world.

Today we sit and sip our wine
or fancy bespoke cocktails
and talk about the end.
We did this yesterday
and the day before.
No fear this time,
just resignation.
Because everything has changed
and everything is the same.

This much we can say:
It never ends well for the Tsar.

Enough, Already

Seriously, enough. Enough of the frivolous lawsuits, the fraudulent claims of fraud, the fact-free fits of faux outrage. In the five weeks since Election Day, we have seen the same play fifty times: the Trump campaign screams about nonexistent fraud and sues to have election results reversed; absent any actual facts and any plausible legal theory which would allow the disenfranchisement of millions — for no reason other than the litigant doesn’t like the election result — the court summarily dismisses the case. Trial courts will have none of it; appellate courts won’t allow it; and the United States Supreme Court refuses to hear the case.

In the latest episode of this outlandish opera buffa is brought to us by the state of Texas, which wants to sue the states of Wisconsin, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan in the US Supreme Court. What possible cause of action might Texas have? Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, has concocted the notion that these four states somehow damaged the Lone Star state when they changed their election rules to allow universal mail-in ballots — something which Texas surely could have done, as well, but chose not to.

Per The New York Times:

The lawsuit, filed by the Republican attorney general of Texas and backed by his G.O.P. colleagues in 17 other states and 106 Republican members of Congress, represents the most coordinated, politicized attempt to overturn the will of the voters in recent American history. President Trump has asked to intervene in the lawsuit as well in hopes that the Supreme Court will hand him a second term he decisively lost.

The suit is the latest in a spectacularly unsuccessful legal effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to overturn the results, with cases so lacking in evidence that judges at all levels have mocked or condemned them as without merit. Legal experts have derided this latest suit as well, which makes the audacious claim, at odds with ordinary principles of federalism, that the Supreme Court should investigate and override the election systems of four states at the behest of a fifth.

Of course, there will be no end to this farce: it has proved far too profitable for Trump, for whom a debt load of about $420 million comes due in the next year. Since Trump almost certainly hasn’t the cash, isn’t capable of writing a book worth a nine-figure advance, and has spent his 74 years avoiding spending his own money when grift and suckers are available, he has turned his electoral loss into a fundraising opportunity: donations to his “stop the steal!” fund are directed, in essence, into his own pocket. His credulous supporters don’t read the fine print and won’t believe anyone who has.

That the demands to invalidate the electoral results require a feat of dizzying mental gymnastics, cognitive dissonance on a scale rarely if ever seen, doesn’t seem to bother these self-styled defenders of democracy one whit. Consider: the election was rife with fraud on a massive scale, but only on the top line of the ballot. All the down-ballot races — races which the 126 members of Congress now clamoring for SCOTUS intervention won — were magically legitimate. It defies law, it defies logic, and it defies any real sense of patriotism, which would put country over party and long-term civic goals above short-term self-interest.

That this suit is without merit (and beyond redemption) hasn’t stopped Republican attorneys general of seventeen other states from seeking to join the fun — despite the irrevocable certification of election results in all fifty states. This is an unabashed attack on the core and fabric of democracy; it is, in a word, seditious: We don’t like the result so we must find a way, any way, to undo and overturn it. And if we can’t do that, can we at least undermine public confidence in all electoral outcomes? (We don’t care if it undermines our own victories as long as we can seize power and maintain control of the levers of government.)

This is not representative self-government. It is reprehensible self-serving. Enough, already. Republicans, you lost. Sit down, shut up, and muzzle your Dear Leader. He is doing the Republic great harm — and you, too, if you gave a care to history.

Hysteria

A friend writes that in her deep-red part of the country yet another conspiracy theory is taking root: The Biden-as-Trojan-horse gambit, the Far Left’s way of sneaking Kamala Harris into the Oval Office. In this fervid fever fantasy, a frail Biden will not fill out much of his term and Harris is a progressive darling who will enact Medicare for All, raise the minimum wage, and destroy the American Way Of Life by implementing the Green New Deal.

