Tag Archives: America

Sidelined Onlookers Documenting the Last Days of the Republic?

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When I was working on my Ph.d for political science (how’s that for a first line, name-dropping, “look how important I think I am” opening?), one of the observations I kept making was how so many political pundits of their day were constantly making the prediction that the empire was about to crumble. There would be all sorts of analogies pointing at the fall of Rome, and yet another self-important political pundit of that time and day was convinced that the United States republic was about to collapse upon itself. It got to the point where I started to make predictions about the predicters, figuring that the eventual demise of a political entity is the propensity to fall into the ultimate entropy of political discourse: The belief that eventual destruction has to come on that person’s watch.

So, as I am watching the events of today unfold, I can’t help but find myself making the same mistake that everyone of these Thomas Paines, Mark Twains, Bill Buckleys and Helen Caldicotts kept making. We underestimate the inevitable apathy of the American people to care enough about their own circumstances to ever want to try to make things better.

You see, that’s pretty important, and as a political observant, it’s equally important to understand why people don’t do something as well as why people do the things they eventually do. Political scientists are very good at seeing French Revolutions under every rock, but incapable of seeing Moscovites living in squalor and despair, yet never doing anything to change their personal situation because while the payoff might seem great, the cost of achieving that payoff is sometimes just a bit more than any one man (or woman) is willing to pay. It’s one thing to complain about current events and to demand justice, but when that demand requires that you stand up against oppression by personally risking your own hide, that dynamic changes quickly. Oh, don’t get me wrong. We’re really good about making grandiose statements, like “give me liberty or give me death” or “I may disagree with you but I’ll fight to the death to defend your right to say it” but when it comes down to actually putting up one’s survival against one’s survival instincts, survival instincts win almost every time. We’re really good at complaining and claiming a backbone that we believe we might have, but like every bad war movie there’s that inevitable scene where the cigar-chewing sergeant reveals that a soldier may act all tough, but it’s only on the battlefield when you see whether he puts up or shuts up. In reality, we’re very much like that. We’re often all talk and very little action. I’ve often thought that political science could benefit from incorporating psychology into its discipline (where we put people into a room to see how much their political rhetoric stands up to experimentation…for the record, we don’t do that sort of thing because it’s ethically vacant in social science, but I’m really only talking in semantics right now).

Which brings me to my thesis for today, and that’s that I’m seeing all sorts of “fall of the Republic” activity happening on a daily basis right now, and I wonder how much of it is in place observation that always happens versus actual observations of real implications. In other words, I wonder how much my educated observations are really seeing as opposed to how much my educated perspectives are skewed by that same institutional framework I’ve been talking about since the beginning of this essay. In even more words, am I really seeing what I think that I’m seeing, or am I just another one of those overly observational folk that see things that have always been there but our current paradigm now recognizes it as something less than it really is?

I mean, let’s look at some of the evidence. We’re currently in a budget mess that this country has never been in before. Unlike the past, our solutions were usually to go back to the drawing board and come up with new solutions. Today, we aren’t going back to the drawing board but spitting out rhetoric that doesn’t solve anything but actually makes things worse. People are out of jobs because we may have exhausted the majority of the low-hanging fruit that was once available to us by virtue of our ever-expanding economy and untouched resources. Our economy is no longer expanding, and our resources are essentially tapped, overtapped possibly. The solution was always to find cheaper labor and cheaper resources, but we’ve run out of those options because the former labor solutions have wised up to this act and now controls the labor channels that we used to exploit. Instead, we have lost revenue sources, labor pools, and our own people don’t seem to be able to find the jobs that they used to find that usually existed on top of these other resources and lower income labor pools. If you look to our political leaders, the choices are either to raise more taxes or to cut spending. But neither solution is a solution to the actual problems we seem to be facing. Raising taxes doesn’t do any good if you have no one to raise them on, especially if we have fewer and fewer jobs. Cutting spending is great, but at the same time that only kicks the can down the road again because as we lose that choice labor we used to have, more people end up relying on government to fill in the gaps, yet cutting spending makes that even harder. In the end, we have what’s called the continuous rush to the bottom, and rather than recognize this and try to push back up, we are building infrastructure to make sure the trip to the bottom happens a lot more comfortably.

So what’s the solution to all of this? Well, if you’re a naysayer or a doomsayer, your answer is pretty simple. We let it all collapse and start over again. And sadly enough, we have political leaders that seem to be advocating just that. Oh, they won’t say that exactly, but their solutions are just that. Rather than try to find viable solutions to build prosperity, we seem to have a lot of leaders who are basically just trying to fund the megastupidopoly a little bit longer so they can cash out before it all comes crashing down. The solutions all appear to be named: I’ll get mine and the hell with the rest of you.

Which brings us back to the “people”, the ones who are responsible for fixing it all sans great leaders. But what can we really expect from them when the only input we allow from them is to punch a Yes or No hole on a ballot? We don’t ask for their ideas. To be honest, our political leaders don’t care about their ideas and are really only interested in their money, support and again, what the people can do for their leaders rather than the other way around. Oh, the rhetoric always sounds the opposite of what I just said, but actions speak much louder than words, and those bad actions have been speaking a lot lately.

When the economy started to collapse, our leaders bailed out the car companies, the banks and Wall Street gazillionaires. The common person received zilch. When the common person had his house foreclosed on, the government backed the banks. When it become political impossible to keep doing that, the government stepped in and demanded the banks be slower about taking everything away from their customers. Not that they stop taking everything away. Instead, they gave the banks everything they wanted in practically every area of discourse. Credit card companies received guarantees that people could no longer go completely bankrupt without some kind of continuous debt to the banks involved. When banks were discovered with their pants down involving overdraft charges, government stepped in and did as little as they could there as well. Even with the tiny movement made by government on the people’s behalf, the banks managed to get huge lobbying to soften the changes, and even now are working on reversing some of the impact they have “suffered” as a result of government forcing them to be less greedy and more upfront about their attempts to screw over their customers.

