Arthur redux

It’s been a long time—over 3 years—since I shared a post with my neighbor Arthur. I should do it more often. I represent one side in the Culture Wars and he the other, and he holds up his end so civilly I almost forget how repugnant his opinions are.

Just the other day, we were chitchatting across the fence, and I couldn’t resist the urge to feel him out again on gun control issues. Here, in part, is our conversation.

Arthur, that horrific mass shooting in Las Vegas… any chance it made you modify, if only a little, your thoughts about gun control?

Not in the final analysis, Ken. For a while, I wondered if something might be done to minimize such tragedies, but then I realized it was a fool’s errand.

So you think it’s hopeless? How can making a serious dent in the frequency of gun crime be hopeless?

I’d say unrealistic rather than hopeless. It all has to do with American exceptionalism. Our country was born in a rebellion that depended on the widespread ownership of firearms. But more than that, there was, and is, a temperament of defiant independence. It’s in our cultural DNA— a “don’t tread on me” mindset. You need a gun to make that warning credible.

I’ll give you an example of why gun freedom is a done deal. That madman in Vegas… he used an add-on, a bump stock, to convert his semiautomatic rifles into automatic ones. Now possession of an automatic rifle, in effect a machine gun, is illegal, but adding a bump stock isn’t. Makes no sense. To muffle the post-Vegas outcry, the NRA and the Republican Congress hinted at a willingness to outlaw bump stocks. It looked like a sop, but now we see it was really a feint. The bump-stock ban, the tiniest of concessions, has fizzled. What does that tell you?

Good point, but of all the changes in the ebb and flow of history, cultural shifts are the slowest to take hold. I think in each shift there’s a tipping point, preceded by a lengthy groundswell of contrary opinion. Take gay marriage, for example. How long did that take to become acceptable? Right, it’s been regarded as a sinful perversion ever since the institution was invented. What about smoking tobacco? It became popular in Elizabethan times. 400 years later, cartons of cigarets were given as Christmas presents. Then, in 1964, the Surgeon General’s report, Smoking and Health, was released. Most Americans want well-regulated firearms. Their moment will come.

What you’re saying is nothing is forever. OK, I’ll buy that.

Tell me, Arthur, why do you own guns?

Safety, Ken. Safety for me and my family.

May I paraphrase and say it’s “freedom from fear”?

Um… OK, that’s pretty much the same idea.

You know, this reminds me of FDR’s Four Freedoms speech in 1941. He believed people around the world should enjoy these basic freedoms:

* Freedom of speech
* Freedom of worship
* Freedom from want
* Freedom from fear

So you’re saying FDR would validate my reason for owning guns? Bravo! I commend him for this insight.

But, there’s a catch. What if lightly regulated gun ownership actually creates more bloodshed and mayhem—and therefore more fear—than well regulated gun ownership?

Again, your embrace of statistics. I’ll say what I said before… statistics don’t prove anything!

You’ve also said that an attraction to guns is in our cultural DNA. Which means we’re paying a price—more gun crimes—for our unique DNA. Doesn’t that tell you that gun crime statistics are probably right?

OK, OK. Maybe there is some truth in the stats. But that doesn’t negate the fact there’s nothing we can do about it.

Well, I don’t buy the DNA metaphor. I believe that identification with cultural labels—gut behavior—trumps reason. But sooner or later reason will have its season, and that season will be transformative.

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.

Intolerance

The kerfuffles late last month in Indiana and Arkansas confused a great many. There was broad agreement that the issue was intolerance, but what kind of intolerance? The Bible thumpers and the Republicans who curry their favor—pretty much the entire party—told us they were addressing religious intolerance. Of course, they were instead legitimizing sexual intolerance, and any other intolerance that could be tied to scripture.

In retrospect, I’ve realized that the RSA (Red States of America) had done it again! Uncannily, they made us blue-state dwellers feel like broad-minded, accepting people. I found myself basking in my superior moral vision. I had fallen into the trap! I was on the road to the kingdom of Holier Than Thou. There was only one thing to do: remind myself of the many ways in which I’m an intolerant person. I made a little list of my intolerances, which I’d like to share with you. In repayment for these confessions, perhaps you could comment on this post with your own list.

