Robert Wright, writing in The Atlantic, considers what may be a key metric of danger to the economy in What if the Fiscal Cliff Is the Wrong Cliff?, making a strong argument for restructuring of private debt not just to improve the economy, but to avert the continuing threat of economic depression. Key concept: we're still in deep enough to crash the bus.
I was briefly flabbergasted to read this piece — a straight news story in the Courier calmly relating facts about climate change. Who screwed up and let this through?
Even that gratuitous final reference to trumped-up controversy, "In conservative states, the term 'climate change' is often associated with left-leaning politics," points up the isolation of the critics from reality. I notice no one took a byline on this one, no surprise in a town where such behavior might get you disinvited from the parties, but even so, just having it appear in the paper is a breakthrough. Could the tide be turning at last?
Related: End of the Arctic Era
In which our token local reactionary defends the honor of poor downtrodden nonwhite and women reactionaries, assailed and vilified in public not for their actions and policies, but for their nonwhiteness or gender.
Putting on his Pat Buchanan-signature blinders, Buz pulls examples out of thin air and ancient history to construct a way to see non-reactionaries as the racists in the room, a classic psychological projection all the more pitiful for its transparency.
Here's a clue, Buz: If you were to go back and review the actual coverage and commentary about Clarence Thomas, Alberto Gonzalez, Condoleezza Rice and the rest of your list, you might discover that the criticism was substantive and focused on their actions and policies, just as it was for Robert Bork, John Ashcroft, Henry Kissinger and the rest. Seeing the nonwhite-nonmale group as separate, while refusing to countenance the substance of the arguments against them, only indicates your own prejudices. It's really that simple.
Another example of this kind of "thinking":
Yet another deranged man shoots his domestic partner to death, then pops himself off in a public display. He's famous, she's not, and he gets all the media attention, even sympathy. A sportscaster steps out of his accustomed role and mentions the tragedy of the deranged man having easy access to a deadly weapon. America's powerful gun cult swings into action, and suddenly the criminal isn't the deranged man, it's the sportscaster. The victim is forgotten. What ought to be satire has long since become daily reality here on Bizarro World.
What strikes me about this podunk-paper editorial reacting to a national media-hype story that has nothing at all to do with our community other than our unhealthy average time suckling the glass teat, is the raw defensiveness underpinning it.
Why do gun cultists feel the need to rush to the defense of their demigod and man the barricades at the slightest suggestion that we might consider rethinking our insane national addiction to firearms? Could it be that deep in their hearts they realize just how shaky their argument is? Could perhaps their faith be flagging just a little?
If so, it's about time.
The unnamed editor seems so confused about the issue of school discipline that I have to wonder why the board thought it was a good idea to write about it at all.
How many sides of the issue can one editor stand on? He writes, "... a bright red, aching backside was effective. ... We just can't believe that public humiliation is an appropriate way to deal with a juvenile problem ... but it seems very unlikely that those two boys will fight on school grounds again. ... In-school suspensions also are an effective innovation. ... an area that used to be as simple as swatting away trouble. .... raining down scorn on a pair of wrongdoers, effective or not, is a stretch of that authority."
First, it's off-base to imagine a clear distinction between the corporal punishment of old and the public shaming that the editor refers to here. They are essentially the same. The act of placing another human in a helpless physical position to inflict pain with impunity isn't about the pain so much as the humiliation, and you can be confident that whenever someone was paddled in school, it was known to all the students, making it pointedly public. Second, shame is where it's at. Instilling discipline means shaming, in every human society everywhere. It's essentially the society telling the perpetrator that bad behavior carries the risk of societal rejection, the worst punishment for a social animal.
If there were a broadly effective method for getting every kid to behave well in class, our schools would be using it. Let's talk about the "in class" piece of that. What we have to recognize is that assembling kids in large groups with minimal adult supervision leads them inevitably to make up their own social structures, which will be immature by nature. The problem is not the kids, it's the culture they come from plus the ones they create in the context of the industrial-style education model that we all grew up with.
I think the old way is better, but I go back a lot further than the corporal-punishment fascists. Preindustrial education was done on a much more individual basis, the children working among adults, not with other kids, acquiring skills directly from the people who used them. This raised the child directly into the adult social context, providing both structure and role models, and if later in life they worked with a teacher, it was someone with specialized skills that would clearly lead to professional and/or social advancement.