But what it really comes down to is the question of whether or not the common person in America really cares enough to pay attention to what’s happening. President Obama and the minions of government are trying very hard to convince the rest of the country that the budget impasse is important. The media is starting to make comments about how much the debt really “costs” each person and how much in debt EACH person is as a result of the debt ceiling we are currently living under. But what none of them have been capable of doing is convincing the average American that he or she really should care. Oh, they’re trying to make that argument, but it’s falling flat. Let me explain why, using simple logic that the average American is using.

Let’s call me Citizen A. The government tells me that my current debt (as a result of the deficit) is $70,000 (just for the sake of using an arbitrary number because the real number is just that, a number). My first thought is that as a citizen of this republic, I should be concerned, but in reality, I’m more concerned about the $150,000 student loan debt I’ve incurred trying to get a college education, my $350 monthly car payment, and my $500-1000 monthly rent bill I have to pay. Adding in a whole bunch of other expensese I probably have to pay a month, Citizen A really doesn’t care one iota about the personal $70,000 that is part of my slice of the deficit because to be honest, it’s not really my debt. I don’t see it that way. That $150,000 I owe in student loans is my debt, but it’s going to take a lot of rhetoric, a lot of speeches and quite possibly an overweight FBI agent in a bad suit with a crowbar to convince me that the government’s deficit is in fact, MY deficit. Citizen A doesn’t feel a connection to that debt. In fact, he thinks the government squandered that money, and that it’s really the debt of people who work for the government. That, in fact, it’s THEIR debt, not his.

Now, as a rational individual with a bit of education, I understand it shouldn’t be this way, but game theoretics are involved here, and when it comes to payoffs, the average citizen feels just like Citizen A. We don’t feel the debt is ours. It belongs to the government that for years has treated the “people’s” money as its own. When we took away the draft, made voting voluntary, and made presidential state of the union addresses optional television programming, we eliminated the ties between government and Citizen A. People see our government as an entity that exists because it has to exist, but as none of us fought to create this republic, very few of us actually have served to defend it, and most of us are oblivious to what this republic does on a daily basis, it’s very difficult to sell the supposition that government and people are tied to each other.

So, I ask: Are we seeing the end of days, or is this just another hiccup in the usual way things happen? And if it’s the latter, then how do you get people to care enough so that it doesn’t end up becoming the former by eventual default?

Osama Bin Laden, Terrorism, Being an American and Rejoicing in Death

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For some reason, this has been gnawing at me all day. Fortunately, I’ve had one of those days where I’ve sat behind a computer and had to work on meticulous details about a health care module I’m building, so I’ve had little time to really reflect on anything. But when you’re doing that sort of drudgery work, your mind gets to thinking, and no matter what you do, you can’t stop it from thinking the things it does.

Right off the start, I’m left thinking a bunch of random thoughts about the whole situation. A horrible man who hated Americans, just because they were Americans, is now finally dead, reportedly killed by a group of Navy Seals. As I have no reason to doubt the events that took place, I am left with a bit of concern as we went through a lot of work to get rid of the body really, really fast. But I’m going to assume everything went as planned, although it did seem a bit odd to have done the whole “burial at sea” thing without a grandstanding of parading the dead body through Ground Zero first. But I’ll just leave it at that.

What does bother me is the hoo rah’s that are going around by average Americans, including someone who sent out an email to people stating something to the effect of “thank God for protecting America and for blessing us with Navy Seals.” Or something like that. Now, I’m not one to rain on a parade, but I really hope that if there is a god, that god isn’t really going out of his way to make it easy for Americans to kill people for revenge, even if it is the right thing to do. I was as angry as every other American after 911, but something feels really wrong to be celebrating the death of anyone, no matter how bad he is.

You see, part of me wishes for the redemption of man and mankind. When bad people do really bad things, I’m not tied up in a sense of Christian revenge, but if I have to take a page from Christianity, I would like to think that the ultimate redemption of a bad person is probably the best revenge. We seem very tempted by the desire to achieve vengeance in all things, and you can see that in so many things that we do, including our tendency to build more prisons than we build schools. Rehabiliation is rarely our goal; instead, we want to make people pay for their crimes. Sometimes, we’re like the Roman Empire in how it deals with those who trespass against them. Rather than punish the transgressor, we tend to go after the transgressors family, friends, his dog Skippy and anyone who might live on the same block. We use the word collateral damage as an afterthought, and years ago stopped answering for it as an excuse or as an apology. Much like Rome, if this is the tactic we want to take, we need to understand that it has to play to its logical conclusion. We either destroy all of our enemies, including those who are friends of our enemies, or we become destroyed ourselves. The whole idea of “rebuilding Afghanistan” makes little sense if we’re a country that understands only revenge. What we should have done was lay waste to Afghanistan, chase down any of their friends to their eventual deaths and then park an aircraft carrier off their coast to make sure they never join the rest of humanity again. That’s the Roman way, and if we’re going to celebrate like Romans, we need to be a lot more like them.

But I don’t think we want to be the Romans. We have a president in office who is supposedly trying to achieve “peace” in the world, especially in places where we seem to be exacting vengeance upon our enemies. I don’t think we’ve figured out exactly what it is we really want to do. When our enemies, like Al Qaeda, put on Pakistani clothing at night after returning from their day job as a harbinger of terror against all things America, it’s pretty hard to try to achieve a sense of friendship with the same people who have no desire to ever be friends in their lifetimes. But we keep trying to play both sides of the fence, and we’re not very good at doing that.

