Junk Mail Update: Thanksgiving 2016

I visited my family "back east" for Thanksgiving and had my US mail held for thirteen days. The postal service delivered my mail yesterday, and today I sorted through it, keeping a small number of catalogs that might prove useful for winter holiday presents — "Put Saturn back in the Saturnalia!" — plus appeals from worthy causes I might contribute to, plus a bill, a notice from Medicare of a whopping increase over this year in what I'll owe them in 2017, and one piece of hand-addressed, actual mail: a Christmas card accompanied by a succinct Christmas newsletter.

The rest of my mail was pretty pure junk and weighed in at 5.4 kg, or nearly 12 pounds.

The e-mail in the formal Junk file on my computer was in the hundreds.

I live alone and don't order all that much on line; I do give to those worthy causes, both charitable and political, but not excessively.

So: If you're looking for reasons why many Americans are turning off, tuning out, and at least partially dropping out of real-world communal life, add the data deluge and exhaustion over appeals for our money and (less often) time. I've decided the best thing to do with all those demands for my attention is to ignore almost all of them.

And so I'm closing out this post to toss into the recycling bin two substantial bags of various kinds of mail I refuse to deal with. And in this conscious narrowing of attention I am not alone.

"Our Democracy" and the Electoral College

Once again it looks like the popular vote for President of the United States is going to go to a Democrat (Hillary R. Clinton) and the vote in the Electoral College to the Republican (Donald J. Trump). Okay; possibly the worst results of these results will be environmental degradation and violent weather, but, fortunately, I'm old and will be dead before the worst hits or will get enough sympathy to be evacuated out when the Pacific overwhelms my neighborhood.

Two things here.

First, don't get your hopes up for reform of the Electoral College, not until a fire-breathing Republican wins the popular vote and loses in the Electoral College. Second, don't talk about "Our democracy" in the same paragraph in writing or within five minutes in talking about the Electoral College.

The US of A is not a democracy. We're a federal republic with occasional democratic aspirations and a history of increasing democracy — but we were designed as a "mixt constitution," with democracy only a part. Over simplifying a lot (and to hell with it; I'm a retired English teacher, not a historian), to oversimplify a lot, the grand design has the House of Representatives for representative democracy; the original Senate, with senators selected by state legislatures as federalist and aristocratic — way more aristocratic nowadays, as in rich, than even some of the planter elite could've dreamed — and the Presidency as mildly, constitutionally, monarchical. 

And the goddamn White trash rabble were to be kept away from selecting the president (to say nothing of those even lower than poor White men in the divinely-ordered Great Chain of Being and the really-convenient-for-the-well-born, food chain of politics). 

Against some pretty tough competition — I'm looking at you, original-version of the Senate — the Electoral College may be the most openly un- or even antidemocratic part of the Constitution. (The parts on slavery and women work more indirectly [the "s-words" slave or slavery don't appear in the original Constitution] or through silence.)

As it evolved, and since 1913 and the 17th Amendment and the popular election of senators, the Electoral College has been pretty much undemocratic in the same way the Senate is undemocratic and gerrymandering — not explicitly mandated by the Constitution but traditional — like gerrymandering is undemocratic. The rule can be "One person, one vote," but that doesn't means that everyone's vote counts the same.

E.g., my vote hasn't been as important as some except for the time I was in Ohio when it first became "a swing state" and we got what we'd grumbled we hadn't gotten: respect and the attention of candidates. Place here your favorite version of the advice to be careful what you wish for. 

I live in ungerrymandered California, and in an area where we have some hotly contested state and local races. Ventura County, though, went for Hillary Clinton 54.01% to Donald Trump's 38.25%, which came out to 143,095 votes to 101,351. We're both urban and rural in Ventura County, and I live in a port town of 22,399, but the county churned out 264,965 votes in the 2016 presidential election, against, say, the 255,791 votes I add up for the three electoral votes from the State of Wyoming. 

