Home » Posts tagged 'politics' (Page 8)

Tag Archives: politics

Born yesterday

Posted on by | 7 Comments

I’m up in Sault Ste. Marie, MI, in a little gift shop near the great locks that pass ships between the high waters of Lake Superior and the lower Lake Huron, bypassing the St. Mary’s River rapids (sault in French).  A thousand-foot Great Lakes freighter is passing by, on her way to the locks.  A much smaller boat is ahead of her, looking for all the world like a leading dolphin, and someone asks, “Is that a pilot leading the freighter to the lock?”

“No, that’s your $10 million government boat,” answers the clerk, with a knowing smirk.  We’re supposed to smirk back in that knowing way we have when we don’t actually know, but suppose the speaker does.

“Coast guard?”

“Homeland Security.”  This with more of a smirk.  We’re all in the know here; the government can’t pull the wool over our eyes!

“I’ve heard,” the clerk continues, “that they can read your credit card from a mile away.”

That does it.  I’m all over it.  “Who told you that?” I ask.  “That’s ridiculous.  They would have to be within at least ten feet, and that’s only if your card has an RFID, which most don’t.”

That earns me an icy glare, and I just give up and leave.  The clerk’s ignorance of government snooping capabilities is apparently only surpassed by her smug certainty.  Never mind the “$10 million dollar boat” and whether Homeland Security had any business hanging around the Canadian border.

You see this sort of thing more and more these days, this smug rumor mongering, this assumption that we can see through the transparent lies of the government, or big business, or whatever dragons we’re onto.   Everyone’s a hipster these days.  But the skepticism of the hip has become the cynicism of the wannabe, a much easier posture, since it doesn’t require one to actually look into anything, to research it, to know it.  We’re engulfed in hipness, swept away by the deluge of the media we’re addicted to.  Music, film, even books all drone away on the exposure of Big Lies,  But in this anxiousness not to be duped, this obsessive non-rubeness, we are often fed only alternate lies, which, ironically, we accept without question.

By now, you may be thinking I’m in favor of government snooping.  You’re wrong.  I am concerned about it, and I believe we need to seriously consider laws curtailing it.  More to the point, we need to stop giving up all that information to the sacred Private Enterprise that is making it available in the first place.  But we need to get a grip on reality first.  Do you really believe all those loyalty cards are there to make life better for consumers?

Up here in the Soo, as it’s called, people love grousing about the government, which they are convinced exists only for the purpose of taking their money for no return.  Never mind that the wicked bogey-man government supplies virtually all of the employment here, what with the locks, the Air Force base, and the Lake Superior State University, just to name a few.

Well, sure, people say, but there used to be the carbide company, the coal company, shipping companies, all that glorious Private Enterprise, you know, that people worked for.

Well, those lovely businesses all left town, dear people, not because they weren’t making money, but because they weren’t making enough money.  The basic fact about business is that it is all about making the most money possible.  Those fabled mom-and-pop businesses that were run out of town by evil Walmart?  Before that, they had virtual monopolies on your bucks, and as often as not were  gouging you for them.  You knew that, of course, because you switched to Walmart quicker than a three card monte dealer as soon as you got the chance.  Essentially, you drove them out of business, not Walmart, which would dry up and blow away for lack of money if everybody who hated it would stop shopping there.

Same goes for big government.  We’re all for cutting spending, unless it’s something that benefits us personally.  A boondoggle is a project that benefits somebody else.  Let’s face it, we’re not deep thinkers on that account, either.

Similarly, we’re up in arms if the NSA misses a clue, and something gets blown up by terrorists, and then complain that they’re snooping too much when it turns out they’re tapping information we’ve happily provided to businesses, whose stated sacred charge is to get as much money from us as possible.

We cannot get reasonable government until we become reasonable ourselves, and we cannot become that by automatically believing or disbelieving anything.

I hate to spring this on you so late in your life, but you are going to have to work at democracy, if it’s going to make it.  Ignorance just won’t cut it.

More heretical ideas

Posted on by | 11 Comments

I could never understand the proselytizing impulse. After all, if one had the truth, wasn’t that the end of it? To be sure, there are some kind souls who would like to share heir good fortune, but that does nothing to explain the vitriolic view of infidels in general held by believers. Why this unreasonable insistence that people believe something, anything? Surely, if you believe yourself to have The Truth, all who failed to acknowledge that would be equal, whether they believed in a competing system or not. Finally, I think I have the answer. It came to me in a flash, like St. Paul. Lucky I wasn’t riding a horse.

If you’re pushing an agenda, you can’t count on anyone coming to your assistance on the basis of reason. Too unpredictable. You need blind faith for something like that. Similarly, it’s harder to predict the actions of another group if they’re being rational.

Reason is so fickle. Change one little fact and everything falls apart; worse, it’s impossible to know and take into account all possible factors. This is especially a problem when dealing with adversaries, who almost certainly have privy to facts which you do not. Ah, but true believers, that’s a whole different kettle of fish. You know straight up what they think, how they will react, and what their motivation will be. As for your own cohort, you can be sure of their support without lengthy and tedious rational explanation. All goes smoothly!

