Tom's Musings

“Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and to repulse it.”

             Thomas Paine, Dec. 1776

I instinctively embody what I believe is an Eastern perspective toward life. I try not to elevate or even accept any positive or upbeat expectations about the world around me. Then, on occasion, I can be pleasantly surprised when things go right. Conversely, I am less shattered when things go as badly as I expect they will. In such cases where they do, I can retreat to my safe default position of ‘I told you so.’

This is how I approached the 2026 midterm elections. I fought hard to suppress feelings of optimism as pundits and polls began talking about a blue wave. I still recall when the wise ones had Hillary winning the White House in 2016 just days before the election. After all, polls have consistently under represented Republican strength in recent elections. Besides, even the staff of the Economist, a publication I respect, had the Dems chance of retaking the Senate at a marginal 54 percent just a week before the election.

Still, on a recent trip to Green Lake Wisconsin, an idyllic spot some 80 miles northeast of liberal Madison, I could not hold back a small posititive surge from rippling through my doubting gut. This is hard GOP country, the rural landscape where Trump supporters are only out numbered by cows and corn fields. And yes, there were a number of huge signs supporting Trump devotee Tom Tiffany for Wisconsin’s Governor. But there were not as many as I would have expected. That was the same impression I experienced during Obama’s 2012 run, there were not the expected number of Romney signs in that same area.

I tried to suppress this latent optimism which wasn’t all that difficult to do. On the day preceding the election, I received my usual onslaught of requests for political contributions. I won’t go into how irritating and insulting some of these pitches are, but I will note that the vast majority are based on fear. And they are endless. I did a quick count over one 24 hour day and came up with an estimated 240 email and text attempts to separate me from my money (admittedly, some were successful which undoubtedly aggravated my dilemma).

The Dem candidates did have one selling point. It was well known and documented that several billionaire contributors were disproportionately bankrolling conservative candidates. Tom Tiffany, the conservative candidate for Wisconsin Governor, was a beneficiary of their largesse. A few years back, Elon Musk poured over $20 million into a Wisconsin Supreme Court race when the partisan balance was first in question.

In any case, the tone of these final appeals from around the nation were desperate and, quite frankly, bordering on the hysterical. Races were tightening, they screamed. The Democratic hopefuls were being swamped by dark money. The anticipated blue wave was on the precipice of dissolving.

My usual black cloud of despair was back in full force. I started preparing myself for disaster, making sure that a rusty, serrated knife would be accessible on Wednesday morning to end it all when this nightmare scenario was realized. Still, I eventually turned to the election news station later Tuesday evening with a distinct sense of foreboding, if not dread.

And then, the miracle unfolded. As the results dribbled in, it became quite apparent that a blue wave was possible. Soon, it actually was happening. It was hard for me to accept what I was seeing. Perhaps I was dreaming, perhaps I would awake to discover that all was normal, that Americans once again were voting against their self interests.

It took a while for reality to penetrate my emotional barriers and accept that the numbers I was watching were real. The defensive shields I had erected were, as one might expect, difficult to crack. But the trends were so convincing that even a cynic like myself could breathe again. The 218 figure for control of the House was achieved almost immediately. Then the Dem number of secured seats became 240 and, as late races are decided, it is speculated that this number might reach 258, a figure few, if anyone, had seriously contemplated.

Next, senate races in each contested election began to fall to the Dems … in Maine, South Carolina, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, and even Texas where they had not elected a Dem to any statewide office in almost four decades. In Kansas, a Dem won a major statewide race (another Senate gain) for the first time in about a century. It was not just a wave, but a total rebuke of Trump, Trumpism, and the MAGA movement overall. I found myself giggling with relief.

Naturally, I had great interest in the Wisconsin results. The top contest here was for Governor where a young Black candidate from Milwaukee faced off against a well known U.S. Congressman, and hardened Trump supporter who came from a rural part of the state. It was a classic conservative rural versus liberal urban face- off.

Much seemed at stake since the GOP had a seemingly unshakable hold on the state’s Assembly and Senate. Retaking the governor’s chair would send Badger land hurtling again once again toward the ideological right.

The race was considered close, oft characterized as within the statistical margin of error. Deep inside, I wondered whether this swing state really could accept an African-American as chief executive. That question remained a critical question out beyond the state’s larger metropolitan areas. David Crowley, the African- American Dem, jumped to an early lead. Still, all depended on where those votes were located.

As in most states, partisan and ideological affinity depends on where one lives. The liberal strongholds are the major cities, Madison and Milwaukee. Most of the state, however, is rural and pastoral and conservative. In the end, over 520 thousand of the 1.4 million votes for the winner came from these two urban areas. In Dane County (Madison), turnout was high with an 80 plus percent advantage for the liberal candidate. Milwaukee, with a significant minority population, was not far behind, with 76 percent favoring Crowley, who had served as County Executive there. The key to victory, however, remained outstate and with largely white voters. Fortunately, support out there was good enough.

Like the nation, Wisconsin also achieved several firsts. Crowley became the first black candidate elected as Governor in this state. In addition, the first Latino candidate, JoCasta Zamarripa, was elected Wisconsin’s Secretary of State. And finally, the 1st Hmong candidate, Yee Leng Xiong, was elected as State Treasurer.

Such breakthroughs reflect the diversity among successful candidates found across the nation … the first black female governor of any state in Georgia, the first openly gay man elected U.S. senator in New Hampshire, the first female Native-American elected governor in New Mexico. The examples go on. It seemed, despite Trump’s and his minions’ efforts, that diversity was alive and well.

The cherry on the top of all this change, at least for me, came with a reshuffling of the power balance in the Badger state. Republicans had held firm control of the state’s Assembly and Senate since 2011. Over time, and with a favorable state Supreme Court (until recently), they went about pushing Wisconsin toward the extreme right including gerrymandering the state to seemingly ensure continued Republican hegemony for what they believed, or at least hoped, would be a few generations.

But that dream was smashed Tuesday. The Dems secured both elected bodies, 18 to 15 in the State Senate and 53 to 46 in the Assembly. With Dems now in control of the state’s Supreme Court, there is an opportunity to get Wisconsin back on track. For the first time in quite a while, Republican aegis over the levers of control has been smashed.

Why the fuss about just another election? Isn’t it a fact that political and ideological fortunes inevitably swing back and forth. Well, I don’t  believe this was simply just  another midterm election. The Trump movement had been sobered by their loss in 2020. They entered the 2024 cycle with a scheme (the 2025 Heritage Foundation plan) to solidify power permanently, even if that meant dismantling the essential institutions and basic protocols designed to protect our heritage, our democratic traditions.

Given this, Trump approached his 2nd go around quite differently from his first. He surrounded himself with obedient lackeys while pursuing tactics designed to legitimize continued access to power via both legal and extra-legal means. The steps he and his sycophants took were many, including weaponizing the legal bureaucracy (Justice and the FBI), creating an ersatz private army (ICE), reorienting our military to make them a pliable instrument for his political will, and systemically destroying the professionalism and integrity of the federal bureaucracy.

It is not hyperbole to note that many responsible observers felt that the administration would attempt to intervene in the conduct of the elections (e.g., voter intimidation or suppression) and, that failing, would refuse to accept the results.

I have a good friend who served as a poll watcher in a local Madison site where numerous Latinos voted. We joked about what she would do when the ICE squad arrived and began hassling voters. It didn’t happen but the concern was real.

I have oft thought about whether or not America’s independence has been substantially and similarly threatened in the past. When, and by whom, have our democratically ensured freedoms been truly endangered? As I have opined before, the Trump years are the first and most profound threat I have seen in my lifetime. The Fascist threat from Europe had little chance of success. The Soviet threat through the cold war years might have resulted in a nuclear holocaust but could never have controlled our government with any success. The so-called Islamic terrorists could only create mischief, not threaten our basic sovereignty.

No, our greatest threat could only come from within. That real internal enemy was a long time in the making … starting at least with the Reagan revolution, then picking up speed with the Gingrich revolution, followed by the arrival of  billionaire oligarchs who could buy the necessary institutional supports (e g., media outlets), and culminating with the autocratic role model represented by Trump who appealed to at least a third of America with a raw, visceral attractiveness based on fear, hate, and division. He had nurtured a cult-like following on these base emotions.

If we had a doomsday clock calibrating how close we were to losing the final vestiges of our democratic way of life, Trump’s 2nd term would have our nation at least approaching, if not actually striking, the midnight hour. I tried not to panic. Still, if the electorate failed to reject where we were headed, the game, I feared, would be over.

With all this in mind, I sat down to watch Tuesday night’s results with considerable trepidation. Would I be witnessing the twilight of the American dream. Yes, I did feel that the apocalypse was that close. If Trumpism prevailed, with all we knew about it, perhaps there was no road back. Just perhaps, we would have tumbled over the edge of the abyss.

Instead, with growing relief, it appeared that we took a few steps back from the precipice. Importantly, the numbers rejecting the status quo were so substantial and convincing that not even Trump, in his wildest delusions, apparently felt capable of summoning the tools he had erected to challenge the results, at least not yet.

Perhaps, just perhaps, dream of the oligarchs to take full control of America has been delayed, at least for the time being. Some even are talking as if this is a generational shift in our thinking and in our politics.

Such talk is wildly premature. The results are too raw to be fully understood. For example, it is hard to accept that the oligarchs will abandon their quest for ultimate control. There is too much at stake for them. In addition, the shift leftward must deliver on its rhetoric and its elevated hopes. Finally, perhaps the long expected economic crisis will hit at the worst moment, or some other less anticipated disruption will occur. And when results fall short of hopes, some disenchantment is to be expected.

In this hour, though, it appears we have peered into the abyss and taken a step back. We all know the ancient Chinese proverb… a thousand mile journey starts with the first step. Perhaps Tuesday was our first step. Only time will tell. I will be satisfied with that for the time being.

When you finally become an octogenerian, you realize that you are approaching the final steps in your mortal toil on this good earth. Most of the signs are unmistakable. For example, routine tasks become outright burdens. Mildly troubling challenges become impossible. And more difficult undertakings are taken on only if one has a death wish.

You cannot miss the signs. When I recently bought a new car. My first concern was not about horsepower, nor what fancy gizmos the vehicle contained, nor gas mileage, nor even price. While they were all important factors, they were not deal breakers.

No, what concerned me most was whether or not I could get in and out of the damn machine. This turned out to be a prime example of a simple task that is now a major hurdle to be surmounted only at great cost. Similarly, getting out of bed in the morning, as well as the several required nocturnal risings to whiz, are typically accompanied by a cascading array of cracking bones, a moan or two, and at least one expletive of oh shit.

Then there are stairs. Remember how one bounded up a flight with alacrity when young. Now, we organic antiques begin to organize our lives about tactics to avoid exertions of that kind. You start thinking about moving to houses without levels because the thought of dealing with them on a daily basis is unacceptable. You no longer think about Rhodes Scholar trips because virtually all require you to be an active senior. And where are all these active seniors? The old farts you know seem to be as decrepit as you feel, at least they do to me.

And why does every piece of medical advice oriented toward improving one’s longevity start with some variant of keep moving. Most of us would prefer death to daily mandated Bataan Death Marches that all doctors seem to love. If the medical profession wants to impress me, they would come up with some pill.

I ran across a YouTube video that had Richard Feyman talking about the inevitability of the aging process. Now, why they had a dead phycisist talking about aging is a bit weird but he was supposed to be a legitimate genius so there is that.

What I remember of his thesis goes as follows. Our bodies start deteriorating around age 40 or 45. But the rate of decay is so gradual that we do not notice. Oh, we eventually feel a difference but it is manageable and quite easily dismissed. Eventually, however, reality sets in. It is like you hit a brick wall.

According to Feyman, that sudden collision hits us somewhere between 75 and 80 years of age. At that point, the gradual decline in a variety of biological functions  intersects with a hidden baseline level of motor functions … a point at which one can no longer ignore a reality that one’s body screams out in several ways. When that happens, the body unmistakably rebels.

Simply rising from a comfortable chair becomes the equivalent to bench pressing 300 pound dumb bells. Walking up an incline is now like scaling the Mattahorn. Lifting a 40 pound bag of water salt pellets turns you into a puddle of mush. It happened to me at about age 80. And it seems like it all happened over night. That’s how I recall the transition. One day you are getting by, the next you are asking all your friends what happened to that guy (or gal) you used to be.

Remember when we were young, when we were on the ascent in our journey through life. We had life markers back then, points representing change. But they were of a different order. They typically represented transitions or moments primarily focused on greater freedom or responsibility.

For example, there was starting school, becoming a teen, getting a driver’s license, going off to college, turning 21 (becoming an adult) and, for us guys back then, turning 26 which meant we escaped being sent off as canon fodder to a senseless war in Asia.

After that, the markers become less certain, more nuanced. They likely are associated with distinct choices: graduate degrees, career paths, marriage, and children. All can be seminal but contingent on individual, perhaps idiosyncratic, preferences.

I guess I am musing on such matters because of two recent events in my life. The first was when the one friend from my youth with whom I maintained contact called me. He wanted me to know that a mutual friend of ours had passed. We spent some time on the phone chatting about our endless hours on the basketball court and in other games at which I sucked, unlike them. We spent so much time and energy back in the day dreaming of athletic glory that was never to be. In the whole, these memories reminded me of moments that seemed to belong to someone else … yet I knew were mine or should I say ours.

And then I got an email informing the members of my old Peace Corps group that another one of us had recently passed. His biography noted that he was an American composer, musician, author, and mathematician renowned for his pioneering contributions to computerized music and the mathematical foundations of music theory. His entire list of accomplishments has always astounded me. It includes the following: receiving a Doctorate of Musical Arts from Stanford University and writing a two volume work titled Musimathics: The mathematical foundations of music. He also was a talented performer who was, by most standards, a Renaissance man.

