Month: May 2015

Within hours of the Dennis Hastert news breaking, I texted two people I know who have met him on multiple occasions for their thoughts.

Both stated that he did not Seem Like the Type but that the evidence of what he did is substantial and he is now persona non grata. This was a relief to hear, as it bothers me when people leap to "I know him and he would never do such a thing" defenses. What scandals like this remind But us is that whether our friends are nobodies like us or powerful elected officials, you never know them as well as you think they do.
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I sincerely believe that a lot of Hastert's friends, even family, are shocked by these revelations. They're shocked because you never suspect someone you know so well of harboring this kind of secret. But that's just it; everybody has secrets. Maybe, hopefully, not everyone has a secret as vile as having molested a minor. But show me somebody who has never done anything of which they are ashamed or was against the law and I will show you a liar.

It's not a defense of his actions in any way, shape, or form. Instead it is a reminder that humans are remarkably talented at hiding parts of themselves from one another. Even our spouses, our parents, our children, our best friends…no matter how well we think we know them, we never know them fully. What we've seen lately, this wave of men being outed for secret (and in some cases lawbreaking) lifestyles, is a result of our shrinking privacy. I don't mean that in the "The gub'mint's stealin' my emails!" sense, but rather a recognition that the ability to hide some secret aspect of one's life is becoming more difficult. If some pastor wants to have sex with other men on the side and ends up, as people do these days, using the internet to facilitate that, it's not a matter of if but of when it will become public knowledge.

I used to fancy myself someone who was a good judge of character, the kind of person who said he knew right away what a person is like. Over time and with experience I learned how silly that is. There are people in this world who are married for years and still don't know everything about one another, people who sit next to one another in the same office for forty years with no idea that one of them is swindling money from the company and the other hosts bi-weekly Craigslist anonymous orgy meetup in that charming little ranch house. So "I know Bob and he wouldn't do that" is one of the most dangerous conclusions a person can jump to. We don't know what the people we interact with and know are capable of. We've seen the cliche often enough, the reporter interviewing the neighbor of the recently unmasked serial killer saying "But he seemed like such a nice boy…
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"

Life is full of surprises; finding out what the people we know are hiding from us and from the rest of the world is the least pleasant type.

Some things are funny because they are predictable, but it's a tricky kind of humor.
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When Leslie Nielsen turns to the bartender and asks for a Black Russian, you know with such certainty what's about to happen that there is no room left for humor when the visual punchline arrives. Foreshadowed is funny, telegraphed is not. Predictability is a source of humor more often when there is no overt attempt to be funny. When Charlie Brown lines up for the hundredth time to kick the football he's not trying to crack you up. It's funny because he doesn't know what's going to happen but you do.

When we saw the first reports of severe flooding coming out of Texas, I suppressed a soft chuckle. Not because I think death and destruction inflicted upon my fellow man is funny – no, the impending humor was the certainty that we'd be seeing Greg Abbott requesting Federal disaster relief aid by the end of the week. It may not take long, though, since he has already met with He Whose Name Cannot Be Spoken in Texas.

Stop me if I've mentioned this before, but when I teach Intro American Government (a breadth course that forces you to cover a new topic every other class, with no time to address anything in real depth) I am a realist who accepts that the students are unlikely to remember more than a fraction of the details. So I try to make sure that there's one or two big points from each topic that they remember. With the obligatory chapter on federalism, the One Point is that states balk at Washington's involvement in their affairs only until they're begging for it.
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With the dire budgetary situation found in most states today, there is no Rainy Day money lying around for hurricanes, tornadoes, forest fires, measles outbreaks, or anything else that can't be forecast with certainty. All the tough-sounding talk about getting Washington off Our backs goes right out the window when things, as the kids say, get real. It is politically appealing for state-level politicians to bash the federal government; some of them may even believe it. They learn very quickly, however, that ideology goes out the window when the state is faced with billion dollars in repair and cleanup costs. No one's a states' rights advocate when a city is under water and the Coast Guard and FEMA are the only ones equipped to handle it.