In all, I’m disappointed that the end to our conflict wasn’t eventual peace and friendship, and maybe a learning moment for some people. The realist in me realizes that maybe such conclusions just aren’t possible. But the little guy inside me that still hold onto hope thinks that we’re doing this all wrong, that perhaps there’s a better way that doesn’t involve either killing someone or being killed by someone. Unfortunately, in our good/bad choice paradigm of American understanding, I don’t think we’re capable of seeing alternative pathways to future avenues of prosperity. For too long, we’ve existed in the “you’re either with us or you’re against us” universe. Honestly, George W. Bush didn’t start that thought process. We’ve been living under that delusion since we first pretended to be Native Americans and threw British tea into the Boston harbor. I don’t thik we’re capable of thinking any other way.

But as an American, I have to feel a sense of “we got our enemy yesterday”, and perhaps leave it at that. As a veteran, I’m proud of what our trained soldiers accomplished. As an American who hated what he observed nearly a decade ago, I can’t help but feel a sense of accomplishment was made here. However, as someone who secretly wished that the world might one day be a better place, I’m afraid we’re continuing to move further and further away from that ever happening.

Taxation Gurus Just Don’t Seem to Get It

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CNN Money ran an article today from Jeanne Sahadi advocating the need to raise taxes “because the looming debt problem is just too big”. Her argument goes on to say that Republicans are misthinking the whole issue because as long as the debt remains large, the country can never go forward.

Well, my response is twofold. First, we need to stop putting taxation into a partisan framework. That never solves anything but makes the issues so tied to other agendas that there’s no way to have a rational conversation about the issue in the first place. By making it partisan, any response of negativity to Sahadi immediately gets lumped into a “he’s a Republican, and therefore he is only limited to Republican talking points.” Whenever the conversation moves to the next level of analysis, the responder can immediately throw it, “oh yeah, but Republicans also believe (fill in the blank, and you realize why no rational debate is then possible).”

Second, and this is really my more important point, at what point did government become so important that it became the elephant we SEE in the room rather than the one hiding in the background? In other words, why is government always the most important factor for the debate? Why isn’t the individual considered more important?

Think about it this way. If we go back to the original foundation theories of government and agree that people came together in a Hobbesian fashion to escape from our evil surroundings, we understand that we then gave up a little bit of our freedom to achieve security. Now, no matter whether you buy Hobbes, Locke or Rousseau, at no point did we ever really give up the original reason for getting together, meaning that we got together because it was mutually beneficial to us, NOT because we were all desiring to create a government. At no point did the foundation of government ever supercede our reason for creating government. In other words, those who create a government are always more important than the government itself, not the other way around. Yet, in every one of these arguments, especially the one put forth by Sahadi, government is the reason we do the things we do, so that we are required to sacrifice at the altar of government, instead of the other way around.

I pay taxes. I’m not rich, but because I am low middle class, I pay money into taxes that really makes an impact on my daily life. The majority of people who pay taxes are like me, lower middle class people who don’t make a lot of money. Any increase in taxes to us hurts big time, yet we’re rarely ever represented in these conversations about taxation and government. Instead, the Republicans represent the interests of the very rich, and the Democrats represent government attempting to fund more money for governmental programs. In a fair world, we’d have another party that actually represented a social class of common people, but we don’t have that in this country. Oh, both sides claim to be that representative, but they never are. They represent their own interests and those interests are never ours.

What it comes down to for the majority of us is a question of how much we value government. I, personally, don’t value government all that much. I see it as a mechanism to keep gangs and drug dealers from killing me on a daily basis. And to be honest, government doesn’t even do that very well. Serious amounts of money are spent on a drug war that fuels this continuous battle between mean streets and the common person, and the common person is rarely seen as the one to which government answers. An example: A few years ago, I was beaten and robbed by gang members who targeted me because of my color. Instead of a serious response to the victim, which you would expect in a case like this, or at least might see on television played by actors who don’t represent real police officers, I ended up in a bizarre situation where two police agencies argued IN FRONT OF ME over which one was responsible for taking the report. Neither one of them wanted the responsibility. Of course, after all was said and done, the culprits were never caught, and I suspect they were never even pursued. Over the next few weeks, before I finally moved across the country to get away from the cesspool that is Hayward, California, I read the blotter reports in the newspapers about how the same individuals were continuing to target citizens in the EXACT SAME AREA EVERY DAY, and even escalating to public buses, convenient stores and train stations. In other words, government didn’t care one bit whatsoever.

Yet, when it comes to taxation, Sahadi believes that if government is starting to fail financially, it is within our requirements to respond immediately and fix it. Sorry, I don’t buy it. Right now, we spend so much money on things that have very little to do with the average American who does pay taxes. Let’s go over a bit of that list.

Wars in Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq: Who benefits from this? Me? I don’t think so. Did I care about freedom in Iraq to begin with? No, not really. I’ve never had contact with anyone from Iraq before. Nor have I had contact with anyone from Afghanistan or Libya. Sure, I buy gas, and some of that comes from some of those places, but if we weren’t fighting a war in these places, we’d still be buying gas from these places regardless. I don’t even suspect it would cost that much more because prices are controlled by OPEC, not tin foil hat dictators.

That pretty much translates to our entire military budget. Yes, it is responsible for protecting America from foreign enemies, but honestly, we’re not actually doing that with our military. We are located in countries that are not ours, fighting for issues that have nothing to do with freedom in the United States. And in order to conduct these wars, we have had presidents (the last two specifically) advocating to suppress our freedoms, which means we’re fighting to lessen our freedoms, which is ironic in its own cynical way. If we were defending America specifically, I’d be happy, but we’re not. We’re pushing agendas of people who are not the lower middle class. And we’re backing up those issues by sending young lower middle class soldiers into wars to support people who rarely serve in the military themselves.