Hearing these fears I was at first dismissive: Harris is neither Bernie Sanders nor Elizabeth Warren, nor is she Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, or Ilhan Omar. And while I personally favor a more progressive agenda, I also recognize that politics is the art of the possible (see here and here): it does no good, and in the end considerable harm (in lost time, lost energy, and lost opportunity for compromise), to advocate — for example — universal government health insurance if the proposal will be met by unreasoned and unrestrained emotional resistance. “Medicare for all” isn’t socialism any more than automobile insurance or monthly condominium maintenance fees. It isn’t a terrible prospect and would likely save considerable lives and dollars. Opponents have been unable to articulate any real and substantive objection, ranting instead about keeping Government away from the doctor-patient relationship. (They seem to have no problem with insurance companies coming between you and your doctor, but that’s a discussion for another day.)

None of this analysis will help my friend convince her friends and neighbors that their fears are irrational and overwrought. Paraphrasing Jonathan Swift, you can’t reason a man out of a position he didn’t reason himself into. Or, as the Federalist congressman Fisher Ames, of Massachusetts, characterized such strongly held opinions:

They will not yield to argument; for, as they were not reasoned up, they cannot be reasoned down. They are higher than a Chinese wall in truth’s way, and built of materials that are indestructible.

With all Trump’s palaver and frothing at the mouth about impenetrable walls, Fisher’s turn of phrase seems particularly apt today. Since 1980 the GOP has excelled at convincing people to vote against their own self-interest, often by screaming, “Socialism!” Democrats would do well to better understand the emotional buttons the GOP has mastered.

And Republicans: If your best path to electoral victory is through voter suppression, what does that say about your policies? This segment from NPR’s On the Media is as chilling as it is eye opening. Of course every “legal” ballot should be counted.  We should all — all — be worried about a political party that defines “legal” as “for us” and “illegal” as “for them.”  If you doubt that characterization — which I admit sounds outlandish — take a look at the situation in Georgia, whose two sitting United States senators are calling for the resignation of the Secretary of State (whose job includes election oversight). Why? Because this fellow Republican didn’t deliver the election to them. Instead, he did his job and counted the votes.

Fatigue (II)

Fatigue comes in many forms, and from multiple causes. The jingoists who have appropriated the flag and other national symbols as their own are fatigued, to be sure; but they misdiagnose the source. The rest of us — by which I mean the great majority of the American people — are also numb. Doubly-numb, in fact: for outrage fatigue settled in many months ago, probably early in 2018. As E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post observes:

Trump has, for the past four years, used the sheer breadth of the scandals that surround him to numb the public. No one focused long enough on any single outrage for it to do the damage even one comparable disgrace would inflict on any other politician.

It’s something we’re all familiar with and yet have been too fatigued to analyze or articulate. With so many outrages weekly, and often daily, we have neither the time nor the patience nor the sheer force of will to do more than commiserate: offenses against custom and institutional practice; offenses against families; offenses against ordinary decency. Offenses, most often, against our laws and the rule of law. We have been watching a slow-motion train wreck and have felt powerless to stop it: the people in power, in coequal branches of government, are content to do nothing so long as they get their judges and their tax cuts.

The price to this nation, Senators, was far too high. And you have sold your souls far too cheaply.

Fatigue (I)

A graph published this week in The New York Times documents the unacceptable reality: in the United States, today, the number of new infections daily is double what it was at the end of March — not long after Trump declared that cases would “soon be down to zero.”

Graph from NY Times 10/19/2020 with link to article.
Click the image to open the article.

We — the public — are seven months into this pandemic. The White House, with its intelligence briefings as far back as late December, has had ten months: more than the full gestation of an infant human or a calf, and nearly enough time to birth a horse, a llama, an elk, a seal. Given where we are today I believe its fair to say we will be lucky to return to something like a pre-pandemic normal some time before an elephant conceived in January 2020 is born, which would be next September or October.