This isn't a perfect model either, but it offers a contrasting angle that throws the deficiencies of the current model into relief. Warehousing children in large groups to train them in a standardized curriculum seems insane when we need to produce adaptive, creative self-starters for an increasingly entrepreneurial society. Until we can find a way to get out from under the old industrial model, discipline in the classroom (and society at large as a result) will be a growing problem, no matter what methods we try.
The unnamed editor's Barcalounger turns in the column for today, rehashing Ken Hedler's piece from Friday's edition about an amateur theatrical ostensibly about economics, held by and for Prescott's Very Serious People Club.
The chair seems to get it right in characterizing the show as "an accurate picture of division in our country." I'm a little skeptical that it really understands why, however.
Where the chair seems to have seen "contrasting views on America's slow recovery from the Great Recession," what actually happened, as Ken describes it, was that one guy gave a talk on economics while the other ranted about his political ideology.
This is indeed how the bulk of our public discourse has been playing out for about twenty years. One side talks about facts and policy, the other talks trash. And no, these roles do not reverse according to the issue -- the trash comes from the reactionary Republicans. It's long past time for us to stop pretending that the sides are equally at fault and simply trashing one another at every opportunity. There is legitimate, fact-based criticism based on facts, and there is schoolyard name-calling. They are not of equal value, and the sooner we stop pretending as much, the sooner we'll begin to move forward in addressing the systemic and cultural problems that are crippling this nation. If we can't have an adult conversation, we can't have adult solutions, let alone smart ones.
On that score I've got a cookie for Ken for having the balls to point out in print that one guy was talking and the other just barking. I can't speculate on how that got past the editors, but let's have more of it.
Tom Steele writes to wag his finger against public debt, using a quote from Thomas Jefferson.
Mr Steele is here parroting a line that's appearing all over the right-wing blogosphere and in not a few letters to the editor. The quote is from Jefferson's 1816 letter to Samuel Kercheval (click here to see it all), and neglects his main point, which may irk "originalists" like Mr Steele:
"Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading; and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead. I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects. But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors. It is this preposterous idea which has lately deluged Europe in blood. Their monarchs, instead of wisely yielding to the gradual change of circumstances, of favoring progressive accommodation to progressive improvement, have clung to old abuses, entrenched themselves behind steady habits, and obliged their subjects to seek through blood and violence rash and ruinous innovations, which, had they been referred to the peaceful deliberations and collected wisdom of the nation, would have been put into acceptable and salutary forms. Let us follow no such examples, ...."
Jefferson lived and died in an agrarian backwater that we would not recognize as a viable state, let alone the richest and most powerful nation on the planet it is today. His economic sagacity left him perpetually broke. I imagine were he confronted with the challenges of governing this land in the 21st century, he would likely have the humility and wisdom to heed his own advice and avoid foolishly standing on outdated principles.
Further, Sunday: We should also note the context for Jefferson's rant about debt. In 1816 the US had just come through its first war of choice, a disastrous encounter thoughtlessly trumped up for political gain from which we managed to escape only lightly scathed because the British had more serious business to attend in Europe. In those days government borrowing was almost exclusively about financing war. So we may take Jefferson's admonishments, in context, to be against running up debts to finance military adventures, a no-brainer in my book.
Today the unnamed editor reacts to the idea of a federal Secretary of Business, under which the government would consolidate related functions.
From the vague official trial balloon the editor imagines a nightmare of new bureaucracy and more problems for business. Having built this straw man, he dances with his torch and sets his helpless adversary alight.
In point of fact neither I nor the editor nor anyone else knows how this proposal might shake out in real life, because the plan is not yet written. The editor is writing against his own imagination, nothing more, failing at the starting gate.
The core of his argument, that "red tape" would increase, is clearly contrary to the intent of the proposal. Having never set up and run a business himself, perhaps he doesn't realize how much red tape is generated because related government divisions don't talk to one another or coordinate their responsibilities, forcing business owners to negotiate complex minefields of overlapping and often conflicting regulations. At least in theory, an overseeing authority could improve on that. So let's wait for the details before we fire our torches.
In context, it's interesting that when the idea arose to consolidate authority over intelligence, border security, travel security, customs and the Coast Guard under the Orwellian title of Homeland Security, the Courier was all for it, once again reacting to parochial imaginings rather than reality on the ground. We can only get above this reflex by reserving judgment till we've done the research.