I am intolerant of:

The gun culture. This is the culture that comes to mind when the rest of the world thinks of “American culture.” We’re a nation of cowboys, all too eager to deliver justice out of a gun barrel. In truth, many of us abhor guns, but we’re in the minority. It’s those in the absurd majority who have created the American caricature. You know who you are. You believe an ambiguous anachronism in the Bill of Rights is the ultimate source of your freedom. The impulse to possess shiny, portable tools that go bang is irresistible to you. The fantasy of the armed nebbish who neutralizes strong and menacing bad guys is thrilling. Guns confer real power, and you don’t even have to fire them to feel powerful. Carry one on your hip, and you project power. Carry one in your pocket, and you have a delightful secret! Well, enjoy your illusion of power, but please stay away from me.

People who are guided by scripture. Religious scripture has an important place in the cultures of the world, as an anthropological record, as a historical curiosity, and sometimes as great literature. But certainly not as a model of the cosmos or as an unfailing guide to right conduct. If you think it is, you’ve adopted one of the infantile worldviews of bygone millennia, when superstition was the first line of defense against fear and suffering. So long as this sort of thinking holds the world in its grip, ugly divisiveness will plague us.

Political ignoramuses. I admit it—“political ignoramuses” is pretty much synonymous with “Republicans,” especially in the last 15 years. Maybe it’s my imagination, but the leaders of that party actually seem to be getting more paleolithic with each election cycle. And it’s not just the leadership. The people who vote for them have also been whacked with the stupid stick. (A case in point is the adjacent photo, showing Scott Walker admiring a hard hat with a tattoo of St. Ronald.)

This might be comical but for the fact that by Election Day, 2016, the Democrats will have controlled the White House for nearly 8 years. Voters like to rotate parties, the issues be damned. Sooner or later, the Republicans will sweep everything and a Dark Generation will commence in America. I know of no way to stop it. I can only hold these bringers of darkness in contempt.

Hollywood studios and ad agencies. These are the people who tell us, on the big and small screens, what the words “attractive” and “likable” mean, and what it’s like to be truly alive and engaged in the moment. That is, “hip.” They have an easy task because most people, having only the slightest clue, are thankful for any information they can get. In fact, Hollywood and Madison Avenue don’t have much of a clue either, so they go for easy formulas. Young and sexy is attractive, fun-loving is likable, uninhibited is hip. So we have a society that’s divided between the inauthentic—people whose personas are the product of the commercial and entertainment media—and the alienated—people who are onto the manipulation but suffer from a social disconnection. One can easily imagine the destructive consequences of this cleavage but, in the last analysis, it’s OK. In America, taking responsibility is beside the point. If you’re making good money, it’s all good.

Those are my big ones, buy why stop there? I’ve got lots of petty intolerances, too. They are made of disapproval and bewilderment, pretty much in equal parts. For example:

People with annoying speech habits. I don’t go around clucking my tongue whenever I hear mispronunciations or bad grammar, but there are some errors that set my teeth on edge. For example, when people pronounce “niche” as NEESH. How did the pronunciation revert to French? Have all the pretentious people in the country entered into a conspiracy? Another one is “often,” with the T spoken. I can’t recall anyone pronouncing the T when I was younger. Even worse are the people who leave out the T but lengthen the word to “oftentimes.” I can’t take anyone seriously who says that.

The grammatical error I hate most is confusing “lay” with “lie.” Somehow “lay” became intransitive as well as transitive, a dual-purpose verb. It’s not as though I hear this error now and then; I hear it constantly, and in contexts where it should never come up. In physical therapy, for example. I’ve had three physical therapists in the past six years, covering more than two dozen therapy sessions, and in every instance I’ve heard “please lay down on the exercise table.”

People who send text messages. It’s wonderful that we can communicate so easily with others who are far away. We can send email to practically anyone in the civilized world. If we want real-time intimacy, we can call them on our mobile phones or use Skype. We can share thoughts within a circle of friends through social networking. Our lives are interlinked as never before. Tell me then, what need is there for sending real-time text messages? What does it add to the smorgasbord of communication services we already have? People who do it with regularity aren’t merely staying in touch. They are bonding in a way that submerges their individuality and reduces their power to think for themselves. What’s more, they can be a danger to themselves and to others, as when a texter hypnotically walks in front of a car or drives through a red light. Frequent texting is a scary neurosis.

People who tweet. I know celebrities tweet and politicians tweet. They want to be out there, accessible, down with the hoi polloi. Twitter is made for them. But why on earth do John and Jane Doe tweet? Their opinions count for nothing in this medium. All they do is move a “reaction” needle, and that means—what? Perhaps you think that tweets are informative or make entertaining reading. Nope. No important insight or news item has ever depended on Twitter to enter the stream of human discourse. In fact, the content of Twitter is pretty much a sewer. And who are John and Jane Doe, besides being ordinary folks? I think they’re people who just want to pop off, and then text their friends with “Hey, I tweeted. Yeah, the dress was definitely gold and white.”