Most governmental agencies that the common person desires are usually handled by the states. My education is handled by the states. The federal government does nothing but institute standards that no one ever achieves. Our federal government has no idea how to educate the youth of America, yet they feel worthy of forcing their standards on the states regardless. I don’t see the value in this. Sure, I can see the value of making sure we don’t teach creationism in school, but nowadays, federal government isn’t even doing that; it’s doing the exact opposite and then fighting with itself over those specific, political standards. Not necessary and not helpful.

Heath care seems like it’s important, but when you threw it into politics, it starts to get useless. Tylor Cowen, in his excellent article, The Great Stagnation, points out that even though the United States spends more money than most countries on health care, we have some of the lowest levels of life-expectancy and our health success rates are dismal at best in comparison to nations that actually spend less of their GDP of health care. Like most governmental issues, we do horrible with our money because we keep believing in American exceptionalism, when we don’t realize that exceptionalism doesn’t always mean better. Part of our problem is that we have a lot of money already in the mix that should be spent better, not a need for more money to be spent on doing the wrong things more often. That last sentence is probably the most significant of this essay but will echo with no one.

In the end, it will come down to partisan drivel politics again where we have people who have a stake in winning an argument over issues that should never be decided by partisan politics. But we don’t seem to care because we’ve gone way beyond caring about what’s important and care more about winning arguments that don’t benefit us even when we do.

As a taxpayer who pays what he believes to be enough taxes, I don’t subscribe to the theory that more money is necessary to fix the problems of bad spending. Unfortunately, the people we have in government are not the best people when it comes to spending wisely; they never have been. Instead, we have the people who are best at convincing people to vote for them because they’re good at making people feel better about themselves, especially when we live in a country of people who should be a lot more critical of their own shortcomings. We’re educating ourselves horribly, we’re grossly overweight, and we let ourselves be ruled by foolish passions over issues that require serious contemplation. But this will fall on deaf ears because we’re a nation of people who likes to hear that we’re great, and when that person comes along who strokes our ego, we’ll vote for him, and we’ll wonder why no one ever does anything about fixing our country. We certainly won’t get the answers from anyone who is paid to tell us what we already keep hearing, but then we’d stop paying them if they didn’t. We’re pretty good at creating vicious circles in this country. Another thing we’re good at, eh?

What a No-Fly Zone Really Means

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I really shouldn’t have to write this post, but it bothers me that so many people don’t understand what it really means when they advocated for a no-fly zone over Libya. It’s like we’re playing some kind of video game where America (or the west) is so powerful that we have all of the cheat codes enacted, and there’s no way anything bad can happen. Well, we just declared war without actually declaring war again, so in case anyone thinks this is something less than that, you’re wrong. We’re now at war with Libya for as long as it takes to scare a dictator into surrendering, backing down or something equally improbable. In reality, we’re demanding he step down, which then means he either escape to another country that might take him, hope his own people won’t kill him or put him on trial, or that some other equally undesirable event doesn’t befall him. In other words, we’re asking someone to take a path of worse consequences than the one he’s actually in right now. We did the same thing to Saddam Hussein, who held out until we had to put troops on the ground, decimate his country, kill LOTS of his own people, and then finally capture him hiding out in a cellar somewhere, hoping he might not be caught.

Right now, the French have attacked with aircraft. It’s possible one plane has already been shot down. Details are hard to come by this early in the war. But they have engaged the Libyans on the ground.

Which means people are already starting to die. So, no amount of posturing, pretending or ignorance gets us away from the fact that our entrance into this war means people will now die. Yes, people were dying before, but we’re going to be killing people ourselves now. We don’t get to paint over that with new paint and then put up a new car fragrance ornament to hide the smell. We’re killing people now. And we may lose some of our own. This is war.

I’m not against a war. I just want people to know and understand that they’re in one now. Sure, we’ll all go back to the mall on the weekend and buy videogames, dresses and other crap, but it doesn’t disguise the fact that we have aircraft in the air right now bombing people we don’t know anything about, and probably never will, especially since they will be dead soon. Hopefully, it won’t be as bad as some previous wars, and hopefully the survivors won’t grow up to hate anyone from the west, planning our deaths decades from now while we’re celebrating  a holiday or just going about our usual business.

This is war. It sucks. Don’t let anyone try to pretend it’s anything more pleasant.

But they will. Because that’s what spin doctors do with these sorts of subjects. Just hope that we don’t end up having to send soldiers over there to “finish what we started”  because someone in power who will never see combat can’t see any other way around the “dilemma”. War sucks, and it rarely turns out the way you plan, intended, or desired.

Now, back to American Idol and whatever we were doing before I so rudely interrupted with reality.

I’m Curious…Is America Over?

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us flag  

Towards the end of the Roman Empire, after centuries of power, prestige and prosperity, the great nation crumbled inwards as its inability to acclimate to new events and changes finally led to an eventual collapse. Historians often point at the Visigoths and other non-melting immigrants to the empire that finally brought about Rome’s demise, but it may be possible that the sacking of Rome was more a symptom than a cause of it undoing, as it had probably seen its end on the horizon for at least a century before it realized things were as dire as they became.

Which leaves one to wonder if there had been a number of people who saw it coming but just kept hoping that things would last long enough for their own retirements, the ends of their own mortality and beliefs that it would last just long enough for their children to escape the eventual destruction that was sure to come. Somewhere, at some point, there had to be a number of people watching the horizon, realizing that the end was near, suspecting that it was closer than they were seeing through their focus on the distance.

Which then brings me to today, to looking at our own civilization, our own society and the wonderment at whether or not the Visigoths are already within our borders.

