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I just accidentally deleted a very civil comment I had overlooked. Damned touch screen device...

Irreconcilable differences

In the autumn of 2008 I lived in a suburb of Dayton, Ohio, and worked in a village of about 2000 people, forty miles away. To make an otherwise hypnotic commute between corn fields more interesting during that election season, I got into the habit of counting campaign signs along the way. At the beginning of my trip, driving through my deteriorating middle-class suburb, the signage was overwhelmingly pro-Obama – about 5-to-1 Obama to McCain if I recall correctly. In the middle portion of my route I drove through parts of two towns, each with a population in the 20-40,000 range. These were about evenly split between McCain’s midnight blue signs, and Obama’s electric blue signs with their curious Grant Wood sunrise logo. After leaving the last full-fledged town, the McCain-Palin ticket reigned supreme. In the village where I worked (and still work) there was not a single Obama sign.

America is one country, but it contains two nations. Arguably there are more than two, but the primary division tends to push any lesser distinctions into one or the other of two camps – the predominantly urban liberals on the one hand, and the predominantly rural conservatives on the other. I don’t use the word “nations” lightly. We are not, at this point in our history, talking about a few minor policy disagreements, or about some superficial differences in habits or tastes. American liberals have more in common with their European counterparts than they do with most of the people who populate the vast interior of America. American conservatives, for their part, tend to consider places like New York City and Los Angeles as loci of crime and moral degeneracy – places entertaining to peer at on TV, but certainly not safe and wholesome places to take the kids. Each side stares at its image of the other with incredulous, smug contempt – only some of which, in either case, is actually deserved.

I have lived, worked, and traveled in both nations. It is plainly obvious to me is that neither side is going away. Elections change policies but, short of actual genocide or similar draconian actions, they do not eradicate cultures. Consider the Roe v. Wade decision. Legal abortion has be settled law in America for forty years now, but people who oppose abortion still number in the tens of millions, and are still as active and determined as they ever were. Like it or not, both sides of this issue stand on deeply held principles – beliefs about which they are unlikely, at any point, just to shrug their shoulders and say “Ok… you win.”

The two opposing nations are about on parity in number. If this were not so, neither Bush nor Obama could have won a second term. Despite this, each side likes to characterize the other as merely a radical fringe. Most people are surrounded by other people like themselves. Conservatives like to say we are a center right nation, and that liberals only make up about twenty percent of the total population. Again, unless you believe in election fraud on a truly massive scale, no right leaning country would have elected our current president after witnessing his first term. It may be that only a minority of the public self-identifies as liberal or progressive, but there are obviously plenty of others who either want to ride that train, hate the opposition, or both. Likewise, the idea that the Tea Party represents only the lunatic fringe of a generally pliable Republican base cannot be true. Despite an ongoing war of suppression by the media, the Democrats, and the Republican establishment, the Tea Party remains an active force. Its sympathizers, if not its actual members, are as thick as corn in August. The supposedly more mainstream Republican establishment, on the other hand, does not appear to represent anyone other than themselves – and, perhaps, a handful of very wealthy donors.

When separate incompatible nations vie for power within a single political state, the ultimate outcome is likely to be the oppression of the weaker by the stronger. The stronger side may see themselves as benefactors, “re-educating” their wayward or backward cousins, but this is really no more than a rationalization of what is really the same old exercise of dominance. When the US Army finally defeated the last of the native American tribes on the great plains, the government rounded them up and put them in reservations. They then took their children away to be re-educated in government schools. Government functionaries cut the children’s hair and forbade them to speak their native language. This is conquest. This is what the attempted eradication of a culture looks like. It is all done with the best of intentions, by people who are certain that they are doing the right thing. It seems harsh and shameful only in hindsight. In the moment it seems the best and kindest thing to do. Why would anyone not want to be like us?

If we were as enlightened as we like to think we are, we would leave Montana in the hands of Montanans, and New York City in the hands of its residents. We would not be so happy to see a level of cultural control inflicted on other Americans that we would find appalling to see inflicted on foreigners. We would not take for granted that our own ideology is so virtuous that its imposition on others by force or deceit is still a blessing.