Sports fans. I have to clarify immediately. I don’t mean people who participate in sports or have kids in sports leagues. Nor do I mean those who watch a half-hour of a sports event on TV, or an entire Super Bowl, or a couple of World Series games, or even several hours of the Olympics; they are merely curious spectators. I mean someone who is sports-obsessed. Certainly this includes body painters; people who dress as vikings, pirates, cowboys, cheese heads, etc.; and people who come out for games in freezing weather. It further includes anyone who holds season tickets for any sports team or belongs to a sports fantasy league. And I want to throw in all those who routinely bore their co-workers with day-after-the-game small talk and their friends with emails in the same vein. Not to mention those who daily read the Sports section, subscribe to Sports Illustrated, watch Sports Jeopardy, listen to sports talk on the radio, or ever watch a pregame, halftime, or postgame show.

Sports fans are in dire need of heroes. How did their obsession with heroes come to be? I wondered about this for quite a while, and then one day it dawned on me: sports fans have never achieved the escape velocity needed to leave childhood behind.

Having confessed all this, I’m nevertheless certain that St. Peter will not bar me at the Pearly Gates. If I ran a catering service and a gun-toting, semi-literate goon walked into my shop, wearing a Raiders jacket, a cross, and a “Cruz to Victory with Ted” button, I’d say in a good-natured voice, “Please come back without the gun, sir, and I’ll be happy to serve you.” As long as a person isn’t threatening or obnoxious, I’ll do business with him.

The American Cheerleader

The midterm elections will be here in a few days. When the results are in, everyone will be gratified by some of them and disappointed by others, but in any case most of us will share a tingle of pride—we did it again! The greatest democracy on earth will have again made some leadership changes and course corrections and the ship of state will sail peacefully on. All our rights and freedoms, set out in the Constitution and affirmed by our courts and traditions, will be intact. Our country will be as it always has been—the best place in the world to live. No American with his head on straight could conclude otherwise.

Wait… time out! That’s not my voice. That’s the voice of the American Cheerleader. Most likely we heard it first from our parents. It then got reinforced in every American history class from elementary school to middle school to high school. When we became adults, we heard it from friends and acquaintances, and certainly from politicians. It possessed some of us. As in the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it snatched our minds. Many of us are quite comfortable being snatched. If that describes you, you should stop reading now. But if it makes you uneasy, if you think that rah-rah voice is messing with your objectivity, I can help you to exorcize it. The process I use involves a hard look at some of our favorite cheers. Read on…

We are entitled to certain rights that no person or government agency can ever take away. These are our so-called “unalienable” rights. The Declaration of Independence tells us these include “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” I think by “life” and “liberty,” Jefferson meant that we each have the right to proceed with our life as we choose and not have it hijacked by an authority—Mother England, for example—for arbitrary or unjust reasons. It appears that, on the whole, we do enjoy these rights today—that is, if we’re white. But if we’re a person of color, not so much. We have only to look at the way the police enforce the law when detaining black people. If there’s any resistance, the current police procedure seems to be “fire your gun until death is certain.” Or we can look at the percentage of Americans who are incarcerated. Our incarceration rate is 7 in every 1,000. Only the Seychelles and Singapore have higher rates. That means we’re worse than the likes of Russia, Cuba, Iran, and Syria. How, then, in light of these data, is it even conceivable that life and liberty are being respected?

There’s yet another way to look at these rights. Jefferson was thinking only about government actions that limit our unalienable rights. What about government inactions? For example, when the government fails to regulate the ownership of firearms, might that not affect life and the pursuit of happiness? When government fails to regulate the schemes of bankers and financiers that crash the economy, what happens to the 99% who are innocently pursuing happiness? And when government fails to create work projects for people who have been jobless for a year or more, doesn’t that also show contempt for life and happiness? Such callousness is no accident. One of our political parties—the one predicted to control both houses of Congress next year—believes that only two government actions are justified: defending the country and abetting Social Darwinism.

