Author Archives: Chris

The “Let’s all pull together to save the country.” thing didn’t quite come to pass, did it?

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Jon Lovett back in August of 2015 thinking he was writing satire, Looking Backward on the Presidency of Donald Trump:

“It was the terrific leader of India, Gandhi, who said, ‘First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, and then you win.’ Well we won, didn’t we?”

That’s how President Donald John Trump began his inaugural address, that clear morning in January of 2017. The fact that Gandhi never said these words was among the very least of our problems. Besides, the line drew rapturous applause from the crowd. According to a joint statement released by the White House and Nielsen, the Trump Inaugural drew the largest television audience in human history. As President Trump himself pointed out in his second press availability that afternoon, the numbers would only go up, once you factored in DVR.

It’s amazing, isn’t it? How adaptable we are as human beings? It was only a year earlier that Trump was a punch line. Obviously, everyone knew, he could never actually get anywhere once the votes were cast. American democracy was too robust to let that happen. He was too dangerous to win, and to win would be too dangerous. It couldn’t happen because it couldn’t happen.

 

Reading material – January 29, 2017

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Pitbulls and pigs

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Years ago I remember someone commenting that pitbulls trained to fight were too aggressive to survive in the wild.  All they know how to do is to kill.  They’re too aggressive to hunt effectively and they pick fights.  They lack the skill to feed themselves and eventually they pick a fight with the wrong animal.  Either way they end up dead before they can propagate the species but oh they can do some serious damage before their ignorance and/or belligerence does them in.   That’s a segue to Jeremi Suri’s, How Trump’s Executive Orders Could Set America Back 70 Years.  See also Ambassador Haley’s comments at the UN today.  Imbeciles.

Musical accompaniment –

Reading material – January 24, 2017

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Reading material – January 20, 2017

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I think one thing that I’ve learned over the past eight years is facts are necessary, but they’re not sufficient. In other words, you can have smart people who know all the facts about a specific conflict or country, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they have good judgment or bold vision.

 

Reading material – January 16, 2017

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Kasserian Ingera

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Patrick T. O’Neill, And How Are the Children?:

Among the most accomplished and fabled tribes of Africa, no tribe was considered to have warriors more fearsome or more intelligent than the mighty Masai. It is perhaps surprising, then, to learn the traditional greeting that passed between Masai warriors: “Kasserian Ingera,” one would always say to another. It means, “And how are the children?”

It is still the traditional greeting among the Masai, acknowledging the high value that the Masai always place on their children’s well-being. Even warriors with no children of their own would always give the traditional answer, “All the children are well.” Meaning, of course, that peace and safety prevail, that the priorities of protecting the young, the powerless, are in place. That Masai society has not forgotten its reason for being, its proper functions and responsibilities. “All the children are well” means that life is good. It means that the daily struggles for existence do not preclude proper caring for their young.

I wonder how it might affect our consciousness of our own children’s welfare if in our culture we took to greeting each other with this daily question: “And how are the children?” I wonder if we heard that question and passed it along to each other a dozen times a day, if it would begin to make a difference in the reality of how children are thought of or cared about in our own country.

I wonder if every adult among us, parent and non-parent alike, felt an equal weight for the daily care and protection of all the children in our community, in our town, in our state, in our country… I wonder if we could truly say without any hesitation, “The children are well, yes, all the children are well.”

What would it be like… if the minister began every worship service by answering the question, “And how are the children?” If every town leader had to answer the question at the beginning of every meeting: “And how are the children? Are they all well?” Wouldn’t it be interesting to hear their answers? What would it be like? I wonder…

 

Wake the #$%& up. Please.

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Jeb Lund gets it.  If his observations aren’t already obvious to you then please wake the fuck up take note.  (Hat tip to driftglass for linking to Lund’s post.)  Stop Waiting for Trump to Start Making Sense:

Let’s say you were suddenly whisked back to the sixth grade, and you found yourself face-to-face with a bully threatening to kill your Tamagotchi. Now let’s say you countered that surely his actions would exhibit a break from norms and that he would feel hypocritical because he’d probably once been victimized by someone. You would, in all likelihood, get your ass beat.

Anyone who went to an average middle school understands how this plays out. Which is why it’s all the more bewildering that leftists, centrists, and guardians of the genteel status quo seem to think this approach will work with Trump after it failed to work with the Republican Party for at least a generation.  This has not, and will never, work. The president-elect’s team is a hammer, and every problem, including you, is shaped like a nail. They have no sympathy.

Like a lot of bad ideas, this all started with a misunderstanding. It is an article of faith among the left that people vote against their own self-interests and tolerate political chicanery because they don’t understand economics or history or good governance or what popular conservative demagogues said once six years ago….

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Rebecca Solnit, The Ideology of Isolation

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Noted few months ago.  Worth reading again.  Rebecca Solnit, The Ideology of Isolation:

If you boil the strange soup of contemporary right-wing ideology down to a sort of bouillon cube, you find the idea that things are not connected to other things, that people are not connected to other people, and that they are all better off unconnected. The core values are individual freedom and individual responsibility: yourself for yourself on your own. Out of this Glorious Disconnect comes all sorts of illogical thinking. Taken to its conclusion, this worldview dictates that even facts are freestanding items that the self-made man can manufacture for use as he sees fit.

This is the modern ideology we still call conservative, though it is really a sort of loopy libertarianism that inverts some of the milder propositions of earlier conservative thinkers. “There is no such thing as society,” Margaret Thatcher said in 1987. The rest of her famous remark is less frequently quoted:

There is [a] living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.

Throughout that interview with Woman’s Own magazine, Thatcher walked the line between old-school conservatism — we are all connected in a delicate tapestry that too much government meddling might tear — and the newer version: “Too many children and people have been given to understand, ‘I have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it.’ ” At some point in the decades since, the balance tipped definitively from “government aid should not replace social connections” to “to hell with others and their problems.” Or as the cowboy sings to the calf, “It’s your misfortune / And none of my own.”

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