Profile of a patriot

I’ve got to tell you about my friend Dan, an extraordinary human being. To begin with, he smells bad. He can’t recall the last time he bathed. His clothes are old and frayed. They get washed about as often as he bathes. He has a scraggly beard, and his hair is never combed. And last month he was fired. His boss told him he’d become unproductive. Maybe so, but more likely he was just too unpleasant to be around.

Dan wasn’t always unhygienic. In fact, as recently as last fall, anyone would have said he was a well-groomed, attractive person. What happened, you ask. A divorce? A death in the family? News of a terminal illness? No, none of these. Incredibly, it was the trauma of realizing that another Trump-Biden election was inevitable and destined to be a tossup.

I had to get my head around this. I’d known Dan for almost 20 years and was very fond of him. His breakdown was shocking. I was concerned, of course, and mystified. Dan was always full of surprising insights. Perhaps he saw something about the fate of the nation that I’d like to see too.

I decided to invite him over for lunch. When I met him at the door, I was momentarily stunned by his appearance. We embraced, and I led him inside. I took his arm …

Dan, I’m very worried about you. You’re a dear friend, and you’re in a slump I don’t understand. It scares me. If you don’t mind, I’d like to talk about it. I’m not presuming to be your therapist, but there is value in talking, probably for both of us. I think you’ve been struck by a vision of something acutely painful. I hope you’ll share it with me.

Ken … thank you … so much! When you came by last January and I sent you away, I felt miserable. I wasn’t talking to anyone then. I wasn’t sure I could ever turn my depression into words, and I wondered whether you’d ever talk to me again. I think now you may be a way out of this hell. I’m ready to talk.

I’m so glad! Please tell me about your depression.

I’m in mourning, Ken. Last fall, I realized our country was dying with no hope of recovery.

Why would you think that?

It’s a long story of evolution gone awry. When America was founded in the 18th century, it was a historical novelty. There was nothing like it before. Oh, there were the Greeks with their direct democracy and the Romans with their democratic republic, but our democratic republic was an invention, penned by a few men and refined by a convention. Unprecedented! It provided for free speech and a free press, a separation of powers, and mechanisms for amendment.

And the rules for populating the branches of government with representatives and judges, as well as rules for removing them from power.

Yes. It looked like the American Constitution had all that was needed to cope with changing times and a growing nation. As our country lurched forward, it faced a near-fatal question — whether an individual’s freedom extended so far as to permit the ownership of slaves. We fought a civil war, amended the Constitution, and rolled on. The lesson in this episode was that the boundaries of freedom were a disputatious matter that could incite civil disorder, if not war.

I think I see where you’re going with this. There are contentious issues about freedom’s boundaries that we have today. Abortion and gun control, for example.

True, and there’s also the matter of paramilitary groups. Should people have the right to associate in such groups?

I’d say no. They now seem ready to act at a conservative president’s behest.

Good point, and this raises the question of the boundaries of presidential power. For example, the War Powers Resolution of 1973 allows the president, under special conditions, to deploy military force without a Congressional declaration of war. But presidents have dodged these conditions more than once and faced no consequences.

Former President Trump brushed aside a presidential boundary in the last year of his term. He ignored the requirement that the Senate confirm his cabinet nominations by simply saying that his cabinet choices were “acting” officials who therefore needed no confirmation.

He has already promised to go on a firing rampage with civil service employees as his target. Anyone he suspects of not working in his interest will get the boot. These employees have a few legal protections, but they’ll be of little help; the Justice Department will be headed by an “acting” Attorney General.

Then there’s the matter of executive orders. These are presidential fiats that don’t require the approval of Congress. The rationale is that the president is the head of the executive branch, and the Constitution says presidents must ensure that laws are “faithfully executed.” But who is to say an executive order lacks a credible connection to the faithful execution of a law? Only the Supreme Court can do this. If Trump is president, will our irresponsible Supreme Court countermand his executive orders?

That’s a horrible thought, Dan. I can understand why you talk about America’s demise, but it’s certainly not inevitable. It could well be that Biden wins in November.

Sure, Biden might win, which is far better than embarking on a dictatorship. But here’s the bad news: it doesn’t actually matter. America is still doomed. It’s doomed because it’s ungovernable.

Inevitably, political parties arose early in our history. They were foreshadowed as far back as the Continental Congresses. Over the decades, the prevailing parties went through metamorphoses beyond anyone’s control. The allure of human exploitation shaped them, as did our fortunate geography, the possibility of westward expansion, our vast stretches of arable land, the abundance of natural resources, the energy of foreigners who escaped poverty and religious oppression, and a swelling national pride that often expressed itself as jingoism. Most telling, in the 1980s, a fever of greed swept over our politics.

Today, we have two very partisan parties. I’ll call them the Blues and the Reds. They oppose each other on practically every governmental, economic, and social issue that concerns the public. The Blues are preoccupied with the welfare of the entire population, but they avoid confrontation with our ruling oligarchy. The Reds embrace our oligarchy and use the term “socialism” as a bogeyman to frighten voters away from efforts to transfer wealth for the public good. The Blues are horrified by the saturation of firearms in the population and the bloody consequences of unregulated ownership. The Reds see gun ownership as an American birthright and want no regulation, despite the mass shootings in schools, churches, and other public places. The Blues want government to have no role in fundamental private matters, like the decision to have an abortion or to marry someone of the same sex. The Reds want government to intervene if a personal decision is opposed by a Biblical dictate. In fact, the Reds want America to formally become a Christian nation. One more difference, the most important one. The Blues believe a government of laws is a defining attribute of America. The Reds believe a tyranny is palatable if not preferable.

I’ll give you this, Dan. I can’t imagine a credible chain of events that leads to a reconciliation.

Some people think that someday enough Reds will join the Blues to push through several desperately needed Constitutional Amendments, like one discontinuing the Electoral College or giving more Senate seats to populous states or outlawing gerrymandering or regulating firearms.

Well, I know why the first three will never happen. Many states are sparsely populated Red states. There’s no way in hell they’ll say yes to an amendment that would diminish their political power.

Exactly. As for firearms regulation, most Reds believe it’s synonymous with firearms confiscation. And that would lead to a tyrannical government. They fear a tyrannical government! What irony!

We’ve always had a so-called “lunatic fringe” in our country, people who are neurotically superstitious, pathetically uninformed, or bereft of critical thinking. Every country has them. They’re usually fewer than 10% of the voting population. In the 2020 presidential election, Biden got 81.3 million votes, and Trump got 74.2 million. Imagine, 74.2 million after he cozied up to Putin, horribly mismanaged the pandemic, and tried to extort political support from Ukraine! That’s a shocking indictment of his supporters, but nothing compared to their current lunacy. They’ve watched him spread malignant lies about the election; start an insurrection to stop the count of electoral votes; label the jailed insurrectionists “hostages”; receive 88 felony indictments; hawk trading cards, sneakers, and Bibles to pay for legal fees; pose as a Christ figure, battling a corrupt power structure; and beleaguer the entire legal system with petitions for trial delays. You’d think that at least half of his 74.2 million supporters would have deserted him in the ensuing years, but no. He’s tied with Biden in the polls! It shows that the lunatic fringe in our country is massive and durable. One day, Trump will disappear from the national stage, but the insane political bloc he created will still be around to stymie our social progress and world leadership. America will sputter like an old jalopy. We’ll be helpless in the face of the stresses the AI revolution will bring.

What shows me the steadfastness of Trump’s supporters is their reaction to his claim of absolute presidential immunity. He’s confessing, “Yes, I’m guilty. I’m guilty of everything. But … haha … I have immunity from prosecution!” And that’s good enough for them.

Remember when he said he could shoot someone in broad daylight and be absolved by his followers? He had sized them up perfectly. He couldn’t help but gloat about it.