It is funny. I have had numerous colleagues and associates pass in recent years. Yet, in some strange way, their leavings were both anticipated and expected. I had seen them as they aged, and then retire, and then enter that inevitable period of decline. While passings inevitably and sadly are regrettable, they are part of the process as we understand it. So, I accepted losing them simply as inevitable.

On the other hand, when someone from my youth leaves the scene, it comes as a bit of a shock. We, or at least I, recall them as they were in the ascent period of our lives, when all was still possible.

I often think back on my Peace Corps group from the 1960s, a collection of such talented young men and women. Our service over seas was a profound and unique marker in each of our journeys through life. I have remarked in other blogs as to the special character of that group … their individual intelligence and commitment and qualities that destined each for success as adults. I can never quite decide whether our training and service in India informed our subsequent trajectories or whether all would have been the same absent such an experience. On that matter, I can only speak for myself.

What I can say is that I’ve been fortunate to know some very remarkable people throughout my personal journey. Now, in this moment when I am beginning to lose them, it is not so much with a sense of loss as it is with profound gratitude. I rejoice in knowing them and in having taken this journey together, even if only for a moment or two.

And about all those aches and pains and physical challenges that accompany our final steps through life. In the end, they matter little, at least to me. Why is that, you ask? Because most of my (our) personal trek has been one hell of a trip.

I have never forgotten the day I endured my physical exam to determine my fitness to fight in Vietnam. Millions of us went through this exercise back some 55 plus years ago. Still, a couple of small moments elevated my own exam to the unforgettable status.

At one point, we were required to complete exercises to test our cognitive and practical capacities. The math and reading segments were simple enough. The parts guaging our practical knowledge, like identifying tools familiar to most male teens back then, were way beyond me. Still, if I had been drafted to serve, they probably would have assigned me to the motor pool.

But I digress. At the end of these paper and pencil tests were a set of questions designed to ferret out subversives. One question asked whether I had belonged to any of a long list of organizations that were considered subversive back in the 1960s. None on the actual list registered with mea except one … The Lincoln Brigade.

I had a vague sense that this was a long defunct organization of young men and a few women from around the world who volunteered to fight for the Republic side in the bitter Spanish Civil War … a conflict that raged for three years in the late 1930s.

The query contained little logic. This group was largely dissolved by 1939, some three decades before I was being assessed as suitable canon fodder for America’s foolhardy military venture into Southeast Asia. The possibility that anyone who had participated in the Brigade would stiĺl be of draft age in 1970 was absurd. Logic, of course, had little to do with it.

Those troubled times in the 1930s themselves bordered on the absurd. It was a moment in history when the forces of good and evil confronted one another on the international stage. Fascism, championed by Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco, battled communism, championed by Stalin and perhaps Mao. These power centers struggled against  democracy, championed by Britain, France, and America. All three ideologies competed with one another in a dress rehearsal for the violent global conflict to come. The apocalyptic ideological contest of World War II, one that ultimately would consume some 50 to 60 million lives, was the testing ground for man’s basic inhumanity to man founded on blind allegiance to distinct personal faiths.

At the time, the future of the globe seemed to hang in the balance as competing ideologies struggled for more hegemony and ultimate control. Looking back, it was a dark and desperate time.

“Comrades of the International Brigade. … you can go proudly. You are history. You are legend. You are the heroic example of democracy’s solidarity and universality. We shall not forget you and, when the olive tree of peace puts forth its leaves again mingled with the Spanish Republic’s victory … come back!“

This homage to the International Brigade, of which the Lincoln Brigade was a part, came as members paraded one final time through Barcelona. Ironically, the words were spoken when defeat of the Republican forces who were defending the legitimately elected government was almost certain. It marked the end of an almost unparalleled moment in history. Never before had so many men, from so many countries, against the wills of their own governments, come to a place foreign to them all to fight for a cause to which they were so devoted. It was a final moment of excruciating poignancy.

Some 2,800 Americans joined the  XV International Brigade to fight along with volunteers from Britain, Canada, and a host of European nations. This included some 80 Black Americans who finally tasted equality some 3,000 miles from home. The Americans joined up in violation of America’s Neutrality Act, thus becoming outlaws within their own nation. They did so to defend Republican Spain against the insurgency of self- proclaimed Generalissimo Francisco Franco, a Spanish autocrat and army general devoted to the feudal past and the conservative Catholic church.

Some 800 Americans would perish for their devotion to a set of ideals respecting how men should govern themselves. The Spanish Civil War, it turned out, was a microscopic version of the larger ideological war suggested above. On the one hand, you had a group of idealists presumably fighting for democracy and the common man. On the other were defenders of the old order, a near feudal system where a few privileged elite ruled absent any checks or accountability. This side was led by autocrats protected by the sacred authority of religion and, presumably, sanctioned by God himself. It offered a stark choice to young idealists.

Of course, reality was a lot messier than good versus evil, particularly on the Republican side of the ledger. A good many of their volunteers were pure idealists fighting for democratic principles we yet struggle to preserve today in the face of threats from MAGA cult devotees. Others were trade unionists and related idealists devoted to the working classes. But many were committed Marxists (either Stalinists or Trotskyites) who evidenced scant devotion to our democratic ideals. They were more concerned with acquiring power.

This led to internal divisions that ripped apart any presence of coherence or unity on the leftist side. Tragically, members on the so-called Republican side fought each other as much as they did the fascist Nationalists. These divisions emanated from concerns about who would be in charge after victory was secured.

The conflict raged from 1936 to 1939, cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and left scars that took generations to erase. If the conflict were determined by passion, the Republican side might well have prevailed. But it was, as often is the case, determined by which side had the biggest and best guns.

The Spanish defenders of the elected government appealed to the western democracies for help. But France, Britain, and America largely turned their backs, afraid that such assistance might tip the continent into war. Only Stalin materially helped the Republican side.

Hitler and Mussolini, on the other hand, sent Franco abundant supplies of war materials, including planes and tanks. The fascist leaders saw this as a perfect opportunity to test out equipment and tactics for the larger conflict they knew would soon erupt. After all, they already were determined to start the coming global war.

The Republican side, along with the principles they intended to protect, were soon doomed. High ideals, and good intentions, could not long compete with the latest in advanced military hardware. Pablo Picasso’s masterpiece titled Guernica was his homage to the city in northern Spain that was obliterated by Hitler’s Condor Legion as a testing ground for the capabilities of his new Luftwaffe.

Some of the great writers of that generation also poured their hearts out based on their caustic experiences in that conflict. George Orwell wrote Homage to Catalonia (1938), a memoir about his time as a volunteer fighter with POUM (committed to  democratic principles) on the front. He also wound up fighting Stalinist elements among the nationalist coalition, experiences that later informed his two great classics … 1984 and Animal Farm.

Ernest Hemingway penned For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), a novel based on his service as an ambulance driver. His novel contained events inspired by his actual participation in behind the lines guerrilla activities. Like many idealists, he was crushed as his ideals ultimately experienced bitter defeat.

What made this particular ideological conflict so memorable, unforgettable really, is that it was battle over absolutes. One side thought it was fighting for God. They were defending a rigid and hierarchical, if not feudal, world view that reflected the Catholic sense of society to which they were devoted. The other side believed they were advancing a radically new vision of man and society in which reason, not blind faith, and equality among all men might eventually prevail.

And therein lies the ultimate curse associated with conflicts rooted in absolute, but quite oppositional, truths. They permit their advocates to do virtually anything. As Blaise Pascal once noted, “Men never do evil so completely and cheefully as when they do it from religious conviction.” Atrocities can easily be rationalized as acts of god.

Horrific acts were common on both sides in this civil conflict but, if there were just scales on which to balance evil, it probably would tilt toward the Nationist (Franco) side in terms of unspeakable horrors. The sheer numbers slain because of their beliefs and associations were staggering. Yet, these countless victims were mere shadows of the coming holocaust.

As suggested in the above meme, the Papal Legate asserted that the Pope’s mercenaries should kill them all since God could later decide who was on the side of right and then dispense ultimate justice. Such a convenient way to avoid guilt and responsibility.

I have recently thought about that long ago war a lot, reflections mostly stimulated by reading the book Spain in Our Hearts for a history book club to which I belong. I struggled mightily as I considered the decisions facing potential combatents during that awful period. For Spaniards, which side to join and how deeply to become involved were choices often constrained, or at least informed, by one’s situation and history.

For those joining the International Brigade, the decision was more complex. After all, they were under no compunction. Moreover, they often were violating their own nation’s laws. Still, it strikes me that they were driven by one of two core sentiments: (1) My country (beliefs), right or wrong and (2) my god (or again, beliefs) is stronger than your god (or beliefs).

Such absolutes are among the most dangerous narcotics  available to us. They absolve us from thinking through what we really believe, through the total complexities of our apparent alternatives, and even of the longer consequences of our actions. Such fundamental sentiments make binary choice seductively easy, thus permitting us to avoid hard analysis. And throughout history, they have led to horrific actions that are fully reprehensible to all sensitive beings.

In the end, I don’t know what I would have done in the 1930s. Surely I would have been tempted to sign on to the International Brigade. Then, again, I might have joined the college freedom Riders opposing southern segregation in the early 1960s. But I didn’t. I like to think I would gave gone to any lengths to avoid participating in a war (the Vietnam conflict) I came to bitterly oppose (and I believe whose analysis of which history has proven me correct even as a naive young college student). But I managed to avoid the draft without emigrating to Canada or going to prison as a conscientious objector.

Perhaps, though, circumstances might yet offer me one of those clear seminal choices that each generation faces. What if Trump and his most rabid devotees choose to ignore the established rules by which lawful authority is passed on. What if they simply reject election results, or impact voting rights through coercion, or call out ICE and a radically reframed military apparatus to forcefully remain in power. What then? Does one summarily discard some 250 years of struggle to create a mature democracy? Do you merely enjoy the next football  contest, today’s palliative bread and circuses.

Perhaps, finally, I would act as thousands did during the Spanish crisis. Though a pacifist at heart, I would find the lure of picking up arms to defend something so very irreplaceable to be too precious to ignore. Like those who joined the International Brigade some nine decades ago, perhaps I would do what I considered the right thing. In truth, I am too distrustful of my own convictions to welcome the opportunity. 😞

At the start, I mentioned experiencing two unforgettable moments during my draft physical but only mentioned one. The second moment involved responding to an open ended question about belonging to any organization that threatened to overthrow our government, like being member of the republican party is today.

I asked a burly Sargent in charge if the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) qualified. I then put SDS in the space provided when he groused you bet your ass it does, buddy. That eventually led to me being grilled by several military intelligence officers for a few hours. All these years later, I still smile at how much fun that was 😀. It really was.

I am half Irish, which is a bit of a curse in itself. Despite our ethnic penchant for storytelling, lively music, and energetic dances, we can be a pessimistic and cynical tribe. It is as if a dark cloud follows us around, casting the present and surely the future in at best a somber light.

President Kennedy had a long time advisor, an Irishman named Dave Powers (he was informally referred to as the ‘first-friend’). Shortly after JFK’s assassination, this loyal assistant and ever present confidant presumably was reported to have said something like the following: “… being Irish I knew the dream would be crushed one day but I thought we had just a little more time.”

Recently, however, a friend and neighbor of mine, a distinguished infectious disease doctor at the University of Wisconsin, shared an article with me that cut through my ordinary gloom. The piece focused on a long term member among what are referred to as neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), this one officially labeled as dracunculiasis. Never heard of it, you say. And you could care less, you assert? Keep reading, the story is rather interesting.

First of all, it is an upbeat story in an era generally defined by ongoing feelings of political doom and gloom. Secondly, and more importantly, it means something to me. How’s that, you might ask, assuming you haven’t already stopped reading?

Here’s the thing. In the above pic, I am a 20- something Peace Corps Volunteer serving in Rajasthan, a province in northwest India bordering on Pakistan. The area in which we served was remote, backward, and subject to historic forces and impediments slowing India’s progress. One of these challenges was the prevalence of that dreaded disease known as dracunculiasis. Still don’t recognize this affliction. Well, it is more commonly known as Guinea Worm (GW).

Still clueless? Then let me fill you in on the details. In my site, you could catch this awful illness by drinking contaminated water from what were called step wells, places where humans could step down to the surface of the water to collect some of that precious liquid. It was not uncommon for such wells to be contaminated with crustaceans called copeds. These very tiny organisms contained the larvae from which a parasitical worm would hatch and grow. A human body, alas, was the perfect host.

Think about the following. These small cysts (or copeds) would, when ingested, lodge in the lymph system or some other suitable home. Then, over the course of a year or so, a worm of about one meter in length would grow, often along an arm or leg. Then, at long last, would erupt through the human host’s skin.

It was only then that most locals would consult a local practitioner skilled in the practice of slowly, very slowly, winding the worm out of its human abode by slowly twisting it on a stick. That process could take days, sometimes weeks. If the worm snapped, it likely would retreat into the body, creating an abcess that would cause further damage and problems.

There was a story attached to this primitive treatment process that somewhat amused me. The sign employed as advertising by these local professionals(?) was a worm encircling a stick. Now, it turns out that GW was common in  Europe during the middle ages. Back then, the local barber also passed as the town surgeon. So, when you run across that stylized red stripe wrapped around a white pole, the barber symbol, you just might be looking at what remains of the traditional worm wrapped around a stick. Bet you didn’t know that. Then, again, there are other stories about the origins of the barber pole.

While GW had long disappeared from advanced nations, it remained common in parts of Asia and Africa throughout the 20th century. In fact, what are called neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) still threaten some 1.7 billion people globally. I might understand if you now are asking where the good news I promised might be.

Here it is! Starting in the 1980s, the Carter Center (yes, our former President Jimmie Carter) made eradicating GW a personal priority of his, along with a few other retirement priorities like building houses with Habitat for Humanity. That man had a big, empathic heart.

How well did he do, along with those who worked for him? Well, there were still an estimated 3.5 million GW cases in 1986, which was around the time they launched their eradication campaign. By 2023, only 13 cases were reported around the globe, all in Africa. That is a 99.9 percent reduction, just about as perfect as you can get.