Perhaps former cop Buz Williams will grow into his new role as a regular columnist. So far his stuff's been not much better on content or style than the right-wing rants in the comments. But like in ninth-grade English, a regular writing assignment can lead to better writing, so we'll see. Look what it's done for Mike Reagan.
In today's column on our hated electric traffic cops, Buz buries his best idea. Well down in the piece he writes, "(During my years as a police officer, it didn't occur often, but there were a few occasions when I didn't write a ticket after speaking with the driver)." (pic) To a certain degree this runs against the usual "it's-the-law" position of the right wing, and interesting in that Buz uses it as the linchpin in his argument that the mechanical enforcement of law is inherently unjust.
Buz is saying that the discretion of the enforcement officer is an essential component in a just system. To at least a certain extent, he trusts cops to understand the context of an action and choose or decline to apply the law according to whether it poses a real threat to others.
If lawnforcement cheerleaders like Buz were to think this through (beyond their own fuming at getting a ticket themselves, as this column seems to be), we might be able to put together a social consensus on raising our standards for police officers to make them less about hardline enforcement (particularly for the sorts of people they personally don't like) and more about real threats to society. We might see more sensible traffic rules that are less about mindless adherence to standards and more about what makes sense in the specific situation. We might actually begin to expect our legal system to think.
Imagine that.
Tom runs down the Keynesian basics for the many Courier readers who should have learned all this in high school, and does it in a way that avoids both ideology and academic complexity. Good work!
The sidebar of references is a great tool for readers, and a good example of how an online newspaper can be fundamentally better.
The headline is cute at the expense of information, but I'm sure Tom's not responsible for that.
Related: I covered some of this a little while ago.
Pop Rocket, December 2012
The sound of clanking chains awoke Bob Scrooge from a warm, comfortable sleep. The hackles rose on his neck as his bleary eyes focused on the apparition at the foot of his bed. It rose nearly the nine feet to the ceiling, human-shaped but all of iron, rivets and burning coal eyes. "I am the ghost of the Industrial Age," it spoke in a gravelly voice to the dumbfounded man, "Awake, and see your past."
It rattled the heavy chains in its metal hands, and Bob found himself suddenly freezing in his thin rayon pajamas. His bare feet were on the slick, listing wood deck of a huge ocean liner, and all around him in darkness he heard the cries of people scrambling for safety in the few lifeboats left, or rapidly freezing to death in the water. "This is the unsinkable Titanic," growled the monster, "done in by human complacency and the myth of invulnerability." "What has this to do with me?" demanded Bob, shivering. "A lesson in humility, perhaps," the monster replied, "or hubris. But more than that, the coal that drove this ship and humanity's other machines has already preordained that your time will see rising oceans, chronic drought, monstrous storms and the beginnings of disaster for you all."
"I've heard some nonsense like that, but there's nothing we can do about the past," retorted Bob, "It's not my fault! Anyhow, our technology will find a way to keep it from being a problem," he sputtered, confidence fading. The apparition turned to him as the broken ship groaned and began its final descent, "That, sir, is much what the captain of this boat imagined before his collision with Nature."
A whirl of chill North Atlantic air caught Bob, and he found himself back in his warm pillowtop bed made in China. "Bah," he spat, "Bad dream. Must've been the pizza," as he settled back to slumber. But the sounds of clinking crockery told him there was a prowler in the house, and he rose and crept into the hall. Light blazed in the kitchen, and the sounds grew louder. "What's this, a raccoon?" thought Bob, and he burst into the room.
It was no animal, but a little fat man, no more than three feet in height and at least equal that in girth, dressed for a party and gorging himself, pulling food from the open refrigerator with amazingly long arms. "Ah, Scrooge!" he smiled in greeting, "You're awake at last! You've got some lovely leftovers here. Come dine with me!" He tossed a chicken bone at the sink. Bob noted the nearly empty fridge and scattered containers. "Who the hell are you?" the unhappy homeowner cried, wondering where he'd left his cellphone. "The cops will have something to say about this, bubba!" The imp grinned again, his mouth nearly as wide as his head. "Why I'm the spirit of the Age of Consumption, here to share your joy in plenty!" He belched noisily, and Bob found himself thrust into a crush of people.
