Category: Rants

Try this little experiment sometime. Walk up to a large person and say "Hey, you're FAT." When they get angry and when other people within earshot start calling you an asshole, state that the 1st Amendment protects your right to call people fat. It does, after all. And since you're able to call people fat, doesn't it follow logically that you should?

This is an example I've been using in class for a decade to introduce the section on freedom of speech / expression when we cover the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
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What the 1st Amendment protects our right to say is almost without limit. Seriously, take a look through Federal court cases involving free expression. Then look around the internet at the things people say without sanction. You can find examples of every conceivable objectionable expression of ideas: racism, blatantly incorrect facts and history, websites dedicated to ad hominem attacks on single individuals or groups of people, misogyny, anti-anything groups, and so on. Hell, the average news site comment section is guaranteed to contain at least a handful of exhortations to kill somebody.

Put on a Klan outfit and march around your city. Scream "Fuck you, Kikes!" as loud as you can in public. Start a group advocating the extermination of Muslims. People will think you're an asshole, but the fact remains that you can do any of these things legally in the U.S.

Of course you don't do any of them, because the fact that you can does not mean that you should or that you will. As a human being with a basic awareness of the society in which you live, it doesn't take much thought to conclude that these are all terrible ideas even if they did enter your mind for some reason.

OK? Let's talk about the Confederate flag now.

Can you plaster Confederate flags on your car, home, and person? Yes. You can do the same with swastikas, Juggalo logos, or images of Cap'n Crunch if you feel like it. It's highly unlikely that the Courts ever will interpret the 1st Amendment otherwise.

If you want people to think you are a jackwagon, go ahead and do any of those things. Otherwise, consider these good examples of how discretion moderates your enjoyment of the rights afforded to you.

The important thing to remember, in that light, is that displaying the Confederate flag is not illegal but it most emphatically is a dick thing to do. When Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, Rick Perry – Rick Perry! – and ultra right-wing Town Hall columnists say that it's time for the old Dukes of Hazzard flag to go, it's a pretty good sign that it is approaching swastika territory as the kind of symbol you're legally able to display but you might possibly probably be a major asshole if you do it.

As the aforementioned columnist states, "Like a lot of people below the Mason-Dixon Line – white people, anyway – I saw the emblem as a token of regional pride.
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I didn't revere slavery and Jim Crow. But I thought there was much about the South to love." You hear things like this a lot; it's a symbol of "southern pride", or honors the bravery of the Confederate soldier from 160 years ago, or heritage or tradition or blah blah blah. Try wearing a swastika t-shirt and telling curious onlookers that your purpose is to honor the memory of the Indus River Valley civilization of 3000 BC. They will look at you like you have brain damage or are in need of the padded van. So why should essentially the same argument hold any water with the flag?

It shouldn't. The Confederate States of America stood for "states' rights" alright – states' right to have slavery. If you want to honor your southern heritage, there are other symbols you could choose that don't stand for our racist past, the legacy of which fuels the racist present. You can choose symbols that aren't a giant, throbbing middle finger extended at about 30% of the population who are not white. Try your state flag. Try an image of your state or the whole south. Try literally anything that isn't a thinly veiled expression of semi-literate white underclass rage about the passing of the days in which they could stay off the bottom rung of the ladder simply by virtue of being white. Every time I see a Confederate flag I think of Gene Hackman in Mississippi Burning: "If you ain't better than a nigger, son, who are you better than?"

That's what the flag represents. So shut up about how you have the right to display it; you do. Spend a little more time thinking about whether it's a good idea. Think about what it says to other people. Think about what it says about you. When you get over your own stubborn ignorance you'll realize that it's not complicated. It's a very basic Can vs. Should problem with an obvious correct answer.

(From a laundromat in Anchorage. Remind me to copyright the slogan "Anchorage: The Scenic Bakersfield!")

