Month: May 2017

The only way I can rationalize Kenneth Rose's Myth and the Greatest Generation (2007) being anything less than a best-seller and a national conversation starter is lack of promotion by the publisher and the absence of a Big Name Author with a well developed Personal Brand on the title page. Written as a detailed and informative rebuttal to the "Greatest Generation" series from Tom Brokaw and its numerous imitators, it proceeds from the simple premise that the generation born shortly before the Great Depression and which came of age during World War II was not notably different from other generations except for how we choose to remember them (and they choose to remember themselves).

The myths of a virtuous, civic-minded generation defined by sacrifice and the greater good is partly accurate, of course, as Americans in large numbers did indeed make great sacrifices for their country and to fight fascism during the 1940s. However, our cultural narrative of WWII chooses to overlook all the less glamorous aspects of life during that time that reveal the WWII generation to be no different than others. There were Americans who fought bravely, and others who dodged the draft enthusiastically. Some rationed, and others fed a billion-dollar black market in rationed goods. Some worked until they dropped to support war production at home, while others malingered and went idle. Some wives endured the emotional battle of maintaining a marriage during wartime, and others ran off with someone else and sent "Dear John" letters to the front. Some soldiers fought in a way that reflected well on their country and values, while others shot surrendering prisoners. Women and African-Americans filled the void in the economy left by sixteen million (mostly white, mostly men) people enlisted or drafted; some workplaces used this as a springboard toward a new conception of the labor force, while others met them with half-wages, discrimination, and other forms of ill treatment at every turn. Many American businesses gamely redirected themselves toward war production, while others rapaciously profiteered off of the war effort in ways that would make the Mafia blush with shame.

In other words, they weren't good, nor were they bad. They were just normal. We make the decision, conscious or otherwise, to remember them in a certain way. We associate "Draft Dodging" with Vietnam but ignore the millions of men who went to another country or used wealth and connections to secure employment deemed essential to the war effort to avoid having to fight. We ignore that, for example, when the Korean War draft began, my grandfather and millions of other WWII veterans quickly arranged to conceive children to make themselves exempt from being re-enlisted. Does that make them bad people? No. It makes them normal. If World War II conditions were re-created today we would see the same mix of reactions. Some people would make sacrifices and others would take advantage of opportunities available to them.

Part of the problem with our false memory is a conscious effort to market to a demographic with spending money over the past two decades.
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Starting in the late 1980s a tsunami of WWII history-propaganda overtook Hollywood and (especially) the publishing industry. Go to a large chain bookstore (if you can still find one) and go to the History section – half of the space is devoted to World War II and its era. Every conceivable aspect of it has been covered to death, usually in uncritical terms by authors eager to tell the target audience of aged white men what they want to hear. There is nothing new about this.

There will always be attempts to cash in on selective nostalgia.

The other problem, and the one we more often ignore, is that memory is a poor guide on any subject, especially across decades. The fundamental fallacy of yearning for things to go back to The Way They Used to Be is that the way we remember Things Being is guaranteed to be selective and distorted. Have you ever visited a house you used to live in, a school you used to attend, a neighborhood from your past, your old favorite bar, and so on? Invariably the reaction we have is one of surprise when we discover that over time we have distorted little things about it.

Sure, the house is where we remember it being, but was it really this small? Were those trees there in 1980, or are they new? Really? I could have sworn they were farther away.

Social conditions are not exempt from this phenomenon. Memory is incomplete even under the best circumstances. The way modern American politics bathes itself in sloppy rhetoric about the golden days we have left behind is the worst kind of indulgence in fantasy. Not only are we intentionally omitting some of the parts we choose not to remember, but even to the extent that we think we are remembering it faithfully we are fooling ourselves. A hypothetical journey in a time machine would reveal that our sunny memories of the 1950s or whatever time period we consider to be immediately Before the Fall have been edited substantially over time. We remember things being better than they were because we want to and because we can't remember things any other way.

There's nothing meaningful about anniversaries per se; they are but a convenient excuse to raise and recall historical events that are interesting, relevant, or important. Sunday was the 90th anniversary of Charles Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic from Roosevelt Field to Le Bourget in Paris.
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Truly, honestly, it stands as one of the most incredible (if pointless in the practical sense) feats a person has ever accomplished. A modern equivalent might be someone named Jane Doe showing up at a spaceport with a capsule she made in her yard and flying to Mars by herself while Elon Musk and NASA look on and predict her imminent death…followed two years from now by footage of her standing on Mars waving.