It was well before dawn, and cold, but the teeming crowd was pressed against the glass front of a big-box store. "I love Black Friday!" cackled the imp, and in a rush the doors opened and Bob was swept into the store with the mob, people trampling store workers and each other in their frantic haste to grab for themselves the gadgets, gewgaws and nostrums that populated the canon of their true religion. "Get me out of here!" begged Bob, screaming above the din. "I never shop like this! I buy online!" The little fat man only laughed harder. "Fine, you're innocent!" he chuckled, gobbled a stray jumbo Toblerone and and placed a long, knarled finger beside his nose.
Bob turned his head to find himself standing on a hardpan desert under a burning sun. Around him were the abandoned wattle-and-daub huts of an East African village, surrounded by what must once have been fields of maize. But there was no blade of green in sight, the trees dead, the people long gone, not even a bird left to pick the bones.
"This is plenty?" snarled Bob, with more than a hint of sarcasm. The imp wiped the last of the chocolate from his cheeks. "This is what our appetites leave for the rest of the world," he said slyly, and pointed to the sun. "Feel that? It's getting hotter. As you lie comfy in your bed, you have already doomed your grandchildren to failing crops and system breakdowns worldwide as the heat begins to spiral out of control, beyond levels not seen for ten thousand years. So party on! The best times are here!" Bob covered his ears to the raucous laughter, squeezed shut his eyes and fell from the ceiling flat into his bed again.
He had barely time to thrash himself to a sitting position and get his bearings when he felt rather than saw the cowled figure by the window. It loomed black, silent and faceless. Bob cowered and whimpered, "I know this story. You're my Future, aren't you?" The figure only raised an arm, revealing the bones of a hand, the forephalanges extended accusingly. "What have you to show me?" quavered Bob, now frightened out of his wits. With a whoosh he felt himself drawn bodily into the empty cowl, falling into space.
Bob realized he was floating high above the earth, yet still he could see the details of the surface. Evidence of humans was everywhere, but try as he might he could find no people. Away from the sun no light shone where billions once thrived, on the day side the cities were fallen and ravaged by war, weather and decay. Mats of green and orange algae choked the little remaining of lakes and rivers, equatorial deserts stretched to what was once tundra, even the continents were barely recognizable for the encroaching oceans. A nearly Pacific-sized cyclone obscured a quarter of the globe.
Scrooge caught his breath. "What happened to us?" he wailed, "What did we do to deserve this fate?"
The dark figure whispered one word, the voice scratching like a dead stick on a window, rattling with disdain. "Nothing."
Pietro Nivola, a senior fellow with the Governance Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, offers a fascinating perspective in The Atlantic on how escalating partisanship and, more importantly, hardline ideology has led us to disaster before, and no doubt will again. That we as a nation survived the War of 1812 can be fairly attributed to dumb luck.
Read it: What the War of 1812 Can Teach Us About the Fiscal-Cliff Debate
Pop Rocket, November 2012
Wow, I got fired. Sort of.
I've been a poll worker for the county for something like a decade, showing up at the precinct in the freezing crack of dawn on election day, helping voters navigate the increasingly complex process of exercising their franchise, enjoying the fleeting esprit of building a working team from a group of random strangers as we endure one very long day of dull imprisonment punctuated with bursts of enthusiastic customer service. It's an odd little world that everyone aspiring to community involvement should experience, where small-r republican idealism meets a chain gang over a potluck supper.
I'd missed a couple of elections when they called me for the state primaries this year, and there were some pretty big changes in the system and its technology to catch up on, but it went well enough and I found work in the newly created office of Election Day Technician, aka tech wrangler or house geek. The county scheduled me to do that again for November in the same voting center, and I was looking forward to it because the team there is happy and efficient, and puts on a good feed besides.
So it came as a surprise last month, a few days before the regular pre-election training day, that I got another call from the County. The elections official organizing the poll-worker staff, who impressed me with her ability to be both assiduously professional and personable at the same time, apologized profusely, but the County wasn't able to use me at the polls because I'd taken "a public position on an election issue." I took that to refer to this column last month, in which I set out opinions on the propositions. OK, well, I might've been a little harsh about some of them.
I've been writing about local issues for six or seven years, of course, but apparently this was the first time anyone at the County noticed, so props to Pop Rocket, I guess. Someone's actually reading.