For years now, we have been struggling with cyclical recessions that seem worse some decades than others, yet we continue to tell ourselves that things are still great, that we are still the great empire that we once were. We are Americans, and we see ourselves as the successors of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln, having lived through the various vicissitudes of struggles, always emerging with the belief that we are better for the efforts of our past, kind of like a version of the “if it doesn’t kill you, it only makes you stronger”.

Yet, I’m left wondering if we are still the same country that stood up to the British monarchy in the 18th century and then again at the dawn of the 19th century. Are we still the people who rushed to defend Europe during the first and second world wars, emerging as the victors, producing what we believed to be a shining beacon of freedom to the rest of the world to always aspire to. Or did something happen that changed us so that the next generations were no longer the same people who could pat themselves on the back as the nation of people who believed they were most definitely a part of an exceptionalism that we believed no other nation could achieve, yet every nation under the sun might one day aspire?

After the Vietnam War, the United States changed, or at least it may have metamorphasized into something different than what we believed it to be. Instead of that nation that others aspired to be, I start to wonder if we began to live on laurels of people who lived before us, convinced that the rest of the world would always see us as the exceptional Americans we believed ourselves to be, even though journeys to other nations would allow to us to see how little other people actually respected us and believed us to be that shining beacon we still kept adding to our resumes.

Over the years, we have supported vicious dictators who killed their own people, all in the name of feigning friendship to us. When a cold-blooded killer emerged to power in some far-off land, we turned our eye and accepted him because he offered us future economic incentives that we used to enrich already very wealthy people in our lands, even though the majority of the people in our country did not benefit as well. And then we sent soldiers to other lands to defend evil people whose only connection to us was they weren’t the “other guys” who we didn’t like a little more than the ones we were supporting. And now, a lot of those choices our forefathers, or our actual fathers and grandfathers, made have come back to haunt us over the years. Where we sided with bad people because they had fossil fuels we could use to propel ourselves to the local Wal Mart, the children of those who suffered no longer see us as the friends we used to believe we would be seen as because of our past dealings.

Which brings me to today. A lot of very wealthy people in this country seem to control the majority of the government, the economic power and even every decision we might make as a nation. The common person has little input, power or even a voice in this current era of government, which leaves me to wonder if all of our efforts led us to create a dynasty of misplaced power that is only now starting to become cognizant of the dangers that lie in the path before us.

Essentially, we have a nation where those who hold the strings of power have little to no connection to the majority of the people who have to live in that paradigm of a society. The last election should have actually been a wake-up call to those holding the reigns of power, but instead voices of complaint have managed to yield no response from those who are now being tasked to make some kind of comment. We have a nation of leaders who claim to represent large segments of people with whom they have never communicated, and yet believe themselves to be worthy of such power.

As was pointed out previously, there had to be Romans at one point who realized there was something on the horizon yet coming closer to the protection of the front gates. Is that repeating itself today, but we’re reacting the same, partying in the chambers of the Roman Senate until the Visigoths finally overthrow us, slaughtering us in our sleep because we never even realized there was a problem in our midst?

All I can hope is that I retire or reach the end of my coil of mortality before it happens. Some may not be so lucky.

The Future of America is in its Past

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In case you haven’t noticed it lately, America has stagnated and isn’t really moving forward anymore. I know most people don’t want to face that possibility, and most people reading this (which means anyone aside from my stuffed animals and imaginary friends) will probably just ignore it and hope for the best. Unfortunately, we’re a bit beyond that option, and even though most people will attempt to embrace that plan, we’re kind of screwed if we do.

You see, according to Tyler Cowen’s thesis, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, we’ve pretty much exhausted all of our free ranges for expansion and exploration, leaving us with pretty much nothing but what we already have. And America was never designed around resting on its laurels; it was designed to expand and develop out, something it can’t do if there’s nowhere else left to go. Now that we’ve entered this inevitable recession, we’re hitting a point where we start to realize that there’s nowhere else for us to go, and that all of those jobs that we expect to come back might just not, and thus, we’re going to have to figure out how to make lemonaide out of already eaten apples. Yeah, I’ve run out of metaphors, similes and allusions. I’m a lot like my country.

Americans live in a system that promises that anyone can do wonders with little as long as that someone is willing to put forth a bit of elbow grease. Unfortunately, that’s kind of a lie, something we’ve been telling each other for generations, even though the lie relied on a lot of extra room to grow that we figured would always be there for expansion. Once that land started running out and the resources as well, we felt we could keep telling the stories long enough to pull a bait and switch, figuring no one would live long enough to really ask any important questions, at least not before we retired and/or died first. Well, we’ve reached the saturation point of that possibility, so now we’re kind of stuck in a future that relies on the lies of the past never being called, like markers in a poker game where we’ve been holding two aces, hoping its the best hand in the game, even though someone else may have had three twos showing all along. Yeah, more bad analogies, metaphors and similies. I’m just full of it today. Or them. Whatever.

Which leaves me with an observation that is probably important because we’re now hitting a point where we’ve already been called on our bluff. Everyone wants to see the hands of the cards we played, and all of the money is already on the table. Man, I’m just going to push this bad analogy all the way to the bank.

So what do we do? We’re in the middle of the unending recession, and we’ve been pushing forward with the belief that it had to end eventually because that’s what recessions tend to do. But if our economy doesn’t really have the power to pull us out of the doldrums, then where do we go from there? What if the recession we’re in happens to be the harbinger of doom that we should have been expecting from the beginning? What if all we have left is that Pandoran conclusion and hope just isn’t enough? Where does a rapidly expanding nation go if there’s no more room within which it can expand?