You see where this analysis is going, and I will "leave as an exercise for the student" to work out what part of 55 electoral votes for Hillary Clinton we got in California for the 5,481,885 people who voted for her, as opposed to the 3 electoral votes representing the 174,248 people in Wyoming who voted for Donald Trump. (Use a calculator and, if you know how to do it, scientific notation.) 

Nowadays, we have pledged electors who almost never vote other than they've been instructed to by the laws of their states, so the undemocratic part here is in the numbers and the feeling that having some votes are worth more than others — way more between Wyoming and California — is undemocratic. It doesn't prove the Electoral College system is a bad idea.

Arguably, the system ensures that Wyoming will get some attention, and candidates won't spend all their time in large centers of population. And anything that gets candidates out of the NYC-DC axis and into small towns and rural areas is good. Indeed, it would be a contribution by the Trump campaign to America if it demonstrated that the Electoral College can be gamed against the popular vote precisely by getting out into the rural counties and getting enough "more-equal-than-thou" votes to outweigh New York and California and Illinois.

Except there will still be too much concentration on the "swing areas" and gaming the system, and too little serious discussion spread over way, way too much time.

Arguments can be made for the Elector College, but in updated forms of defense of the College as it was intended to be: a check on democracy, at least "democracy" as defined as "one person, one (equal) vote." Just please spare us the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian B.S. of the purity of solid yeoman farmers and the wisdom of simple country folk. People are people. All of us act dumb some of the time, and some of us are just stupid most of the time. So it's arguable that democracy needs its limits, and liberal democracy demands limits to prevent "the tyranny of the majority." Those limits on democracy, though, are part of "Our republic"; don't get ingenious and insist on limits on democracy "central to our democracy." 

Problems Getting Participants for Political Polls

For much of my grad student career, I was part of "a convenient study population" — University of Illinois graduate students, or just grad students in English — and I definitely got invitations to be studied. With exquisitely bad timing, I finally rebelled and counseled rebellion in 1969 or 1970, when it turned out the researcher was the wife of another grad student in English at the U of IL, who (the husband) was both a well-liked colleague and a paraplegic, to add to the apparent nastiness of what could be interpreted as an attack on this nice couple.

I didn't intend to attack them. It's just that by 1970 I was tired of people's being quite so generous with my time and tired of people prying into my opinions, attitudes, and various feelings. As an undergraduate, my fraternity chapter had at least gotten free stuff for marketing tests — I recall Tiparillos as one horrible product we tried — and I was coming to the conclusion that if someone wanted my time, they could bloody-well pay for it.

And a few years later, I was offered a pittance to participate in surveys: primarily about batteries for some reason.

Anyway, by 1970 I'd had it with being surveyed, and I've gotten downright churlish about it lately, when I'm asked repeatedly to be "kind enough to take a short survey" to help construct The Grand Taylorite Panopticon to monitor employees and (more positively) independent folk selling books and films and other products.

So I understand how people far more dissatisfied with America in 2016 than I am would refuse to respond to political pollsters and how this could skew polls enough to get them wrong, Wrong, WRONG on the final outcome of votes such as that for BrExit and the 45th President of the United States.

Nowadays, all sorts of people are on-line and potentially in "convenient study populations" and are getting studied up the whazoo. Adding this to all the other generous donations of our time — starting with phone menus — it is no wonder that increasing numbers opt out.

So, Attention, Pollsters! (of all sorts): You're going to have to find indirect ways of measuring opinions. People who respond to your queries may become increasingly atypical, and maybe annoyed enough to get very creative with their responses. 

Righteous Gentiles, Anti-Semites, and Overrating Attitudes

Where there are no men, be thou a man. — Rabbi Hillel

            Toward the end of Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, Timothy Snyder notes a small but important and surprising fact: some of the heroic people who saved Jews during the Hitlerian Holocaust, were anti-Semites.