That sickens me, Dan…. Yes, I see now why your pessimism is so deep. I see why America will probably be a hospital case for a very long time. But some day, well after you and I are gone, might there not be a gradual reconciliation and reawakening of America’s founding principles?

Of course, Ken. But the people of that time would be fooling themselves if they thought the original America had revived. It would be like Charlemagne believing he had reestablished the Roman Empire in Europe. There can’t be a once and future America. The original America, that bold, brilliant experiment, has evolved into a schizophrenic beast without a future. And that’s sad, Ken. Terribly, terribly sad.

The “end times”

Take my hand, friend, as we steer our ship between Scylla and Charybdis, hoping to navigate the Sea of 2024. If your mind works anything like mine, one question more than any other is tormenting it: How the hell did we get into this godawful mess? I am no Christian, but if I were, I could make a pretty good case that we have entered the “end times.” These are the prophesied times that call forth the end of the world, and with it, Judgment Day. I’ll tell you what … Even though I am godless, I think I can convince you that the end times are indeed upon us, and you can tell me whether you tremble as I do.

Early America was the destination of choice for Christian emigrants. The idea of the end times was one of their most closely held beliefs. It would be no exaggeration to say there was a paradoxical element of enthusiasm in this belief. No one wants to die in waves of chaos and destruction, but an eternal afterlife in the bosom of Jesus was, and remains, their most cherished wish. Today, 39% of American adults believe the end times are coming.^{1, 2}

After World War 2, much of the world had reason to believe it had seen a preview of the end times. Two horrific wars, a flu pandemic, a worldwide depression, the advent of nuclear weapons, and a nuclear confrontation in Cuba were pretty good evidence that humanity was close to a messy exit. But even though Bob Dylan sang, “a hard rain’s a-gonna fall,” it didn’t. At least, not right away. Instead, humanity diligently sought ways to make the end times more likely: nuclear proliferation, an Asian war against the spread of Communism, religious terrorism, a war against religious terrorism, drone warfare, the continuous modernization of weapon systems, experimentation with a plague virus³, and a proxy war between the nations with nuclear arsenals.

To further darken the future, class warfare in America and a self-absorbed youth culture threatened to make the country ungovernable.

Class warfare

During the Truman administration, a coalition in corporate America and Wall Street came together. Its aim was to create, for the third time in American history, a ruling oligarchy⁴. Its first targets were unions, whose power was growing immensely, and with it the size and prosperity of the middle class. The dream that each generation could live more comfortably than the earlier ones had become “The American Dream.” But in 1947 the Taft-Hartley Act was enacted, marking the start of three decades of restrictive legislation and political harassment against unions. Their ability to deliver worker benefits alongside rising corporate profits gradually evaporated. In their glory days, 1 in 3 American private sector workers belonged to a union. Today the number is 1 in 16.

By the time the Reagan administration arrived, wealthy American executives, under the guise of practicing vigorous capitalism, had devised a number of strategies to plunder the livelihoods of middle class and poor Americans. Big corporations began to globalize by building facilities in Mexico and Asia, where labor was cheap. Millions of Americans lost their jobs. Corporate raiders devised buyout schemes to take over healthy businesses, fire most of the work force, divide the businesses into units, and sell off the units at a substantial profit. The entire ethos of Big Business changed. Its focus turned to operating as leanly as possible to maximize profits. Executives who wielded the axe with the most zeal were glorified in the media ⁵. All this occurred during an era of deregulation. Government oversight waned, corruption grew.

The American middle class, which hadn’t worried about job security since the Depression, now looked to the future with deep concern. In 2000, the dotcom bubble burst, and a recession ensued. George W responded with a tax cut that chiefly benefited the wealthy. During his administration, financial corruption became so widespread that it could no longer be concealed. Mortgage lenders were recklessly stimulating the residential housing market by approving loans to borrowers with poor credit. They then bundled mortgages and sold them as a package — a derivative investment product — to other financial institutions. Many of the mortgagors defaulted simply because they lacked the money to carry their mortgages. Even more defaulted because they held adjustable rate mortgages whose rates increased. And, of course, the derivatives collapsed in value. The homeless population increased by 20,000 people. Unemployment went to 10.6%. 1.8 million small businesses went bankrupt.

This catastrophe was named the Great Recession. To deal with it, Congress appropriated $700 billion in taxpayer funds to buy toxic assets from failing banks. None of the corrupt executives went to jail. The public endured a trauma whose scars are still with us. The worst of these was a deep distrust of the Federal government. It had neglected its oversight obligations, bailed out all the large financial institutions, and failed to punish criminal behavior. It was clear to American workers that they couldn’t rely on the protection of their own government. The depth of the distrust was on display in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump and remained vigorous throughout the Covid pandemic. Today, that distrust is entrenched, and a large part of the American electorate is entertaining the idea of abandoning its country’s Constitutional foundation in favor of fascism.

A self-absorbed youth culture

Compulsory education can have bad as well as good consequences. Even as it informs children and builds vital skills, it necessarily segregates them from adults (teachers excepted). Inevitably, their close association creates a distinct culture, one that reflects the desires, dreads, and worldviews of developing minds.

The most representative segment of our youth culture is Gen Z⁶, which will soon become the most populous generation of all, surpassing the Millennials⁷. It has qualities that distinguish it from earlier generations and give us an insight into the future. For example, its members are more sensitive to racial and ethnic injustice. They are aware of and alarmed by the changing climate. They strongly favor social diversity. They are more attentive to their health and fitness. They are more likely to exercise, eat healthy meals, and stay hydrated.

They also demand and pay for more entertainment than any other generation. Most have seen more than 25 live concerts in their brief lives. They show their enthusiasm for the performers and their music by standing throughout the performance. A full view of the stage is rare, yet tickets go for an average of $250.

They spend 23% of their free time on social media and 17% on games. Mobile phones are the most popular way to interact with the world.

What I find most worrisome about Gen Z is their grasp of history. They don’t have one. I get the impression that Gen Zers believe time began when they were born. The “Black Lives Matter” movement occurred during their lifetimes, as did awareness of climate change, the Covid pandemic, and Israel-Hamas hostilities. These are real, worrying events. All the rest of history is a timeless jumble that has lost its connection with the present. They don’t know whether “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” is true because there is no arc to see. Democracy has no roots or philosophical underpinning because nothing has roots or a philosophical underpinning. If I’m right about this, then where is the hand that will steer our ship through the perilous waters ahead?

________________________

¹A finding of the Pew Research Center in 2022.

²39% also happens to be roughly the number of Americans who are diehard Trump supporters. Must be a coincidence.

³American investigators disagree over whether the Wuhan Institute of Virology released the Covid virus, but they have no doubt that the laboratory was experimenting with it.

⁴America’s first oligarchy was America’s founders and their families. They dominated national affairs until the Jackson administration. The second was the tycoons who ran the nation during the Gilded Age (Reconstruction until the Theodore Roosevelt administration).

⁵From 1978 to 2022, the best-paid CEOs saw their compensation grow by 1,209.2% while a typical worker’s income went up by only 15.3%.

⁶Generation Z, born in the years 1997 to 2012.

⁷Born in the years 1981 to 1996.

Not enough data

I like data, gobs and gobs of data. I like gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes, and whatever comes next. I’m particularly fond of data about groups — their preferences, predilections, penchants, partialities, and politics. Yes, I’m aware of the tyrants and lowlifes who use data destructively to abuse people and amass power. This is a drawback that powerful things — like corporations, nuclear power plants, the wired world, gene editing, artificial intelligence — have in common. We need them, but they can be dangerous. The answer is regulation, not rejection.

I like to imagine the topology of data, the hills and valleys of data we have about every subject that we’ve deemed fit to study. There are some subjects — say, the global distribution of Formosan subterranean termites — that can boast a ton of data. Conversely, there are subjects, many that are keenly important, with a dearth of data. One such subject is comparative cultural values. We need a set of metrics that tells us how close (or far apart) the values of any two cultures are. If we had a way to reliably measure cultural distance, we’d have a tool that could show where cultural collisions might occur. Forearmed, we could use the science of mediation to find the roots of our value differences and work at reconciling them.