Now the only issue is to get rid of all those pesky infidels. You can’t count on them for anything.

Politics, huh!

Posted on by | 5 Comments

I contributed a fair amount of money this last election cycle, in a few cases to elect someone I thought would be good, in most cases to defeat someone I thought would be a disaster.  Oh, well, c’est la guerre, I suppose.  The vast majority of the people I thought would be a disaster I didn’t even know; it was the keep the Other Side from ascendancy.

Politically, I’m liberal, ish.  But I have some experience with countries that have gone to extremes both left and right, and I’ve come to believe the real culprit is ideology itself, irrespective of which particular flavor.  Being pragmatic doesn’t mean, however, that there can’t be certain guidelines, and, for me, that mostly ends up siding with the party slightly left of right of center, the Democrats.  They used to be lined up against the party slightly right of right of center, the Republicans; they still are, but the Republicans lately made a strategic decision to appear as insane as possible, probably on the inexcusably cynical notion that most Americans would find that attractive.  It worked, for awhile.  I’ll leave it to you to figure out why this coincided with the tenure of our first African-American president, whom the Republicans quite clearly and explicitly vowed to expel from the government.  This personal vendetta was their highest priority in the most complex global environment in recent history, and it was this complete lack of perspective that drove me to contributional excesses.

Well, now it seems the Dems have decided to flatter the dickens out of the Republicans, if imitation be the sincerest form thereof.

It is, of course, understandable, if indefensible, that when you contribute money to an enterprise, the most immediate response is for them to deluge you with requests for even more money.  If you respond to that positively, they crank it up a notch or two.  At a certain point, the requests become more like demands, and the demands contain threats of dire consequences to the nation, indeed, to humanity itself, of you not personally forking over yet more.  I understand all of this.  It is deplorable, but the nature of the beast.

Here’s what I don’t like, and what is turning me completely off:  More and more, the stated primary goal of some campaign or another is simply to embarrass the opposition.

“If we get this amount of money, or if this bill passes/doesn’t pass,  Boehner will be furious!”  Or the Tea Party will be livid.  Or some other such nonsense.

What?  Since when is that of any importance?  What happened to the consequences of the bill in question as an issue?  It’s as if they’re saying that once your financial contributions reach some critical point, they can drop the pretense of any substance, and go after the real target, the Other Guy.

This is precisely the kind of BS from the Other Guy that prompted my concerns in the first place.  Now it seems that even ideology is irrelevant, except to the extent it can be used to pry more money from a gullible electorate.

Peasants

Posted on by | 6 Comments

No one understands the peasant.  Not the lords in their manor houses, not the bloody saviors of the masses, not all the bishops in hell.  Whether they think we need saving, scourging, stamping out, breeding, baptizing, arming, disarming, manipulating, controlling, or just crushing underfoot, none of them understands one simple truth: after they’ve burned and pillaged each others’ castles and cathedrals to the walls of Armageddon, we’ll still be here, not much the worse for the wear.  It’s what Jesus meant about the meek inheriting the Earth.  He wasn’t pontificating, just stating a simple fact.

Peasants belong to the Earth.  She is our mother, not in some New Age, crystal gawking way, but as an ordinary truth.  We’re more feral than not.  We sprang from the soil like autochthons; in the great divine arc of history, our job was to provide pillage.

We tend to be naive, and easily duped.  It’s not something that can be educated out of us.  It’s a genetic propensity to take others at face value, and we’re stuck with it.  You might argue that this is a fatal flaw, yet here we are, aren’t we, while all the bloody Ulyanovs, Romanovs, and Cromwells have long since mouldered away clutching their cleverness to their poisonous hearts.  We hate and fear, but never despise.  We love too easily.  It’s our greatest weakness.  It kills us every time.  It’s what saves us every time.

Religion tends to fall lightly on our shoulders; we’re not built for worship when  reverence will do.  We have churches, but woodlands and moors are more sacred to us than pews.  On those rare occasions when religion settles into a peasant’s heart, it is an ugly thing.  Rasputin, sure, but Stalin and Mao had the disease just as surely, albeit behind a mask of social theory.  Peasants tend to overdo power in general.  It’s just like us, isn’t it?  Rubes, at heart, in loud suits.

My homeland, Latvia, is as pure a peasantry as you’ll find anywhere.  The culture, the very language, exists only because the lords and saviors who plagued us over the centuries didn’t think it worth extinguishing.  Typically, when Latvia gets praise, as it recently did from the IMF for being a model of the kind of austerity Europe needs to pull out of the recession, it’s for taking its flogging well, without causing trouble.  All the more disheartening, then, to learn that the flogging was not only unnecessary, but only made things worse after all: the theory behind all the demands for economic austerity has just been shown to be based on flawed data.

Suckered again.