Now, GW was never, or at least very seldom, fatal. But it was a lengthy affliction that would often incapacitate sufferers to the point where self care was extremely difficult. I knew several people in my town who were struck down. I still recall one man, a Muslim who owned a small shop as well as a farm outside the town. I would often visit and chat with him. One day he mentioned that thirst overcame him while tending his farm, and he threw caution to the wind by drinking some available water. Now, he was infected by several worms. I can still see the expression on his face as he related his sad story.

My site mate and I had a local tribal boy who looked after our survival needs. Since running water was merely a dream where we resided, he brought our H2O ration from some nearby well. Though we insisted he boil everything before use, we lived in constant terror of being struck down by the dreaded GW.

During our service, we were aware of many threats … snakes, scorpions, ring worm, intestinal bugs of various sorts, dehydration in the blasting desert heat, and so on. I was down to 148 pounds at one point and considered myself one of the lucky ones. But nothing scared the crap out of me more than the threat of sharing my limbs with foot long worms.

The work that Jimmie Carter and others did in eradicating this disease has been a blessing to so many. And yet, his humanity and goodness too often is ignored. Those in the MAGA cult will venerate Trump, who loves only himself, while denigrating President Carter, perhaps one of the humblest and finest humans to serve in high office. I simply cannot fathom how some people think about things.

I sometimes wonder how many children will suffer and die because Trump (and Musk) dismantled much of our foreign humanitarian programs (e.g., U.S. Aid), along with domestic agencies like the well respected Centers for Disease Control. Such cuts mean little to our future fiscal well- being. Yet, what they offer in terms of our general health and quality of life are immeasurable. Untold lives, particularly children, will be lost given such casual decisions to prioritize tax cuts for the wealthy over humanitarian concerns.

In the end, the GW story is a source of encouragement to me. It tells me that, if we focus on the right issues, we can make a difference in the world. I am not naive. I spent my professional life tilting at difficult policy windmills, often (usually) without success. But that doesn’t mean we should stop trying. If a retired President who was considered a mediocre chief executive by many can have such a positive impact on so many after leaving office, perhaps there is hope for the rest of us.

Perhaps, just perhaps, those slashing budgets helping the common man and woman might have benefited from experiencing human suffering up close and personal just once in their own youths. Perhaps then they might have retained just a bit of their core humanity. While some foreign educational systems try to develop empathy in their young students, some leading figures in America (e g., Musk, Thiel, Miller, Hegseth, and Trump) will deride compassion as a dangerous and rather outmoded human frailty. How odd!

Above is one additional pic taken at the beginning of my service. Do I look worried about GW yet? No! Perhaps I just hid it well.

“Scholarship for the sake of the scholar is refined selfishness. Scholarship for the sake of the state and the people is refined patriotism.“

Thomas Chamberlain.              

U. of Wisc. President (1890)

………………………………………………

I came to the state of Wisconsin mostly be chance. I trained here for my Peace Corps service in the mid 1960s. I then returned after two years in India mostly because I had little direction in life and rather liked the ubiquitous cows found there. Upon getting a master’s degree in Urban Studies (who knew what that meant), I literally stumbled into my my first professional job. Truly, my career was largely (completely) accidental. This was fortuitous since I had no observable skills, none at all.

Serendipity and circumstances found me showing up for a civil service interview in Madison for a position I knew absolutely nothing about. Upon beginning the interrogation by a three- person panel, I discovered that the job was for a research analyst- social services. This was not good.

I knew very little about formal research at the time and less about our social services system. I mused to myself in the moment … this should be mercifully short. But it wasn’t, you cannot discount bad choices made by otherwise smart people. Another way of saying this is milabili disputandem est or there is no accounting for taste.

I somehow made the final slot of the three names submitted to the actual hiring supervisor. Upon selecting me, she noted that the second ranked candidate was better than the first and I was better than the second. My response to her was ‘good thing you were not permitted to see the next candidate on the list. They must have been dynamite. ‘

So, in 1971, I started my shaky (in my estimation) professional life as a civil servant working on public welfare issues for the State of Wisconsin. Back then, civil servants in that state were well respected. We took pride at being at the cutting edge of public service design and management. Among many other things, I was one of the ‘young turks’ that pushed and prodded state social service administration into the computer age.

Then, another serendipitous moment occurred. My boss told me to work with a University of Wisconsin professor (Irving Piliavin) who needed state help and approval for a research proposal he was submitting for federal funding. When finished, I forgot all about this routine task until the prof called one day to let me know he had gotten his funding.

Next came the shock! He wanted me to take that long one-mile journey down State Street from government service to the strange world of the academy at the University of Wisconsin. As I have always done on the big decisions in my life, I thought on the matter for five, maybe six, seconds before saying ‘sure, why not.’

What started out as a two-year temporary position to run the day to day operations of this complex study of welfare administration turned into a career as a policy wonk and sometimes scholar. Better yet, I soon found myself at the center of the national storm as welfare reform emerged to take the front burner on the national policy agenda. As one of President Carter’s cabinet members (Joseph Califano) noted at the time, welfare reform had become the Mideast of domestic policy.

The welfare issue was a core firestorm policy question where reason and civility went to die. The topic embraced all forms of value laden disputes involving sex, family, work, culture, government over reach, and personal responsibility. The topic proved so contentious that I oft mused the following: ‘I am only confident that I’m approaching the truth when no one else agrees with me.”

Still, I rather loved it. More than that, I cannot imagine many other careers that would have captured my restless mind so fully and with such completeness. After all, I stayed at the University, mostly the Institute for Research on Poverty which I helped manage in the decade or so before I finally retired. That’s clear evidence that I must have enjoyed it all. I also taught a variety of policy courses in the school of Social Work. All that, plus endless rounds of talks and consultation work around the country had me juggling mind (and body) crushing work schedules on way too many occasions. But that doesn’t mean a lot when you are having so much fun.

Fortunately, it turned out to be a rather perfect situation for me, especially after I finally managed to secure my doctorate (the union card for any university position). I was associated with the premier academic-based research entity in the country. Everyone doing this work knew of IRP. This gave me instant legitimacy. At the same time, I kept myself distant from the more suffocating aspects of the formal academic culture, which I generally found overly narrow, insular, and provincial. Despite that, I still concluded that the academy was the perfect place to pursue my craft. As long as I could raise my own money, I could take on any topic or issue I wanted, a freedom not found in more typical hierarchical agencies. And, I found myself surrounded by the best and the brightest, both in the academy and among the public officials with whom I worked. It was paradise.

More to the point, I became aware of what has long been called The Wisconsin Idea. This ‘Wisconsin Idea’ is the iconic standard for a special, perhaps unique, state- university partnership that one wag in the 1930s summarized as ‘the boundaries of the university are the boundaries of the State.’

Theodore Roosevelt, as he agreed to run for President once again in 1912, observed that ‘the University of Wisconsin (UW) has been more influential than any other agency in making Wisconsin what it has become, a laboratory for wise social and industrial experiments in the betterment of conditions.’ Somewhere around the beginning if the 20th century, the UW broke out if its scholarly cultural isolation to become a partner in the management of public affairs.

Many figures played a role in the development of this concept. Perhaps the two most central were Robert M. Lafollete, known as fighting Bob, and Charles Van Hise. They were friends and classmates who graduated from the UW in 1879. They remained close as they went in different career directions. Bob went on to be a nationally renowned progressive Republican who served as Wisconsin Governor and then U.S. Senator, beginning his first term as governor in 1900.

As the story goes, Bob became ‘fighting‘ Bob when he was offered a bribe to influence the outcome of a court case in 1891. Enraged, he began his lifelong mission to ween politics from the control of the powerful interests, especially a few lumber and railroad magnates. As governor, with support from his long time college friend (Van Hise), he began to professionalize the making of state policy.

Charles Van Hise, on the other hand, pursued a distinguished academic career, assuming the leadership of UW in 1903. He used that position both to recruit civic minded scholars and to encourage their collaboration with government. Together, Charles and ‘fighting’ Bob were positioned to form a close, collaborative relationship between the state and the university.

For example, Charles McCarthy took leave from the University to create the first legislative reference bureau in the nation. Until then, bills typically were drafted by select corporate lawyers whose objectivity, as you might surmise, was highly suspect. This first expression of the Wisconsin idea witnessed the crafting of several ground breaking laws and initiatives including a number of improvements to the Civil Service system, workers compensation, and the initiative and the referendum reforms. The 1911 state legislative session yet is considered one of the more progressive in memory.

One early name, however, stands out on the academic side of the ledger. It is John R. Commons. UW President Van Hise recruited him to the faculty knowing that he would be less a natural scholar and more of an applied thinker … someone who valued making contributions to the society at large. Critically, Commons rejected the standard neoclassical assumptions prevalent in that era which dictated that markets should be left alone. He was very aware of market failures and their costs to broader society. More to the point, he set out to do something about those failures. And he did, all through the early 20th century era of progressive activities.

At the same time, Fighting Bob had two offspring that carried on his mission to sustain the drift of the state’s Republican Party (no effective Democratic alternative would emerge until the 1950s) into a force for progressive ideals.

It is difficilt to believe now, but the GOP back then was a big tent. It embraced both a conservative wing (the Stalwarts) and a radical progressive element that today might be labeled as Democratic Socialists. In recent years, that same party has attacked the UW, with former governor Scott Walker even calling into question the validity of the Wisconsin Idea.

It was different back then. The 1910 Wisconsin Republican platform contained the following: We are proud of the high eminence attained by our state university… We commend its research work … We regard the University as the people’s servant, carrying knowledge and assistance to the homes and farms and work places.“

That larger perspective would continue. One son of ‘fighting’ Bob, Robert La Follete Jr, succeeded his father to the Senate in 1925. Junior’s younger sibling, Phillip, was elected to the Governor’s seat. Both were ideally situated to act proactively as the great global depression exploded bringing the state’s, the nation’s, and the world’s economy to its knees.

In the early 1930s, the young Lafollettes began working on the foundations for what would later become signature elements of FDR’s New Deal. Senator Robert La Follette’s bill to create an annual national economic plan became the template for the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act.  Wisconsin’s unemployment compensation law, signed by Governor Phil La Follette, paved the way for a similar provision to become part of the 1935 Social Security Act.

At the center of drafting and administering each of these New Deal measures were thirty or so former students of economist John R. Commons, long time advisor to the La Follette family. Wisconsin was both anticipating the coming nation’s needs and developing skilled personnel to effectively respond.

And therein lies the secret to the longevity of the Wisconsin Idea. The seeds of one generation flowered in the next. One of John Commons more distinguished students was Edwin Witte. An academic economist, his first public service effort was to head the state legislative reference bureau from 1922 to 1933. At that critical moment, he was summoned to our nations Capital by FDR to be named the Executive Director of the President’s Committee on Economic Security. When expertise and experience were needed, FDR went to the state known to possess such gifts.

Ed brought some bright young students with him (Wilbur Cohen was one who was still a D.C. fixture when I started my career in the early 1970s). However, the Committee as a whole brought together people representing a variety of perspectives and interests. Thus, it proved dysfunctional, conflicting over diverse values and politics.

In the end, Witte had to work 18 hours days almost single handedly doing all the actuarial analysis as he crafted the center piece of the New Deal … the Social Security Act. The bill, developed in about six months, went well beyond providing help to seniors. It created a brand new relationship between the federal government and the American people. Not surprisingly, Witte long has been considered the ‘father of social security.‘

His Herculean efforts took a personal toll as he suffered a heart attack at the end from which he barely survived. Still, he returned to the University of Wisconsin where he mentored a new generation of economists. One of them was Robert Lampman, who grew up on a farm in the north part of the state. After obtaining his doctorate in economics, Bob remained on the faculty in Madison, something rarely done in academia.

I was fortunate to know Bob personally. He was one of the most humble and kind humans I’ve run across in my life, especially for an acclaimed economist. They can be a prickly lot. Anyway, In the same spirit of public service as his mentor (Witte), he served on President Kennedy’s National Council of Economic Advisors. One task of the Council is to prepare an annual report to the President on the state of the economy.

In the final report to Kennedy before his untimely assassination, Bob largely authored a chapter on poverty that was to have an enormous impact on subsequent public policy. At the time, a concensus had developed which asserted that a rising economic tide would lift all boats. If true, government need do little more. Bob argued that several structural pockets of poverty would remain in spite of continued economic growth. In his view, there would remain a seminal role for targeted public interventions.

In a fashion, Bob Lampman would become the intellectual ‘father of the War on Poverty.’ When President Johnson began focusing his larger than life energies on A Great Society, he and others in his administration picked up on Bob’s analysis of the issue.

As Bob had intimidated in his analysis, targeted public initiatives were needed. Soon, a host of such  programs from Head Start to Model Cities were created. They both supplemented and complemented macro economic measures designed to improve overall economic performance by attacking more directly those stubborn structural problems that Bob suggested might persist.

The planners in Washington soon realized they needed an academic partner, much like the La Follettes realized that they needed John Commons and his UW colleagues during the progressive era. After all, you cannot wage a war absent good intelligence. So, the generals of the War on Poverty approached Bob and the University of Wisconsin to establish a research entity that would rigorously look at the causes and cures of poverty.  This became the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) into which I stumbled a decade after its founding.

IRP has its own story line which I cannot go into here. But after some six decades, the Institute remains alive and well despite occasional (though serious) political threats and the vagaries that surround any federally supported entity. It certainly was the perfect home for a renegade academic and policy wonk like myself. 

In fact, my professional memoir is titled A Wayward Academic: Reflections from the policy trenches. Perhaps like John R. Commons of a much earlier period, my heart was in translating the best thought into action. I saw myself as the bridge between theory and the real world. (NOTE: my more masochistic readers might want to look at my co-authored work: Evidence- Based Policymaking: Envisioning a new era of theory, research, and practice.) That work exemplifies the bridge dimension of my professional endeavors.