            Snyder notes that the Jews saved by "righteous gentiles" speak very little of the motivation of their saviors, and that the righteous gentiles speak of their motives just as little or less. They usually dismiss what they did as just behaving "normally," just doing what people do, or what any human being should do. These good people, of course, were not behaving normally, not in the statistical sense of "normal"; and in terms of cold-blooded economic theory of rational actors pursuing self-interest; they were not even behaving rationally.

            In the midst of horrors, these righteous few maintained what George Orwell called by the modest term "decency"; they maintained Menschlichkeit (Yiddish, Mentshlekhkeyt): where indecently few people were acting like humane human beings, they remained human.

            But not necessarily because they liked Jews, and in these our sentimental days, when we want people to like us, when attitude really counts — this is important.

            Some of these quiet heroes saved Jews on patriotic grounds: If the Germans wanted the Poles to deliver up their Jews, to give the Germans the Jews in Poland for killing, a loyal Pole resisted, even if he or she would just as soon have Jews out of Poland, and in the 1930s had voted for political parties endorsing doing just that.

            Some thought that murder is murder and that it was their Christian duty to resist murder, even the murder of Jews. For traditional Christian haters of Jews, Jews were people cursed as Christ-killers; but Jews were still people, not subhuman as Nazis saw Slavs (and Blacks), or, most relevantly, nonhumans, as orthodox Nazis saw Jews.

            A fair number took very seriously Jesus' Parable of the Good Samaritan, and saw it as their Christian duty to help strangers in trouble. And some helped people they knew or a good-looking Jewish girl they had a crush on or adopted babies or children because they had lost their own or could use child labor on the farm.

            And most Jews were not killed by professional murderers at Auschwitz or the other death camps, but were shot by more or less ordinary people, some of them very ordinary police officers, and a fair number more or less indifferent to "the Jewish Question." Anti-Semitism obviously had a role in the destruction of the Jews of Europe — including anti-Semitism in England and the United States — but one could not predict from the virulence of anti-Semitism in any given country just what percentage of its Jews would survive the war, how many would be murdered.

            As hinted at in the Stanley Milgram obedience experiments and other work in social psychology, character and attitudes count, but not always in straightforward ways or for a whole lot: context is important, and "character" can be complex. One "moral" of Snyder's study in Black Earth is that people who are indifferent to people like you, or who even like your kind of folk might turn you in for extermination; people who dislike "your kind" might know and like you personally and might save you. Or people who don't particularly like you or your kind at all might save you for all sorts of reasons, including a cold sense of duty or decency.

            When the world moves into barbarism, your friendly neighbor might betray you for a little extra food and your apartment; Sister Attila the Nun, that cold-hearted horror, might give her life to keep you alive.

            People are strange, and in times and places "Where there are no men" — where normal human behavior is inhuman(e) — it is very difficult "be a man" in the sense of acting humanely. And those who do the right thing will do so for a mixture of reasons and some odd ones.

            Those reasons may not include much of their personal likes and dislikes, and they may even overpower a generic but deep-seated hatred.

Trusting Trump with Secrets

Looking back on World War II as a young adult, I got the impression that parts of US culture put a bit too much emphasis on secrecy and spying and code-breaking for reasons having more to do with the Cold War than with the victory against the Fascists of the Second.

      * I had grown up on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and knew how important fear and suspicion of "spies and saboteurs" are for reinforcing loyalty and group solidarity. As Senator Arthur Vandenberg advised President Truman, the government had to "scare the hell out of the American people" to get support for the Cold War — and the scaring the hell out continued, including stoking fears of spies.

      * Stressing the elegance of code-breaking and triumphs of spying drew attention away from how much the Allies owed for victory to the brute-force barbarism of the Red Army smashing its way west into Hitler's Reich.

      * Stressing the elegance of code-breaking and triumphs of spying drew attention away from how much Allied victory was the result of US Federal government coordination and to some extent cooptation of US industrial production and other aspects of a directed, highly regulated capitalism.