And yet: Movie theaters are reopening, restaurants are back to serving indoors, and there is no shortage of people who still believe that their rights are trampled if they are obliged to wear a mask to protect the health of others. Of course this begs the question: Why is your right to be a jackass superior to everyone else’s right to avoid infection? The selfishness (not to mention the ignorance) is astonishing. Let’s be clear: the fact that our lives are slowly, even cautiously, returning to normal is hardly good news. It is a sign, rather, that after seven or eight months people are becoming desperate for some reassurance that it will all soon be over. It will not — and the fatigue currently driving people into the streets, into stores and restaurants, into the cinemas and health clubs, is almost certain to prolong, not curtail, our national suffering. A second wave is coming.

And yet: The people evidently most chafed by stay-at-home orders and mask protocols (“Don’t tell me what to do!”) evidently take their marching orders from a would-be autocrat. These are the people who plotted to kidnap the governors of at least two states to “protest” public health initiatives. Put another way: the self-styled patriots who object loudly to state authorities protecting the public health (by issuing mask mandates and requiring social-distancing protocols) have no objection to their “strong” leader deciding, on his own, who is worthy of state protection, who can stay, who must go, and who should go to prison. The human capacity for cognitive dissonance is without limit.

Trump himself called out the fatigue problem — as always, without a trace of irony or self-awareness — in a conference call with campaign staff: “People are tired of COVID. Yup, there’s going to be spikes, there’s going to be no spikes, there’s going to be vaccines. With or without vaccines, people are tired of COVID. I have the biggest rallies I have ever had and we have COVID. People are saying whatever, just leave us alone. They’re tired of it.” Of course people are tired of it: not the hearing, but the living. It has gone on for seven unnecessarily long months. Most other countries — including developing and third-world nations — have returned to a semblance of “normal” without the threat of spikes or the cloud of super spreader events. “But it came from China!” Aside from being factually suspect (the virus spread to the US from Europe, not China) it isn’t a reason for inaction. Blame-shifting might be effective to avoid responsibility among the more credulous; it never yet actually solved a problem.

Trust (II)

Democracy cannot function without trust in government: people must know that their elected officials are working for the collective good, not for private gain nor for the limited benefit of (let us say) wealthy donors. This is the fundamental compact of democracy: Governments, Jefferson wrote, “are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The citizens of this nation live for this ideal and many have died for it; but too many people now believe themselves powerless in the face of a government that does not operate in their interest. Simply put, they do not trust their elected representatives.

And why should they? These same (“Trust me! I alone can fix it!”) elected officials, and their appointees, have failed the most fundamental tests. In a crisis — a worldwide pandemic, a health crisis that has claimed over 200,000 American lives and nearly a million around the globe — they have failed in every imaginable way: from literally throwing out the NSC manual on dealing with a pandemic; to pitting states against each other to acquire protective gear; to denying the seriousness of the problem; to pretending that it has already passed, even as the daily number of new cases outstrips the rate of March and April.

“We have serious problems in this country and we need serious people to solve them,” says President Andrew Shepherd in the 1995 movie, “The American President.” We did, we do.  And we do need serious people to solve them: people dedicated to an ideal, people who will work for the greater good. These are not the people currently in the White House or the Senate majority. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a gang less serious about solving your problems — they would much rather line their own pockets or amass power simply for its own sake. It’s easier than working, and apparently more rewarding.

In the last six months we have seen our government yawn at those 200,000 unnecessary deaths; release tear gas on citizens exercising their First Amendment rights; vow to revoke the health insurance of 21 million Americans during a pandemic; and call into question the results of a future election. The chief executive has called soldiers fallen in battle “losers” while he hides from protesters in a bunker. 

Serious people to solve our problems? Hardly. The people nominally in charge are the serious problems we face. While the House of Representatives continues to do its work, as best it can, the United States Senate — the self-styled “World’s Greatest Deliberative Body” — perfects its transformation from functioning legislature to legislative graveyard, where bills supported by a majority of voters go to die. The Senate majority leader can’t be bothered, in the face of a pandemic that is on track to kill over a quarter million before Election Day, to bring a relief bill passed by the House in May to the floor for debate and a vote; but he will rush through a Supreme Court nomination — a nomination which has yet to be announced. Just what are the priorities here? Doing the People’s business has taken a back seat to entrenching a jurisprudence rejected by a solid majority of those same People.