It is probably wishful thinking to believe the two contending cultures of America will ever get along. It is probably wishful thinking, too, to imagine they can stand at arm’s length amicably. Contemporary liberalism is an internationalist movement. Not to keep Montana in line would embarrass American liberals in front of the French. Obviously, too, religious conservatives are unlikely to give up their effort to proselytize. Their unexaminable faith commands it. Thus, two enormous titans beat each other bloody in the dark. Both sides strengthen the growing police state, even though no ordinary person wants it. Year by year, it gets harder to say “I believe this” or “I believe that” without falling prey to the brutal orthodoxy of the question “are you one of us – or one of them?”

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Note: I wrote a much more detailed but rather rambling essay on the same topic under the title of The Great Divide. http://www.cadwaladr.blogspot.com/2010/12/great-divide.html

A simple argument against liberalism

This is the epiphany which transformed me from a leftist into a dedicated, if somewhat nuanced, conservative. It is really an argument against not only liberalism, but against leftism in most of its forms.


One has to understand that, for the liberal, the government has two chief functions. One is to constrain the greed of private enterprise, and the other it to steadily improve society. Phrased that simply, those sound like admirable things to do – and it isn’t difficult to understand why many people find liberalism appealing. Every liberal I have ever spoken with believes, whether they think about it or not, that the twin virtues a society should strive for are fairness and progress. If our leaders were angels, this might be an acceptable basis for government. We do not live in a world run by angels, however, but in a world run by less than perfect human beings.

To understand the heart of the liberal worldview, let’s imagine that every businessperson on Earth is ambitious to the exclusion of the slightest sense of compassion. In know this isn’t true – I personally know a CEO of a midsize corporation who spends a good portion of her time dispensing charity – but, for the sake of argument, let’s give liberals their cherished meme. Let’s imagine private industry is a den of heartless sociopaths. Isn’t it obvious, then, that it’s in everyone else’s interest if these evil people are regulated, punished, and suppressed?

No, it isn’t. The first thing one must recognize, when we are talking about the real world, is that the ruthlessly ambitious, who do exist, are not attracted to business per se. They are attracted to positions of power. Money is power, but so is political authority. Marginalize business with too many taxes and regulations, make business people society’s hated pariahs, exalt the status and authority of government, and you will only put the determined and ruthless few on a new career path. When government is small and business is booming – the ambitious gravitate toward business. When business is precarious and government is expanding – the ambitious gravitate toward government. History and common sense both bear this out.

At the height of that corporation’s power, the CEO of General Motors didn’t have the authority to arrest me, imprison me, seize my property, fly a surveillance drone over my house, draft me into his company’s security department, take my money without selling me something, or force me to buy health insurance. While the power of a major corporation is considerable, its power over individual rights is limited. Government’s power over the individual is fundamentally unlimited. They enact the laws. They direct the people who have the guns. In those instances in which corporations have trampled the basic rights of ordinary people, they have almost always done so by manipulating governments. While such corruption is genuinely appalling, it must be pointed out that corporations are only buying the coercive power that governments possess by their very nature. When a corporation buys influence, it can only do so because influence is for sale.

When a person advocates for an ever larger government with ever fewer Constitutional limits on its authority, he or she implicitly imagines a government that will be run by angels – which is to say, by some breed of people who are above the petty and self-serving motives that the rest of us are prone to, and certainly a far better breed than the wicked, predatory monsters that run business. More, the liberal imagines that these angels are not merely selfless but nearly all-knowing – having the capacity to know more about what is good for us than we ever could ourselves. The liberal trades freedom in a competitive, difficult world for the illusion of an eternal happy childhood in the household of the governmental parent. Even if it worked out that way, eternal childhood is a sad condition for a grown-up human being to be reduced to. In reality, since our leaders are neither angels nor all-knowing, expanding government is unlikely to produce much happiness, and very likely to produce exactly what Friedrich Hayek said it would – serfdom, suffering, and passivity.