      * Stressing Russian theft of American secrets helped denigrate the ability of the Soviets to use their German scientists almost as well as we used our German scientists for the rocket, missile, and other programs of the Cold War, and helped justify the execution of Ethel Rosenberg.

Well, etc. We did have intelligence and spy-craft triumphs during the Second World War, and "spies and saboteurs" are a threat — and terrorists as well; but my highly unoriginal feeling was and continues that the threat is often overblown and over-emphasized. 

Which brings me to Hillary Clinton's 33,000 deleted e-mails and Donald Trump's attack thereon early in the debate of 9 October 2016. (I don't know if they went back to it, since I returned from the gym where I was watching the ... show to finally write this blog post.)

What got me was Mr. Trump's chiding former-Secretary Clinton for not know that a circled "C" on a document indicated classified/confidential material. Hence, Mr. Trump indicated, Ms. Clinton couldn't be trusted with secrets. And the following went through my mind, coming from the big story of the weekend of Mr. Trump's comments on a bus about imposing kisses and, well, grabbing what once was called "queynte."

    If one is going to confess to a possible crime, much less to brag about committing one, it is well to check if you are in the presence of someone wearing a "wire." Mr. Trump bragged about a couple acts  somewhere between crude and criminal on a bus at a television studio while people around him were clearly wearing microphones and he himself was miked.  

     

     There was no subtle "C" here; there were obvious microphones, and if he was sufficiently stupid to admit to groping or assault in the presence of visible microphones — while wearing a microphone! — he is in no position to talk about anyone else's handling of confidential material unless they're sending pdf's of it to ISIS and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. 

    It's not so much that "Power corrupts," including, apparently "star power." The crucial thing is that Power regularly "makes arrogant," and "arrogant makes stupid"; and Mr. Trump clearly is too arrogantly stupid to be trusted with secrets, even his own. 

Mr. Trump, Mr. "Lonesome" Rhodes — And, Like "The Gun Is Loaded," the Microphone (You Schmuck) Is *Always* ON

Here's a link to the climax scene/turning point in Elia Kazan's A FACE IN THE CROWD (1957), where a PopCult-star politician reveals what he truely thinks of his audience. It's posted as "A FACE IN THE CROWD: Marcia Destroys 'Lonesome' Rhodes," with Rhodes a kind of combination of Huey Long and Elvis Presley, but with a more recent analogy.

One positive note from a bit earlier in the surprising month of October 2016. Replying to an earlier set of remarks by Donald Trump, an admirably direct and ideologically-committed older woman said she remains committed to Donald Trump because (quoting from memory) she "supports the conservative party; and if that's the jackass leading this mule train," she will follow. Well, good for her, unless her general view becomes even more common: Countries need responsible conservative parties, and the party of Trump is not one.

The Most Racist Places in America, According to Google

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/28/the-most-racist-places-in-america-according-to-google/

"Interestingly, on the map above the most concentrated cluster of racist searches 

happened not in the South, but rather along the spine of the 

Appalachians running from Georgia all the way up 

to New York and southern Vermont." 

Two points: (1) James Carville, "Between Paoli and Penn Hills, Pennsylvania is Alabama without the blacks." (2) It's not just interesting, it's readily understandable from migration patterns of Appalachians, the folk-ways analyzed in Nancy Isenberg's WHITE TRASH: THE 400-YEAR [...] HISTORY OF CLASS IN AMERICA, and James Webb's more friendly BORN FIGHTING: HOW THE SCOTS-IRISH SHAPED AMERICA, and Colin Woodard's AMERICAN NATIONS [...]. Appalachian Mountain folk were used by their, ahem, "betters" to keep the Indians out and the Blacks down, and "the old schooling sticks." Almost as important to the Powers that Were and more subtly still be, the caste system "kept in their place" poor Whites. 

Bob Dylan summed it up, back in 1963: They remain pawns in the game.