The First Amendment prohibits Congress from making any law that abridges freedom of speech or freedom of the press. Does this mean that we can say anything or publish anything we like? No, not anything—nothing that is slanderous, libelous, or endangers public safety, and most of us agree that these are small and necessary exceptions. What’s critical to our democracy is what I call “enabling speech.” This is speech (and writing) that gives us the information we need to discuss social and political issues knowledgeably. The other kind of speech is “diverting speech.” It deals with pop culture (including sports), crime, and man-bites-dog topics. It really doesn’t need Constitutional protection. At bottom, then, there are two critical questions: does our media provide us with a continual stream of enabling speech, and does our government do anything to impede its flow?

To the first question I’d say yes, but it isn’t really a stream; it’s a trickle. The business of television, Internet, and print news outlets is mainly to excite and entertain. For example, the preponderance of speech on the ABC, NBC, and CBS news programs is of the diverting kind. ABC is the worst, with at least 80% of its news content dedicated to diversion. CNN’s specialty is sensationalism. Fox News poisons its trickle with editorial bias. The upshot is that the enabling speech has no depth. You get only a veneer of the ideas and events that are shaping the world. If you want depth, you have to diligently seek out the TV shows, Internet sites, newspapers, and magazines where dedicated journalists do their work. (I have some suggestions on my Links page.)

To the second question I’d say yes, the government tries to impede enabling speech when journalists expose its dishonesty, stupidity, or incompetence. Take the case of the “Pentagon Papers,” a history of our engagement in Vietnam that records the lies and deceptions practiced by four administrations on Congress and the public. The document was surreptitiously given to the New York Times and Washington Post, which began publishing installments. The Nixon Administration obtained a federal court injunction and succeeded in stopping publication until the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the newspapers. Or take the recent case of James Risen, an investigative journalist who has twice won a Pulitzer Prize for writing critically about government agencies, most recently about the CIA. To do their jobs, journalists like Risen rely on leakers, or what they call “anonymous sources.” Such a person revealed to Risen that the CIA had recruited a Russian scientist to pass erroneous nuclear blueprints to the Iranians. The scientist then told the Iranians that the blueprints were flawed. Risen wrote about it, and now the government is pressing him to reveal his source. Risen has refused and will likely be sent to jail. The message to potential leakers is clear: If you talk to journalists, they will out you or they will go to jail. This is how our government fends off embarrassment and public scrutiny.

The First Amendment also prohibits Congress from making any law that establishes a national religion. However, the absence of such a law is irrelevant—we have a de facto national religion! It’s a hyphenated religion: Judao-Christianity. (The “Judao” part is only a reluctant acknowledgment by Christians that the Old Testament is a necessary prologue to the New Testament.)

The evidence that our government endorses Judao-Christianity is right in front of us every day:

• We put “In God We Trust” on our money. Is there another democracy in the world whose money asserts such a thing? No, not even Israel.
• Both houses of Congress have a chaplain who opens every day’s business with a prayer, and who provides spiritual counsel to the members. Only Christians have been chaplains.
• Our Pledge of Allegiance affirms that we are a nation “under God.” These words were added by an act of Congress in 1954. (How was this constitutional??) President Eisenhower proclaimed that “in this way we are reaffirming the transcendence of religious faith in America’s heritage and future.” I don’t know about you, but religious faith isn’t transcendent in my life.
• Every president in my memory has concluded speeches to the nation with “and may God bess America.” The tone of the final sentences is prayerful by design, and the call to respond with an “amen” is compelling. Presidents must perform this ritual and testify to their faith in many other ways; otherwise, there’s no possibility of being re-elected. In fact, all candidates for federal office or even a high state office must make a show of religion, whether sincere or not, to have any hope of getting elected. American politics is no place for avowed atheists and agnostics; the leadership they might provide is lost to us.

At this point in the exorcism, I imagine hearing objections. You’re saying, “No country is perfect, but our democracy is an instrument of continuous improvement. We’ll solve the problems you cite as a consensus for solutions emerges over time.” Fair enough. I would never say that we’re shackled with a given problem for all time, but I would like to make three points in rebuttal.

First, some of our problems are actually getting worse. The idea of putting gun ownership beyond any possibility of regulation is no more than 50 years old. It’s the child of an NRA propaganda campaign and has gotten so out of control that state after state is passing “open carry” laws. The Wild West of the Nineteenth Century is taking over the whole of America in the Twenty-First Century. The problem of race relations is also getting worse, and no one is proposing the one action that can bring about an improvement: a national code of police conduct that dramatically reduces the use of force, especially deadly force. Right now, every police overreaction is seen as a local problem that needs a local remedy. Governmental intimidation of journalists is yet another worsening problem. The trend is fed by the growth of data collection and covert activities, which in turn makes investigative journalists more vigilant, and rightly so. Does anyone believe that the security mania in our country will subside anytime soon?