Fortunately, there are prototypes for such a tool that we can refine into better measuring instruments. One that I know of is called The Political Compass. It’s produced by an enterprise whose roots are deliberately mysterious. I suppose the owners don’t want their political views known for fear that a political agenda might be attributed to them.

Their test has 60 multiple choice statements that you can strongly agree with, agree with, disagree with, or strongly disagree with. Your responses are digested by a secret algorithm. Its output is a point on a graph whose x-axis is an “economic scale,” from politically left to politically right, and whose y-axis is a “social scale,” from authoritarian to libertarian. Thus the point, your score, can fall in any or four quadrants. Here’s the graphical score of a left-winger whom I persuaded to take the test:

The test isn’t strictly political. Statements about such subjects as abstract art, astrology, mental illness, the source of morality, keeping to our own kind, racial supremacy, the legalization of marijuana, and the basic function of education have a tenuous connection to politics. I’d prefer to call the test The Cultural Compass. Also, I’m uneasy with an axis labeled Authoitarian-Libertarian. To my mind, libertarianism is a dogma. I’d name this axis Dogmatic-Permissive. (If we lived in a pure libertarian society, we would quickly sort ourselves out into Givers and Takers. The Takers would become oligarchs and use their power to keep economic regulation nonexistent. In America, we are not far from that point now.)

I have another reason for wanting a cultural differentiation test. Presumably, it could not only quantify the cultural distance between countries, but also the distance between subcultures within a country. Every American knows there is a cultural chasm between Blue America and Red America, but we can only wonder at its breadth and depth. I think it’s enormous — as huge as the chasm between Blue America and, say, Hungary or Turkey. I’m convinced of it, and I hope these bits of data will convince you:

• There are more guns than people in America. [CHECK]
• 3% of American adults own 50% of the guns. [CHECK]
• All 50 states allow the concealed carrying of handguns but differ on giving permits to nonresidents. [CHECK]
• 31 states allow the open carrying of handguns without a permit or license. 44 states allow the open carrying of long guns, although 3 of these states require the long guns to be unloaded. [CHECK]
• The #1 killer of American children and teens isn’t car accidents or disease; it’s gunshot wounds. [CHECK]
• Over 95% of American K-12 schools conduct active shooter drills. [CHECK]
• 61% of Trump voters agree that “a group of people in this country are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants and people of color who share their political views.” [CHECK]
• In 2020, 55% of all the perpetrators of hate crimes in America were white. [CHECK]
• The number of teenage reports of hate speech on American social media doubled between 2018 and 2020. [CHECK]
• More than 40% of Americans do not believe Biden’s 2020 victory was legitimate. [CHECK]
• Last year, 24 new laws were passed in 14 states that allow state legislatures to interfere in the outcome of elections. [CHECK]
• 46% of Americans think a future civil war is likely. [CHECK]
• More than 50% of Americans see right-wing militia groups as a threat to the U.S.; a third say they pose an “immediate and serious threat.” [CHECK]
• 13 states have abortion “trigger laws.” These are laws that ban abortion if the Supreme Court overturns the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. [CHECK]
• 30% of white Americans believe nothing about racial inequality should be taught in public schools. [CHECK]
• In the past 9 months, nearly 1,586 books have been banned in school libraries, up from 483 in 2018. 41% of these feature characters who are people of color. 33% have LGBTQ themes, protagonists, or strong secondary characters. [CHECK]
• 34% of Americans are “not worried” about global warming. 30% say natural change, not human activity, is causing global warming. [CHECK]

This isn’t tongue-clucking data. It’s goosebumps data. It’s data that should call forth fear and rage. But those emotions are never on display from our leading Democrats. When Biden really gets up a head of steam, all you hear is the indignant yapping of a puppy. We desperately need leaders who talk like Chris Murphy. Such people are our real leaders, and we need to arm them with data that cries out like a siren and shakes us awake from our tepid discomfort.

Clinging at a cliff’s edge

We thought last January that the worst was behind us. We had a new president with an inspiring agenda. He called on an admirable cast of professionals to fill his cabinet posts. Covid vaccines were widely available. In short order, a Covid relief bill became law, though without the support of a single Republican senator. That was the first dark sign. Now, as the final days of the year play out, our democracy is clinging at a cliff’s edge. How the hell could this have happened? Let me count the ways.

“Stupichosis” never stopped growing.
That’s my word for the marriage of stupidity and psychosis. It’s the phenomenon you see when a long, costly election recount fails to placate angry voters with the truth. It’s on view when hundreds congregate for weeks in hopes of seeing dead people herald the return to glory of an ex-president. It’s in evidence when millions of credulous fools ingest medicine for farm animals to ward off a fatal disease. It’s manifest when the world is ravaged by superstorms, floods, rising sea levels, and wildfires as the adult population looks to the next generation for action.

Political rot is abundant at every level of government.
Trump warned us of a swamp in Washington and then proceeded to use the levers of power to ratchet up the stench in the Congress. He went on to spread it to the executive and judiciary branches through a multitude of irresponsible appointments. He left behind a rot so entrenched that it became self-propagating. It has settled into state legislatures and the offices of state officials, and it’s now taking hold in city and county commissions and on school boards.

What does this legacy of rot look like? For a start, it rejects any disquieting truth, like an uncomfortable medical fact or persistent evidence of systemic racism. It opposes any remedial government program that isn’t aimed at big business, like the elimination of student debt, the extension of the Child Tax Credit, or the expansion of Medicare benefits. Worst of all, it seeks to nullify any election that weakens a party’s hold on political power, the Constitution be damned.

The Supreme Court has lost its mission.
SCOTUS no longer upholds the Constitutional principles that are our heritage. Women, in its view, are not the equals of men. In dealing with the vicissitudes of life, a woman’s freedom to act, as SCOTUS sees it, is clearly more constrained. And now states are granted an escape from judicial review. They need only cede the role of law enforcement to its residents, who can punish “malefactors” by bringing civil suits against them. In effect, SCOTUS has voted to castrate the courts by giving a green light to vigilantism.

Even more damage lies ahead. Until the early years of the Roberts court, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 required states with a history of voting offenses to get a clearance from the Justice Department before passing new voting laws. This provision was struck down in 2006, with Roberts writing the majority opinion. Now many states are rewriting their voting laws. What chance will opponents of the new laws have when their cases reach the Roberts court?

Biden is the wimp many guessed he was.
Biden has long sought to project the image of a scrappy guy. He’s quite the contrary. He’s a let’s-have-a-beer-together-and-hug-it-out kind of guy, just as Obama was. But Biden takes it further. He believes he can compromise with anyone despite unmistakable signs that he can’t and evidence that he’s destroying the integrity of his legislative agenda. It never occurs to him to “go for the jugular” as many effective presidents have. In the case of Joe Manchin, Biden could have called on the DNC to produce a series of ads with the theme of “Wake Up, West Virginia!” with a retelling of how Manchin offers no relief from the dire conditions in the state. Biden should have called him into the Oval Office long ago and said, “Vote for the Build Back Better Act or kiss your re-election goodbye!” The consequences for his failure will be grim. House progressives don’t trust him now. Democrats of all ages can cite provisions they yearned for. The people with huge college debts must be inconsolable; the bill would have reduced them considerably. One of Biden’s campaign promises was to take down their debts. He can still do so by executive decree but stays mum.

Merrick Garland is even wimpier.
Nine months ago, Merrick Garland was confirmed to head the Justice Department. As you would expect, he continued the pursuit and arrest of the January 6th rioters. They were the small fry who were led by the nose to the Capitol grounds and exhorted to stop the peaceful transition of presidential power. But what about the people behind the scenes, the planners and the lackeys who handled the the logistics? Were senators and congresspeople involved? Trump’s friends and appointees? Trump’s lawyers and Trump himself? Obviously there was nothing in the appearance or mood of that crowd that suggested spontaneity.