One sad but interesting development since the end of the second World War is the death of pacifism as an organized movement. Well, at least I find it interesting (Nicholson Baker's "Human Smoke" is a particularly good read if you're interested too).
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In the course of reading a book about Henry Ford, I was reminded about the Peace Ship debacle prior to World War I and the central role that religious groups used to play in the pacifist movement. And it wasn't just groups like the Quakers, whose stance on nonviolence remains well-known today.
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Major, mainstream Protestant religious groups – especially, curiously enough, evangelicals – the Catholic church, major Jewish organizations, and the like were all strongly associated with the anti-war movement before World War II.

Part of the difference today stems from the Hitler, Imperial Japan, and fascism making war a moral crusade that religiously inclined people felt safe getting behind. War is not a moral or ethical dilemma if one conceives of the potential target or opponent as the Third Reich. Unfortunately this has served as little more than a straw man since 1945, as whoever the western nations of the world feel like reducing to rubble happens to be "just like Hitler," coincidentally enough. Attempts to recreate the black-and-white morality of World War II in modern conflicts is not only idiotic, but seemingly mandatory on the part of political leaders.

What stands out to me is how much, in the United States, mainstream Christianity has bent and molded itself around the preferences and prejudices of the one demographic – white people, particularly conservative and rural white people – with which it is still popular. We know from all varieties of survey data that Americans are identifying with organized religion less than ever today, and even among identifiers the percentage of Protestants and Catholics is declining. Smaller religions like Mormonism, Hinduism, Buddhism, "New Age" belief systems, and so on are all growing at the expense of traditionally common Christian denominations.

Not to be accused of concern trolling, but it seems like a religion should have a belief system that tells followers or potential followers "This is the One True Path. Join us. If you're not interested, piss off, because the One True Path does not change for anyone." In practice we see American Christianity, particularly the evangelical variety, becoming hard to distinguish from a Support Our Troops rally, which makes sense when you realize both organizations are aiming at the same demographic.
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Religion seems to have ceded, at least in our case, the moral argument against violence and war. I haven't been a practicing Catholic in decades, but I do like the fact that the incumbent Pope is willing to remind his flock that there are things they should be opposed to beyond just abortion and The Gays – poverty, war, injustice, and other things that fly in the face of the Dignity of Life and Humankind thing that they care about collectively.

I may not be the kind of person to whom organized religion appeals, but nonetheless I understand the potential it has to be a positive force in the world and in the lives of individuals who do find it appealing. It would be nice, in that light, if American churches were willing to take some kind of moral stance against something other than the convenient target groups that its core supporters already hate. It's safe and easy to bash abortion from the pulpit; how about branching out and asking the congregation what exactly it needs all those guns for, or why they don't mind that an alarming number of unarmed black men seem to end up dead when they encounter police. I don't disrespect right-wing Christianity because of the beliefs per se, as there are tons of belief systems in the world I find ridiculous personally. I disrespect it because it tells the faithful what they want to hear while remaining silent about what they need to hear. "The customer is always right" is a poor strategy in this case.
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I usually express optimism here about once annually, and rather than procrastinating I decided to get it out of the way early this year.

One of the lessons of American history is that we're capable of social change but we take our sweet time doing it. Think about Dwight Eisenhower calling on American blacks to exercise "patience" in their calls for equal rights – nearly a century after the 14th Amendment ostensibly guaranteed them (and Thurgood Marshall's sick burn response, "I'm the world's original gradualist. I just think ninety-odd years is gradual enough.") And of course here we are sixty years later with some of the same problems left unresolved. We're….a little slow sometimes. Glacial, even.

There are some less bleak examples, though.

In the past 20 years Americans, particularly those born since 1980, have done an about-face on gay marriage (57% opposed in 2001, 57% in favor today). That might not seem like much, but swings in public opinion on social issues usually play out over decades. The fall from 57% opposed in 2001 to 39% opposed today is significant.