Second, a large percentage of the American electorate is disaffected and has been for generations. Fewer than 60% of eligible voters turn out for presidential elections and under 40% turn out for midterm elections. I believe it’s the disaffected voters who are the key to correcting America’s most vexing problems, but as these problems worsen, the cynicism deepens, and the likelihood of these voters turning out becomes even more improbable. This is our country’s Catch-22. 

Last, our Constitution has given us a democracy in which the will of the people is often frustrated. For example:

• The drawing of state congressional districts is left to the states, and whatever party is in power in the state legislature is free to gerrymander the districts. A typical gerrymandering strategy is “packing,” which means drawing a district’s boundaries so that it contains as many members of the opposition party as possible. This concedes an overwhelming victory to the opposition in that district but weakens the representation of the opposition in many other districts. In this way the democratic principle of “one person, one vote” is subverted. There are democratic countries in which this tactic is ineffective. In New Zealand and Germany, for example, if the proportion of votes cast for a party is greater than the proportion of seats it won, the party is awarded more seats, which it fills from a list of supplemental candidates. So these countries can never suffer the kind of travesty that occurred in our 2012 House elections. Democratic candidates received 54,301,095 votes, Republican candidates 53,822,442 votes; yet the Republicans won 233 seats to the Democrats 199 seats!
• When the Constitution was being drafted, the states with small populations were concerned about being outgunned by states with large populations, so they conceded less representation in the House if every state would have two senators, irrespective of population. This patently undemocratic request was granted to ensure that the Constitution was ratified. So today a resident of Wyoming, population 582,658, has the same representation in the Senate as a resident of California, population 37,253,956. What is particularly galling is that we don’t even need a Senate, and we wouldn’t have one if the Founding Fathers hadn’t insisted on copying the houses of the the British parliament. I’d be happy to trust to the judgment of the House if only their members were chosen fairly.
• The Senate, like the House, is free to make its own rules, even if those rules are undemocratic. Perhaps the most notorious Senate rule is the one that tells them how to proceed after a presidential nominee or piece of legislation has been debated. If it’s a nominee other than a Supreme Court nominee, they take an up or down vote—not on whether to confirm the nominee but on whether to table the matter or move on to a confirmation vote. Sound crazy? Well, the process is even crazier when it concerns legislation or a Supreme Court nominee. In that case, they again vote to table or go forward, but it takes a supermajority of 60 votes to move on to a final vote! So if your party has 59 Senate seats, don’t get cocky. The legislative mandate you think you have doesn’t mean a thing if the opposition can line up just 41 votes against you.

To complete the exorcism, only one thing more need be said: the Congress we elect doesn’t even work for us! Though on the federal payroll, they’re actually in the employ of the business interests who lobby them and contribute to their re-election campaigns. I know this coup de grace is likely to leave you feeling a bit hollow. I’d like very much to end on a positive note of some kind, so I’ll quote a political pundit I saw on the Internet a few days ago. After discussing a number of issues that were besetting the country, he added, “The American Dream is alive and well—in Scandinavia!”

Arthur speaks his mind

My neighbor Arthur had some strong objections to my last post, specifically to my characterization of gun owners. Not surprisingly, he’s a gun owner himself and took my remarks personally. I encouraged him to leave a comment and vent to his heart’s content, but he said, “That’s not my style.” I didn’t want to leave him disgruntled, so I made a proposal: “How about an interview? We’ll talk about your point of view, and I’ll post it.” He liked the idea, so I sat down with him the next day. Here’s a transcript of our conversation.

To start, Arthur, I think it would be good for you to say some words about yourself—an introduction.

Sure. I’m Arthur Bromwell. I’m 43, married with two kids, and I’m a CPA. I live here in San Jose. I like camping and hiking—most anything to do with the outdoors. I also like to read, especially science fiction. And, of course, I own a gun—a pistol, in fact. I’ll give you a picture of it for your blog.

Thanks. So now the floor is yours to respond to what I wrote. Just fire away… so to speak.

Well, first, I didn’t like being compared to Muslim terrorists who fire their guns into the air. That was insulting to all American gun owners and, by the way, to Muslims. If any of them happen to read your blog, you’re in big trouble, Ken. I’d buy a gun if I were you.