The men who wrote the Constitution were more suspicious (earnestly so) of power in the hands of a national government than any of the corn-pone orators elevated into high offices today. Yet they understood the necessity of having such a government. Even if they don't realize it, people like Greg Abbott recognize it too.
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It takes very little reflection and imagination to come up with a dozen scenarios that would have even Sam Brownback reaching for the phone to beg for Washington's help faster than he could say "I've never met Josh Duggar."

Usually on Memorial Day I go through the list of people serving in the military who died in the previous year in Iraq or Afghanistan, choose someone at random, talk a little about who they were and what happened to them. Generally I think this holiday is misguided, though, in that it focuses on the sacrifices made to the exclusion of why they were made. As important as it is to recognize that the ordinary men and women of the military do what they are ordered to do regardless of whether they want to or think it's a great idea, recent history teaches us that we and the political process in which we participate have an obligation to think a little harder about when we require them to make that sacrifice. Because if you'll recall we didn't think too hard about it the last time it came up, and here we are, 13 years later still fighting wars that were pitched as brief excursions.

This is more important than ever now not because the events are so recent but because as we stand here today they are distant enough in the past to be forgotten. Worse, they are distant enough in the past to be remembered not entirely accurately, with the intervening decade slowly eroding away the details.

We remember, but we remember selectively and heavily influenced by 13 years of re-imaginings and re-tellings that cast the events as we want them to be rather than as they were.
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The narrative of the well-intentioned political and media class acting in good faith – a phrase that has become the modern Nuremburg Defense, "just following orders" – leading us astray because of intelligence that unfortunately and unexpectedly turned out to be false has taken root with a large segment of the population. It is worrying to think of young people who don't recall the events from personal experience being exposed to such an appealing but wholly fictional version of events.

With Jeb Bush apparently being considered seriously for the presidency by some portion or the electorate, Iraq is likely to come up periodically in this election. And the early indications are that we are in for some brazen revisionist history.
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The "faulty intelligence" trope simply isn't true even if our recollection of the run-up to the wars is distorted as badly as the intelligence in question. Even giving it the benefit of doubt, the faults were a direct result of the ideological and political commitment to generating a specific narrative. To say "Knowing what we know now, I would not have done it" is the most intellectually dishonest of cop-outs, since the passage of time has only confirmed and added more detail to what was already known at the time. Facts will always remain unknown to people who steadfastly refuse to acknowledge them.

And people died because of it. Remember that part of the story today as well.

(Check in with Part I here)

So does Scott County really have to be as bad as it is? Realistically, yes. Its fate is sealed. Here's why.

There is no reason to stay in Scott County, Indiana. There's nothing to do there, no economic opportunities. It's ugly. The weather sucks. It has a lot of crime. Its only real asset – low cost of living – is a direct function of its status as a void in the universe and therefore not worth much. So like any half-rational person, you leave. You find the nearest big city or make the big move out to New York or whatever. You leave just like everybody leaves.

Well, not everybody. The people who are capable of leaving – young, not tied down, not incarcerated or on probation, not dirt poor – leave.

So who's left behind? Old people who refuse to leave. Young people counting down the minutes until they can leave. People who can't pay their bills let alone the cost of moving. People with life-obliterating problems (with drugs, with booze, with gambling). People who have no skills or education that might be salable elsewhere. People who are barely adults and have four kids. People who don't have a parole officer. People who don't think that (insert name of essentially city anywhere) is better than Scott County. People who can't get their shit together even if they have the means. People who either had their asses kicked by life or are losers, basically.

So who ends up in charge? Who makes the decisions that make the Scott Counties of the world so spectacularly and consistently backward? Well. The idiots elect a handful of other idiots, who hire their idiot relatives to perform important jobs very badly. The Chief of Police in Scott County is behaving like some kind of reactionary, pitiably stupid backcountry hick because he is a reactionary, pitiably stupid backcountry hick.
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We know that with certainty because if he were any good at his job or had marketable skills he would move 25 miles away to work in the safe, fancy suburbs of Louisville, KY and do the same job only easier and at double the salary. And that's the reason communities like these are in a death spiral – anyone good enough to do the job(s) of running the place well is good enough to get a better job in a better place at a better salary. If a few capable people do stick around, they'll find it impossible to accomplish anything against the tendencies of the elderly, the ignorant, and the ignorant elderly.