The negligent slaughter of the US economy

After World War II the United States was, without question, the dominant economic power on the globe. Our industrial base, already huge before the war, had survived the conflict intact while the rest of the industrialized world had been significantly battered. At the end of 1945, America was ready and able to be the manufacturing center of the world. While there were some rough times transitioning from a war economy to a peacetime economy, and a period during which Europe had to be propped up enough to at least be viable as a market, the American economy grew steadily through the 1950’s and 1960’s. We had plenty of smart people and plenty of cheap Texas oil. A generation grew up believing that a gradual improvement in the American standard of living was the inevitable – a god-given birthright or a law of nature, depending on one’s religious views.

There was pollution, of course, in this otherwise rosy world. The air and water were less than ideal. Industrial economy – that is, making goods instead of moving data around – is an inherently dirty process. Steel mills and chemical plants will never be things you want to live near. Inevitably then, the people who had already brought us the New Deal, with its central notion that if there is a problem anywhere of any kind it is the government’s responsibility to fix it, decided to fix the rivers and the sky.

Now, don’t misunderstand me here. There is no question that clean water and clean air are good, wholesome, and laudable things. No one wants dirty air and dirty water, regardless of what the current president may tell you. Even industrialists really don’t like pollution. But there’s a problem. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. If you want to have cheap goods made of plastic then somewhere there has to be a plastics plant full of all sorts of toxic and carcinogenic chemicals. If you want copper to make wiring for electronics and nice saucepans for your local snobby restaurant, you are going to have to put up with huge, unsightly holes in Arizona and gigantic stinking leach piles of copper ore. Most things cannot be made by good-hearted hippies using garden waste and love. There is a whole science of thermodynamics that explains exactly why manufacturing makes some part of the world a great deal grungier, but I think that if you’re smart enough to read this you have probably already grasped the point without the mathematical fuss.

So, here were all these do-gooders out punishing American industry for its sins. Those sins amounted to: making the air and water dirty (by making goods that everybody wanted) -- and making lots of money doing it (and never mind that they provided the jobs that built the middle class). To be fair to the liberal planners, they did alot of good initially. The Cuyahoga River that runs through Cleveland stopped its novel habit of catching fire. Smokestacks began making pretty white smoke instead of dingy black smoke. I am talking about smoke, not people – so spare me any racist accusations. There certainly is a level of cleanliness that leaves industry with a manageable burden, and everyone, for awhile, is happier when that level is reached. Unfortunately, the problem with regulators is that having fixed a problem they will inevitably look for others to fix. If they can’t find any significant problems, they’ll magnify the importance of progressively smaller and smaller ones. They do not call themselves progressives by accident. To give one small example, there are now a number of regulations that deal with the danger posed by chemicals found in upholstery foams – not dangers to workers, but dangers to consumers. My memory may not be what it used to be, but I cannot recall a single instance in my lifetime of seeing a family expired in front of their TV, cut down by the lethal outgassings of their couch. My instinct is that if you lie on a couch long enough for the chemicals in the upholstery to kill you, obesity and heart disease will probably kill you first. It really will be too much Xbox and too many of mayor Bloomberg’s famous 24oz. sodas, and not the polybrominated biphenyls which snuff out junior’s one and only non-virtual life.

The gradual expansion of environmental regulation has had several consequences, probably unintentional. At some point, people who thought that manufacturing things could be a fun and lucrative way to make a living stopped thinking that. People are not naturally inclined to spend their lives in legal battles with Federal regulators, so the ambitious and creative ones ventured into finance, government, and the law – in other words, into occupations not involving smelly chemicals. Being in finance allows you to engage in business without getting your hands dirty in a literal sense. You can just make money buying and selling other peoples’ companies, mortgages, grandmothers, etc. Enron was never an energy company in any physical sense of the word – they were more-or-less an investment bank with a narrowly targeted set of assets. Going into government or the law, on the other hand, is following the adage – If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em! Lawyers, bureaucrats and politicians aren’t really in the business of making wealth – which is to say, real, tangible goods – any more than their banker counterparts are. All of these occupations are, for the most part, engaged in a zero-sum game of moving money around – taking from the haves and giving to the have-nots with one hand, and taking from the powerless to line the pockets of the powerful with the other. I sometimes think the processes of taxation, spending, and civil law might be easily replaced with a few traveling roulette wheels. Everyone puts their money in and everybody gets a chance. It would be only slightly less fair than the system we have now, but would be a good deal more honest and cheaper to operate. Like a state lottery only bigger. Any of our recent presidents or presidential candidates, with the possible exceptions of the wooden Al Gore and the grumpy John McCain, could easily serve as charming game show hosts…

Sorry. I digress.