My elections official, who shall remain nameless, as I'm sure she'd prefer, was quick to offer another position in the election hierarchy, answering calls from the poll workers, fielding their questions and helping solve their problems. This presumably put a sufficiently safe distance between scary old me and the voters to make everyone comfy again. (Good workers are hard to come by, and if you're not afraid of a computer, you might consider signing up.)
I don't mind a bit, I get the picture and I don't take it personally. (Taking things personally is a bad habit everyone should try to break.) I think it's a testament to how seriously our elections officials are about their duties that they want to avoid any possible perception of bias in the system. I know these people, from the County Recorder on down, to be sincere in their dedication to doing things the right way, rigorous in their execution, and just good people.
I do have to wonder about the "public position" thing, though. It seems a little hard to get a line around, particularly in our age of personal blogs and social networks, where proclaiming opinions and chronicling one's life in sweaty detail in public is so common as to be almost expected.
It's not like poll workers don't have opinions. I'm reminded of one who stated with great conviction that George Washington was a Republican, and another who expressed during training to all in earshot how much he looked forward to "wiping out" Democrats as a species. But I'm completely confident that neither would say or do anything less than decorous in the polling place, and I've yet to meet a poll worker who struck me as even capable of trying anything untoward. It's as hard to imagine as having someone try to steal a vote. It just doesn't happen, whatever the scaremongers would have you believe.
As of this writing, on magazine deadline, I don't know what my call-center job will be like in detail or how the election turns out. All I know for sure is that it's a promotion to something new and I won't be trapped all day in a place where a Roman torture machine is an object of worship, peach cobbler notwithstanding. Who knows, the food might be even better.
I just want to assure you that however the electoral map has tilted and whatever fresh hell we must now anticipate from the political system, your vote in Yavapai County is in the hands of people who care and the system is impeccably run. So here's a shout-out to my fellow PWs: you guys rock.
Followup, Nov 27: Arizona has taken a lot of heat from the left over the seemingly immense amount of time it has taken to finalize the vote canvass, placing it in context with the Legislature's attempts to discourage and oppress non-Republican voters and implying that the slow vote count is part of that effort. I don't buy it.
We interviewed Ken Bennett on The People's Business, and he says that the voting patterns and canvassing process have been equivalent to those in previous presidential elections, which is easy enough to confirm. Different this time was the fallout from redistricting, which I expect led to a lot of voters being confused about where they were supposed to vote, forcing more provisional votes. Further, a lot of voters on the early-voting list apparently held their ballots until election day, and others were apparently encouraged by party hacks unnamed to go to the polls after they'd already voted early to "make sure" their votes were counted. These factors monkeywrenched the system as well.
In the past week or so Bennett has released statements signaling legislation to improve the election system, and the state Senate has instituted a new committee to that end, chaired by Michelle Reagan, generally known as a moderate. The few specifics I've seen indicate a look at going statewide with the voting-center system used here in Yavapai and in Yuma counties this year as pilot programs. This I think would be a good thing, as it would only expand voter access to the polls.
Pop Rocket, October 2012
With the primaries behind us and the relentless national campaign ahead, it's time to take a look at the initiatives on the ballot, which will likely be lost in the noise. It's a mixed bag this year.
Pop Rocket, September 2012
Bear with an old-car guy for a minute.
In the decades around the turn of the 19th century, automobiles were a fascinating but mostly frivolous luxury, toys for the rich, simply because there was no real need for them. Cities and towns were compact because people walked or used horses to move themselves and their goods. Greater distances and heavier loads were handled by railroads. The system was complete, and it worked.
Industrialists got busy, the world spun a few times, and by the end of the 1920s automobiles were essential to commerce and middle-class life. Affordable personal cars created new possibilities, roads were built and smoothed, people were getting out of the crowded, dirty cities and living farther from their workplaces. Suburbs sprang up, social classes separated further, and once nearly unimaginable long-distance travel for pleasure became commonplace.
Reel forward to today, and there can be no question that the availability of automotive technology has radically transformed our world. Owning a car is essential to identity and social status for most of us, and it obviously changes how we think about the world and act in it.
We embrace the benefits of that technology and try not to think about its costs, amounting to between 30,000 and 43,000 dead and a quarter of a trillion dollars in economic impact every year in this country alone. But does it mean anything useful to say, "cars don't build suburbs, people do"?