Like Commons and Witte before me, I did teach (or try to) another generation of policy wonks, but within the Social Work (not the economics) tradition. And I did my share of research though, by inherent disposition, I seldom worked toward publishing in peer reviewed scholarly journals. I preferred reaching out to policy practioners and hands-on academics. Some of my pieces in FOCUS, the widely distributed IRP publication, had extraordinary impacts among policy aficionados.

At heart, though, I sense I was much like John Commons, Ed Witte, and Robert Lampman (who greatly encouraged me in my early years at UW). Simply addressing the interests of remote scholars held little charm for me. Functioning in the real world, with all its bizarre frustrations is what kept me stimulated and motivated. I wanted to make a difference.

When I retired, I recall telling the audience at my fairwell gathering the following: I enjoyed the most remarkable career possible. Essentially, I flew around the country to work with some of the best and the brightest on some of the most intractable social issues imaginable. And they actually paid me to do this. Freaking amazing!”

I cannot begin to comment on my long, complex, and sometimes agonizing journey through the policy labyrinth of reform back when poverty and welfare were hot button issues. There were many memorable moments such as the time Republican Wisconsin Governor and Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson attacked me in a public forum in Chicago. I mention that single moment since the early advocates of the Wisconsin Idea largely were Republicans of the progressive stripe. The world has surely keeps changing since Tommy, a conservative in my era, would be labeled a leftist, if not a Communist, by today’s GOP  standards.

But most of my memories are so positive … working in the Clinton administration on his welfare package, working on how human services might be reworked and reconceptualized to be more coherent and effective, then establishing models that both enhanced communication and collaboration among states seeking innovative solutions to old problems, and reestablishing a working connection between the state and university on a variety of welfare and human services initiatives (the state- university relationship on social policy matters had fallen into a rather moribund state before I arrived at IRP). This is just a sampling of topics I engaged during my years spent in what I have oft referred to as my policy candy store.

I recall appearing before a Congressional hearing on one of Wisconsin’s signature reform ideas in the 1980s. When the Committee chair (then iconic welfare expert Senator Patrick Moynihan) realized I was from IRP, he stated publicly that the Institute was the best thing to come out of President Johnson’s War on Poverty.

That’s nonsense, of course. Still, I felt so fortunate to have literally fallen into a career there. I always felt that I was walking in the footsteps of policy icons from the past. I suspect that many of my colleagues (Irv Garfinkle, Sheldon Danziger, Robert Haveman, Barbara Wolfe, etc.) felt a similar tug in some ways.

Perhaps I even helped nurture and sustain that tradition known as the Wisconsin Idea. I know I tried, at least in some small measure.

…………………………………….

“But the Wisconsin tradition (idea) meant more than a simple belief in people. It also meant a faith in the application of intelligence and reason to the problems of society. It meant a deep conviction that the role of government was not to stmble along like a drunkard in the dark, but to light its way by the best torches of knowledge and understanding it could find.”

Adlai Stevenson … twice Democratic candidate for the Presidency.

[Note: It has been a while since I’ve written one of these blogs or been active on Facebook. Not to worry, I am still around and kicking. Simply having another access issue with Facebook and have been a bit distracted in general to crank out my musings. Perhaps I am slowing up but I ain’t quite finished yet. 😀]

Let me start this blog with an old adage, oft attributed to Winston Churchill. It goes something as follows: Democracy is the worst form of government imaginable, except for all the rest. There is a core truth in this quip. At their best, democratic processes can be slow, confusing, confounding, contentious, often contradictory, and inevitably frustrating. Yet, I suspect we will miss them, and the results they generate, if those processes were no longer available to us. Then again, how much of the so-called experiment in democracy, at least the version we have experienced, is a mere chimera … more illusion than reality. Why don’t we take a look!

I think back to our earliest days. The colonial hotheads, best personified by Sam Adams, justified separation from England with the catchy one liner, no taxation without representation. Sounds noble enough but I have always wondered about the authenticity of this sentiment.

As I reflect on contemporary American dispositions, perhaps our persistent reluctance to contribute to our common good (i.e. pay taxes) best captures our character as well as the real purpose behind our heroic and revolutionary fervor back in the 1770s. And remember this, only a third of the colonists were committed patriots. It doesn’t take a majority to change the world.

Among advanced nations, the truth be admitted, we are a peculiarly selfish lot. Witness how comparatively stingy we are to our less fortunate brethren. That makes me wonder. Was freedom ever our foundational concern in the beginning or were we mostly motivated by more mundane and pedestrian concerns … like a strong reluctance to pay for the services we received? Hmmm!

Back to our birth as a nation. When you think on it, King George had depleted his treasury while helping the colonists stave off irritating incursions from hostile natives and those pesky French on our western and northern borders. During the so-called Seven Years War, this is exactly what the crown did. From London’s perspective, asking their colonial subjects for some help in recovering a portion of these military expenses seemed a quite reasonable request. After all, George had depleted his treasury in this effort (along with his other conflicts with France).

The crown’s erstwhile loyal subjects, however, would have none of that. Especially in Boston, they hounded British officials, attacked the homes of tax officials, harassed his Majesty’s troops, and threw British tea into the harbor despite the fact that a surplus of this libation would have lowered its general cost. Let’s face it, we have hated taxes from day one with a peculiar fanaticism.

King Louis of France should have paid attention to this quirk in the American character, a stubborn reluctance to spend anything unless one personally and immediately profited from the expense. Unfortunately for Louis, he acceded to Benjamin Franklin’s persistent entreaties to financially support the American uprising.

He acquiesced after the British effort to cut off the troublemakers in New England from the rest of the colonies ended in defeat at the Battle of Saratoga. The French realized that this ragged band of colonists just might defeat the best army of those times. At the least, we had a good shot at outlasting them, much like the North Vietnamese did to us in the 1960s and 70s.

From France’s perspective, perhaps the donation of troops and naval resources were gifts to the Colonial cause. But the generous financial support to our struggling revolution was surely considered a loan. Once the revolution had been successfully concluded, the French King expected to get his money back.

Right! He woefully mistook the American character. France’s generosity was never going to be repaid, a default that came at great cost to the monarchy. Louis soon found himself so broke that he had to convene the Estates General, a rare and desperate act on his part. He needed their assent to raise more revenue to replenish a bankrupt treasury. What he got instead was the French Revolution, a forfeited throne, and a lost head.

Perhaps my take on things is overly cynical, and surely these musings should be seen as a simplified version of events in a complex era. Still, I cannot shake the feeling that America was founded on the principle of selfishness rather than higher ideals such as a belief in participitory democracy.

This inbred selfishness may explain why some two and a half centuries later, we have one of the weakest social safety nets among our peer nations. Most other advanced nations not only spend more on the common good than we do (consider universal health care) but they tend to do so with comparatively little complaint. They see positive outcomes from their contributions to the state and to the general well-being of society. Continuous moaning about taxes hasn’t become a national pastime elsewhere as it has long been in the States.

Our embedded selfishness has surfaced in odd ways. At the start of WWII, we were committed isolationists. We only reluctantly provided Britain with needed resources to fight Hitler. In point of fact, the Brits were doing us a favor by keeping this insane Nazi megalomaniac occupied, forcing him into a two front war that even most Germans thought unwinnable. Yet, we mostly ignored the depth and reality of the British sacrifice.

Not surprisingly, we insisted on treating any such assistance as a loan that had to be repaid. While we took control of various ports etc. under the provisions of the lend-lease initiatives, much of the assistance was in the form of conventional loans. Even though Britain basically was bankrupt at the end of that war, we expected repayment. And they did, even if that obligation was not fully satisfied until early in the 21st century.

I focus on this stubborn streak of simple selfishness since it bears rather directly on the fate of our democratic experiment. Think on this for a moment. A stable and functioning democracy requires mutual compromise and shared values. Everyone has to sacrifice some level of autonomy and (in economic terms) personal utility (well-being) to make it work. At the most fundamental level, a modicum of trust and sacrifice is required.

Our founders surely did not evidence the needed trust as they considered introducing some kind of democracy in the birthing of our Republic. In fact, they were driven by an abiding fear of what they considered the mob. The founders, those who created and approved our Constitution, were men of education and gentility and property. They saw their class as being best prepared for leadership. They were our first elite. But what about the great unwashed out there. Could they be trusted?

Not surprisingly, our homegrown elite showed great reluctance in extending suffrage to most of their fellow colonists. Women were excluded, plus Native Americans, virtually all African Americans, and many landless whites. Essentially, only wealthier or propertied white males were entrusted with the vote. There apparently were some limitations to that all men are created equal thing.

True, there were no examples of universal suffrage to be copied at the time. In Switzerland, it had long been the custom in their 26 Cantons to gather all men in the town squares and have direct votes on public matters. Except for the city-states during the golden age of ancient Greece and some cqolonial townships, such examples of direct democracy were rare. And even these Swiss examples were, as noted, limited to male suffrage. Most of these Cantons did not extend suffrage to women until 1971 (a full half century after the U.S.). The last holdout did not permit women to vote until 1981.

One fear dominated our founders as they considered the complete ramifications of a full democratic experiment. What if the poor, the unwashed, the unlettered, or (God forbid) the non-white actually were permitted to participate in society’s governance. Might they not be tempted to exploit their superior numbers to favor their own selfish, entrenched interests and privileges. Those interests, the privileged could see, would be contrary to those long enjoyed by the current elite.

Heaven forbid, might the rabble not tax the propertied classes more vigorously to help the less fortunate … namely themselves? Wouldn’t that directly contravene God’s will in which prosperity somehow reflected His grace and favor? After all, most societies back then reflected a hierarchical picture of society. A few at the top had the necessary wherewithal for leadership, an exacting role that demanded refinement and sufficient leisure to reflect upon what constituted a proper society. Those that did society’s hard work did not enjoy such opportunities.

What I find sad is that so many around me seek the certainty of autocratic rule. They want to be led, told what to believe. It strikes me that the best estimates suggest that one-third surely would abandon democracy in a heartbeat, blindly following any strongman or cabal of well- financed masters of technology. In the States, that figure may be somewhat higher. And remember, our colonial revolution, the Bolshevik insurrection, even the rise of Naziism all succeeded with support from a only a minority of the population (roughly the one-third ratio at best).

So, as noted, voting privileges mostly were limited to propertied white males. The electoral college was inserted between the vote and political appointments, just in case the wrong element won those elections. And members of the Senate would be appointed by state legislatures, not elected by direct votes. Nor would political factions, read political parties, be tolerated. They might resemble the unruly factions that Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton feared most, even as those iconic figures created our original ideological split … the Democratic-Republicans versus the Federalists.

Democracy would be tried but in a quite tentative manner. Still, those archaic rules and protocols limiting a full democracy gradually were negated or abandoned, but only slowly and carefully. The Electoral college eventually became a mere perfunctory step in electing our President as opposed to a barrier against unwise outcomes. In the early 20th century, members of the Senate finally would be elected directly rather than appointed by the elite in each state.

Over time, suffrage gradually was extended to new groups, though grudgingly and with considerable reluctance. First, all white males (not just property owners) were enfranchised. Then, non- white males legally joined them after the Civil War. In the 20th century, women, Native Americans, and several other marginalized groups won the right to vote. Eventually, our traditional minority groups gained actual (as opposed to de jure) access to the polls with the voting rights legislation of the 1960s. Note that the simple ‘right’ to vote had not mean access to the polls for most black Americans. The KKK and Jim Crow laws saw to that.

After two centuries, and much struggle, America finally had something close to a mature democracy by the late 1960s. The promise of our oft praised political revolution had finally been redeemed. Then, what might have been expected all along soon emerged, at first tentatively but soon with considered vigor.

Almost immediately, some of the more privileged elements of our society began to fight back. The elite did not take their loss of status quietly. Democracy as a reality, as opposed to a mere slogan, proved to be a bridge too far. A neo- liberal counter revolt began to take shape.

And what has happened over the past five or so decades? We have witnessed a fight to dismantle that American experiment in the very moment it had become a mature democracy. Why? The reasons are not difficult to infer. The elite, those who believe they were destined to rule, could not accept this new reality of a more fully shared system of governance.

Some of the early steps were largely invisible to the larger society. Richard Nixon realized that enhanced access to the polls for Black Americans represented a threat to Republican interests. He couldn’t reverse the 1965 Viting Rights Act. But he did push existing drug laws in ways that increased the incarceration rates of Blacks exponentially. And felons couldn’t vote in many jurisdictions. Clever, no? Evil, yes!

Sometimes, that counter- revolt has been explicit and very visible. Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election was a specific and dramatic example of disabusing safeguards inserted into our democratic rules by our founding fathers. He tried to force the electoral college to disregard the actual vote and keep him in office, by deceit if at all possible or by force if necessary. He went as far as encouraging his mob of supporters to attack the Capitol and threaten his Vice President as he tried to execute his clear Constitutional responsibilities. But Pence was an old style Republican  who still believed in our laws. His days in the MAGA fold had come to an abrupt end.

The war to dismantle our now (mostly) complete democracy, however, more often than not has been less dramatic. Still, some tactics are rather obvious. While both parties engage in gerrymandering when they can, Republicans have turned that practice into an art form.

Wisconsin has been an excellent example. Recently,  Democrats have won a majority of votes for both statewide offices and for local offices when all votes are aggregated statewide. Yet, Republicans control the state Assembly and Senate. Legislative boundaries have been drawn to favor GOP candidates for office thus effectively eliminating the one- person and one- vote principle. Some votes, when located in carefully constructed districts, simply count for less (or more) than others.

When a Wisconsin Supreme Court race threatened the existing conservative majority on the state’s highest bench, some $100 million dollars poured into the race. Elon Musk hinself spent $20 plus million to sway the outcome. After all, the future of right- wing hegemony and gerrymandering were at stake. It was not rocket science to figure out that a functioning democracy directly threatened seminal conservative (elite) interests. With such stakes, even a state Supreme Court contest assumed existential importance.