Garland appears to be uninterested. He’s read Biden’s signals that a Justice Department investigation would imperil the hope for a Kumbaya future with Republicans. I might be sympathetic if the rioters had been a band of streakers carrying protest signs. But this was an insurrection and the cornerstone of a planned coup. Even today, the coup plotters are at liberty and plotting anew. There can be no excuse for Garland’s cowardice.

Thank goodness for the courage of House members who volunteered for the January 6th Select Committee. The committee has gone forward despite threats against them. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, both Republicans, have most likely forfeited their political futures. Garland — he says nothing. I blame the news media for not pursuing him with the question, “Sir, do you have anything more than a ringside seat?”

We live in a Covid bunker.
Last summer, Biden pledged to ship 1.2 billion doses of Covid vaccine to other countries. To date, we’ve shipped only 332 million doses. We’re not only screwing hundreds of millions of people around the globe, we’re screwing ourselves. Disease doesn’t respect political boundaries, so the failure to help others comes back to bite us. And when new strains reach our shores, they mingle with the 70 million dummkopfs who won’t get vaccinated much less boosted. Sooner or later, mutated strains become more insidious, vaccines lose their efficacy, and we progressively surrender to the disease. Unless, of course, Big Pharma produces even bigger miracles.

It’s a depressing scenario, and it’s been playing out in an electorate that’s been depressed for nearly two years. The political ramifications can’t be good. The only question is, how bad? I believe Biden when he says he’ll ramp up the shipments of vaccine doses, but what about the multitude of unvaccinated Americans that keep the rest of us trapped? I see no alternative but to declare them social pariahs. The federal government can do this by issuing vaccination “passports” to the vaccinated. These can be checked at restaurants, theaters, concerts, sports events, and other entertainments. It’s fine if a venue doesn’t comply. Their patrons will get word that the unvaccinated congregate there, and they will shun it. Will Biden support this idea? See Biden is the wimp many guessed he was.

We’ve become a misnomer.
For the time being, “The United States of America” remains a genuine international entity. Its federal institutions continue to function, though they sputter badly. In all other respects, the ties that bind us are fraying. To say that the states are “united” is a wry joke. The states are deeply split on issues that go to the roots of core values, issues like voter rights, racial equality, sexual equality, gun ownership, the role of police forces, the permissible limits of wealth, the permissible limits of freedom, and the role of government in buttressing our pursuit of happiness. These issues are fundamental. A nation that lacks a consensus on all of them cannot stand and should not stand. It would simply tear at itself to no purpose.

Our task is not to “come together.” (God how I hate that phrase! How do you make life better by blending constructive policies with toxic ones?) Rather, we need to confront antisocial drivel and evoke a compelling vision to cheer for. The Build Back Better Act and the Voting Rights Act are sound springboards, but most of the voices that advocate them are thin and unconvincing. Surely in the ranks of the progressives there are leaders who can sing out a resonant, eloquent message.

To protect and serve (whites)

Every post about an ugly subject needs an ugly picture; the one below is my pick. It’s one of dozens we’ve seen in the news of cops doing despicable things. Who knows why they detained this poor bastard? Maybe he was just pedaling by, and they needed to verify that their canisters of pepper spray were correctly primed.

Never again will I tolerate the apologist who says, “You know the media. They just pick out a few bad apples among hundreds of good cops.” Stomach acid and rage will ensue. Do apologists know about the surge in police resignations since George Floyd’s murderer was charged? Have they heard about the 57 Buffalo cops who quit their force’s emergency response team? They were upset because two of their buddies were disciplined for knocking down an elderly man in their path.

The common public perception of the police — Baltimore’s, Minneapolis’s, Houston’s, Albuquerque’s, LA’s, you name it — is diametrical to reality. The police today are indeed a “force.” They are a paramilitary force, a cultural force, a labor force, a political force, and ironically, an extralegal force.

Not too many decades ago, the police had no tasers. They had tear gas but no pepper spray. They had fire hoses but no stun grenades. They had batons but no rubber bullets. They had megaphones but no LRADs (Long Range Acoustic Devices), commonly known as “sound cannons.” At a distance of 15 meters, anyone in its audio path will suffer great pain and possibly permanent hearing loss; at 300 meters, severe headaches.

It used to be rare to see a police force backed up by the National Guard, and never by regular military personnel in tanks and helicopters. Now the police are virtually an arm of the U.S. military. How did they ever maintain the peace before they became imitation soldiers?

The police are a culture unto themselves. In one respect, they’re like the Mafia: snitching on a “family” member is absolutely forbidden by their fraternal code. And if an officer is pounding on some innocent schmuck, his colleagues are obliged to stand aside or, better, join in the mayhem. It’s what buddies do.

Their culture often includes guest members, like the DA’s office and the mayor’s office. Bringing criminal charges against a cop does not go down well in a predominantly white community that relies on cops to protect and serve. It’s not lost on mayors and most DAs that they serve at the pleasure of the voters.

Like all unions, police unions are concerned with improving the safety and prosperity of their members, though they needn’t be overly diligent. White communities are grateful for police work, and all the cop shows on TV tell them they should be. Unlike other unions, police unions craft employment contracts that let cops escape accountability for egregious conduct. A Washington Post study in 2006 found that fully a quarter of cops fired for misconduct were reinstated after they were accorded the forgiving review procedure in their union contracts.

Police associations make political endorsements, even though the police belong to the executive arm of government. Imagine the FBI, CIA, or our armed forces endorsing a candidate for federal office! It would be a catastrophe, the end of our republic. Should the executive arm of a state or locality be any different? Nevertheless, the police do it, and pity the politician who gets the “soft on crime” label or some other resonant curse. It pays them to be on the kindly side of the police by blessing contracts that require leniency for police misconduct.

If cops do something provably criminal, say something corroborated by videos and tattle-tale buddies, they still have a lovely ace in the hole. It’s a legal doctrine called qualified immunity, introduced by the Supreme Court in 1967. It grants public officials immunity in civil suits if they’ve done something abhorrent but the law about their behavior is a bit fuzzy. For example, take the case of a pregnant Seattle woman who was repeatedly tasered when she refused to sign a speeding ticket. The police officer in question was given qualified immunity because the law on stun gun use wasn’t entirely clear. Never mind the use of excessive force, which was clearly demonstrable.

Naturally, recent police outrages have renewed calls for an end to qualified immunity. Last week, the Supreme Court acted preemptively by declaring it will not hear cases that request a reexamination of the doctrine. Just like SCOTUS to slink away from a crying need for judicial review.

It’s plain that policing has to be reformed in a uniform way across the country, not just in this city or that city. The headline “Minneapolis Bans Chokeholds” sounds like progress, but it means very little. What about Dubuque? They might allow chokeholds, but perhaps they take a dim view of stomping.

Reforms, therefore, must devolve from the federal government. Otherwise, we’ll get more of what we’ve always had, an unequal application of justice across the land. The situation is much like allowing each state to establish its own voting laws — civil liberty is respected in some places and disrespected in others.

Sorry, but we need a new federal bureaucracy. Call it the Bureau of Police Affairs (BPA) or something similar. It probably belongs within the Justice Department. (I know — Barr has a talent for fucking up both what we have and what we need.)

Here’s what I see as the BPA’s charter:

• • Create a police training course and keep it current. Write a Policing Bible to go with it. The Bible will contain dozens of scenarios that give examples of good and bad policing.

• • Hire a cadre of police instructors to run the courses. How to train police officers will no longer be a local decision.

• • Create procedures for hiring, disciplining, firing, and reinstating police officers. Specify that no police or municipal official may sit on a disciplinary board if an officer is accused of misusing deadly force.