In the aftermath of the Aurora mass shooting I read a fascinating piece in The Atlantic by Evan Selinger, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, introducing me to the little-known field of the philosophy of technology. Leading thinkers in the field agree on the basic premise that a person with a given technology in hand is different from one without, in terms of how we view the world, what the elements we perceive mean and which matter more, and the choices we make.
This rings true for me, like a bell, and brings a fresh point of view to the public debate over personal firearms, one that I think essential to clarifying the basis for how we act as a society.
Like most old saws labeled "common sense," the cliche "guns don't kill people ..." is ridiculously simplistic. Yes, the human pulls the trigger, but how we understand that act has to change if we recognize that, to some degree, holding a weapon changes us, gives us a range of different choices, and significantly alters our perceptions of ourselves and others. Who can deny the feeling of power that comes over us when gripping a handgun for the first time?
Selinger writes, "To someone with a gun, the world readily takes on a distinct shape. It not only offers people, animals, and things to interact with, but also potential targets. Furthermore, gun possession makes it easy to be bold, even hotheaded. Physically weak, emotionally passive, and psychologically introverted people will all be inclined to experience shifts in demeanor. ... there is a reduction in the amount and intensity of environmental features that are perceived as dangerous, and a concomitant amplification in the amount and intensity of environmental features that are perceived as calling for the subject to respond with violence."
It may be that this has been a more or less constant factor in the history of our relationship with firearms. But neither the technology nor our society has stood still. The weapons have grown steadily more powerful, dangerous and accessible, while at the same time our social fabric has deteriorated, leaving most people relatively isolated from larger communities and other kinds of people, infantilized in their focus on self, suckling a steady stream of media sensationalism encouraging distrust and fear. From this is born the cult of the gun, showing just how sick our societal relationship with firearms has become.
Leaving aside our occasional fascination with mass killings like that in Aurora, Americans generally avoid thinking about cost. Each year something on the order of 100,000 Americans are killed or injured by firearms. Yet most people seem confident that the benefits of access to this technology outweigh the costs. The main benefit seems to be that a gun helps alleviate fear, usually unjustified, which has to feed back into changing the gun-wielder.
It's a cliché to say that the men who wrote our Bill of Rights could not have imagined an AK-47, but it's also true that they had no concept of how guns change people and ultimately the society they inhabit. Anyone with better than a gnat's brain can see that the situation is out of control. Our sensible 18th-century safeguard against invasion has grown into an unrecognizable and self-destructive social pathology.
Sensible people everywhere in this country are beginning to rethink their individual relationships with guns. I think it's high time we as a nation start to grow up about this issue, face the massive and insidious cost of the mythology we've built around it, and dig into making changes to head off an even more threatening future.
In another fascinating piece in The Atlantic, researchers report on a large, broad group study designed to uncover how Americans really feel about income distribution, with surprising results:
Americans Want to Live in a Much More Equal Country (They Just Don't Realize It)
Pop Rocket, August 2012
The horror is upon us, and on August 28 some of the voters in our area will choose who represents us all in the state Legislature and the county Board of Supervisors.
If you're a registered Democrat, Green or Libertarian, you'll be sitting this particular election out, sad to say. Your parties have either failed to come up with any candidate at all, or are stuck deep in the rough. If you want to do better than that, you'll have to start showing up at some meetings and doing spadework for next time.
Sure, there's another election in a few months, and that has its own charms, but the local races are all about the Republican primary. The November poll only ratifies the decisions made this month for the offices I'm talking about. So for now I'm addressing you Republicans and independents, since you are our only real hope for improving the political landscape.
You've been switching the channel away from the political ads, maybe you grumble about the signs cluttering up the streets, and you've probably been dodging chats with politics geeks like me, but let's say you're not one of the hopeless cynics intoning with moral superiority about the uselessness of voting and, not incidentally, making things worse.
Assuming you've kept the county up to date on your address, pretty soon you'll get a sample ballot in the mail. If you're registered as unaffiliated or independent, you'll get three or four, and you get to pick one to vote.
You're probably a working stiff with a family or other overcommitments, so you won't have time to sit in on one of the rare candidate forums or show up for a meet-and-greet. If you have any sense at all you're not listening to talk/hate radio, so you won't likely hear local political advertising. Maybe you glanced at the brief profiles in the paper on your way to the funnies, or if you've been paying unusual attention you remember one or two things that one of the more experienced candidates did in the past. There's a small chance that a candidate has actually shown up at your door, asking for a signature on a petition and hoping for the chance to make a case to you, which you more than likely declined without hesitation. But if you're living an average life you're unlikely to have any useful information about the candidates beyond the names on the yard signs.