No wonder Americans have lost faith and do not trust their government. They believe their government does not operate in their interests and feel powerless, unable to issue any corrective. What power, after all, does a single vote have? They are not wrong, but neither are they right: we have seen how just a few votes in the right places can swing an election. (That this has much to do with the Electoral College, itself a vestige of America’s original sin, is a topic for another day. For now the point is simply: every vote matters as we know from the painful experiences of 2000 and 2016, not to mention 1888, 1876, and 1824.) That feeling of helplessness is encouraged by established power structures and the incumbents who support and benefit from them: a poll tax is not the only voter-suppression tool, nor is it necessarily the most effective.

In the long term, big structural reforms will be needed; in the short term, the best corrective is the simplest: Vote.

The Markets and Obi Wan

The markets are tumbling again this week, apparently on Tuesday’s testimony of Drs. Fauci and Redfield before the Senate Health Committee. They warned that the coronavirus is far from contained and that a too-rapid easing of social distancing and stay-at-home restrictions will likely trigger a second wave that could be even worse than the first.

The New York Times reports:

The comments appeared to rattle the markets, driving the S&P 500 down as investors weighed the potential of a second wave of infections against Mr. Trump’s promises that the economy would bounce back once stay-at-home restrictions were lifted.

Seriously? The financial markets are skittish because someone contradicted Trump’s assurances? Trump is a raging narcissist, a pathetic little man whose bombast and lies do not (as he intends) glorify him but starkly highlight the absence of his soul, the smallness of his mind, and the pettiness of his character. Since assuming office he has lied over 18,000 times. One might reasonably begin the count with his inaugural speech, where his language, tone, and “American carnage” imagery were at odds with every measure of objective reality.

The talking heads on television and cable news outlets, especially those which aspire to be information platforms for business, always come back to one word: predictability. “Markets like stability and predictability,” they say. Meaning, the financial markets don’t much care who is in office as long as policy isn’t changed on a whim and without warning. Meaning, the financial markets might be spooked for a moment when a Democrat is elected — on the presumed fear of regulation — but these brief periods of volatility soon smooth out and the markets go on as before. Because they like predictability.

The truth is, the financial sector really shouldn’t like deregulation: it’s the anything-goes, anything-can-happen, nobody-is-accountable temperament of the Wild West that roils markets; its unpredictable nature is by definition unknowable and its consequences unforeseeable, opaque to even the best crystal ball. If we learned anything from the 2008 financial sector meltdown, it was (or should have been) that deregulation begets instability, and that even the best computer models are as clear as mud when it comes to really predicting the future. It’s looking more and more like we didn’t learn that lesson, or any other; just as the 2008 crisis echoed the 1986-1995 S&L debacle. The echoes of history reach all the way back, and after each recovery we take two steps forward and then, when things stabilize, at least one deregulatory step backwards.

Trump wallows in unpredictability; he boasts about it; he sows chaos wherever he goes. It is his briar patch. Burnout is a well-known consequence of working in the White House pressure cooker but Trump’s administration churns personnel at an alarming rate. (Insert joke here about the ten-day period of employment known as a Scaramucci. Oh, you were there a month? Three whole Scaramuccis?)

Financial markets aren’t the only institutions that appreciate stability. Diplomacy might be an art, but it requires some level of predictable behavior and rationality: it’s difficult to negotiate if you have absolutely no idea how the person across the table will respond. (Trump believes this is his strength, that being unpredictable is the art of the deal. To the rest of us it’s a sign of serious mental illness and instability.)

The markets like stability; they want order; they crave predictability. Trump is a known, compulsive, congenital liar whose only objective is to stroke his self-image. To that end he will say anything. With his reelection prospects (already slim, as I discuss here) in tatters he makes assurances nobody should believe about the pandemic being past while Dr. Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, tells the Senate and the nation that the virus will be with us for some time yet. Indeed he has been telling us all along that a resurgence in the fall is likely.

All of which brings me, finally, to Obi Wan Kenobi, whose Jedi wisdom might be the most appropriate answer to anyone taking action of any kind on the strength of Trump’s promises and reassurances. Who is more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him? And if you’re invested in those markets: caveat emptor.