• • Create an attachment to police union contracts that enumerates the rights of officers accused of misconduct. It will supersede any other contractual reference to that subject.

• • Maintain a database of citations of police misconduct and check it whenever a police department sends a “request to hire” notification (a new requirement). Grant or deny the request.

That’s a boatload of authority to bestow on any government agency. The BPA could survive a court challenge only if were created by an act of Congress that was signed by the president. Even then, its legitimacy might be struck down by the Supreme Court, but more about that latter.

While Congress is creating the BPA, it must pass this complementary legislation:

• • A law that spells out the meaning of “excessive force” and rejects the use of qualified immunity whenever its standard of excessive force is met.

• • A law that prohibits any group that does police work from endorsing a political candidate.

• • A law that creates the legal machinery for staffing police review boards on which no police or municipal official sits.

I’ve proposed a BPA, a charter for it, and a Congress that makes sweeping police reforms because street protests alone will never, of themselves, reshape our country’s malformed police establishment. That can only be done with ballots — ballots that put in place a progressive Senate, a new president and, by extension, a new Attorney General and sensible additions to the Supreme Court. (A radicalized Congress would, I hope, impeach and convict at least two of our justices.)

Democracies must continually save themselves in cycles of outrage and reform. If they fail at this task, they degrade and die. If we fail in November, we will have shown a lethal disregard for our lives, our liberties, and our happiness.

American pride

Have you ever watched “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” You can get an education, and not just from the questions and answers. For example, it recently aired a week of shows with the theme “American Pride.” All the contestants did a service for their communities: charity work, nursing, firefighting, teaching, and the like. Certainly, we should be grateful for the good they do, sometimes at the sacrifice of a livable income. But it’s hard for me to see gratitude as pride, and I certainly see nothing “American” about what I feel or what they do.

In fact, I’m pretty much down on the whole idea of connecting nations with pride. The connection has nasty consequences if people don’t take care. I don’t even like connecting national pride with Olympics medals. Didn’t the Olympics originally salute the glory of individual achievement?

But I digress. My aim here is to focus on America’s preposterous self-regard. On the Inflate-O-Meter, we surely must have a score that rivals those of ancient Rome and Nazi Germany. When you’re certain that you go to war with God on your side or that your founding documents were blessed by God, you’re off the meter. When you create a national symbol that you pledge allegiance to and regard as reverently as a juju object (kneeling bad, standing good), you’re off the meter.

Considering our history, you’d think that humility was in order. Yes, our Constitution is an admirable document, but even as it was ratified, we were hip-deep in racism. Native Americans and Africans got the brunt of it, then and even now. As waves of immigrants came to our shores, the Irish, Italians, Jews, and Asians joined the ranks of the mistreated. Theses days, the haters focus on Muslims and Hispanics. Assimilation has been prolonged, tentative, and often ingenuous. Are we proud?

Blue collar workers were overworked and underpaid as America industrialized. New hazards in the workplace were ignored, and the bosses fought efforts to unionize. It took the Great Depression and the decimation of the labor force to make the labor movement irresistible. It grew for decades, with workers from the services sector joining in. But in the 80s, millions of industrial jobs began to move abroad, and the political mood of the country changed. Belligerence swelled toward the foreign producers of oil, cars, and hi-tech products. The political influence of unions waned as the ranks of unionized workers dwindled. The minimum wage stagnated, losing any correspondence to the rate of inflation. Today, it’s considerably harder to earn a living wage than in the middle of the last century. Are we proud?

Though many Western nations offer universal health coverage, we do not. We became politically aware of our failure long ago, but it was only 8 years ago that a partial remedy was enacted. And now our current president and congress have moved to make that remedy unworkable. Insurance is once again unaffordable to people who managed to scrape by for a few years. Are we proud?

We lead the world in annual shooting homicides per 100,000 people, with the exception of the Central and South American countries (minus Argentina) and Swaziland. We are far ahead of everyone in gun ownership. The number of guns owned by Americans and the population of America are virtually the same number. Serbia holds second place, with three-eighths of our ownership rate. We also hold sway in mass shootings. In recent decades worldwide, there have been 18 mass shootings in which 20 or more people were killed. We are the only nation with more than 1 of those mass shootings to its name; we have 7. Our politicians are cowed by the gun lobby, whose solutions to out-of-control gun violence are as shameful as they are stupid. Are we proud?

True, we have won wars, most significantly World War II. We’ve done well in conventional land, sea, and air confrontations. However, nations haven’t fought that way since the 50’s. Our enemies use guerilla tactics, land mines, car bombs, and martyrdom. We can no longer rely on the power of our industrialized economy to overwhelm them with mass-produced materiel.

The men and women in our armed forces have fought bravely to achieve our government’s objectives, even when they were ill considered. But the militaries of our adversaries have done the same. Our military, to the extent it keeps us safe and sound, has my deep gratitude, but I also recognize that its human strengths and weaknesses are no different from those of its opposites. We’re all human beings, and it’s in our common humanity that I find pride.

Can our national ego be deflated? Can we come to realize that we are exceptional only in being exceptionally fortunate—tucked safely between two oceans, free to expand into a continent with enormous natural resources, far from the oppression of Europe’s wars, monarchies, and class system? To make a radical change in our self-regard, we’ll have to focus, day after day and for years to come, on becoming more modest. Then one day—a day I’ll regretfully never see—people may begin to talk about American humility.

Dr. Ken speaks

Here I lie in the ICU of a San Francisco hospital, waiting for life-saving organ transplants. Every day, my vital signs are assessed and reassessed as  tubes and wires deliver meds from IV bags and send data to monitors.

As the waiting game drags on, I rely on this and that diversion to keep my sanity. The other day, a new diversion occurred to me—playing doctor. To make it worth doing, I had to pick a very sick patient. At once, I realized that the ideal patient would be not a single person but an entire nation. I picked the USA, of course.

And so, I cranked out a medical assessment, framed as an analysis of each of the patient’s “organ” systems. I present it here for your second opinion.

The Executive Branch. I begin with the chief executive. His illness is layered and therefore hard to diagnose. At the core, there is what psychotherapists have labeled “malignant narcissism.” By itself, this personality disorder would qualify him only as an overbearing pain in the ass, but over the years, I see it’s been exacerbated by dementia. Many observers have accused him of being an outrageous liar, but they are wrong. It’s the dementia, operating in tandem with grandiosity. I know this because liars in their right mind have a healthy compulsion to hold to some plausible semblance of the truth. Only the mentally ill can pile absurdity upon absurdity with seamless pride and conviction.

On yet another level are the misanthropic instincts of the worst kind of business person. Plunder, underpay, overwork, defraud, and intimidate are words he learned on his father’s knee. So naturally, his cabinet is staffed with flunkies with the same worldview. Almost to a person, they worship wealth and despise any role the government might play in the well being of ordinary citizens. They package their misanthropy under the label “free-market capitalism” and sell it to the gullible as a virtue.

The Legislative Branch. Both houses suffer from a dominance of Republican conservatism, of which there are two strains—morbid and enfeebling. The symptoms are the same misanthropy found in the executive branch, amplified by a marked underdevelopment of the superego. Thus we’ve witnessed unbelievable spectacles, like the exhaustive search for a means to deprive millions of health insurance.

The nonconservative minority, the Democrats, work coherently when it comes to opposing outright harmful legislation, but they’re confused and sightless when it comes to striking out into the future. By all logic, their vision should be an extension of what FDR and LBJ saw for the country, but in the Clinton era the vision faded. Polls replaced principles as the determinants of policy. The party’s been adrift ever since.

The Judicial Branch. This branch is beset by incapacitating arthritis, the source of which is the Constitution it is sworn to interpret. It’s said the Constitution is a living document; that is, one with an “organic” amendment process to accommodate changes in American society and new realities as the centuries pass. The process works, but very badly. The needs of the present and future are too often frustrated by a worshipful view of the past. Social change leaps forward; legal change creeps forward.