The ghastly reality is that an awful lot of people are casting ballots based on no more than that.
But let's say you're ready to put down the cheese puffs, whip into your Super Voter suit and rush out to save the world for democracy and The American Way.
Just do us all a favor and try to avoid choosing candidates who are no better prepared than you are.
Political issues are complex, so candidates offering promises and simple answers should provoke immediate suspicion. Usually this sort of talk comes from people with the least experience. Those who know the ropes are much slower to give an opinion, and that only after careful study of the details.
As illustrated by our hopelessly deadlocked Congress, the public-policy process requires cooperation and compromise. We're not elevating monarchs here to wield power by fiat, we're choosing volunteers to go into harshly lit rooms for low pay to work out solutions that no one's completely happy with. That demands the ability to check the ego at the door, really hear and respect the ideas of others, and work cooperatively to find the best and most practical solution.
Experience with the political process matters. There's a huge learning curve going into any office for the first time, and much as you dislike the idea of "career politicians," someone who's been around the block a few times is far more likely to be able to make good things happen.
Most important, policy is always about the future. We usually wind up reacting to the current crisis because some previous officeholder failed to think about what was coming, or (worse) was working to take us back to some mythically wonderful past. Above a clear-eyed understanding of the problems we face, a good candidate offers a positive vision for the kind of community he or she wants to help build in the years ahead.
"But but but," you cry, "none of them is good enough!" You know what? You're right. But no one's been good enough since 1776, and the old machine is still ticking over.
If you're waiting for Superman, give it up. We govern ourselves, and that means putting ordinary people in place to do extraordinary things. That starts with you, Ordinary Voter, doing what has become the extraordinary work of figuring out whom to elect. Your decision matters to me and everyone else here. Get to it.
Again from The Atlantic, Chauncey Hollingsworth describes the evolution of his thinking about guns and how changes in social attitudes are increasing the risk of our endemic gun culture. I think this line of thinking is essential to the gun-violence debate, and not much considered in the media.
Today the unnamed editor sticks up for Secretary of State Ken Bennett in trying to kick the sales-tax initiative off the ballot. After clearly stating his opposition to the measure, he declares adherence to the fine points of procedure more important than the will of the voters.
If this stickling for the letter of the law were his real motivation, why does he feel compelled to go on about how he doesn't like the idea of a new sales-tax extension? To me this screams of an argument rigged to reach a preset conclusion.
Along the way, the editor mischaracterizes the proposed tax as "only an extension of a current tax." In point of fact the new proposal is better designed to focus the funds on education and keep them out of the hands of the Legislature, which has misappropriated them over the past three years.
He also holds back some important information in saying that Bennett "believes that the group's submitted paperwork does not match the verbiage on the circulated petitions." The backstory is that the group did indeed file two versions with the SoS's office, one in hard copy and a slightly longer one in electronic form that it wound up using for its petitions. Bennett's staff never looked at the version on CD to make sure the two versions were reconciled, and rather than do the sensible thing and paste the CD version into the website, they accepted the paper version as the only one and retyped the hard copy. This doesn't sound like smart management to me.
For the record, I won't support another sales-tax extension either. I think our retailers and less-well-off consumers have taken it in the shorts for the Legislature's incompetence long enough.
But liking or disliking the tax is beside the point. More than 290,000 voters signed petitions asking for the vote, and the mistake by Mr Bennett's office in putting the wrong version on his website cannot invalidate the intentions of the voters who signed on to the actual petition language.
If we truly care about the the headline's "integrity of the process," we have to go with the voters, not the legal dodge that best suits the outcome we want, and the court agrees. If we hope to live up to our ideals and encourage more people to participate in public life, our electoral and initiative processes have to be inclusive. We have to do our best to give ideas and people a chance to prove themselves whenever we can. Using niggly procedures and arbitrary obstacles to keep people out only confirms the idea that the game is rigged.
Writing in The Atlantic, Richard Florida presents some illuminating facts about gun violence in this country . Hint: the most common ideas in the culture are myths, and mythic thinking is a factor.
