Being Careful Is the Key

During the eight years of the Cheney administration, the American Constitution nearly died. The current administration is attempting to revive the rule of law by bringing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to trial in New York, and the Republican leadership is terrified. They are always terrified.

The other night I was watching David Brooks on TV explaining why the world's most powerful nation could not safely try al Qaida members in public. Meanwhile wingnut Pat Buchanan was wetting himself on MSNBC from concern that at the trial the judge and prosecutors would not be able to cope with propaganda efforts made by cave-dwelling 15th century Moslem fundamentalists on Twitter.

I don't recall exactly what Brooks and Buchanan said, but they were quick to dismiss the Constitution of the United States, which they explained represented "9/10 thinking." That is, the Constitution related to events that had happened before 9/11. After 9/11, in which 3,000 people died, America could no longer afford the basic human rights we had retained after two world wars.

While Brooks and Buchanan were fearfully blubbering on, I tried to imagine them explaining their position to Ben Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Hancock and a few others. These men had risked being hanged by the British King for treason. Some had come under musket fire in an attempt to defend inalienable rights. I imagine they would have heard Buchanan and Brooks out, and then they would have used their hickory walking sticks to cane the rich and flabby legs of two cowards, giving them some experience.

Meanwhile, John McCain was welcoming guests to The Hall of Heroes, as he called his eighth home, which is plated with gold and located at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, according to Wanda Sykes. Sergeants Alvin York and Audie Murphy had arrived with their resignations from the Hall in hand. McCain tried to talk them out of quitting, but Audie Murphy only shook his head ruefully. "You were right, John. I fought through an entire world war and was never captured once. I'm no hero." Sgt. York smiled in an embarrassed way.
"Same here, John. Heck, I was so mixed up I thought I was supposed to do the capturing."

McCain sighed and watched them leave, then looked at his list of revoked memberships to see who was next. JFK, of course. In his favor he had lost his ship in the Pacific, but then he swam for miles and saved his crew from drowning. Not one man captured. "This could be a lot easier," McCain said to the club chairman, George Herbert Bush, a pilot who had bailed out of a flaming plane in World War Two, leaving his crew to auger in. "We wouldn't have to kick people out if we were more careful who we admitted in the first place."

The Dead

About 44,000 Americans will die this year because they lack health care. My sister, Shannon Goss, is one of them. She died in February. She was 15 years my junior.

The arguments against providing government health care to the poor strike me as nonsensical. We know that it works in Europe. We know that it saves money. We know that people who have single payer like it. The arguments that government health care doesn't work, that it costs more and that people hate it have proved so false that we seldom hear them repeated now, except from Senator Lieberman, who has lost his mind. At the moment the main health care argument seems to be about religious positions on abortion.

One real problem, of course, is that the health insurance industry's huge profits might be cut back a little by the current bills in congress. Industrial greed is the motive for the massive media campaign. The Republican Party will hitch its broken wagon to any protest group with legs. But why are so many ordinary Americans frantically opposing health care for the poor? My guess is that they have their eyes on the future.

Albert Camus broke with Sartre and the French existentialists because they supported Stalin, who was murdering millions of people on the grounds that it would help working class people some time in the future. Camus' position was that you don't murder people in the name of an unforeseeable future, whether your goal is a workers' paradise, a seat in Heaven or a Christian nation in which businesses are totally unregulated--this last seems to be the genuine aim of the teabaggers.

That pipe dream is unworthy of 44,000 deaths per year, especially when the future seems to include rampant global warming and its impact on business. We are looking at total folly.

Please Start without Facts

"Politics is right in rejecting benevolence to the extent that the latter thoughtlessly sacrifices the future to the present." ---Simone de Beauvoir

"On the other hand, a city council can't possibly be too benevolent to a rich developer--the future be hanged." ---a voter watching a recent council meeting.

***

No one can predict the future with certainty, but it seems likely that rapid climate change will lead, in fairly short order, to a major die-off among human beings. The world economy will be badly disrupted. Probably North America will survive better than poorer regions, but planning, even on the Healdsburg level, is going to grow more difficult in the years ahead. The town should prepare for uncertainty.