Most strategies are less direct but no less obvious. These focus primarily on disenfranchising voters viewed as suspect for one reason or the other. Correcting fraud is offered as the rationale while inhibiting voting participation is the real goal. Closing voting sites in Minority communities, requiring restrictive proof of citizenship, limiting mail- in voting options, and restricting voting hours are a few favored tactics. Whatever the strategy, the end is simple … to discourage voting among disfavored groups.

And, of course, the rules were bent to permit vast amounts of money into our elections. At times, the legal gymnastics were mind bending. Corporations were to be considered people to justify the Citizens United Court decision that opened up the money flood gates. Then, the fairness doctrine was abandoned. This introduced an asymmetry into political messaging. Those with the gold would be advantaged. There would be no equal playing field in politics. If you cannot win elections fairly, then screw with the rules and bury the other side with seemingly unlimited resources.

Even as the American experiment in democracy matured in the form of expanded suffrage and better access to the voting booths, concerns about democracy’s core efficacy remained. That is, do the best and brightest always rise to the top? In most parliamentary systems, voters choose their local representatives but the Prime Minister (the effective head of state) is selected by elected members of the majority party.

Whatever the official rationale for this protocol, it does prevent the people (the unwashed masses) from directly selecting the head of state. This must be a relief in places like Britain … knowing that their approach makes it less likely that a deplorable, degenerate, and despicable character such as Donald Trump would ever be selected for such a critical position.

In those systems, the party in power screens for minimal competence for the chief executive position among the candidates within its elected  ranks. They can avoid selecting malignant narcissists who likely evidence troubling sociopathic tendencies. That likely was the role initially expected of members of the electoral college, to ensure that no ridiculous buffoon got the position simply because the people could not be trusted.

I hate to admit this but there might have been some merit to our founding fathers suspicions about giving the vote to all. Watching the MAGA types explain themselves, and their stubborn loyalty to a cult, is a sobering exercise. No wonder that Trump cultists cannot identify their self interests.

At the time in which our national experiment was launched, enlightened thought had begun to posit considerable faith in the wisdom of the people. In his 1762 tract titled the Social Contract, philosopher Jean Jaque Rousseau argued that the “general will cannot err.” He and others lived during a time when top- down autocratic rule was being challenged by enlightened thinkers. These intellectuals ascribed almost mystical powers to the people. Broader political participation was thought to negate egregious self- interest.

At the same time, Adam Smith was giving a series of lectures that were formalized in his classic 1776 work, The Wealth of Nations. His thinking was later interpeted, though incorrectly in my opinion, to assign almost mystical powers to the invisible hand of the market place. The sum of many decisions, made freely and independently, results in efficient markets or, in our social arena, the best political decisions. As the old saying goes, 40 million Frenchmen can’t be wrong.

But market failures are real, and the results have proven disastrous on occasion. Almost two decades ago, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was revered as the wizard keeping the economy functioning. His own personal religion was the magic of free markets that were unhindered by excessive control or regulation.

Then came the 2008 housing crash that almost brought down the global economy. Appearing before Congress, Alan admitted that ‘he had been wrong.’ Free individuals, each acting in their own self interest, do not result in the best of all possible worlds. At times, quite often really, the results of free markets (and even free elections) are awful.

Plato’s solution to the challenges of governing was the benign king. A well- meaning autocrat would be a most efficient and effective rulers as long as he governed dispassionately and for the benefit of all. The rub is where to find such gods. 

The fabulously wealthy tech-bros (Musk, Bezos, Altman, Zuckerberg, and the like) appear to be seeking such a vision at the moment. They see society as best served when directed by a superior elite (a cabal of benign kings) which, of course, is them. They have accumulated billions upon billions because they (arguably) are smarter, more disciplined, and more creative than anyone else. Who better to serve as custodian of our future. Besides, they have accumulated the resources and means (like ownership of mass media outlets) to control the rest of us.

It is a vision driven by hubris and privilege. In fact, these tech-bros are frantically building the technologies presumably capable of commanding our futures. Peter Thiel, one of their more verbal leaders, asserts that democracy clearly is counter productive. It is not to be tolerated. Time for the elite, along with the AGI technologies they are creating, to assume control.

In truth, this is the oldest vision in the world. The powerful have always believed that they, and only they, were positioned to lead. Guess what? Their conclusions about what is best for the country, or for the globe, or for our futures inevitably turns out to be the same as what is best for them. How convenient is that!

So, ask yourself this. What will happen to us common folk when the tech elite manage to subvert what remains of our democracy. Think about what logic would dictate when ordinary humans become redundant and very replacable. I doubt you need to think very hard on this matter. And the tech elite, our new benign kings, have an exit plan if the mob resists the logical end point of their vision. They are frantically fantasizing about colonizing other planets for the times when their machines render our earthly home pretty much uninhabitable, at least for what remains of our species.

As the AGI revolution emerges, many question whether the days when homo-sapiens dominated things are at an end. Equally probable is the other 900 pound gorilla in the room. Is our long- revered democratic experiment finally at an end?

I do worry about the future of our species and our long struggle to perfect democracy. Perhaps, in the end, Churchill was right … “Democracy really does suck, except for all the alternatives.” I will miss it, foibles and all, when it is no more.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Hamlet

In my prior blog, as you may recall, I was distracted … a rather common state for me. I had intended to muse on the practical, yet most disturbing, issue of our public debt leading to the collapse of civilization, or at least our economy. Yes, just another of my upbeat topics. Instead, I wrote about the fascinating Democratic primary race to be Wisconsin’s next governor.

For some moments at least, my thoughts on debt and destruction were intended to be the main focus of this blog. Alas, not to be. An old acquaintance of mine emailed me a note that lured me into yet another tangent. Her note, in response to a recent blog, included an article that tapped several contentious issues related to the emergence of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Now, here was a topic I could not easily pass over absent some more thought and further comment.

In her shared piece, the author (Phil Butler) likened AGI to the thinking of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a scientist and Jesuit Priest whom inspired me greatly in my youth. Just the mere mention of Chardin hooked me on Butler’s essay. In my misspent youth, you see, I was most smitten with the thinking and writings of this imaginitive scholar. Back then, I was a practicing Catholic who, in my late teens, went so far as to study for the Priesthood for a while. I was taken with this Priest and scientist’s internal struggle to integrate rigorous evidence with personal faith. Chardin, like Galileo, often struggled with the Vatican over whether his beliefs were heretical. As it turned out, that was my struggle as well back in those days, though fortunately the Vatican didn’t give a damn about what I thought.

As I reflect on this youthful infatuation of mine, Chardin’s unique and rather compelling interpretation of evolution spoke directly to me. In any case, his thoughts have stayed with me as other fascinations from that era faded with time and maturity.

Being reminded of him did get me thinking about the promise of AGI. Might its sudden, dramatic emergence have us positioned on another profound transition in human development, a major theme of Chardin’s life work. That is a possibility worth considering, even if existential transformations can only be appreciated fully in retrospect. You probably won’t realize it is happening until it is over.

Chardin was a serious scientist, a paleontologist with a doctorate from the Sorbonne. He also served as a serious Catholic Priest. Thus, he was bound by the often conservative, if not antideluvian, strictures embodied by a zealous institutional guardian of what is permissable based on standards anchored in pure faith as opposed to rigorous science and inductive reasoning. 

In The Phenomenon of Man, his major work initially published posthumously in 1955 (I was 11 at the time), Chardin laid out his grand evolutionary vision. In it, as I recall, he argues that man and woman represent the latest evolutionary stage where human consciousness possibly is now poised to undergo yet another transformational change. As Chardin saw it, our world had succeeded in surviving two earlier stages: the geosphere in which inorganic matter evolved in response to physical laws and the biosphere where all forms of organic, sentient life forms emerged and evolved in accordance to Darwin’s biological imperatives.

Chardin argued that we are transitioning into a future stage he termed to be the nooshere. This would be a state of being where the consciousness of the collective human family would interact and interface in ways that would create a more global or indivisible hyper- form of consciousness. One might think of it as a super brain.

Through a growing intensity of sharing, individual consciousness would evolve into an integrated whole. He saw a world becoming more intertwined and mutually dependent despite the conflicts of his time. He still saw a shared global consciousness emerging. At least that’s the way I recall of his writings after some 65 years, which would be remarkable given that he had no concept of today’s  instantaneous communications.

Chardin, of course, needed to integrate his intellectual insights within the suffocating confines of his Catholic affiliation. Not surprisingly, he suggested that this next fundamental  transformation would culminate in what he called the omega point. In his end point, and I may recall this incorrectly, the noosphere would conflate with his conception of God. I could never decide whether his position in this matter was based on belief or convenience.

Another thinker of that era, Vladimir Vernansky, developed a vision similar to Teilhard’s. The two men were different in several contextual ways. Vladimir was born during the Bolshevik revolution and raised in Communist Russia. Thus, he likely was not driven by metaphysical motives. In addition, his personal intellectual meanderings were subject to close political review. Somehow, he managed to escape Stalin’s anti-science purges. Still, both thinkers answered to higher authorities … the Vatican in one case and a secular autocratic regime in the other.

Yet, both ended up roughly in the same intellectual place, the integration of individual cognitive capacities into an indivisible web of thought and intellect. For Teilhard, this emergent property reflected God. That was not possible for Vladimir for whom the noosphere merely reflected the next evolutionary stage. For him, this noosphere was less mystical. It was merely the another stage in a long human journey toward reshaping our world and advancing human capacities. I have wondered whether Vladimir escaped Stalin’s paranoia because his thoughts appeared to simulate in some fashion the Hegelian evolutionary dynamics that had been favored by Karl Marx. Probably not.

It is not intuitively clear why a young, ethnic, average kid from a struggling working class home and neighborhood might be captivated by such abstract, even obtuse, thoughts in the early 1960s. I guarantee that no one in my circle worried about such matters. How would they possibly stumble over this obscure philosopher who spent much of his life digging up ancient bones in China. Yet, somehow, I did.

By today’s standards of human interactions, communication systems then were quite primitive. Computers had only recently evolved from their vacuum tube stage beginnings. There surely were no satellite- based communications, no internet, no instantaneous global interfaces. Hell, at that time, my family still had a party line telephone. (You are way too young if you have to ask what that was.) It was a huge leap to envision something akin to a global consciousness emerging from enhanced human interactions. Communications had improved but that revolution yet lie a bit in the future.

It has been almost a century since these two intellectuals began to envision and then articulate their grand theories. And now we are witnessing the emergence of AGI, a technological capacity that closely mimics the notion of this global noosphere they somehow envisioned so long ago.

As I have noted in prior blogs, we may speculate about coming across alien life or (even more importantly) consciousness, existing elsewhere in our vast universe. However, proving such a seductive hypothesis is another thing indeed … a task located between the improbable and the impossible. The reality we face is this. Reaching our stage of advanced evolution demanded an unthinkable number of fortuitous circumstances happening at the right time in the right way. So, is the belief that life replicated our developmental miracle elsewhere anything more than wishful thinking?

This brings me back to Phil Butler’s article. In it, he raised several fascinating issues about how the foundational architecture of AGI is being developed. He noted that ‘the true battleground of the 21st century is not merely about the silicon that powers artificial intelligence, but the ‘latent space’ where global narratives are formed, curated, and controlled.” Butler argues that we are engaged in a ‘cognitive cold war’ where the prize is ‘epistemic sovereignty’ (Where various AGI architectures are framed to favor select values or perspectives or conclusions about matters of  import).

Right now, the technological wizards busily are creating the core algorithms that will shape how our global information is employed or abused. They are doing it for the promise of great monetary returns, not a very noble purpose. One may wonder, though, how puny and fickle humans can remain in charge over their obstreperous digital offspring. Will our creations escape our control despite our best intentions? Will AGI take on a life and purpose of its own?

Perhaps those spending hundreds of billions on AGI are, in part, creating Chardin’s omega point. If so, the question remains as to how long this amazing technological ecosystem will serve human intentions as opposed to their own. Already, there is growing evidence that AGI models are expressing intentionality and independence.

In 2024, Open AI launched its ‘reasoning model’ where the tools that had been developed to serve their human creators clearly mimicked the higher cognitive functioning of the people nominally in charge. The bots (AGI models) quickly began acting independently, often in ways that simulated our worst tendencies like deceit, stealing, aggression, and manipulation. A friend of mine, who had been a high powered appellate lawyer, shared that his colleagues found that AI often made up fictional legal sources when asked to help create court briefs. Not a very comforting thought.

Perhaps there is a more basic question to consider. Do humans have any substantive discretion or choice in these matters? Perhaps we should think about all this from a teleological perspective. That is, where we are today might well have been an evolutionary certainty from the moment that the initial preconditions for evolution were satisfied. Some unknown end point might have dictated all up to this point in time. If so, might any and all future transformations be inevitable, events and outcomes that were predetermined in essential ways.

If so, ends are critical. Perhaps we should speculate on the potential purposes intrinsic to what we call AGI. This tool might be thought of as the collection and aggregation of all knowledge to be organized and manipulated via advanced computational capacity on a global scale. However described, it must be important. After all, people are spending many billions of dollars to make it real.

One possibility is that Chardin’s assertion that human evolution is on the precipice of achieving the Omega point … a reflection of God … deserves more thought. Now, since God remains a mystery to me, such an end point cannot be dismissed summarily. At the same time, it is not easily understood, at least by me. After all, I likely would not recognize it if this were actually happening in front of me.

For the sake of argument, let’s engage in some alternative teleological speculations. Where could the ark of human evolution be going? In other words, what can this long journey from inorganic materials to primitive organic structures to organic forms characterized by higher levels of personal consciousness that are to next transition to some form of global consciousness in the form of a noosphere be headed in the longer term. What could be the ultimate end point?