As completely hopeless as the problem of excessive force and institutionalized racism in law enforcement seems – God knows the death toll isn't subsiding – I think Americans are starting to get it. Not all of us, of course. There's 30% of the population that is intractable on this and many other issues for a variety of reasons (usually something to do with racism and/or an Authoritarian-Follower personality type).

The recent incident in McKinney, TX not only resulted in the cop losing his job but didn't see the usual number of people rushing in to defend him. Sure, some people still defended him, the ones would defend a white cop beheading someone for no reason as long as that person happened to be young and black. Moreso than other recent incidents, even those in which someone ended up dying, we seem much more willing to look at this video and say, "What the hell is wrong with that guy." I think – hope – that a growing number of people see this endless stream of videos of police brutality and weekly stories about unarmed black men being shot and think that maybe there's some kind of pattern here. If nothing else, people who don't pay attention to anything going on in this country might be forced into awareness through sheer repetition.

Don't get me wrong, there remain plenty of problems.
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Incidents in which cops actually get punished or prosecuted still inevitably require a bystander's video to keep the system from reverting to the default setting of believing whatever story the cops concoct. And the willingness of Americans to see themselves as Good People who have rights while others are Bad People who don't (or, more accurately, that the violation of their rights is fine because they're Bad and unworthy of sympathy) remains disturbingly high. Prosecutors and juries are deferential to police to the point of absurdity. Despite all that, there are reasons to be optimistic; not that the problem will be solved by Christmas or your next one's free, but that we are moving in a positive direction. The first step in solving the problem is admitting that it exists.

Like any professional association or interest group, the American Political Science Association bombards its members with emails, occasional junk mail, and various Calls to Action. Lately and quite regularly those Calls have been related to Congress's attempts to cut funding for the social sciences from the National Science Foundation. There are no data available but I suspect the response rate on the exhortations to "Contact your elected officials and tell them to fund the NSF!" is very low. Part of that is the nature of the shotgun approach to asking for help. Part of it is because while no one in the field doubts that funding the study of all subjects is inherently good for obvious reasons, the APSA is trying to mobilize its 10,000 members to save something that directly benefits about 0.
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5% of us.

As is the case in any profession, I assume, academia has a pretty rigidly defined class structure. If we're being honest with ourselves, 99% of the NSF funding in this field goes to tenured faculty at about three dozen universities – with the top 5 or 10 collecting a disproportionate amount. So when the APSA asks all of us to help it lobby for NSF funding, what it's really asking us to do is to petition Congress to help our social/professional betters stay on top of us. Sure, they push hard on the idea that NSF-funded projects affect us all, and that's not without merit. But if I'm self-interested – and who isn't, regarding their own professional advancement and compensation – I want to know why I should help Joe Blow get a $5 million dollar grant at Stanford to conduct a survey in the hopes that years down the line I can use the crumbs of the data to scavenge for publications knowing that Dr. Blow and colleagues have already published all the good stuff.

It's a nice case study of how the incentive to participate in politics declines as inequality rises. Maybe if the vast majority of the profession had a snowball's chance in hell of getting an NSF grant we would all be fired up about this and put some real pressure on the relevant members of Congress.
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Or, as I suspect many of us do, we look at it as the rich asking us to help them get richer in the professional sense and check out. That 50% of Americans who cannot be motivated to vote, or can be only at great cost, probably looks at the political process and draws the same conclusions. Hard to blame them. Survey data shows not only that income predicts participation but also that it predicts political efficacy – one's sense of whether participation is meaningful and the process itself is legitimate. The more money people have, the more they believe the political process is responsive to their interests.

They believe that because it's true.

As a gainfully employed white male, I generally don't have a hard time paying attention to politics because the entire system and the society it reflects are biased in my favor. It's remarkable, though, how easy it is to disengage when that's not the case. No wonder so many Americans do it so often. We could debate whether the futility of politics is reality or merely a perception generated to keep the poor complacent. Either way, it's working like a charm.

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.