I could talk endlessly about the technical aspects of the accomplishment, so I will stop myself in advance. Suffice it to say that papers called him "Lucky Lindy" not simply because it sounded cool but because the quest to fly the Atlantic from New York to Paris produced nothing but an impressively long list of corpses until Lindbergh did it, and continued to kill well funded, highly experienced crews in technologically sophisticated aircraft for years after. To point out just two examples, pioneering French aviators Charles Nungesser and Francois Coli flew a technological marvel called L'Osseau Blanc to their deaths in an Atlantic crossing attempt shortly before Lindbergh's try. And Richard Byrd's team, which included both a dedicated navigator and a radio operator, survived its crossing flight but missed its intended arrival point in Ireland by nearly 800 miles. They crash-landed in France, essentially hitting Europe at all only because it is too big to miss if one flies (generally) eastward.
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Lindbergh, meanwhile, flew what was essentially a powered box kite alone, navigated with a pad of paper on his knees and zero forward visibility (the windshield was blocked with a gas tank), and landed exactly where he said he would, to the foot.

More to the point, Lindbergh's act achieved him a kind of fame that has no modern equivalent. The news cycle is so short today that the kind of all-encompassing, smothering, planetary fame that met Lindbergh will probably never be repeated. He became famous to the point that living anything resembling life became impossible for him and more or less destroyed him. It led directly, through constant reports about details of his home life, to the kidnapping and murder of his son in what was, until the OJ Simpson Trial (more on that in a moment), the Crime of the Century.

So, parts of us feel sympathetic to the idea that Lindbergh might be driven by the harassing pressures of fame and adulation to become…a little odd. Maybe develop something of an antipathy toward his fellow man. He could have been forgiven a curmudgeonly, even misanthropic, leaning or two. But that's not what happened. What happened was not forgivable. In a high school auditorium in Iowa in 1941, Charles Lindbergh doused himself in gasoline and lit a metaphorical match. His speech on non-intervention, coming on the heels of years of uncomfortable flirtations with Nazism, "America First" boosterism, and the very darkest corners of the generally already quite dark Eugenics movement, ended Charles Lindbergh with an immediacy and finality that was nothing short of breathtaking. It is impossible to think of another example of a person who went from universally admired public figure to persona non grata as quickly and totally as Charles Lindbergh. OJ Simpson is a rough equivalent, although his popularity never reached the heights of Lindbergh's. Bill Cosby comes to mind as well, although he was already well past his peak of esteem by the time his public defenestration came. Lindbergh went from proposals to name new states after him to He Whose Name is Not Spoken literally overnight.

It is more than a bit striking, then, to read the text of Lindbergh's career-ending speech now, in light of the knowledge of the revulsion with which it was greeted and how thoroughly it destroyed the public reputation of a man who until that moment could virtually do no wrong. Does it not seem almost…tame, by today's standards in American politics? Far from being career suicide, giving that speech today would merit a book deal, a syndicated talk show, and a career in Republican electoral politics. Compare this to the writings of people who currently occupy positions of authority in the damn White House and Lindbergh practically comes off as some sort of reasoned moderate. My point is not that Charles Lindbergh's anti-Semitic, eugenics-guided fascist sympathy adds up to an idea that is defensible or has merit; the point is that none of this would hurt him or his reputation much today.
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The actual President would shower him with praise, which contrasts neatly with FDR's take ("If I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this, I am absolutely convinced Lindbergh is a Nazi.")

There was a time when being at least borderline into Nazism was a liability in America. Apparently that time has passed. Of course, until WWII began Lindbergh's views were not exactly unique among Americans. However, rather than continuing to reject them based on the lessons learned during that almost unimaginably destructive conflict, we are now content to move backward and claim that perhaps we had things right all long back in the days when Madison Grant was respectable reading. I don't need to explain in much detail what that kind of thinking led to, I hope.

When I have the opportunity to teach a senior seminar – intended to be a capstone to the major, a "big picture" course – I assign a reading list that frames what I believe will be the defining Big Questions of the next half-century or more. One: How will the state respond to the possibility than in the future, improvements in productivity and technology will result in an economy unable to produce enough jobs to sustain our current market-oriented system? In other words, how (if at all) will governments adapt when there is no longer a need for labor as we currently understand it. This is essentially the Player Piano scenario. To undergraduates about to head out into the world in search of employment this question resonates.