I think you misunderstood that part, Arthur. I was going for a familiar image to help make a point. And I didn’t use the label “terrorists.” In any case, the “primal joy” of firing a weapon was my focus.

Right, that was another insult. There’s no joy in firing a gun. You made it sound like it’s some kind of sick thrill. It’s just the responsible use of a tool, almost always in a safe place, like a firing range.

Would you say it’s a powerful tool?

Yes.

One that confers power well beyond your own physical power?

OK… so what?

Well, let’s imagine something out of science fiction. Suppose you woke up one morning, and you discovered that you had incredible strength. You could lift anything. Everything had the weight of a feather. How would you feel about that?

Amazed, I suppose.

No doubt. But wouldn’t you also feel a thrill? Wouldn’t you laugh and think, “My God, look what I can do!”

I guess I would, but are you trying to say it would be the same as owning a gun?

Yes, much the same. Obviously a gun isn’t a lifting device, but it is a “power multiplier.” Something like spinach when Popeye eats it. Only guns are the real thing.

You’ve really twisted this, Ken. Yes, I can do things with a gun that I can’t do without a gun, but it isn’t part of me all the time. I own one to protect my family, my home, and me. It’s a powerful tool all right, but an emergency tool.

So I guess you don’t buy the claim that the vast majority of shooting homicides occur between intimates, not between householders and strangers.

That might be true, Ken, but I’ve seen people manipulate data until it suits their purpose. All I can say is, I’m very responsible when it comes to owning a gun. I own a gun safe, and that’s where I keep it. My brother-in-law—I call him Crazy Jerry even though Pauline hates it—is always asking to see my pistol, just to hold it for a little while. No way! That gun is for my use only.

Does your brother-in-law ever visit when you’re not at home, and does Pauline know the safe combination?

Well, sure he visits. After all, he’s her brother. Pauline knows the combination. She has to for her protection. But she would never open the safe for her brother.

I’m curious about something, Arthur. If you thought you heard a burglar in your house, you’d have to open your gun safe to get the gun, right?

Well, no, that would take too long. I take it out of the safe before I go to bed and put it on the nightstand. I keep bullets in the nightstand’s drawer.

I see. A kind of nightly ritual.

I’d rather call it a good safety habit.

What about safety outside your home. Ever take your gun outside?

No. Not yet, anyhow. Right-to-carry is still in the courts in California; open-carry isn’t allowed here.

You’re right, Arthur. California is one of only 8 states in which the right to carry might not be granted. And it’s one of just 6 states that doesn’t allow open-carry. Ever heard of a “Gold Star Open-Carry” state?

No, that’s a new one on me.

That’s an open-carry state that doesn’t require an open-carry permit. And you can take the gun anywhere in the state. To churches, airports, supermarkets, restaurants—anywhere. Any particular location can ask that you not enter with your weapon, but you don’t have to oblige. There are 15 such states.

Wow, that’s what I call freedom! That’s what the Founding Fathers had in mind!

One morning I turned on the news and saw a report from a restaurant in an open-carry state. It looked like all the customers had guns, and all the waitresses had guns on their hips. They walked with a swagger, and they were bursting with pride when they were interviewed.

I see where you’re going, Ken. You’re on your hobby horse again about guns puffing up a person’s ego.

Yes, indeed. A power boost is an ego boost. They’re inseparable. You still don’t see that?

Nope. When you wear a gun outside the house, that’s also for safety reasons. Naturally people are going to be more confident when they feel safer. It’s that simple, Ken.

Arthur, you seem to see danger everywhere.

Of course! C’mon, Ken, I know you watch the news.

I do, but I don’t live in Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, or Nigeria. Look, Arthur, I understand that not everyone has the same sense of danger. I’m just glad that you’re not one of those terribly insecure people who owns an arsenal.

No, I’d never do that, but I do plan to buy another gun.

What? Why?

Because guns are beautiful, Ken! Most people don’t realize it, but most guns today are amazing pieces of technology. Just think—do you own more than one watch? More than one computer or camera? Why? Because the technology fascinates you.

I don’t believe it! You’re making an aesthetic argument for guns?

I guess so, yes.

But surely you see that the more guns we have around us—in gun safes, on nightstands, in showcases, on waitresses’ hips—the greater the chance they’ll be used by a lunatic or in an impulse shooting.

Yes, I read that in your last post. You say there’s a correlation, but like I said, you can make data prove anything.

All right, Arthur. I’m going to call this a standoff. Many thanks for forcefully giving your point of view. The blog’s readers will now have a chance to say what they think.