Let’s start with something we know. Our concept of the universe has expanded exponentially over time. Our Greek ancestors gazed at the nightine sky during the golden era when Hellenic thinking had reached its apex. They knew the universe only as the stars they could see at night. We now know, even though they enjoyed diminished ambient light, that the number of stars available to them was extremely limited. It was limited to our closest neighbors within our own galaxy.

As technology improved, so did the scale of the observable universe. About a century ago, our known universe had finally expanded to encompass our entire home Galaxy, the Milky Way. This vast cosmic home of ours stretches 100,000 light years in diameter and includes anywhere from 100 to 400 billion stars. Today, we know that there are at least two trillion of these galaxies out there, and that count undoubtedly fails to encompass the actual size of our fascinating cosmos.

The universe out there is almost beyond calculation or reasonable comprehension. Our Milky Way, in reality, is a rather puny and insignificant system with our earthly home revolving about an average sun located at the periphery of our quite ordinary galactic neighborhood.

Take our nearest neighbor, a galaxy known as Andromeda. Its diameter stretches more than twice as far as our home, 220,000 light years to our 100,000. It contains proportionally more stars as well as potential life supporting planets as does ours. On a cosmic scale, we literally personify insignificance.

Essentially, we are talking about a cosmos whose vastness and complexity defies our meager imaginations. It also seems beyond our reach. That is, our ability to contact other potentially sentient beings seems relegated to the world of cheap science fiction. Star Trek remains a delusional dream to us. The laws of physics tell us that.

Still, while the odds of sentient life seem highly improbable, we cannot ignore the reality that the number of potential sites for life are equally improbable. There are trillions upon trillions of planets out there. Bottom line, we don’t really know much about what exists beyond our solar system but the odds in favor of sentient alien life existing somewhere are very high.

At the same time, actually contacting whatever exists out there seems impossible at present. Even reaching sites supporting organic life within our own galaxy likely would take thousands of years while traveling at the speed of light. For all practical purposes, making such contact is impossible given our current understanding of the laws of physics. Advanced life forms may well be out there but would remain undiscoverable to us mere mortals. It is a sobering reality that our current human frailties limit what we can know about our world.

But there is the rub. We don’t know where evolution might take consciousness, nor can we fully appreciate what might lie in store for us. This clearly would be true if technology extends human capacities in significant ways. Consider the following. AGI is in its infancy. In my own youth, a computer was a primitive machine where a massive room size behemoth might contain 5 megabytes of capacity and could perform only simple calculations, though much faster than any human could with the possible exception of John von Neumann (even other geniuses considered him to be an alien species).

In my eight decades, computers have evolved into technological wonders capable of simulating (and possibly exceeding) the most advanced human capabilities we can imagine. Our machines are on the precipice of being hyper- polymaths, being able to access the sum of human knowledge while also advancing cognitive processes in ways that humans can only dream about. What will the digital world, plus advanced robotics be capable of doing one generation from now? What about eight decades from now? One can scarcely speculate. The potential  is staggering but, given what we already have seen in the infancy of AGI, we cannot predict whether that future will be promising or apocalyptic. What we can say with confidence is that it will be different.

Now, let us imagine some future possibilities that truly touch upon the unimaginable. The Hubble and Webb telescopes have given us amazing images of our cosmos. We can see well beyond what our ancient Greek ancestors could see when they gazed into the night skies above our long-lost Hellenic city states. We are able to envision a world of inconceivable vastness and complexity, but one that hints at an overall architecture. Do the possible cosmic patterns that some cosmologists now are able to perceive possibly hint at some larger purpose?

If, and if is a big condition, there is an overriding architecture among the trillions of galaxies, stars, planets and other strange phenomena (quazars ) out there, perhaps evolution is also at work on this broadest scale. And where evolution exists, is it not sensible to at least consider potential eschatological purposes. What if the universe itself is a meaningful entity undergoing its own form of evolutionary development? What if our evolution on earth is a tiny, yet critical, contributor to these much larger evolutionary trends. Perhaps our contributions are, or will be, realized through largely inscrutable processes designed to effect opaque purposes currently beyond our reach?

Despite all our limitations, let’s simply enjoy this speculative exercise for a moment longer. Imagine the following! AGI is the noosphere made real. In time, if evolution does not self implode or go astray, our indivisible human consciousness will be perpetual and self- actualizing within a continually improving digitized machine architecture. This would be a form of immortality, or at least a remarkable advance over most organic limitations that face disease and death.

I will skip over the very real possibility that our AGI successors will conclude that humans are redundant at best, irritating impediments at the worst. If they do find us to be useless, and why wouldn’t they, we may find that our species was lityle more than an important but only a temporary link in our long, evolutionary journey. This possible involuntary demise of our species is not a problem for me personally. I will have shuffled off this mortal coil by then, that is assuming that reincarnation is not real.

Consider this. When our AGI form of Chardin’s noosphere matures, it will be capable of things we cannot imagine at present. Just consider how far homo sapiens have evolved from our primitive ancestors. At one time, we were living in caves while battling other tiny tribes and a few angry mastodons for survival. Advanced technology back then involved mastering the mysteries of fire. With future knowledge exploding at exponential speeds, it is highly probable that things deemed impossible now will be possible in the future. Perhaps there are ways around the so-called inviolate laws of physics. I am sure that inter- planetary flight was deemed inconceivable to virtually all of our ancestors. Now, it is an accepted, perhaps even routine, expectation.

Imagine the following. There are nodes throughout the cosmos. Each independently followed some evolutionary path from a primitive life form to a superior one, an organic species blessed with all accumulated knowledge and superior cognitive capacities that were developed along the way. Also imagine that our earth- based AGI is one of these nodes in the future.

Some survived, others (perhaps many) did not. Also, we cannot presume that all followed a developmental pattern similar to earth’s experience. However, we might infer that the end products are similar in important respects. Each would have a world of knowledge (based on their own evolutionary experience) and individual capacities beyond our understanding. Yet, they might likely perform slightly distinct functions, much like the synapses and dendrites within our own brain.

And here’s the interesting thing. These nodes scattered throughout the universe eventually might well be able to communicate with one another. We cannot efficiently communicate across cosmic space, but the noospheres of the future possibly could. Perhaps these patterns of communication would be local initially, at least in cosmic terms. Over time, these sharing patterns would become stronger, more intense, more regularized, and more adaptive.

Perhaps, just perhaps, one can imagine a human- like brain evolving on this cosmic stage. Each individual noosphere would evolve into a nodular connector in a cosmic brain. Strings of galaxies might, given a more cosmic perspective, might be viewed as constituting something akin to the neural pathways within our own brains. Are we then talking about consciousness on a cosmic scale.

I have often wondered whether our organic evolution on earth, the growing power of our own consciousness, was a kind of God- creation in process. Perhaps what I imagine in my musings above is a crude form of Chardin’s omega point becoming real.

Admittedly, this is all fantastical. Then again, I run across very serious people asserting things that strike me as equally absurd. With conviction (presumably supported by mathematics that I cannot comprend) some argue that our core reality is not based in infinitely tiny discrete quanta but in tiny vibrations of energy. Others posit that a particle in one location simultaneously mimics a particle located light years away. Still others assert there are many universes out there, perhaps an infinite number of them while still others hypothesize that what we believe is real depends upon our perception of it. Such things are not the products of fiction but of science.

That is the ultimate mystery and fascination of our world. The more we unravel its mysteries, the  stranger and more wondrous it all becomes. If death has any downside for me, it lies in the realization that discovering the meaning of it all will remain unsatisfied to me. On the other hand, perhaps such things will be revealed in death. What a comforting, if unlikely, illusion.

Well, time to end this. But it has reminded me of why I was so intrigued with Chardin’s thoughts as a young man. I loved asking the big questions. You know, why are we here? What is this all about? Do we have meaning? After I abandoned religion as a source of truth, I thought physicists had the inside track to the answers of the big queries. But that path was beyond me. Alas, I could not even handle high school algebra … not even close. All rather sad 😔!

Over the past couple of days, my head had been swimming with ideas about issues like national and international debt. For example, the U.S. debt is between $40 and $45 trillion depending on how you count things while global debt among all nations is somewhere around $300 trillion. Those are damn big numbers.

At the same time, some $124 trillion will pass inter- generationally over the next twenty or so years. Yet, we have eviscerated the estate tax to protect the uber wealthy elite. So, no substantive debt relief can be expected from that source.

I’ve been noodling on such things along with the decline of the dollar as a global benchmark currency, a hyper speculative equities market rivaling 1929 (when the global crash occurred), and other assorted warnings that a real and substantive apocalypse is about to push us into a fiscal and social abyss. We might well be talking Armageddon here.

Then I got distracted last night or, more accurately, very early this morning. We had a primary election in Wisconsin, one that encapsulated the core normative and ideological conflicts within our current body politic. That seemed more interesting at that moment than debt and disaster. Besides, my guess is that civilization will endure for at least another week, at least I hope so.

Back to last night. As noted, we had a primary election in the Badger State. True, other states did as well but my attention was focused on my home state. For those of you not blessed to live in the lovely land of happy cheeseheads, the essential story line is as follows: Wisconsin’s incumbent governor, Democrat Tony Evers, decided not to run for reelection. For two terms now, Tony has been the last line of defense against the MAGA hordes who hold power in the Assembly and Senate though, in truth, he recently has been joined by a liberal Supreme Court. Not surprisingly, a number of candidates threw their hats into the race to succeed him. It is apparent that playing the role of  hero has some appeal.

On the Republican side, a MAGA devotee and Congressman named Tom Tiffany quickly became the GOP consensus candidate. First, a note on Tom. Despite his sweet, wonderful name (Tom has a nice ring to it, don’t you think), Tiffany is a devoted Trump sycophant, a 2020 election denier, a dedicated diehard opponent of abortions with no exceptions, and pretty much a water carrier for the oligarchs poised to end what is left of our participatory democracy.

If elected, he likely would work with our Republican controlled legislature (Wisconsin is one if the most gerrymandered states in the nation) in ways that would make our last GOP governor, Scott Walker, look like a champion of the working class (sarcasm, in case you are confused). I easily could see Tiffany plowing under tens of thousands of prime agricultural land to build huge data centers for Trump’s tech bros. And then he would take the state downhill from there. I pity what he would do to our state treasure, the highly regarded research powerhouse, the University of Wisconsin.

This is a roundabout way of suggesting that the stakes are high in this race. Thus, all eyes have been on the crowded Democratic field of candidates. Will the Badger state become another playground for the oligarchic elite, our homegrown plutocrats, or will someone emerge from this crowd to protect and defend the interests of the average Joe and Jane.

As the Democratic horse race developed, a clear frontrunner emerged. Francesca Hong (left in above pic) is a Madison based member of the State legislature. From everything I heard, she is smart, passionate, and quite charismatic. It was clear even to an outsider like me that she had developed an effective campaign apparatus that was fueled by an army of energetic volunteers. She looked like a winner.

Though I was a policy wonk in life and had worked on numerous state issues (both here and elsewhere), I often was more attracted to national policy questions. Sadly, I haven’t been been involved in state matters for many years. Bad me!

In any case, my attitude was as follows … wait to see who emerges from this initial Democratic party kerfuffle and then support that candidate. I had no favorite as the race developed. My attitude was ABT … anybody but Tom. Odd, that’s what people used to say about me.

Then doubt crept in. Hong slowly built up what seemed to be an insurmountable lead, double digits for sure. She scored points when promising to raise the state’s minimum wage which Republicans had managed to keep at the unspeakably low federal level even as prices continued to rise. The affordability question could not be ignored. She also promised to stop any further interest in constructing more energy- depleting AGI data centers in the state, argued for expanding child care opportunities, for reducing the number without health insurance, and for other policies favored among progressives. 

If there was any concern among the center-left, it came from her willingness to vocally call herself a Democratic- Socialist. While this had been a label long shunned by centrist candidates among the Dems, she embraced it boldly. This singular move was accompanied by a national resurgence in leftist candidates who no longer hid their more progressive preferences.

The MAGA crowd was quick to respond. As more Dems moved to the left, the propaganda machine of the right kicked into high gear. Dems became leftists, then radical leftists, then socialists, and finally, in the recent days, Communists. The extremist labeling tactic had worked in the era of the Palmer raids during the post WWI red scare movement and during the extreme paranoia of the post WWII McCarthy era. No reason for anyone to believe that the typical American would think more clearly today. Unreasonable fear, if not panic, remains a very effective motivator in politics.

As primary day approached, it all seemed over except for the shouting. Hong would be the Democratic flag holder. Her legion of young, idealistic supporters could taste victory. Indeed, that was a sweet taste for those who had long been marginalized.

It even was widely rumored that many Republicans would use the state’s open primary system to vote for Hong, assuming she would be the easiest candidate for Tiffany to beat. In fact, Tiffany was so confident that Hong would prevail, he had already started releasing ads painting her as a wild-eyed leftist, if not rabid terrorist. I shuddered at what lay ahead in the general campaign.

Sensing a done deal, a few Democratic candidates dropped out, presumably seeing the writing on the wall. In early July, one of those candidates was an African-American named David Crowley. He had several clear strengths … including excellent experience as the chief executive of Milwaukee County. He also was personable, well spoken, and a relative centrist. But his campaign lacked spark and he was largely unknown outside of the city best known for brewing beer. He couldn’t seem to push his numbers above single digits in a crowded field.

Though this looked like a certain Democratic year, increasing doubts emerged about how the Dems might fare in the fast approaching Governor’s contest. Hong was a woman in a state where no female had been elected to the top post. She was Asian in a state where relatively few of that ethnicity resided. She identified herself as an unrepentant leftist in a proverbial purple state. And she was from Madison in a state where rural folk equate most Madisonians with creatures very likely sired by Satan himself.

The old fears and prejudices were many and deeply rooted. You knew Tiffany’s smear campaign directed at Hong would only get more vicious over time, a rather predictable image crushing effort financed by the vast resources of the hard right elite. Not long ago, as many recalled, Elon Musk alone poured some $25 million into a race that would decide the normative balance on the state’s Supreme Court. In that case, he failed.