Anyway, when industry became a sort of hated, punishable offense the financial people figured out that the perfect thing to do was move production overseas. Americans still wanted the same cheap plastic stuff and it wasn’t too hard to find countries without environmental laws where it could all be made. The boom manufacturing markets have traveled like a stinky circus around the far east for decades, finally settling, improbably, in China. The Chinese “Communists” belatedly concluded that authoritarian central government works pretty well – but central economic planning doesn’t. Here in the enlightened west, we are still trying desperately to accomplish both.

There’s another rub here of course – which none of our best and brightest planners managed to see, or if they did they didn’t take it seriously. As I said earlier, people who grow up getting richer every year tend to be outrageous optimists. They didn’t fully realize that stinking up the air and water isn’t just a way to make Winnebagos and Barbie dolls – it’s a basis for real international power. He (or she) who makes the goods holds power over those who want or need them. We imagined, somehow, that we could let the Chinese make the goods and pollute their countryside, but still walk off with not only a clean environmental conscience but a nice tidy profit. America, in other words, would stop making things and just own everything. China, with its strong central government, has clearly gotten tired of that game. They passed a law declaring that the controlling interest in all Chinese companies will henceforth be Chinese. American business may be infuriated by this – but what else could they expect?

The less material wealth America produces the more it’s international economic standing becomes a conjuring trick. We have gone a long way on the momentum of our own legendary power, but the engine is smoking suspiciously and the fuel is running very low.

Speaking of which, the fuel is running low. All that cheap Texas oil, and most of the Alaskan oil, is gone. Most of the Mexican oil boom is gone. The North Sea oil is merely a trickle. Even Saudi Arabia has sucked out their spare capacity. The price of oil is permanently over $80 a barrel for a reason. That reason is supply and demand.

There is an oil boom in the United States and Canada – of a sort. It is not because there are new major discoveries. The much-talked-about Bakken shale in North Dakota was discovered in the early 1950’s. The Canadian tar sands were discovered by the Hudson Bay Company in 1719. Nor is the boom the product of any breakthrough in technology. Horizontal drilling is 1970’s technology. Commercial hydraulic fracturing started in 1949. What has actually created the boom has been a price of oil reliably above $80 a barrel. When oil was $25 a barrel, recovering it by expensive hydraulic fracturing was a losing proposition. At $80 a barrel, it’s a bonanza. If one levied a tax of $50 or $100 on a $25 barrel of oil, anyone with a non-fantasy understanding of economics could see immediately what a brutal economic burden it would impose. Somehow when the law of supply and demand itself imposes the burden many conservatives imagine it’s a sign of hope!

The environmentalists, of course, are living on a mental planet all their own. My favorite example of this is the part of the green lobby that opposes wind power. Wind turbines have many problems as a power source, but they don’t pollute (apart from the pollution created in manufacturing them) and they are at least in the same ballpark with coal-fired power plants in terms of cost. The ultra-greenies complain, however, that the whirling blades kill birds and make an eerie moaning sound – no doubt the howling of the morally outraged mother Earth. It takes the wind right out of me to think about it. I live near a liberal college town whose lawns and shop windows proudly sport signs proclaiming “No Fracking Way.” No hydraulic fracturing for natural gas, in other words. These people all heat with natural gas of course. I have a feeling a couple of January days without gas in their furnaces might make them reconsider. “Frack It! I want heat!” On the other hand, changing your mind requires at least some rational understanding of the world – so I would probably be disappointed. It is really just as likely that these people would blame the gas company for engaging in a rightwing conspiracy – rich, bigoted, homophobes that the gas company obviously represents.