***

The Healdsburg City Council has been asked to consider requiring some short reports on the possible impacts on the community of any new large developments. That would be a modest step, but it is also a symbolic issue in the sense that some people want to prepare for the rapid onslaught of global warming by shrinking government. Let me be blunt: that's unlikely to happen. It's too dumb.

At Monday's city council meeting only council members Jim Wood and Mike McGuire supported looking into whether we should ask experts to gather facts at the start of the planning process. One member opposed the process, one asked for more information, and the mayor looked for a solution most council members could agree to.

The arguments made against gathering facts fell into two categories. (1) We already get all the facts we need, so we shouldn't ask if the process might be improved; and (2) requesting a 30 page report would "add a new layer of government."

I'll tell you what will add a new layer of government: "The road to Bodega Head has gone under water."

The council, led by Mayor Eric Ziedrich, who commented that the system does need improvement, may eventually set up a subcommittee. We should keep trying to get what we need. Remember that the far-right Party of No is less than half the size of the Democrats in Healdsburg. Many centrist Republican voters now support green solutions. We must keep asking our city council to represent the actual voters.

What's coming in the next 50 years is serious business that will need to be addressed without 19th century ideological restrictions. We must start to plan now as best we can. We need council members who can see ahead and cope with developing changes.

Gary Goss

Lies and Group Polarization

In the November 2 NEW YORKER, Elizabeth Kolbert discusses group polarization, the tendency to become more extreme after discussing something with like minded people. After many experiments, the tendency is well documented. Doves grouped with doves become more dovish. Birthers grouped with birthers become more adamant that Obama was not born in the United States. They begin to exaggerate.
They lie to themselves and to each other. No one in the like-minded group challenges them.

Some see the internet as a breeding ground for extremism. If you live in the Haight and have trouble finding a fellow birther to reinforce your conspiracy theory, you can easily reach a support system on the 'net. But, as I see it, there have long been networks of conspiracy theorists using pamphlets, books, clubs, phone trees, movements, etc. Computers and the internet have made some of the contact work easier, but the birthers I've watched on television don't always strike me as computer literate.

The problem with fantasies, whether about Obama or Bush, is that a society cannot flourish if it is infected with mistaken beliefs. To prosper we need truths. When we walk into a drugstore we need to know which sunblocks are safe and which are dangerous. Our ability to handle life's hazards depends on our ability to recognize them.

"Lies are designed to damage our grasp of reality," Harry Frankfurt wrote. "They are intended . . . to make us crazy." And the liar, Adrienne Rich wrote, "lives an existence of unutterable loneliness."

The liar has to pretend to believe what he doesn't believe. As a consequence no one really knows him. He's alone. He can't tell anyone the truth about himself. He's falsity personified. He's Richard Nixon. Or--a sympathetic version--he's the unutterably lonely progressive telling me it doesn't matter whether Bush or Gore wins the Presidential election. He's manipulating me, of course. On some level I grasp that he's lying, but I can't admit it because it calls my own judgment of people into question. I believed in this progressive. If I admit he lied, I admit I am too easily fooled.

If you are interested, read ON TRUTH by Harry G. Frankfurt, a retired philosophy professor from Princeton.

David Brooks Fails Willful Stupidity Test

Yesterday David Brooks published a column in which he questioned President Obama's ability to stand by (stubbornly) a decision to fight on in Afghanistan. Nowhere in the article does Brooks mention that our generals agree that this struggle will take another ten years, which adds up to an 18 year war to control a mountainous desert of no value to anyone. And climate change is not going to make Afghanistan more habitable.

Afghanistan has never been conquered because the place is useless and almost no one wants to live there. It's like the old daoist maxim: the useless tree lives the longest. No one wants its wood or fruit. It doesn't repay cutting down.

Obama probably understands that ten more years of war there (and another 50,000 American casualties) makes no sense, but can he block the massive current momentum and the self-willed stupidity represented by an otherwise B student like David Brooks?

Afghanistan, Mexico or Canada?