Part of the solution was the possibility of an untapped area of manifest destiny that offered a never-ending canvas for exploration. By that, I mean the Internet and the ever-expanding territory of a cyber universe. Unfortunately, even that has its limits, as we’ve realized that eventually everything explored in that world has to have some ties to the old world as well. While it might be fascinating to think one could live within a cyberworld, in reality, one still has to maintain a certain existence within normal society, even if to fulfill certain Maslowian needs. Forever expansion means little if someone still has to eat, drink and sleep in normal civilization. The days of Matrix-like exixtence are not yet achievable, so we’re still stuck with having to full basic, simple needs.

Which leaves us with having to find ourselves new frontiers in a walled garden of our own civilizations. The United States could offer endless expansion in the days of praries that went on forever, but once we hit the Pacific Ocean, we started to limit our ability to travel further. Now, everything has been spoken for, so any further expansion comes at a step backwards, a sort of inward despansion, for lack of better word. Much as cell growth is halted and the cells begin to collapse within themselves, feeding off one cell to sustain another, our future is now a tendency to cave in on our progress and trade resources amongst our already established infrastructure as we consolidate and seek to find new frontiers within those already explored. Our future expansion then becomes within, rather than out, mainly because we are without.

If we’re going to survive this change in perspective, we need to realize that we can no longer cannibalize upon outside resources to which we no longer have access. For territory, we must look at that which we already control. For fuel, we can no longer just take from nations that have weak military forces as the world is becoming savvy to that approach and compensating to it as well. We are going to have to consolidate amongst our own people to determine new ways to fuel our movement by either designing new technologies that allow us to use our own resources or to lessen our movement. The simple endothermic physics involved should go without saying, but we’re often not that intelligent when it comes to such matters.

If we’re ever going to figure out our future, we need to look to the rest of the world and see how it has compensated for our future situation already. When Europe ran out of space, it sent colonists to the new world to explore. We are a result of just that. However, when we rebelled and declared ourselves independent, we cut off an avenue of expansion for Europeans, and thus, forced them to realize that their expansion was forever finished, that they would have to learn to live with what they already had. We didn’t think about their reactions or thoughts because we were too busy thinking about how unique we were in comparison to the rest of the world. But in reality, all we were was lucky enough to still have room to grow. Now, we don’t.

So, our future should very much be the same future that was faced by Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries. When they ran out of space to explore, they consolidated. They began to move back over themselves and create from within. They didn’t just stagnate and disappear as we seem to think will happen to us if we stop expanding and growing. If we’re smart, and sometimes we can be, we would realize that we need to start looking to our future by examining what others like us did in the past. If not, we’re going to continue to try to expand as Germany tried to do in the 1930s, before the rest of the world rose up and stopped them. We might not see ourselves in this light, but if we believe that our expansion is never-ending, and we see ourselves as exceptional to other nations, it’s hard not to see us moving that way. That’s never a good thing.

Unfortunately, I doubt anyone will really listen, and we’ll go that direction regardless of any common sense or rational thinking. American exceptionalism relies on the very nature of believing in irrational outcomes to rational thinking. Think of it as a game theory where the result is an expectation of the highest payoff with the least possible chance of happening, but expecting it nonetheless. That’s kind of where we are today. I’d say more but American Idol is coming on soon, and we all know what’s more important.

My Thoughts on Memoirs and Autobiographies

Memoirs, Writing, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

We live in an age where we seem to get a lot of autobiographical tripe paraded before us as legitimate prose and original content. Recently, previous political leaders have released their “true” stories of their administrative actions, including Decision Points by George W. Bush and Known and Unknown by Donald Rumsfeld. I’m not going to link them because I really don’t feel like hyping their work for sale because I think they can do quite well on their own as they try to force their manufactured truths onto the public through the usual channels.

My problem with just these two works is that the reviews of these have pointed out quite admirably how the truth is extremely distorted in these works. The nation, and the world, knew what happened because we recently lived through these events, yet we have two spin doctors doing everything possible to rewrite the history of those times because they still believe in the axiom that the winner gets to rewrite the history. What both books do, and I watched an incredulously sounding interview on the Daily Show with Rumsfeld the other day that was just filled with attempts at reinventing history, is attempt to clean up a very dirty period in American history by pretending that certain things didn’t happen and others did. Both make a weak attempt to pretend that weapons of mass distruction weren’t sold to us as a given in the lead up to war with Iraq. Both books also attempt to pretend that the administration didn’t do everything possible to sell a war, even though so many other rational voices were urging for more time. The Iraq weapons inspectors were begging for more time, and the Bush Administration did everything possible to discredit their voices during this period. Colin Powell, in the greatest travesty of UN history, stood before the world and powerpointed the most falsified series of documents about WMDs the world has ever seen. To this day, that event gets glossed over, or ignored as much as possible, because there’s no way to get around the fact that the administration straight out lied about the lead up to war with Iraq. And that’s really the elephant in the room there that no amount of rewriting of history is ever going to change. Rumsfeld, himself, went way out of his way to cast Saddam Hussein as the best friend of Al Qaeda, and even his attempts at trying to rewrite the narrative on the Daily Show the other night did not change my opinion that this man is amongst the greatest disgraces to the American people of all time. Sorry, you don’t get to rewrite your history when everything you did was wrong, you lied consistently and you haven’t even acknowledged the wrongs you did in your past, especially when those wrongs led to thousands of deaths of young American soldiers.

Which then brings me to the whole memoir thing that seems to be coming out of the woodwork these days. It’s bad enough that we get tomes written by people who spend 200 and some pages lying through their ass because to tell the truth would be career and political suicide. There’s another kind of memoir that has been driving me nuts lately, and that’s the one that comes out from someone who has done nothing of greatness or significance, who somehow manages to get a million dollar contract to tell his or her life story.