The big D

I first learned about psychological defense mechanisms in college, in an Intro to Psych class. The prof told us about acting out, compartmentalization, projection, dissociation, regression, and reaction formation—all profound insights into the psyche. But the granddaddy of them all, to me, was denial. For my money, love doesn’t make the world go round—denial does.

Denial permeates every level at which people interact. It’s rife internationally and within nations. It’s the hallmark of religions and political parties. It dominates our financial world, the way we educate, law, and race relations. Need convincing? Let’s take a trip around the globe, across the American landscape, and into our institutions…

The world population is a tick under 7.2 billion at this writing. Every year the birth rate exceeds the death rate by 75 million; with medical advances we can expect this number to steadily rise. As the population juggernaut rolls on, our oceans grow steadily more polluted. Ten percent of all the plastic manufactured ends up in the sea and causes more than a million sea birds and mammals to die yearly. The runoff of pesticides and fertilizers from farms produces toxins that deplete water of oxygen and kill marine life. Chemical pollution is responsible for an estimated 400 “dead zones” around the world. Every day, cruise ships dump 250,000 gallons of wastewater and sewage into our oceans with impunity. The sea life that survives poisoning and disease has been overfished for decades. It may be gone altogether in just a few more decades—a catastrophe for the ten percent of humanity that relies on a seafood diet. At the same time, there is good reason to believe that climate change is reducing crop yields. This means starvation around the world, fewer grains in our diets, and less food for livestock, which we also eat. Clearly, the problem of an exploding population and a challenged food supply is a worldwide crisis, but where is the alarm? Many are concerned, certainly, but look at the agendas of the UN and governments around the world. The problems at the top of their lists are all geopolitical. The #1 problem facing humanity gets little more than a shrug. This is denial on a grand scale.

Tens of millions of Russians, with Vladimir Putin foremost among them, believe there is a special glory in being a Russian. They can’t conceive that this isn’t so. Similarly, tens of millions of Americans believe there is a special glory in being an American. We even have a name for it: Exceptionalism. Americans just like anyone else? Absurd, and possibly treasonous. The British, French, Japanese, and Germans have all had delusions of “exceptionalism,” but their eventual disillusionment hasn’t made the slightest impression on us.

People have a genius for inventing ways in which they are superior beings. Nationalism is just a special case of tribalism, which is still thriving today. Of course, there’s religious superiority as well, down to the sectarian level. Nowhere is there a better showcase for the varieties of I’m-better-than-you than the Middle East. The entire region is a murderous cauldron of denial. The common denominator of Middle East relationships is denial of humanity. It goes this way: “I’m virtuous, you’re not; you’re some kind of disgusting devil-dog.” Many of the combatants in the region take this to the ultimate level: “Therefore you don’t deserve to live. In fact, your death would be a kind of cleansing.” Holocaust logic. ISIS isn’t the sole example of it, but they purvey it over the largest area. They teach us what early Islam must have been like, when the religion was spread by the sword from Spain to India in just 125 years.

The Israelis and Palestinians also deny each other’s humanity, which means, in effect, they prefer brutality to empathy. Their unanimity on this point locks them in a “denial bind.” Neither can accept the idea of living harmoniously with the inhuman other, and so both offer impossible peace conditions. Hamas wants freedom of movement, including the freedom to cross the border and cut Israeli throats. Israel offers a two-state solution so long as the division is entirely on its terms, meaning, among other things, complete control of Jerusalem. Deadlock. (You have to cut Israel a little slack. After all, do chosen people trade away pieces of the safe haven that God has promised?)

In America, we like our denial more refined. Republicans and Democrats see their opposites as subhuman only in certain respects. Republicans, as seen by Democrats, are unaccountably dim-witted. They suffer from diminished capacity and have the reasoning power of fleas. Democrats, on the other hand have cultivated naiveté to the point of a mental disorder; they can’t see that their political agenda will wreck everything our forebears have built. The majority of Americans happily pin a party affiliation on themselves and learn the slogans and knee-jerk perceptions that make thinking superfluous. Party affiliations confer the gratifying conviction of “I’m always right; he’s always wrong.” It won’t get you into heaven, but it makes life on earth more pleasant.