So it’s left to the courts to divine the intentions of the people who set down the Constitution’s provisions and then extrapolate them to solve contemporary legal problems. Year after year, the “extrapolation gap” grows. It’s now a chasm. One way to deal with it is to interpret the intentions of the lawgivers as narrowly as possible. Of course, this choice makes judicial decisions less likely to look like justice. Another way is to build a knowledge of American legal history and a well-argued understanding of where the Constitution points us. In its preamble, it proposes to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty. So what effect, for example, will the unregulated possession of firearms have on domestic tranquility? Does the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) promote the general welfare? And so on.

The two methods of covering the extrapolation gap are in opposition. The courts, which should function as the patient’s guidance system, are creating schizophrenia. In the grips of this pathology, the “arc of justice” that Martin Luther King foresaw is just a wishful image.

The People (as in “We, the people…”). Who, exactly, is “we”? If the body politic is to function, surely “we” has to be homogeneous is some respect. What is that respect? It must not be race, creed, or ethnicity because the body politic would surely fail. The only respect that sustains a viable “we” is one of shared principles. The Constitution strives to set out binding principles, but that alone doesn’t make the principles understood, accepted, and internalized. Doing so is the primary requirement for American wholeness. Failure is a prescription for disintegration, for ignorant tribal conflict. The patient now hovers in a twilight state, wherein neither healing forces nor destructive forces dominate.

The patient will not die of his own illnesses, at least not in the foreseeable future. Death from external forces—geopolitical conflict, cyber and nuclear warfare, climatic catastrophes—pose a greater threat. Mere survival, however, has little to do with health. Systemic dysfunction will continue to send the patient’s quality of life into an ever-downward spiral.

 

 

 

The “Trump Is Not Guilty” game

I want to take a break from my usual posts to give myself a pat on the back. I’ve invented a delightful game, one suitable for any relaxed gathering of friends. Here’s how to play…

Some member of the group says with great conviction, “Trump is not guilty of any criminal conduct, and I’ll tell you why.” They then detail all the supposed crimes and misdemeanors of which Trump is accused and explain them away as plausibly as they can. Anyone in the group can chime in, point out an additional so-called crime, and add to Trump’s defense. Or they can offer an even more pardonable rationale for Trump’s behavior than has been given. Of course, attempts to refute are also allowed. After a set time, the group decides which side has made the better case.

I could have called the game “Is Trump Guilty?” but I thought it would be more compelling to assert that Trump is innocent and challenge everyone to support that proposition. I know if I were a player, I’d find the challenge too attractive to pass up.

Trump’s defense has its roots in Comey’s investigation of Hillary Clinton. (Doesn’t everything?) You’ll recall that Comey characterized her handling of email as “extremely careless” and added these mitigating considerations:

In looking back at our investigations into mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts. All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice. We do not see those things here.

Notice how importantly the lack of intent figures in excusing Hillary. I’d guess a kind of hubris of authority swept aside thoughts of taking greater care with her communications. It probably was—and undoubtedly still is—a troublesome character flaw. However, it wasn’t one that rendered her in the least incompetent or dangerous. So it is for the vast majority of us: our imperfections don’t make us a danger to ourselves or to others.

Now let’s consider an exception to this generalization. Yes, him. Donald Trump’s character flaws are deep and numerous. Hillary’s pale next to his. He wants what he wants when he wants it. He’s dazzled by money, power, and machismo. He’s a pathological liar. And he’s astoundingly naive and uninformed. You might go so far as to say he’s dumb as a brick.

Is it criminal to be a pathological liar? Well, for openers, that’s a loaded question. Where does commonplace become pathological? To Trump, lying is no more than a tool—a tool you use to leave a favorable impression or “close a deal” with the public. Why is truth telling such a big deal when you can reach a goal far more easily if you permit yourself to lie? Besides, everyone knows that politicians lie constantly. It’s silly to act shocked. And how can it be a crime for politician X to be a better or more frequent liar than politician Y?

Trump says, “So what?” about Flynn being investigated as an unregistered lobbyist for Turkey. So what if Sally Yates warned that Flynn could be blackmailed because of his contact with the Russian ambassador? Flynn’s a retired general, a manly man, and a loyal booster. He headed the transition team. If the president wants him as the National Security Advisor, that’s an end to it. It’s a president’s prerogative.

How about Trump’s admiration for Putin? That’s easily explained. Putin is undoubtedly the richest man in the world, the king of Russia’s kleptocrats. He’s unafraid of pushing limits, and he’s got a helluva stare. In Trump’s mind, he’s the paradigm of a leader. If he’s not an idol, certainly his style is inspiring. The same is true of Kim Jong Un, Recep Erdogan, and even Rodrigo Duterte. He likes their style and should be free to emulate it. After all, he’s the president—who doesn’t get that?

What was all the fuss about hiring Paul Manafort? He was an effective lobbyist and a political consultant to no less than former-President Viktor Yanukovych, Putin’s puppet in Ukraine. A surefire path to Putin himself, and a way to secure new riches all around. Furthermore, money always has a way of making antagonisms disappear.

Was it OK to share intelligence with the Russians? Of course. The president has the power to declassify anything. More important, what’s the big deal about sharing? It shows friendliness. It’s a kind of gift that helps build a rapport.

Last, there’s the Trump-Comey relationship. Trump didn’t order Comey to end his investigation of Flynn’s Russian ties. He asked, “Can you let it go?” A simple question, followed by an endorsement of Flynn as a good guy. He could have said, “Drop the Flynn investigation, Jim,” but he didn’t. Four months later, did Trump obstruct justice when he fired Comey? No. It wasn’t what Comey was investigating that mattered; it was how he was investigating. The man was using every public appearance for self-aggrandizement. In the saga of the Trump presidency, Comey can’t be the hero. C’mon.

Trump’s character is undoubtedly the vilest of anyone who has led the nation, but is a vile character a high crime or misdemeanor? Many of the House Republicans who were formerly lawyers will make this argument. Nothing less than a “smoking gun” will do. That is Mueller’s challenge.

If Mueller can’t find incriminating evidence, the only hope of Trump loathers—and I proudly count myself as one—is the 25th Amendment. The key provision is Section 4, which describes how the vice president can become acting president—Pence, ick!—if the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” This provision was designed to deal with the case of an incapacitating illness or accident. Dementia would qualify, but does Trump fit this category? Probably not. He isn’t “unable to discharge”; he just discharges with terrible and embarrassing consequences.

The root cause of this mess is the Constitution. The bar it sets for removal is too high and too narrow, but that didn’t matter in 1787. It was drafted by an elite group, none of whom was a pustule on the nation. There were no weapons of mass destruction. There was no need for a pax Americana or a pax anything. A cooperative, globalized economy was unimaginable. The planet was cooler; the air and seas were not befouled. A more limited chief executive presented no problem. The needs of the 21st century are far different. The Constitution must offer a reasonable means for aborting a presidency as repugnant as Trump’s.

Here’s some language from the Vox website that’s a great deal more helpful than “high crimes and misdemeanors”:

Political authority is legitimate only when it is exercised according to the legal rules and social norms that keep it aligned with the public interest and prevent its egregious abuse. When a leader flagrantly violates those rules and norms, he effectively voids the legitimacy of his claim to power.

The U.S. versus Apple

Who doesn’t like computer security? Who doesn’t want more of it? Government agencies, retailers, restaurant chains, banks, credit card companies, insurance companies, and the entertainment industry have all been hacked. They all want more computer security, at least for themselves. Individuals want more of it, too, especially on their mobile phones. Credit card numbers and bank account numbers are likely to be stored there. So are the names and phone numbers of friends, and possibly of contacts we’d like to keep secret. Within our mobile phones lie the records of our financial and private lives. It’s disturbing to realize that mobile phones are so easy to lose, so easy to steal. One careless moment and our identity is in the wrong hands.