First off, I have to point out that if someone is under 25, the chances of that person having a great life story that needs a book is quite minimal. Sure, you might be Alexander the Great, and have conquerered the entire known world by 30, but even he would have needed to wait a few years before writing his great autobiography, if he ever got around to doing it. But I’m sorry, Justin Bieber, who is only 17, or anyone of many celebrities who have done nothing but shake their asses in front of an audience for a few years, really don’t have all that much to share with the rest of us. I mean, honestly, how much more can Justin Bieber, at 17, tell us about his life on the road that is any more intriguing than a book by Robert Plant or perhaps Life by Keith Richards. I mean, at least these people “lived” an actual rock star life that might have a bit of content to them. Granted, I have no desire to read a book of this nature, but at least I know that which ones would actually have something interesting to tell me.

Recently, there have been tons and tons of crappy books being signed by publishing companies for autobiographies of unimportant people who haven’t been alive longer than the lifespan of my car. I’ve had this belief for a long time that a memoir should never be written by anyone who is not at least 35, and definitely not by someone who hasn’t at least done something so significant that rest of the world would stop and take notice. Someone who has spent an entire life in the movies might have a story to tell. Someone who is 13 and nominated for an Oscar because she played a spunky kid in some movie does not. A rock star who has had multiple divorces, four or five near death experiences, and quite possibly is known for ushering in the second age of rock ‘n’ roll might have a story. A Disney mousketeer who is now singing for teenyboppers probably doesn’t.

Which then brings me to the unimportant people writing important memoirs for the rest of us. Unfortunately, not all of us can be Jack London, living a bunch of different lives before finally settling down and giving us literature to ponder over for centuries. That means instead we get a lot of life stories from people who broke their cocaine habit, lived through therapy, had a really cool dog with a funny name, or just outright manufactured their history because it was the only way to get Oprah to let them appear on her show. Very few of those stories are important enough for us to really want to buy their books.

But even when someone does manage to have an important enough story for the rest of us to read, that person needs to realize he or she might not be the next Hemingway and should really stop at that one story. Dave Pelzer is a good example of this. I’m not sure if you’ve read his ground-breaking book, A Child Called “It”, which is his story of living with a seriously deranged and abusive mother. It’s a great book and really pulls at the heartstrings. Unfortunately, Pelzer felt he was onto something and has never stopped writing books about his life. The first one was great. The rest of them tired, old and overdone. At some point, you need to move on and show us that you learned something from your journey, not that the only thing you learned was it was very profitable and worthy of returning to the well over and over again.

One of the greatest memoirs I’ve ever read comes from probably the only man to ever do a memoir the right way. It was so much the right way that he spent his entire life trying to figure out how exactly to write it, and then spent his final years doing just that. I’m talking about the Autobiography of Mark Twain, which the author demanded not be released until 100 years after his death. And having just read through it, or at least the first volume of three that’s been so far released, I can say that he definitely knew what he was doing with an autobiography. I’ve learned so much about his time and the important figures around his life in so little space. Few memoirs are capable of ever transcending the page like that.

Unfortunately, we rarely get a Mark Twain to tell his story as only a Samuel Clemens can. Instead, we get lying politicians and self-important teenagers with a million dollar book contract. If only the middle ground was so much brighter.

Poverty is getting worse in America, but no one seems to care

Economics, Politics, , , , , , , ,

It was reported again today that poverty is getting worse in America. The info came from the Census Bureau this time. Seems that in 2009, poverty jumped to 14.3 percent from 11.3 percent in 2000. Unemployment is also worse. Yet, you wouldn’t know this from the pundits who want to do everything to convince us that everything’s fine, or everything’s just on a downswing, just waiting to start swinging back up to prosperity.

But there’s no evidence of that. We’ve had a couple of HUGE stimulus packages and MAJOR bailouts of industries and banks. Hasn’t done anything but make a few more millionaires into mega millionaires, and the job outlook doesn’t look any better, and poverty looks like it’s becoming more of the norm.

So what are we supposed to do with this information? Riot in the streets? Jump off the nearest bridge? I’d like to know because I don’t really have an answer. There are two political parties in power that will continue to be in power NO MATTER WHO GETS ELECTED, and these two parties are acting like it’s no big deal. Oh sure, they’ll complain if it might get more of their people into office, but in reality, they don’t care. Because everyone of them have jobs. We’re paying for them. They have jobs pretty much for life because the system is designed to keep them in power and to allow them to decide how much we get to pay them. We, on the other hand, have little to no power, and we have to listen as they argue about how much they should be able to charge us for the privilege of letting them serve on the government payroll.

Oh, we can get upset, but it won’t do any good. They’ll still be in power no matter how mad we get.

And people will still continue to get poorer, and the jobs will continue to disappear from us because the corporate heads of most companies have discovered there’s profit in not paying people. There’s even profit in bankrupting your company, cheating all of your customers, and in some cases, pretending you have a real company and charging people to rip them off before they go bankrupt themselves and the criminal gets even wealthier.

No, there are no jokes in this post because there’s really nothing funny about it. Those who might actually be reading this will just file it away to never be used again and then go back to wondering about whether or not Lady Gaga will wear something bizarre during her next television appearance. Instead of paying attention to who really runs the country, they’ll think about who they want to vote for on the next American Idol, or who to vote off the island.

Meanwhile, the poverty rate will continue to rise, and unemployment will continue to dip, while someone in government (doesn’t matter which party) will spin it to make it seem like everything’s better, even though everything’s not.

Kind of sad. I’ll close with a picture of cute puppies because that’s probably more important to people anyway.

Do Superpowers Recognize When They’re Losing Their Significance?