Denial in America is by no means confined to the political arena. It pervades our entire society:

• The leaders of business and finance, with few exceptions, believe that regulations are anathema, even though history repeatedly demonstrates that a lack of regulation lets greed run amok, which in turn collapses the economy. When we get a dead economy, these same titans believe that government must severely curtail spending to curtail debt, which will in turn inspire confidence and stimulate consumer demand. It happens that the last six years have served as a real-life laboratory for testing this thinking. After approving a modest stimulus in 2009, Congress thwarted every proposal to stimulate demand that the White House put forward. The result has been a slow, puny recovery that has left a trail of impoverishment and wrecked lives. In fact, if it weren’t for the stimulative policies of the Federal Reserve Board, we would have millions more unemployed than we do now. And what has the 1% learned from years of irrefutable data? That the government spent too much on unemployment benefits, food stamps, and medical insurance! The House even threatened not to pay the nation’s bills unless more counterproductive cuts were made!
• Speaking of the need to regulate, what about gun ownership? And how long will Americans deny that unregulated ownership leads to a high homicide rate? Those who oppose regulation will give you two reasons why nothing should stand between them and all the guns they want. First, safety. They feel more secure with guns around. But they have no explanation for data that shows the vast majority of shooting homicides occurs between intimates, not between a householder and a stranger. Second, freedom. When our tyrannical government eventually sends its agents to arrest them, they will stand tall in defense of their freedom. This notion is too ridiculous for comment. What gun owners are ultimately denying is the ego rush conferred by a tool that makes explosions and fires deadly projectiles. To command such power is a thrilling thing. You can see this clearly by recalling news clips showing the primal joy of Muslim fighters as they fire their weapons into the air. Power is bliss.
• Our educators have put grim data before us for decades. Our children compare poorly with the children of other countries in math ability, reading comprehension, verbal skills, and knowledge of science. In a world where educational outcomes and prosperity go hand in hand, this data is a frightening signal. So how has the education establishment responded? Basically, by denying that the other countries are doing something that we ought to adopt. Are they paying their teachers more to attract better prospects to the profession? Are they training their teachers more rigorously? Do the teachers relate to their students differently? Do they match curriculum to age groups differently? How do they confirm that learning has occurred? How are foreign teachers evaluated? None of our educators seem to care about the answers. They deny that they can be taught anything. I’m inclined to give them a no-confidence vote until I see a lot more humility about what they don’t understand.
• Our law enforcement establishment must do its job with fairness, firmness, compassion, and a regard for life. Its members would no doubt howl at any suggestion that they do less. Yet we repeatedly see evidence that they perform their jobs otherwise. In Los Angeles we see a highway patrolman pummel the face of a helpless woman as she lies on the ground. Obviously confused, she hadn’t obeyed his commands not to walk beside the freeway. On Staten Island we see four policemen grab a man who loudly insists he’s done nothing wrong. One of the officers applies a choke hold and doesn’t relax his grip, even when the beleaguered man calls out that he can’t breathe. He dies of a heart attack. In Ferguson, Missouri, we hear about a policeman who shoots an unarmed man for unclear reasons. We know, though, that the officer fired a volley of six shots, paused, and fired a volley of four more shots. Killed and rekilled. In nearby St. Louis, some days later, we see several policemen fire a volley of eight bullets, killing a man brandishing a knife but not attacking any of them. What do all these incidents have in common? Unquestionably, excessive force was used in all cases—killing force in three and life-threatening force in one. In all cases, the officers were not facing life-threatening danger, although there was a small chance of harm in two of the cases. It’s not a reach to conclude that in all cases the officers were prepared to kill rather than receive any harm. Is it an acceptable policy for a police officer—a professional keeper of the peace—to take a life rather than risk injury? That’s far from my law enforcement ideal. One point more. All four of the victims in these cases were black. Who among us has seen a comparable video where the victim was white? I can’t recall any. Yet I expect that every last law enforcement agency in the country would vehemently deny that they were poisoned by racial prejudice.

I’ve amused myself by imagining how transformed the world would be if I could snap my fingers and thereby banish denial from the repertoire of human defenses. What a shock would run through the world! The idea reminds me of an old, entertaining movie, The Man Who Could Work Miracles. In it, the protagonist, a mere draper’s assistant, is given supernatural powers by a demigod. He becomes so enamored of his power that he tries to stop time by commanding the Earth to stop rotating. Of course, buildings crumble and anything not anchored to the ground is thrown into space. Something equally horrendous would no doubt happen if denial could be banished everywhere at once. Instead, we can only hope that it will disappear in stages. Perhaps the definition of progress is the peeling away of denial very gradually, layer by layer, while taking care to spare the human psyche as much as possible.