Somewhere recently I read an article in which the author wrote that if our goal is to build a sound democratic nation, gain access to oil reserves, fight narco-terrorists and free women from an extremely dominating male culture, we should pull out of Afghanistan and invade Mexico. I see a problem with that: global warming. Leaving Afghanistan is a good idea--in decades to come the deserts of the Middle East will likely be uninhabitable and no Israeli or Palestinian will want to live there. But invade Mexico? How bad will the climate be in Mexico? Meanwhile the San Joaquin Valley, the vegetable garden of the USA, is already drying up. Obviously we need to invade and annex Canada, where they have plenty of oil, a balmy climate (in the decades to come) and the Okanagan to grow our grapes. Also they have single payer health care. We'll need to adjust to people saying things like "hoser" and ending sentences with "eh?" but that's a small price to pay given the superb Chinese food available Richmond. (If you've never eaten Chinese food in Richmond, make it a point to visit.)

Willful Stupidity

The most powerful determinant of human destiny is stupidity, someone said, meaning willful stupidity. He was teaching one of those newfangled courses in stupidity at a university down south--I forget which one. When I heard about our destiny I immediately sent away for a book on stupidity, and it should come soon. Meanwhile I'm on my own.

Let's look at one issue. On a scale of 1 to 10, Mexicans give the problem of climate change a rank of 9. Citizens of the United States give it a rank of 4.7. That's willful stupidity. For example, take Senator James Inhofe (please) who announced that global warming had ended when a snowstorm hit Oklahoma: "You know God's still up there. We're now going through a cooling spell."

I don't believe that Inhofe is that stupid naturally. His kind of stupidity is an act of will. He prefers to believe that we will be saved by a very large Person up in the sky. Inhofe himself need do nothing.

Inhofe also believes that the world's scientists have joined the liberals in a conspiracy of enormous size in order to do something bad, although what that bad thing might be remains hidden.

I have figured out what it is Inhofe should fear, although I have to give most of the credit to Steven Stoll in the latest HARPER'S. Stoll's theory is that the Little Ice Age that began about 1350 was caused by the partial disappearance of humans from the planet, brought on by the black plague. So much human activity ceased that the planet cooled off.

Stoll points out that global warming by humans began 8,000 years ago.

There are no good estimates yet about how many people will die in the coming climate wobble, but it may be as much as several billion. That's Mother Nature's way of cooling Oklahoma.

One result of the Little Ice Age was, after centuries of acute human pain, a massive shift occurred in the value of the ordinary worker--workers became scarce. The old social order crumbled. Forests sprouted around vacant homes. The surviving serfs demanded and won freedoms.

I don't suppose the specific changes were inevitable, but in this instance, centuries of economic catastrophe yielded the Renaissance, a social revolution. That's what Inhofe fears, a revolution that alters the system, perhaps ending the monopoly capitalism he serves, but he's too willfully stupid to help head off climate change. He's joined in this willed stupidity--to a lesser degree--by world leaders in general. We do know how to stop climate change, but China, the United States, India and the Palestinians aren't doing it. Too bad.

Gary Goss

Victim vs. Volunteer

About a month ago I overheard some conspiracy theorists complaining that people mocked them. This brought to mind Christine Lavin's old song "Victim/Volunteer." Lavin is better known for writing and singing the funniest song of the 20th century, "Sensitive New Age Guys," but "Victim/Volunteer" has its own profundity. (You can find Lavin's songs on Amazon.com.)

The basic idea is that if you date only people who treat you badly, you aren't a victim of unpleasant people, you're a volunteer. And so on. If you go about claiming that FDR aided the Japanese attack on our fleet at Pearl Harbor or that Clinton murdered Vince Foster or that Obama was born in Kenya or that George W. Bush ordered the destruction of the Twin Towers, you are volunteering for ridicule. You aren't a victim.

It's easy for those of us on the Left to see the damage done to conservative credibility when conservatives pretend that it is sensible for their fringe groups to inquire again and again into Obama's birthplace. The credibility of the Left becomes equally suspect when people like me are silent about our own subculture of fringe ideas. Serious people on the Left have issues they would like the Middle to consider. Credibility is central to the discussion.

The Press Democrat Publishes Something Stupid

This morning's paper has a letter in it from Bill Konrad of Healdsburg in which he asks "what part of the 63,000 residents (of Sonoma County) with no access to health care are legal citizens."

I know that my sister, who died in February, descended from two families that came to America before the Revolution. She died from skin cancer because she could not afford an annual checkup. That reduces Konrad's number to 62,999.

My hope is that people who deny health care to the poor will rot in Hell.