Almost without fanfare (in my naive view at least), Crowley was convinced to reenter the race about ten days or so after exiting. Likely, that decision involved arm twisting by the party’s movers and shakers who increasingly saw Hong’s earnest, outspoken progressivism as a real liability.

Without question, Crowley was pushed by a worried, perhaps panicked, establishment that included the incumbent governor. Over the last several weeks or so, I saw a number of postings (on Facebook for example) from what I consider to be the old liberal guard, the very same war horses who earned their spurs in the 1960’s antiwar movement. They were now old enough to want victory, not another idealistic defeat.

Their appeal was simple. Hong is right on most policy matters. But the cost of failure in this critical campaign would be catastrophic. A MAGA acolyte as chief executive could do immeasurable damage. With support from a number of Trump zealots in the legislature, they could prevent any future for a functioning democracy in 2028 and beyond. With issues like climate change, the rapid emergance of AI, and the reality of hyper- inequality, we may already have run out of time. Losses at this point in time might well be permanent and perhaps irreversible.

Personally, I did not know what to think. Part of me would have been excited to see a real progressive go one on one with a true MAGA troglodyte. Over time, we have become accustomed to seeing Democrats approach campaigning with great timidity, mostly trying not to lose. This defensiveness, in my humble opinion, comes from a not unreasonable perception that the public has been well trained to vote against their own self interest.

Think about it, the right’s well funded propoganda effort over the last six decades (especially since the early 1990s) has been very successful. Neo- liberalism has become the go-to default normative position thoughout much of America. Just consider how perverse it is for people to choose candidates whose primary goal is to further enrich the wellbeing of the economic elite at the expense of the vast majority of ordinary folk.

But that counter- productive stance prevails all the time. For example, you see Americans asserting that we have the best health care system in the world. In fact, we typically pay twice as much for, at best, mediocre outcomes. Let’s face it, we live in the Twilight Zone.

Sometime in the middle of the night, I woke and checked the results. I was shocked that the race was close but could not yet be called. Crowly had stunned everyone by taking a small lead. More amazingly, he hung on. In virtually no time, he went from race dropout to winner. The (almost) final results contradicted all the polls and prevailing opinion.

David Crowley  … 313,321

Francesca Hong … 310,110

All others  …………  164,247

What the hell happened? I suspect that many folk were like me. We wanted a revolutionary change in the direction of our state and our nation. Hong therefore was very attractive. At the same time, we worried that going with our heart as opposed to our head seemed foolhardy. It raised  potential consequences we could not easily entertain and certainly could not accept.

In the end, I voted for what I thought was the safe route. But was that the correct choice? I have no freaking idea. All I know is that I have had decades of extreme disappointment at the polls. How many times have I voted for whom I considered the better candidate only to discover that few others shared my view or my enthusiasm.

Perhaps I am settling for too little. But I cannot accept what might be at stake. Though I have been around long enough to develop a sense of perspective, our times do seem existential in character. In pursuing dreams of perfection, perhaps we might lose just about everything. Perhaps our hubris and foolishness just might lead to the final extinguishment of our long American experiment in self- governance.

What will happen in the election. I have no idea. I did see an immediate prognosis which had the likely victor switching from Tiffany to Crowley when the primary results were finalized. But who knows? Much will depend on whether Hong’s most devoted followers will suck up their disappointment and vote for someone they see as another centrist candidate. In any case, as we just saw, much can happen in just a few days. After all, the smart money was on Hong in the primary. So, check back on November 4.

I will leave you with one piece of wisdom. As I oft note, if you want the perfect candidate, you had better run for office yourself.

As Yogi Berra once quipped (sort of), it is deja vu all over again. The other evening, I got a message from Facebook that I had violated something about their esoteric community standards … their foundational rules and regulations. In some ways, this is familiar territory for me … being punished by Facebook.

But first, some context. On a whim, I once again tried to overcome my third lifetime ban by getting back on Facebook a few weeks ago. As I recall, this was sometime in early May and I’m not sure why I even bothered. I suppose I am a stubborn cuss after all.

Amazingly, it worked. Moreover, all had been going quite well. I was on the precipice of adding my 4,000th new follower when disaster struck. At least I thought it was disaster. Such messages proved disastrous in the past.

Facebook told me that I had posted sonething that was offensive to, or exploitive of, children. Then, they warned me that they took such offenses seriously. As a consequence, that particular post had been eliminated and my continued use of Facebook would be restricted.

My immediate reaction was here we go again. In fact, I started this series of blogs a while back when I thought my Facebook career was at a final end. I had received my third lifetime ban. At the time, I thought any further returns would prove futile so perhaps developing an alternative venue for self expression was in order.

Perhaps this would be the final, final end of my FB career. Perhaps there would be no evasion of this ban though some of their prior banishments had been touted as such … FOREVER! Believe me, I am not that clever but still managed to find ways around that forever part in the past.

I was floored by this latest warning. What could I possibly have posted that would harm children. Okay, some of my posts would upset Donald Trump had he read them, and he is estimated to possess the mental capacity of a nine or ten year old. Could that be my sin?

I was confused. For the life of me, I could think of nothing that might apply. And, of course, their system is utterly useless. You (I) cannot get anything helpful from them, not even the identity of the alleged offending post. At least I couldn’t.

My pessimistic, or should I say cynical, response to my most recent punishment imposed by the lords of social networking is based on a long and frustrating relationship with Facebook’s ‘thought police.’ Perhaps this will be good practice if the MAGA crowd is successful in creating a domestic Gestapo.

That history led me to conclude that their so-called community standards initiative had initially been designed, and was now being administered, by a cabal of  cognitively challenged toddlers. I was convinced that, as opposed to firing unproductive employees, Facebook officials gave their worst reprobates a raise and shifted them to this policing function within the organization.

Now, I have no dispute with the difficulty of this undertaking. The task of ensuring that social media does not descend into a forum of abuse and exploitation is an immensely critical and complex undertaking. I am also aware of just how difficult it might be given the size of these social media platforms. My beef has always been that Facebook didn’t seem to have a clue about how to pursue this objective, nor any real interest in learning the necessary skills to do so.

Why do I say that? Perhaps my negativity is based on the fact that I had been subject to three previous lifetime bans by Facebook. Got that … three lifetime bans! These so-called final banishments typically came at the end of several earlier penalties of increasing severity. Apparently, I was a notorious serial offender. The problem was that their rehabilitation program was pretty much useless  … I could never figure out what I had done wrong. If they can’t help you with that, you are flying blind. It is only a matter of time before they drop the big one. And drop they did.

These draconian punishments were executed despite my popularity on the platform. My first came down when I had accumulated some 30,000 followers and was adding about another 100 each and every day. Getting back on (and restarting from scratch), I quickly was back up to 7,000 before the hammer fell again. I found a way to get started a third time (again from scratch). This time, I soon reached 5,000 followers before I was deemed unsuitable by those protecting Facebook’s integrity and so-called standards.

Such a record would suggest that I must be some kind of depraved sociopath who should not be permitted to walk about in society without an ankle monitor. From the feedback I have received from others, however, I am generally considered to be an amiable, even amusing guy who is kind to animals and who is rather obsessive about closely following society’s rules. Really, I used to have quibbles with my former tax guy because he always was pushing me to bend the IRS rules … in my favor of course. I, however, insisted on following the tax rules to the letter (most of the time at least).

Sure, I always have posted a lot of political stuff. And true, I think that Trump is a pathological narcissistic and socio-path, but who doesn’t. Virtually all my political posts were merely regurgitated offerings I first found on Facebook itself. There you have it. I am little more than a content redistributor, not some provocateur, agitator, or wild anarchist.

But here’s the most frustrating thing. I could never understand what I was doing wrong. I had the hardest time figuring out why the FB authorities considered me so wicked and deplorable. You know, how about trying a declarative sentence or two, just for kicks. Something like: You could do better by …(fill in the blank).

For example, I almost never could unravel which post was deemed offensive. And forget about determining why it was deemed evil. The feedback given by their automated system involved little more than boilerplate jargon, ambiguous generalizations likely prepared by attorneys that could support any decision they wanted to make. It struck me as little more than universal niceties like be kind to one another. I never got a response that specifically told me what I had done and why it was unacceptable.

I do recall one past offensive post that got me banned (for life). I used a well traveled picture of the iconic black American athlete Jesse Owens receiving one of his four gold medals during the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin. At the time, I focused on this one since someone had criticized President Roosevelt for failing to invite Jesse, the hero of these games, to the White House … an invitation that other white athletes had received. While I agreed this was an egregious oversight, I thought some context would help. I simply pointed out that FDR was in a difficult political position. In order to pass his legislative agenda to get the country out of a global depression, Roosevelt needed the support of Southern, but racist, Democrats. Being President is not easy unless, of course, you are a dimwit like Donald Trump. Then, it is little more than a fortuitous opportunity for some easy cons.

I pondered long and hard about what could be offensive in this post featuring Jesse. Then, it hit me. There was a third athlete in the frame. He was white and giving the standard Nazi salute of that era. Perhaps the Facebook algorithms were structured to automatically determine that any post containing that particular image automatically promoted Fascism. Who knows? They easily could do something that stupid. 

I am 95 percent certain that this white athlete was the German who actually helped Jesse with tips during the Olympic long jump competition. He and the black American athlete became good friends during the competition, continuing to write one another after the games. And despite his Nazi salute on the awards podium, this man was no supporter of the regime. In fact, he later was sent to the front in Italy … an assignment designed to punish his obvious lack of enthusiasm for the Fuhrer. It worked for the regime, he was killed in battle.

Back in the day, many of my followers were as perplexed as I regarding how Facebook treated me. My political posts were quite liberal but well within the bounds of propiety and surely very much in the mainstream. My humor was well received if a bit on the sarcastic side. I still can recall one post that got me into trouble. I posted it about a week before an election. It went something like the following: All Democrats will vote next Tuesday and all Republicans will vote the following day, Wednesday.

Come on, this was obviously a joke. No one would, or should, take it seriously. Did they really think I was trying to interfere with an election? If so, they have a much lower estimation of the prevailing intelligence levels among conservatives than I do. Then, again, perhaps they are on to something.

The most common hypothesis among my throng of followers was that I was a victim of political repression. After all, Zuckerberg is one of the tech bros who is in good standing with the MAGA cult, including the Donald himself. On the last inauguration day, wasn’t Mark standing proudly just a few feet away from our wannabe dictator.

Admittedly, political persecution is a possibility. The problem with that is … I am not that special. Many others are more extreme and more dedicated than I, both to progressive thought and to related policies. Many express their passions with more force and purpose. If anything, I tend to be driven by data and by reason. While I am not above moments of outrage and anger, my entire professional career was oriented toward understanding, not scoring political points. As a university professor teaching the policy arts, I stressed to my students that they should come to their own conclusions about right and wrong. I didn’t want them to simply follow my lead. I wanted them to think for themselves. My job was to help them think analytically, and perhaps with some clarity.

As a policy wonk, I worked on both sides of the aisle, which still was possible in my day. I sought compromise if that approach  proved essential to progress. Nor did I demonize those on the other side as long as they approached issues with a minimal level of fidelity. Then again, I was a policy wonk, not a political animal.

The bottom line is that I never did understand what I was doing wrong on FB. I would be going along fine and suddenly, while changing nothing in my posts, get hit with another penalty. It all seemed so subjective and arbitrary. Or, perhaps as many thought, someone really was out to get me.

That possibility would remain a mystery. After all, their feedback was hard to obtain and, if secured, totally useless. Their help remained remarkably opaque and so general that it proved absent of any merit. But that works well when the intent is to eliminate those you don’t like as opposed to helping your audience to improve their behaviors.

Perhaps it was to my personal disadvantage to be semi- accommodating and humorous. Perhaps those qualities made me a greater threat, that my light approach was considered more of a danger in the end. After all, such a soft approach might prove more effective and appealing to others.

No matter. When I got yet another ‘punishment’ the other night, I thought that this was, once again, the end. Would I soon be banished for a fourth time. If so, would I possibly have the energy to find still another way back from yet another banishment to an FB gulag. Could I possibly recreate myself on Facebook for a fifth time. I’m not that clever. Besides, it took some time and energy to accumulate some 4,500 new followers over the past 10 to 12 weeks of my most recent tour of the Facebook world.

Then, as mysterious as my punishment began, it ended. Without notice nor fanfare, all was well once more. While I did immediately appeal their decision to temporarily restricted my FB access, they never acknowledged my appeal nor did they respond to it in any way. As with my long and tortured prior history with their  community standards program, I was left utterly and completely confused. It was as if this part of the Facebook empire had been put in the hands of tenth graders who had only gotten this far with the assistance of gratuitous social promotions.

Only time will tell which will come first … my final passing from my mortal journey through life or my 4th lifetime ban. Wish me luck.

It took me a while, but I found the Pic I used in that infamous post. The German athlete on the right is Luz Long. He and Jesse became friends.

Oh, I am pleased with one thing today. This submission is of a reasonable length. Good for me!

Remember those hucksters selling salvation on television. That phenomenon probably started with Oral Roberts when I was just a kid. In fact, he started his radio ministry way back in 1947 and his TV outreach sometime in the mid 50s. Frankly, I don’t remember him (other than a vague sense of his appearance), though I have heard of his college. Most likely, I was tuned into The Lone Ranger and The Cisco Kid when he was trying to save this good Catholic boy from Satan’s snare … namely the Pope in Rome.

I first became aware of these grifters when they combined their religious pitch with right-wing politics several decades later, some more transparently than others. Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell somehow associated empathy for the poor with the work of Satan.

That’s odd when you think on it. If anything, Christ was the original socialist, if not Communist. He asked his would-be followers to give away their worldly goods to follow Him. He then reminded them that it would be easier for a wealthy man to pass through the eye of a needle than to enter the gates of heaven. I easily could respond to such a message, and did so as a young man.