Politics, Television, ,

I’ve often wondered what it must have been like to be a citizen of France at the end of the first World War when it can be argued that the French Empire was finally no longer the superpower they once were. Almost overnight, the German war machine built itself up and rolled right over the forces of France, forever destroying their ability to posture like…well, like the French. At the same time, I also wonder how a British Empire citizen must have felt when he or she realized that the imperial power of the once great British Empire was no longer significant. Some might argue this happened right about the time the American colonists kicked them out of the colonies, but it’s quite possible that this demise was coming sooner than that, and that it may have taken a bit longer than 1789 to finally occur.

But what gets me wondering is how those citizens must have not believed that it was possible their empires were no longer the behemoths they once were. Having said that, I start to wonder if the United States might not be in the same boat today, having once been the emergent superpower in the world, but now somewhat irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

Oh sure, like most superpowers, we’re still up there at the top of the list, but at the same time I don’t think we evoke the respect and fear that we might have had maybe 50 years ago. Look at how nations like Iran react to the United States today. In the 1960s, a country like Venezuela would never have dared say half the things Chavez says on a daily basis. His country would have been invaded, and he’d be sharing a prison cell with Noriega. Remember that guy?

But not today. Today, the US is seen as one of the most powerful countries in the world, but it’s not seen as the hegemony that it tends to think it is. At one point, in response to 911, we invaded Afghanistan and then for any number of irrational reasons, we invaded Iraq. But then we got bogged down in those stupid wars and we really don’t have a way out. I don’t even think we have a rational reason for why we’re still there, other than “we’ll leave when everything calms down”, which is a pretty scary thought because these are areas that have never really been calmed down, at peace or even stable. Well, Iraq was, but we wiped out the guy who stabilized it, and well, who knows?

During the Cold War, it was probably okay to be one of the main hegemonies in the world, but we were directly at odds with the Soviet Union, and today, I’m not even sure what it is our point is any more. We keep building up a huge military to fight against some mysterious enemy that doesn’t exist, although Russia keeps seeming to want to become the enemy it used to be, even though there really doesn’t seem to be a rational reason to let them do so. There’s nothing about Russia that is really a problem for the United States other than the idea that they’re the “other” hegemony, but in reality aren’t really powerful enough to be just that these days.

That’s the problem right there. We seem to exist to counter a great enemy somewhere, but there is no great enemy anywhere any more other than ideological ones, like the concept of terror. But how do you counter a concept? You really can’t. You can talk about it, scream at it, and claim you will stop it, but it’s an idea, not an actual enemy. It’s like declaring a war against smoke but not recognizing fire as an enemy but something to be coddled in hopes that it will make smoke go away. That’s why I hate these concept wars, like the war on poverty.

But what no one wants to face is the possibility that the United States really has no meaning any more. Think on that for a moment. If someone was to ask you what the United States stands for or means, the usual answers of “freedom” are pretty limiting because “freedom” exists in many places, some of which have more of it than the United States. The idea of the “melting pot” also comes to mind, but in reality it’s more a fantasy and a promise that we don’t actually live up to any more. If you go to any major city, you’ll find more people interested in ethnic and racial separation (within those ethnic and racial identities) than you’ll find that are interested in “melting”. In the old days, the melting pot metaphor was useful because when people melted into society, they still tended to look a lot alike and didn’t seem to want to fall back into their identity separations. But not today. Nowadays, we spend a great deal of energy with politically correct dogma that requires us to work on separating ourselves from each other by color and creed, all in the name of this bizarre fantasy that somehow this will make us all want to live together in harmony. Something really wrong happened in this country, and people are too scared of being branded racists, bigots or haters to want to do anything about it, when in reality the people who want cohesiveness and racial harmony are the ones who most often have least chance of achieving it. It’s pretty hard to advocate for racial harmony when there are people who owe their entire political careers to making sure those separations never go away. Sorry, but that’s a sad sate of our current affairs.

But back to the thesis of this post, and that’s that what we don’t seem to realize might be exactly what is happening all around us: The entire foundation of what makes America “America” has been falling apart for many decades now, and no one is doing anything about trying to bring things to a better place. Instead, every time someone talks about “fixing” America, it ends up being someone who wants to do things that make America that much worse, doing stuff like creating barriers to immigration, forcing English on the population, or just making it so that more and more people hate each other all in the name of some ideal that no one really intends to emulate.

Sadly, most people won’t realize there’s a problem because the fantasy of America is much stronger than any reality can ever be. It’s because of this that we can rack up a massive deficit that is reaching proportions we may never be able to repay. And instead of deal with it, we just stick our heads in the ground and figure that it will all fix itself, or we’ll all live long enough to die before we ever have to deal with the consequences. Well, I have a feeling that many people in the numerous republics of the Soviet Union were probably thinking that nothing bad could ever happen even as the warning signs started appearing in the 1980s, not realizing that in a decade the whole foundation would collapse on itself.

As a huge fan of Stargate SG1, a sign of my eternal geekdom, I have to say that I’ve always been a fan of the one dialogue they kept bringing up, where they’d talk about their main plan, and then realize that if it doesn’t work out well, they’ll have to fall back on Plan B. And in the show, one of the running gags was that they never really had a Plan B, but they’d always just keep running until things worked themselves out. Well, that’s the United States today. Plan A is to hope for a miracle that no one is actually working towards. Which means Plan B is already in place, and we’re running forward, hoping that the evil aliens don’t end up killing us and destroying everything we believe in. Fortunately, in the TV universe, they usually came out ahead. Let’s hope that fantasy is somewhat based on a sense of reality. Otherwise, we might be in a whole heap of trouble, and there’s only so many “To be Continued” episode endings we can use before the network finally realizes it has to cancel the show.