There is one group of people that wants less security on mobile phones: law enforcement agencies. They dislike password-protected data. Worse yet is password-protected encrypted data. Discovering the mobile phone of a criminal is like striking the mother lode; finding that its contents are protected and encrypted is like coming upon a blocked mine shaft. iPhones are the most popular mobile phones among people from all walks of life, including criminals, and they come with strong security features. That’s why law enforcement agencies are particularly eager to enlist the expertise of Apple Inc., the manufacturer, in disabling iPhone security.

Federal agencies have asked for Apple’s help in “unlocking” (breaking into) iPhones in 13 criminal cases. Apple doesn’t want to, so these agencies have commanded Apple’s help by convincing judges to issue writs (court orders). The authority for these writs is the 1789 All Writs Act. It gives a judge the power “to order a third party to provide non-burdensome technical assistance to law enforcement officials.” The key word is “non-burdensome.” Apparently, law enforcement doesn’t think it would be burdensome for Apple to devise elaborate security features for the millions of iPhones it sells and then undo these same features whenever one of them is involved in a criminal case. Apple might as well spin off a new company that is permanently on contract to federal crime labs.

Last Monday, a federal magistrate judge in New York said “no dice” to the Drug Enforcement Agency. The All Writs Act does not justify “imposing on Apple the obligation to assist the government’s investigation against its will.”  So now we know that this statute cannot compel Apple to unlock the iPhone of a drug dealer, but what about a more serious crime—like terrorism?

This brings us to the case of Syed Farook, who, with his wife, killed 14 people and injured 22 others at a party last December in San Bernardino, CA. The police and FBI subsequently searched the couple’s Redlands townhouse and found guns, ammo, pipe bombs, bomb-making equipment, computers with missing hard drives, and smashed mobile phones. The FBI Lab was able to retrieve the contents of all but one of the phones, an iPhone 5C that belonged to Farook. In this case too, the FBI got a court order to compel Apple’s assistance. Arguments for both sides will again be heard by a federal magistrate judge. Will the judge rule that the All Writs Act is appropriate to this case, one of much more consequence than drug dealing?

In a legal brief submitted to the court, Apple asked that the order be vacated. They asserted it overstepped the scope of the the All Writs Act and violated Apple’s Constitutional rights. Specifically, they cited a 1996 federal court ruling that “computer code is protected speech under the First Amendment.” Ted Olsen, Apple’s lead counsel, went so far as to say that the U.S. was unwittingly empowering a cyberattack on millions of Apple’s users. Outside parties who support either the FBI or Apple have also filed legal briefs. Microsoft, Google, Twitter, and Facebook weighed in on Apple’s side. On March 10, the FBI’s counsel will respond to the pro-Apple arguments. On March 15, Apple will offer its final reply to the FBI’s case. A week later, both parties will argue in District Court before the judge, who is expected to rule shortly afterward. Whatever the verdict, there is no doubt the loser will appeal it.

I see two possible outcomes, one that will fail in time and one that will hold indefinitely. The bound-to-fail outcome is one in which either the Supreme Court or Congress draws a line: “Law enforcement agencies may compel the use of technical expertise in cases of national security, meaning that criteria X, Y, and Z have been met.” Most likely the Supreme Court will punt, saying that it cannot compel Apple in the absence of new law that addresses the issue. Then we’ll have the spectacle of Congress trying to spell out the criteria. If a law is passed and signed by the president, it will no doubt be challenged in court, and we’re back to square one. Round and round we’ll go until the whole enterprise collapses.

We’ll get a durable outcome if the Supreme Court concludes:

• Apple’s rights would indeed be violated if something it made—something useful and demanded by the marketplace—could be unmade by court order.

• No matter what protections Apple took to keep its solution a secret, its details would eventually be discovered. Criminals would know a solution existed and would focus their energy on learning it. All it would take is one key software engineer who was bypassed for promotion and then offered a princely sum to tell what he knew.

• Law enforcement already has a plethora of analytic tools to use in fighting crime. No doubt new, non-invasive ones will come along. Therefore, on balance, the advantages of protecting our identities and private thoughts outweigh the advantages of adding a decryption tool to law enforcement’s arsenal.

The threat of terrorism is forcing us to make difficult choices about our right to privacy. In their zeal to protect us, government agencies will not cease in eroding this right—unless we push back.

American mythology

Brace yourselves. Here comes an appalling assertion: None of our teachers is doing an adequate job of teaching American History! What do I mean by “adequate job”? you ask. An adequate job is presenting a reasonably accurate and complete picture of the events and ideas that have shaped American society.

To do this, teachers have to talk about what is positive in our history, of course. This includes topics like the establishment of a Constitutional republic, the enumeration of human rights, the ingenious effort to balance the powers of government, wars that won personal freedom and defended against foreign threats, the progressive expansion of civil rights, and increased attention to the welfare of the poor and elderly. But the negative must also be included. For example: the slave trade and the degradation of slavery, the theft of much of the West from Mexico, the abominable treatment of Native Americans, the Robber Barons, Jim Crow, the Prohibition debacle, the endless cycle of booms and busts, government lies and ineptitude in recent wars, and the decades-long weakening of the middle class.

We know that much of our negative history is whitewashed in textbooks and in classroom discussions, particularly in the Red States. Worse, however, is that no course in our middle schools or high schools deals with American mythology. This is the set of ideas that Americans generally believe to be true that are never exposed as illusions. Why never? Because any teacher who did more than hint at them obliquely would be severely disciplined and probably fired. So as the decades roll by, a gullible electorate remains under the spell of myth spinners and misguided convictions.

Fortunately, it’s never too late to disabuse ourselves of misinformation and plug the holes in our formal education. Perhaps this summary of the worst of the American myths will help…

America is a nation of, by, and for the people. Like any other country, ours is “of” ordinary working people. That, in itself, is trivially true. The “by” part, however, is not. The representatives we govern through do not, in fact, represent us. Rather, they represent the wealthy and powerful, who finance their electoral victories and hire lobbyists to set legislative agendas. Naturally, the “for” part—the beneficiaries of the process—are again the wealthy and powerful. To make Lincoln’s formulation true, a great many unlikely changes would have to occur. For starters, the abolition of gerrymandering, the apportionment of senators based on state population, election campaign funding with taxpayer dollars, and limits on the access to legislators by lobbyists.

Our Constitution is a fixed star to navigate by. As the legend goes, it was set in the firmament by a founding group of geniuses, who built in an amendment process to keep its guidance relevant over the centuries. In truth, the Constitution is a creaky old thing that hasn’t been amended nearly enough to keep pace with a changing world. To cite some examples:

• The War Powers Clause, which was written in ignorance of ICBMs, stealth aircraft, drones, aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, worldwide air travel, suitcase bombs, terrorism, etc.—modern threats that can devastate us or our allies before Congressmen can get their pants on.
• The rules by which the houses of Congress conduct their business—there are none! Each house is free to draw them up as they please. So the House speaker can invoke the so-called Hastert Rule and keep any bill from coming to the floor. In the Senate, the minority party can block most legislation with just 41 no votes. The silence of the Constitution on such matters has made Congress a moribund branch of government.
• Trial by jury, which has it roots in ancient Greece and Rome, where “peers” really meant “peers.” Today, jury selection is an absurd ordeal, with voir dire examinations and character consultants. Jury trials are an American obsession; we conduct about 80% of the world’s total. Other democracies rely much more on judges, individually and in panels.
• The Second Amendment, which establishes the the right of people to bear arms (read “muskets”) to ensure the existence of “a well regulated militia.” Well, there are no militias today. Instead we have the National Guard of the United States, a reserve force that comprises the National Guards of the states and territories. Its members do not rely on privately owned weapons. In effect, the Second Amendment is obsolete. It should have been amended long ago to say that gun ownership is a privilege, not a right, and therefore subject to strict regulation, as owning a motor vehicle is.
• Birthright citizenship, as stated in the Fourteenth Amendment. It was meant to confer citizenship on former slaves and their progeny. But Section 1 gives an incentive to people to enter the country illegally, have children who are automatically citizens, and use that as a lever to gain citizenship for themselves.