The second: How much are individuals willing to change their way of life and the current understanding of individual rights to combat non-state actors? In other words, terrorism is essentially impossible to stop by any conventional means. One man can rent a truck and drive it into a crowd and the Good Guys combating terrorism will never have had the slightest chance to intervene.
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One person can walk into a crowded place with a gun, no prior planning or terror-networking involved, and fire away. The only way to prevent this type of terrorism is by giving up our concept of privacy on a scale that is currently unimaginable. Theoretically, if The Government read every person's online activity and monitored every phone conversation on Earth in real time it might be possible to intervene against Lone Wolf or decentralized terrorist network attacks. You could in theory find every person who visits an ISIS propaganda website and send the police crashing through their door moments later. You could even have smartphone technology that records and transcribes every conversation in range. You could even, if future technology advances at the rate we have seen in the last 50 years, have the ability to record and transcribe our thoughts. Don't laugh – research on how to replace user interfaces (mice, keyboards, tapping the screen) with technology that reads our thoughts is in progress. Are we there yet? No. Might we get there? Sure.

Whenever I see something like the apparent terror attack in Manchester on Monday evening I become more convinced that this second question is going to make or (probably) break western democracies in the coming decades. With enough of these attacks over a long enough timeframe individuals will gradually grow fearful of everything – flying, public transit, sport events, concerts, malls, any public gathering of more than a handful of people, tourist destinations…you name it. People will find that no amount of resources allocated by the state can stop terrorism of this type because it requires only motivation and the amount of planning a dullard could complete in 20 minutes.
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The goal of people like Osama bin Laden was and is to bring about the collapse of Western societies by exploiting their weakest points. It is a long game, aimed at making us slowly lose our collective sanity and resort to increasingly undemocratic rule and concentration of power and wealth in the state until it collapses from within.
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It's working so far. Give the US and France and the UK twenty more years of random, periodic carnage and it is likely to produce some results that seem far-fetched now.

We will have to choose as societies whether we will live with a persistent low level of danger (You're still incredibly unlikely to die from terrorism compared to just about anything else, but the fear it causes is disproportionate) from insidious elements that wish to do us harm or whether we will subvert a handful of the core, defining principles of 20th Century Western democracy in exchange for greater security, real or perceived.

We know which the Boomers choose, but in twenty years none of them will be left. Today's young adults ultimately will be the ones who have to pull the trigger. It will be a historic decision; once the path toward a surveillance state and "clash of civilizations" policies toward Muslims is chosen, the consequences for our nations and the world will reverberate for the next century.
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Of all the styles of pundit writing the most loathsome is the "You can't blame me for failing to foresee this, as nobody could have foreseen it!" self-absolution. And when this three-ring shitshow in the White House meets its tragi-comic end, whether on schedule in January 2021 or earlier, it will take a great deal of fortitude to plow through the inevitable hand-wringing pieces from Republicans who fancy themselves Serious People without projectile vomiting our spleens onto the ashes of whatever is left of us by then.

Circa 2005 when it became so obvious that the Iraq War was a poorly thought-out, poorly executed misadventure in imbecilic optimism as a one-to-one replacement for strategy and legitimate cause, Very Serious People on the right began lining up to purge themselves all over our eyes. What was once the very best idea suddenly became the worst foreign policy disaster in American history, but lest the gentle reader entertain thoughts of questioning the judgment of people like George Will it must be pointed out that no one – no one at all – could have foreseen in 2003 that the invasion could possibly turn out in any way other than Super Great. No one could have known, for example, that the White House cherry-picked intel, placed huge amounts of political pressure on agencies to reach predetermined conclusions, and generally had no goddamn idea whatsoever to do once it used the military to smash Saddam Hussein's regime into dust other than "They'll hail us as their liberators and everything will be great." Never mind that all of this was widely recognized and shouted until hoarse for 18 months leading up to the war. Nobody could have known.

And now we will have to read the same masturbatory thinkpieces all over again. Because clearly nobody could have predicted that taking a person with obvious personality disorders who has never had a job before and is proud of the fact that he has no idea what he is doing and making that person president would turn out poorly.