I believe the economic future of the country would be better guided by conservatives than by liberals. While it is true that conservatives are prone to a certain kind of naïve optimism, they are generally practical people who will get up off the floor on their own when reality knocks them down. Liberals will cry that the government needs to do more – and they will beat-up the only people whom a crisis has left standing.

Writing, tweeting, and barking

I used to pursue a public forum the old-fashioned way, writing books and laying them before the cold, businesslike eyes of editors. The writing part was always enjoyable, but the self-promotion exercise was boring in the extreme. I never found rejection slips humiliating – only tiresome. Little anticlimaxes at the end of modest expectations. Editors, for the most part, are looking for marketable material and have trained their noses to detect good sales prospects. They are not fine arbiters of artistic merit, much less the judges of the ultimate value of one’s soul. Marketability and self-worth really should be two different things. If you want to feel better about a publishing failure, go to a bookstore and have a look at all the worthless dreck that actually succeeds. It may be better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven – but it is also better to go unrecognized than to be a famous writer of dreck. Unless you are too shallow to know the difference – in which case you had better move on to another article because what follows will probably only insult you, if that’s possible.

We are all authors now. Anyone with fingers and an intact chunk of cerebral cortex can fling an electronic message-in-a-bottle into the abyss of cyberspace. One may blog and tweet and Facebook and Reddit and comment and venture into more venues than I can count. In one sense, it is nothing new – an electronic medium is just another medium, another kind of paper, but in another sense it is uncharted territory that humanity is stumbling enthusiastically into. Even grandma can have her Facebook page. In theory, Tamil villagers in Sri Lanka can be enthralled with gripping tails of the grandkids and their puppy, or whatever else the industrious grandma might choose to inflict upon a fascinated world. Everyone can strive to be famous, without the tedious, unsympathetic bulwark of the editor. Free at last! Free at last! Except, of course, that no one really cares about you now that didn’t care before. The Tamil villagers have no reason to care about Grandma, her progeny, or little Toto either. The only nearly sure-fire method of acquiring a willing audience is to make an utter fool of yourself in some novel and usually disgusting way. YouTube overfloweth with such fools. Video yourself jumping off a diving board into an empty swimming pool, or taking a dump in the aisle of your local grocery store, and you will get your 15 minutes of fame. A certain fraction of murders and would-be murders have always understood this possibility. John Hinckley not only got Jodie Foster’s attention by shooting Ronald Reagan – he got everybody else’s too. A sad, sick nobody became a sad, sick somebody. We all know Dzhokar Tsarnaev’s name and what he looks like. He didn’t even need an agent.

People throw themselves at the internet in all sorts of ways and for all sorts of reasons. I want my ideas to be heard, and I thereby hope to alter the world, however slightly, into something a little more to my liking. I want to be immortal, if only in a footnote somewhere. It is a ridiculous quest, of course, but most of the people out there trying to save the world, or some portion of it, are not actually doing anything better than that. We want our lives to have some meaning, and, paradoxically, the more of us there are and the more noise we make the less meaning we all have. Meaning is a luxury we indulge in when we aren’t starving or freezing. The pursuit of it is a bit better that self-mutilation or shooting holes in politicians du jour, but it isn’t a special or sacred avocation. It is just a quirk of the brain – a sort of Nietzschean will to power with a sugary glaze of altruism to make it more palatable to modern sensibilities. I should like to expand the realm of “me” by making you think like “me.” Who cares? So what? But I have held onto you this far – and that’s something. At least we can be ridiculous together.

Social media is a different species of animal from what I consider “real” writing, but it serves some of the same functions nevertheless. If it’s not an outreach of ideas it’s at least an extension of small talk. It is the communication mode of choice for those that find security not in meaning, but in simple attachment. It is now possible to engage strangers in the same sort of mutually reassuring babble we used to share with family members, friends, and neighbors. It is also possible to reinvent yourself in the convenient absence of a commonly known personal history – or even a body. I am a bit too misanthropic to spend my life in one long session of social network maintenance, so I admit I don’t have much to say about this sort of activity. I’m a deaf music critic when it comes to Facebook. Twitter, however, I despise on principle. Any form of communication that constricts an interlocutor to 140 characters is a direct assault not only on linguistic subtlety, but on the complexity of any underlying thought. It is reminiscent of Orwell’s newspeak from the novel 1984. The intention of newspeak was to constrain language to such a limited set of words that seditious or otherwise dangerous ideas could no longer even be entertained. This is language as a sort of straightjacket for the mind. Twitter, not surprisingly, has become a primary means for politicians and other celebrities to commune, in a sort of grunting troglodytic way, with their fans. I know I’m not insulting anybody here, because if you’re a dedicated tweeter, I’ve long since exceeded your attention span. LOL! ROFLMAO!