How do we fix it? We don't. Communities need people with a mix of skills in order to prosper, and short of handing out Ferraris and a blowjob to anyone who agrees to move there it is not going to get a mix. It is going to get people for whom getting through one day is a struggle and therefore unwilling to focus on anything other than their own lives.

It is going to get knuckleheads and miserable old people. It's going to get a lot of people caught up in the justice system or on meth.
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And they're going to be on the school board, in the police force, teaching in the schools, and raising their inevitably terrible children.

They will try to fix the local economy with ideas that were stale 20 years ago. They'll take ineffective, counterproductive, and punitive approaches to dealing with social problems like drugs, poverty, and crime. They'll teach their kids that the Earth is 6,000 years old and girls all want to be raped and The Messicans are comin' to take their part-time job at Casey's General Store. The courts, justice system, and law enforcement will be corrupt, petty, and inept. And that's just the way everything will be, and everyone will be used to it, and everyone will accept it as their lot in life and that will be that.

The only hope is that a higher level of government – particularly the state legislature – is run by less incompetent people who can enforce some half-decent choices on rural and failing urban areas. Good thing Scott County has Mike Pence and the Indiana Legislature handling the really important things in the State Capitol.

For the last several months, one of the worst places I have ever been in the United States has been in the news. Not surprisingly the reason isn't positive. Scott County in southern Indiana (anchored by the metropolises of Austin and Scottsburg) was the site of a rapid spike in HIV infections from prescription opiate addicts sharing needles in that little slice of Real America. If you've never been to Scott County, you've been to Scott County. Just think of whatever nearby dilapidated, tumbleweed-strewn rural dump is nearby and you're there. Think of a big trailer park, but dirtier and poorer. Think of small towns that have no reason for existing anymore. That's Scott County. Everything necessary to create an HIV outbreak is there in spades: lack of healthcare, lack of public health services, lack of education, lack of employment, lack of money, and lack of anything to do but make and shoot the kind of drugs that destroy people from the inside out.

After some of his trademark waffling between right wing talking points and massive public and Federal pressure, Indiana Governor Mike Pence recently approved a temporary needle exchange program for Scott County.
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Then after he swore repeatedly he would veto it, he signed a law to the same effect. For a moment it seemed like a rare example of Republican lawmakers making a decision based on evidence rather than ideology.
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Not to oversimplify the issue, but everyone who isn't weapons-grade stupid or steeped too thoroughly in War on Drugs propaganda to see over the edge of their paranoia understands that things like needle exchanges are sensible policy. People addicted to things like heroin and meth are going to do things like heroin or meth every day regardless of whether they have proper sterile paraphernalia available.
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There is no opiate addict on the planet who ever said "Looks like I'm out of clean needles. Guess I have to quit using." Until some kind of treatment program intervenes (which in the United States usually takes the form of getting incarcerated, at least for poor people) to break people from addiction, addicts use drugs regardless of any externalities. Even anti-drug crusaders are capable of understanding that things like HIV and Hepatitis outbreaks are expensive public health problems that cost far more in the long term than a bulk-bought $0.49 syringe.

Don't worry, though. The yokels of Scott County have found a way to fuck it up. Even when events conspire to accidentally produce good public policy from the Governor and state legislature, leave it to the ingenuity of the kind of people in positions of power in America's rural sinkholes to ensure that no sensible ideas are enacted on the ground.

Why does it always have to turn out this way? Aside from the obvious lack of a stable economic base, why must places like Scott County suck so completely and consistently? Many Americans insist that not terribly long ago small town America was actually a fairly pleasant place to live. The same is said about any number of medium sized Rust Belt cities that have been on the decline since the 1950s. Obviously these places are poor and that's a big problem. But lacking great wealth doesn't mean everything has to be terrible. Your school district might not be rich, for example, but it doesn't cost anything to teach students that the Earth is not 6,000 years old. It costs nothing to teach real Sex Education rather than abstinence-only detritus.

I have been thinking about this a great deal lately, and I have an idea that doesn't invoke religion, the Culture Wars, or the Republican Party's messy divorce from reality. But that will have to wait 24 hours.