It would not surprise me if a lot of the Republicans and conservative media figures have their "the day after Trump is gone" pieces in the can already. Even Fox News has to be planning ahead despite their comical efforts to keep this unfolding disaster away from the dead octogenarian eyes of their remaining viewers; a slew of "What went wrong and why are we not at fault for failing to mention any of this before it actually went wrong?

" pieces exist in the ethers, awaiting only the push of a button to be unleashed and accepted unquestioningly.

Revisionist history as absolution is the only thing the right does as effectively as phony moral outrage and IOKIYAR-ism.

Spare us. That's all I ask. Living with the consequences is punishment enough.

Don't double down by telling us that an honest person had no idea how this was going to turn out.

The curious lack of enthusiasm for getting to the bottom of the ties between the current administration and Russia is about more than partisan politics and Americans' general lack of interest in anything substantive. The whole story makes people uneasy because it speaks to a fundamental change in the world that has unsettling consequences for all of us. Privacy is essentially dead, and we don't want to learn just how dead it is. The implications are too frightening.

We get stories about email hacks, computer viruses, information theft, and other forms of electronic snooping to understand – whether we realize it or not – that the concept of privacy on the internet does not truly exist. Anyone willing to devote the time, effort, and resources to getting at our personal information can do so. The only reason it doesn't happen to you and I is that you and I are not important.
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If we were, hell or high water couldn't stop an interested party from reading your emails, flipping through your text messages, and so on.

Given the extent to which we have transitioned huge parts of our lives onto the internet, this is not a reality we are eager to confront. Not many of us have an internet footprint that would involve issues of national security, but I think it makes people profoundly uncomfortable to see these stories on the news and realize that under the right circumstances, everything we have ever said or done online could suddenly become available for the world to read. If you don't believe that, pause for a moment and imagine that everyone you know could read everything you've ever said (some of it about them, no doubt) in a text, email, IM, and so on.

The best case scenario would be some serious embarrassment. The worst is documentation of activities that could land you in legal trouble, given that those text messages to your weed dealer probably aren't nearly as inscrutable as you suppose them to be.

The technology and talent for invading someone's privacy online will only get better in the future. The fact that your credit card number, identity, bank account, and email haven't been hacked is not an indication that online security measures are protecting you, but that you're not important enough for the people who have these skills to use them against you. As the ability to pry improves, electronic blackmail is likely to become the unstoppable billion dollar illegal activity of the future.

"Pay up or else everything goes on Wikileaks" is a demand that many people in the professional world are likely to have a hard time ignoring. If you're in a field in which it matters in the least how other people see you (i.
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e., nearly every profession) you aren't going to be pleased by the thought of the world finding out that you forward off-color jokes, have a deep and lasting fondness for illegal drugs, consume a truly heroic amount of porn, write long harangues against your immediate superiors at work, like taking pictures of yourself in various states of undress, have a thriving account on Furry Fetish Personals, or any of the hundreds of other things people do in their private lives under the assumption that the phrase "private lives" is meaningful. We aren't quite ready to admit to ourselves that if the wrong people take an interest in you, the idea of privacy effectively ceases to exist.

On an intellectual level the majority of Americans believe it's important to know fully what sort of connections elected officials might have to a foreign government or any other potentially questionable interests. When we pause to consider how that information has become available to the public and to law enforcement, though, we are divided into two groups: those of us made uncomfortable by the extent to which electronic spies can pry into our lives and those of us who don't understand the issue well enough to realize the implications.

There was a good deal of (always welcome) criticism of two similar previous posts drawing parallels between the Russia scandal and Watergate. The most common charge was that I am excessively optimistic and fail to consider how craven the modern Republican Party and its leadership are when it comes to defending their own and maintaining themselves in power. In other words, things are Different now and the people in control of Congress are unlikely to turn on one of their own no matter what. Even if he's not really one of their own, he is a useful idiot.

The original post, "On the Nature of Tides" was general and preceded the inauguration by a week. The second, "On the Properties of Wind," was from late March and emphasized that Trump had not even been in office for 90 days at that point and the Russia problem is not one that would be resolved immediately. Instead, it was/is likely to smolder and get worse over time.

That point Trumdeserves some additional emphasis this week.

First, remember that this administration has barely crossed the 100 day mark. It remains unrealistic to think that any Congress, even one with principles, would have railroaded any president out of office by this point. What we are learning this week – and this is crucial – is that the Russia story is never going to go away.