Freedom is an absolute good. Don’t get me wrong. Freedom is a good thing, generally, but we are mesmerized by the concept and value it beyond any rational limits. Here’s some evidence:

• In explaining the necessity of separating from England, The Declaration of Independence made a case for armed rebellion: “… when a long train of abuses and usurpations…evinces a design to reduce them [the people] under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government….” Add to these words the paranoia that our government has its tentacles in our daily lives, and you get a paranoid population that owns hundreds of millions of unregulated firearms and stands ready to fight for freedom. So passionate is this vigilance that no amount of routine horror has been sufficient to instigate prudent controls on gun ownership. We can regulate driving, drones, drugs, and tobacco to protect public safety, but we can’t regulate guns. Ben Carson summed it up for the gun nuts: “I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away.”
• Another irrational freedom is the freedom to have a secret life, a black box to everyone but especially to the government. This paranoia is no doubt another symptom of the perceived British tyranny in colonial American; authorities could be ruthless in pursuing troublemakers. It’s another paranoia we have never purged, despite the very different times we live in. We file tax returns, we share our medical records to facilitate health care, we apply for bank loans, and we post our opinions on social media. Yet we don’t want the NSA to look for patterns in telephone records, even though we know that some among us are plotting mayhem. Of course, authorities must always establish a credible “need to know.” Beyond that, we have to let them keep us safe.
• We have a great dread of losing freedom to our federal government. It’s so profound that we created a Constitutional amendment to check federal power, benign or not, by reserving all unspecified powers to the states. We fought a civil war because slavery was a right reserved to the states. Women’s suffrage and income taxes would have resided with the states were it not for Constitutional amendments. Old-age security and gay marriage had to be upheld by the Supreme Court to be instituted nationwide. The Bill of Rights itself did not originally apply to the states! It was only in the 1920’s that the Supreme Court used the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to “incorporate” the Bill of Rights into state law.

“That government is best which governs least.” It’s not at all surprising, given our mania for freedom, that many Americans applaud the idea of living close to the edge of anarchy. The obvious way to achieve this condition is to make government as trivial as possible. Jefferson got the ball rolling with ideas like, “It is to secure our rights that we resort to government at all.” The sticky wicket here is what he thinks “our rights” are. A slender few, I’ll bet. Thoreau tried again with the quote shown in bold. He subscribed to a movement called Transcendentalism, which preached the dopey idea that human motives, pure and benevolent by nature, had been corrupted by society and institutions. Transcendentalists believed that by maximizing individual freedom and self-reliance the good in people would emerge (a view of human nature antithetical to the one held by our founders). The movement waned in a couple of decades but not before Thoreau’s maxim was lodged in the national ethos.

The Constitution gives the federal government the power to make war and to regulate commerce with “foreign Nations and among the several States.” Of course—no one state or subset of states can perform a task that requires nationwide coordination. So what about other tasks that affect citizens no matter where they live? Tasks like maintaining highways, bridges, and rail systems; providing life-sustaining services to the indigent; guaranteeing the delivery of health care without undue economic hardship; ensuring, through public education, that new generations are well informed and able to function well in adult society; protecting the consumer against unethical business practices; and funding beneficial programs that lack sufficient private investment (for example, energy development, space exploration, and medical research). If we leave these tasks to the states, they will be ignored by some and done to differing degrees of adequacy by the rest. If the laws of State X produce more impoverished, sickly, and poorly educated citizens than State Y, how can we say that “equal protection of the law” exists? The test of whether the federal government is governing enough is how little it allows states to undermine the rights or their citizens.

Free-market capitalism is the ideal economic system. This is two myths rolled into one. The first is that a free market—a market with zero regulation—can even exist. It can’t; such a market would soon annihilate itself. So when people talk about “free-market capitalism,” they mean capitalism with a bare minimum of regulation (sound familiar?). The second myth is that such a system is economically ideal; that is, most likely to produce sustained prosperity. In fact, the market of goods and services we have today is so unfettered by regulation—so tilted toward a “free” market—that it cannot sustain widespread employment, and sometimes collapses. The collapses and more severe contractions are usually due to consumer ignorance and runaway greed. Investors buy with borrowed money, banks purposely make bad loans, insurers offer protection they cannot deliver, finance houses risk exponential losses in the quest for exponential gains—all due to a lack of government regulation.

We are a secular nation with separation of church and state. I’ve written about this before. We give lip service to being a secular nation, but there is no end of evidence that we are a Christian nation. Ask for a creche to be removed from public property, and there are howls. Ask for God to be removed from our money, our pledges, and our public oaths, and there are howls. Ask public officials and private citizens to offer their services to gays who want to marry, and there are howls. Sure, there is no legal basis for a bias toward Christianity, but no matter; it is grounded deeply in the American culture. So deeply that any legal victory for secularism begets cries of Christian persecution!

The larger our military, the safer we are. If we changed our name to Fortress America, no one would have a legitimate reason to object. We spend as much on our military as the next 12 nations combined. We spend a third of all the military spending in the world. Every year. The U.S. Army stations soldiers in 9 foreign countries. One of these countries, Italy, has 113 facilities; Japan has 84; Germany, 56. The U.S. Marine Corps has camps in 3 foreign countries, with a multitude in Afghanistan and Japan. The U.S. Navy is in 14 foreign countries. The U.S. Air Force is in 21 foreign countries. I won’t bother to count the military facilities located here. Suffice it to say, there are dozens. The big question is, have we bought safety for ourselves? Of course we haven’t—not even close. Yet every year we spend more, and presidential candidate Donald Trump says, “I’ll make our military so powerful that no one will dare mess with us!”

Briefly after World War II, we had a monopoly on nuclear weapons; now nine countries have them, and Iran is within a hair’s breadth. Once we alone could put these weapons in missile warheads; now that capability is common. How long before stealth and drone technology are common? Not even a decade, I should think. How long before computer hackers can take down an electrical grid? It could probably be done now. How long before satellites are weaponized? Maybe that’s happened already—I don’t know. The point is, we keep spending more on military technology without getting any safer. Surely we have long passed the point of diminishing returns, but no one in government has bothered to examine that likelihood. Worst of all, we spend a pittance to combat a genuine global threat: climate change.

America is exceptional. In an insignificant sense, this assertion is true: we are home to an exceptionally high concentration of wealthy people. Our economy is exceptionally productive. We have an exceptional entertainment industry. In the same sense, a great many nations do one thing or several things exceptionally well. Many have an exceptional cuisine, an exceptional musical tradition, an exceptional literary and artistic tradition, an exceptional electronics industry, an exceptional automotive industry, an exceptional reputation for fine craftsmanship, and so on. But when a fellow American proudly says, “America is exceptional,” he doesn’t mean any of those things. He means we are exceptional as a civilization; as remarkable in world history as the Greeks, Romans, or Chinese of bygone centuries; greater in all important respects than any nation that exists today. If you agree, you should listen to the rant in the first episode of “Newsroom,” a TV show that dealt bravely in hard political truths. All I would add are a couple of items in which America really does lead the developed nations of the world: incarcerations and child poverty. Anyone proud of that?

As I reread what I’ve written here, I’m struck by what a formidable challenge it would be to de-mythologize the America that’s presented to us in our schoolrooms and media. Not only would we need teachers who cared nothing about employment, we’d need to recast the social studies curriculum to present the American past as a blend of American history (the usual fare), sociology, political science, and critical thinking. How thrilling to think of the difference that would make! How sad to know it will never be.