Last, and least, among the varied breeds of cybernoisemakers is the habitual snarky commenter. To be fair, I have read a few very insightful comments, and more than a few amusing ones. These are worthy products of the mind, and not the idle barking of the sort of beast I’m talking about. The kind of loathsome creature I’m referring to is the one whose favorite word is “idiot” or “asshole” and who takes a clear delight in name-calling from the anonymous safety of his smart phone – or whatever connective device they have these days in hell. Decades ago, public bathroom stalls were lavishly decorated with random (and not-so-random) insults, crude sketches of genitalia, and the general outpourings of small and primitively antisocial minds. Public bathrooms are much cleaner places now – but I’m pretty sure I know where all their unpaid decorators have gone. “FUCK YOU IDIOT!!!” Hmm. The similarity is uncanny. Some people don’t have the courage to pitch themselves headfirst into empty swimming pools to get attention. Still, in the spirit of tolerance and generosity, I wish them all the best in finding that much courage.

A simple argument for conservatism

I have a number of liberal friends and acquaintances, and have been considering how to make the best and simplest argument for the conservative cause – which I take to be the cause of limited government. This is that argument.

If you are a US citizen, your Congressional Representative in the US House now represents more than half a million people. If you live in one of the least populous states, your Senators represent about the same number. In the most populous states, the Senators each represent tens of millions of people. The odds are very good that you have never seen your Congressional Representative or either of your Senators. The odds are even better that you have never spoken to them. If you write any of these federal legislators, you will be virtually guaranteed a form letter rubber stamped by (and probably also written by) some minor member of the legislator’s staff. If you write on a matter of general concern, you can expect that the rough content of your letter will be compiled with thousands of others into a statistic. If your concerns are unique, you can expect they will be more-or-less politely ignored.

When your Congressman or Congresswoman and your two Senators climb the stairs to do the peoples’ business, it is a rare thing anymore for them to write or haggle over the detailed content of new laws. Rather, they vote on bundles of paper they have neither written nor even read. Documents thousands of pages long, written by staffers, lobbyists and federal bureaucrats – documents your representatives could not possibly read regardless of their level of public spiritedness and good intentions. They vote on their ideas about what the bundles might contain – typically along ideological or party lines.

Frequently, these legislators you have never seen or spoken to don’t even get to vote on the bundles of paper they have neither written nor read. Two people, the Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader set the agenda for Congress, deciding what is brought up for a vote and what gets dropped into the legislative abyss. When your legislators do get to help vote a bundle of paper into law, and the President decides neither to veto the bundle nor to direct the bureaucracy not to enforce it, dozens or hundreds of faceless people you will never have the privilege of voting for implement and flesh-out the bundle of paper in ways that could profoundly change your life.

These are simply the facts. You may think that your party is good and the other party is evil, but in the best of circumstances the form of government you have is almost wholly untroubled by your wishes. You don’t have even weak representation – you have only a ghost of representation – a pathetic parody of the common will. You might, through some incredible act of blind optimism, believe that the people running things are the best, brightest, and most well-intentioned in society – but you cannot possibly believe they express your will. If you believe such a thing, it is only because you have chosen to align your will with theirs.

Send a letter to your state representative, and you have some chance of getting an actual response. Send a letter to your local city councilperson and you will very likely get one. The odds are better, too, that they will understand the issue you’re addressing. Putting more and more power into the hands of the central government is, straightforwardly, to surrender both freedom and representation. It cannot be otherwise. To advocate for such a course is, ultimately, to argue for your own political irrelevance.

wave with echo

wave with echo, image by e.m. cadwaladr on Flickr.