It may briefly be pushed off the front burner in favor of some momentary flare-up, but it keeps fighting its way back into the headlines.

The most persuasive reason to believe it will keep doing so – and this is equally crucial – is that Trump is very stupid and he will keep doing things to bring attention to it and make it worse.

It is worth remembering that not only did it take time for Watergate to torpedo Nixon but the crime itself was not what brought him down; the attempts to cover it up, including efforts to stifle the FBI that amounted to abuse of power and interference with an investigation, were ultimately fatal.

It is easy for fatalism to set in, and these days liberals talk as though suffering from political PTSD – the big strong man is invincible, nothing will ever get better, everything is hopeless. This line of argument ignores one of the most obvious and important things about the man in question: He is incredibly stupid, impulsive, and childish, and as a result he will continue to manage the Russia story by tantrum, guaranteeing that it will never go away and it will get worse with time.

Astute commentators have been pointing out since November the massive flaw inherent in the "white working class" (in media usage, read: hillbillies, white trash) argument to explain the most recent election: lower income people of any race tend not to vote much, and nothing about the demographics of Trump voters as a whole suggests that poverty is among their defining characteristics. The median income among voters – not mere "Hey I like that guy!" supporters, but actual cast-a-ballot voters – is well over the national average. Hell, according to the stated figure the median Trump voter is out-earning me considerably. And I'm not a poor person.

The reality is that no amount of think pieces about Appalachia can obscure the fact that Trump is a phenomenon of white suburbanites (combined with poor turnout among people most likely to support a Democratic candidate). If you are like me and spent any portion of your formative years in the suburbs, you have known this in the marrow of your bones and don't need any data to prove it to you. In truly poor areas, white conservatism is mixed with a healthy dose of apathy and indifference. In rural areas it is mitigated by the remnant fumes of agrarian populism (and a total dependence on government subsidies). But the suburbs…the flame burns clean there. Don't go to small town Appalachia if you want to see pure, mindless adherence to the Fox News version of reality. Pick a big city and head for its newest New Money suburbs.

Jesse Myerson offers a useful take on why this is. Suburbanites have just enough wealth to convince themselves that they are just one step away from cartoonish one-percenter wealth (Just don't ask too many questions about debt!) and therefore are not only susceptible to Horatio Alger "hard work is all you need" narratives but also to scapegoating groups perceived to be the last obstacle between oneself and True Wealth. Gosh, just think of how much better everything would be if only my money wasn't being given to Welfare Queens / Immigrants / Chinamen / Etc.

The second factor he points out is that suburbanites, having engaged in a pattern of increasing their spending every time income increased, are overwhelmingly dependent on the value of their homes as the foundation of wealth. Many have borrowed huge amounts against their property, and many more rely on selling it and using the proceeds (the mortgage long since having been paid off) for retirement. If non-white people move into the area, home values will fall. Nothing will turn a suburbanite into a white-hot ball of rage more quickly than the prospect of losing some of the equity in their home. These are not good homes, objectively. They are flimsy, expensive to heat and cool, and ugly. They have no inherent value, so the value of their location (i.e., far away from Those People) and sheer size determine their worth on the market.

These are valid points. To them I would add two more that Myerson missed.

One is that suburbanites are, as a group, unhappy people. I swear to god, you will never meet people who have more but are less happy than your random South Suburbs of Chicago people. These are people who – to engage in a little cheap armchair psychoanalysis – have spent their whole lives believing that the next purchase would finally make them happy and it didn't work out. If only I had a bigger house, or the 5-series BMW instead of the 3-series, or more jewelry, or just MORE of everything…then surely happiness would be here. So they are unhappy despite in material terms having nothing really to be unhappy about.

Second, and related tangentially, is that the design of suburbs combined with the huge amount of time suburban adults spend alone in their own homes divorces them fairly effectively from reality. They don't see much of the real world. They see a gated community of white people with big houses, and perhaps some glimpses of the rest of the world out of a window during a commute. They use the media to inform them what cities and rural areas are like in the same way that you and I rely on the news to tell us what is going on in China. Chicago might as well be China to someone living in its suburbs. They are as likely to form an opinion of it based on what Bill O'Reilly says as they are by driving 15 or 20 miles to do anything there.

I try not to go back to visit family unless I absolutely can't help it. Kunstler was right; we built a landscape of crappy places and became crappy people.