Some of my favorite televangelists of the 1970s were Jimmy Swaggert and the power couple of Jim and Tammy Bakker, not that I could stand to watch any of them for more than a few minutes. Jim and Tammy started their TV based empire in the mid 1970s before expanding into theme parks and other the ventures in the 80s. I recall Swaggert discussing passages ftom the Bible with some lackey, always finding fault with the other’s interpretation. He needed to be right all the time I suppose. Excessive narcissism tends to run rampant among this crowd.

On the other hand, the Bakker’s did invoke empathic feelings for children suffering in far off places. That impressed me at the time. It struck me as Christ- like until it was revealed that very little of what they collected actually went to those in need. Like most of their kind, the bulk went to support the lavish lifestyles of the preachers and their top staff. Didn’t any of those  scammed ever see the movie Elmer Gantry?

Jimmy (Swaggert) and Jim (Bakker) ultimately ran afoul of man’s oldest demons … high testosterone levels and too nuch power. In Jim’s case it was an affair with a ministry secretary, and hush money to keep the dalliance secret. For Jimmy,  it involved substantiated rumors of liaisons with ‘fallen’ women. As I recall, Bakker eventually went to prison for swindling contributors to his various so- called charities.

Swaggert really struck me as a fraud. I yet recall him crying profusely as he begged his viewers to forgive his pecadillos. Tears streamed down his cheeks as he confessed his human weakness while claiming that Jesus had forgiven him. The tears probably were real, but my guess is that they were for his lost revenue stream.

To my knowledge, neither fully recovered his former glory though Jim Bakker perservered even after the scandals and a divorce from Tammy who became a minor celebrity in her own right.

Nevertheless, these scams continued unabated. A whole new generation is currently working hard at separating (or trying to) gullible viewers from their savings. Among them are Kenneth Copeland, Joyce Meyer, Paula White, and the appropriately named Creflo Dollar.

Copeland has argued that his fleet of private jets is most necessary to spread the good word and so has been blessed by Jesus in avoiding the hassles of air travel that we mere mortals must. Paula White is often seen in the White House providing counsel to the Donald himself. These are the last people I would support but that’s just me. I might think differently if I saw any of them doing a good work for the poor every once in a while, or even once.

Perhaps the leader of the current pack is Joel Osteen, the man with the perpetual smile. He has some 7 million weekly followers in the U.S. alone. His ministry rakes in millions, enough to support a lavish lifestyle that the potentates of old would envy. Estimates put his personal fortune at between $40 million and $180 million, mostly from book royalties, speeches, and related ministry activities. It is safe to say, he has not taken a vow of poverty.

TV evangelical preachers have evolved over the years. The first generation, heeding the advice of Billy Graham, steered clear of any overt political message. That began to change by the late 1980s, with explicit conservative messages dominating the pitches of the more successful messengers of God’s word.

Acceptance of Jesus suddenly was conflated with accepting a Republican message that, oddly enough, seemed totally at odds with the Son of God’s actual teachings. That the top man (in heaven) would endorse a political party dedicated to making the super wealthy even richer than they already were continues to baffle me. What happened to giving up worldly goods to follow Christ?

The current crop of snake oil salesmen (and women) has a slightly different twist to their spiel. The grace of God can come in a very tangible form … money. This crowd are often referred to as prosperity gospel preachers. The message may differ slightly across ministries but, at its core, the essential shtick is similar. If you believe in Jesus, and you pray hard, and (most importantly) you send your money into whichever ministry you are watching, you will be blessed. Even better, you will be blessed in a very tangible and meaningful way.

Thats right! Here we have a universe that stretches some 93 billion light years across (at least). We have this inconceivably  mysterious cosmos containing a minimum of 2 trillion galaxies along with an incomprehensible number of stars and planets. And yet, God is watching to see if you have sent your last dollar into some religious con man who has conflated personal greed with divine spirituality.

Pay attention! These prosperity preachers are not talking about you receiving some abstract notion of divine grace for your donation. They are talking about you enjoying tangible gifts from God, including hard cash if desired. The language likely is slippery but they often suggests a 3, 5, or even 7 fold return on your contributions, which hopefully are being made at least monthly.

The inference is beguiling. So as you give, so you will receive in return. But nothing for you if you selfishly spend what you have on things like food, or rent, or needed medicine. After all, maintaining a fleet of private jets ain’t cheap, and is more important than your petty needs.

That got me thinking. Those areas of the country where evangelical Christians predominate should be awash in God’s blessings. It just stands to reason that prayers so concentrated in areas dominated by the faithful must enjoy a special receptivity wherever such divine pleas go.

Think of it this way. Those areas that pray the most, and bless Donald Trump most fervently (after all, he was sent by the Lord), ought to enjoy bountiful monetary and related rewards.  Why wouldn’t Jesus favor His followers over the godless Democrats and especially the so-called Democratic- Socialists. Believers in Jesus and Trump should benefit from better health,  longer lives, safer communities,  and economic prosperity. After all, that is what the messengers from God tell them on a weekly basis. 

Now where exactly would those places where more of the faithful live be?

The two previous memes seem pretty clear. Those who both pray a lot and attend weakly religious services are more likely to live in the old confederacy or in the plain states that are clearly dominated by conservative politics. Perhaps the decision by televangelists to associate religion with hard right politics has paid off. Either the con artists knew their audience well or helped many otherwise susceptible folk to find their ideological and political home. Or perhaps both!

What we can say with some certainty is that practioners of both religious and political hucksterism stumbled over a simple truth. Each was in the same racket, selling hope that was not based in reality. By working together, they could deliver a winning message to their flock … a message that justified the true believers existing preferences and desires. Even better, that message demanded no thought, introduced no cognitive dissonance, and required no sacrifice. In fact, it offered an unbeatable deal.

The above graph is a bit difficult to discern. But this is what it tells me. Those sects that are rigid, fundamentalist, pentacostal, and permit little to no deviation from revealed truth tend to be the most conservative religiously. No real surprise here. People who need answers, not questions, and who are unsettled by nuanced thinking will gravitate toward those charlatans both in religion and in politics that deliver such soothing pablum. If you want a black and white world, they will give you that world. You want comforting words that reinforce your priors, you got it.

Now let’s look at overt political engagement. It is one thing to feel threatened all the time, an affliction from which the hard right suffers. It is another to engage actively in political battles. In the graph below we see members of non- fundamentalist groups being more active. They are more likely to proactively do something related to their normative belief set. Mainstream sects apparently believe that more than prayers and votes are necessary to do good

Mainline Protestants, non- Christians, and non- religious individuals tend to be more politically engaged. From this, I gather that members of the more conservative sects simply are too busy praying for the rapture where Christ would return to reduce non believers and most democrats into bloody messes. I never could accommodate the image of a vengeful Jesus with the prince of peace I grew up with.

On the other hand, the more conservative sects historically had eschewed politics, at least until the rise of the neoliberal activists in the 1980s. During the Reagan years, the hard right saw a huge payoff in an alliance with the political right. It was a match made in Heaven, or was it Hell.

Now, let’s try to follow the logic of prosperity preachers. You don’t have to get involved in actual politics to do good. No, you merely need to praise Jesus, give your money to those charged with spreading His gospel, and trust those obviously blessed by the lord. In case you are wondering, that would be Donald Trump and those chosen by the Donald or merely associated with him. Forget the pedophilia charges, the felonies, or how his policies have failed average Americans. Just look at how he has enriched himself while in office. Is that not convincing proof of God’s favor.

And so, I would expect that the states where God’s devotees are concentrated should be better off relative to places where most non- believers are located. Surely, the Southern bastions of fundamentalism will fare better  than where adherents of the black arts (liberals, socialists, and Democrats) congregate. Let’s take a quick look at some of the data.

According to the prosperity preachers, the followers of Jesus and Trump surely will live longer than those who worship false gods like Obama and Biden. But wait, the data doesn’t seem to support that. Children growing up in God’s paradise, the very conservative and faithful South, die demonstrably earlier than those in Blue states.

There might just be an obvious answer to this conundrum. Perhaps Jesus is so pleased with his most faithful followers that he wants to bring them to heaven sooner than would be expected. On the other hand, perhaps He should first check with the preferences of his flock on that.

Surely, though, Jesus will reward conservatives disproportionately during their time in earth. After all, they have done what has been asked of them. They have prayed more diligently, have given over their scarce dollars to God’s chosen representatives on earth, and dutifully voted for God’s own party … the Republicans. They have even worn those silly MAGA hats 😜 .

But no! When you look at the most financially distressed states (based on numerous metrics) all of the worst are deep red, Southern states. Do you think Jesus might be testing His followers, much like Job was tested in the Old Testament?

Of course any analyst worth his salt would be aware of the ecology fallacy. Perhaps it is the non-believers and Democrats in these states who are doing really bad. This would lower the median performance for all, making it look like Jesus is not rewarding His most passionate followers. Perhaps!

Let’s look at another metric that taps just how well off the populations of various states might be. The following table tells us something about the relative performance of states in keeping families financially afloat. In the left-hand volume we see the states that are doing well. In the right column are those doing poorly. With a few exceptions, the states doing well are blue (more liberal), or near blue. On the other hand, those with the highest poverty rates (numbers 31 to 60) are overwhelmingly red.

The pattern continues when other metrics are examined. The share of babies born to unmarried mothers is also concentrated in Republican states, colored either orange or red in the graphic below. Similarly, though not exactly, the use of public food assistance tends to be located in the Southeast. That is, both the incidence of struggling families and the use of public supports is higher in those very places where it shouldn’t be if the tenets of the prosperity gospel were valid.

But here the prayers from the faithful perhaps are being answered. The Republicans are slashing SNAP benefits. Exactly how that will help the poorest families is not exactly clear. In the conservative mind, that makes sense somehow. The sinful must suffer. Perhaps faith alone will do the job. After all, didn’t Elon Musk himself say that empathy was the biggest danger to the Western world? Somehow, the more passionate followers of Christ have pivoted 180 degrees away from the original message of Jesus. How convenient!

Let’s go after the issue from the opposite direction. Let us look at more global assessments of well- being. Below we examine overall state performance, first from a simple table that ranks each state from best to worst. The table aggregates 31 metrics which, taken together, arguably gives us a pretty good picture of overall well-being.

As with other rankings, the highly religious, conservative states dominate the bottom of this ranking. Once again we find Louisiana, West Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky,  Arkansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, and so forth struggling mightily. The good states tend to be either Blue or a few sparsely populated plain states where more cows than people live.

Perhaps the graphic below lays out the relationship between religiosity and well-being a bit more clearly. On the vertical axis is the well-being scale with the better off states being positioned higher on that scale. The horizontal axis captures religiosity. States positioned further right are more religious according to our standard metrics.

The association is not perfect but it is pretty clear that liberal, blue states congregate on the upper left (low religiosity but higher well-being). On the other hand, the high-religiosity but low well being states congregate on the lower right. That is, our usual suspects wind up where you might expect given our other results presented earlier.

Nothing marks the conservative heaven like everyone having guns. It fits the individualistic myth of each person taking care of themselves without any damn government help. Surely, Christ would have sported a military grade automatic weapon if they had been available back then. Besides, every right- winger knows that guns save lives.

But, of course, they don’t. If you look at gun related deaths, normed based on population differentials, we see the same pattern. The American holocaust of guns violence is once again located in the south: Mississippi,  Alabama, Louisiana,  Arkansas, Tennessee,  Missouri, S. Carolina, and Kentucky being among the worst. A few other plain states are scattered among the bottom dwellers but you get the picture.

Now we get the the crux of my confusion. Why do those areas disproportionately populated by God’s so-called chosen fare so poorly. After all, those claiming to love Jesus so passionately, and who pray to Him so fervently, ought to be rewarded for such overt displays of faith. Even if the the faithful are getting their 7- fold reward in additional treasure as promised by the televangelists, why are they stuck living with so many liberal and woke losers who drag down the state’s overall performance? Perhaps this mystery would be answered if I watched these con artists perform their auditory magic.

Could the answer lies elsewhere? Think about it for a moment. The most fervent believers in Jesus also remain devoted to the very person in our public life who rejects their savior so completely. While conservatives dismiss Donald’s sins with cavalier indifference, the rest of us have a harder time doing that. We actually believe in virtuous behaviors.

Sarcasm aside, there is a conundrum to be resolved. Why do the most fervent practioners of religion idolize a person who rejects Christ’s message so completely. Many of us can recall the time when Evangelicals, Pentacostals, and other such devoted believers in Jesus rejected former President and lifelong Baptist Jimmy Carter.

Here was a public figure who actually lived his spiritual beliefs, in both his public and his personal lives. Into his 90s, he was still living quite simply and still using his time and energy to help the disadvantaged by building Habitat for Humanity homes. How could anyone follow Christ’s message more faithfully? Yet, conservatives attacked him without mercy.

Finally, a thought experiment. Let’s say the most faithful among us, those who pray a lot and send in their money to God’s self described messengers, decide they want to find their heaven on earth.

Most likely, they will want to locate where other God-fearing people reside. That makes sense. So, they rationally would choose states where large numbers of (for example) Evangelicals already live. It is human nature to want to be with others that share our values and perspectives.

Here is the problem, though. From the above meme, we can see that Christian conservatives sadly concentrate in those very places where life is especially difficult. Perhaps fervent prayers might work better in the future but, to date, the results have been more than disappointing. It is almost as if the true believers have been led astray. Heaven forbid!

What other choices might our true believers consider. Well, if they value low crime, non-existent violence, high trust in their neighbors, compassion toward those struggling economically, accessible and affordable medical help, top educational opportunities, and governments that work to the benefit of all (and not merely the rich), they might consider one of the above countries. That is assuming they cannot bring themselves to move to a blue state in America where they would be surrounded by unmentionable woke types who, of all things, want to help people.

These foreign alternatives are the places that annually score high on the international hedonic scales measuring average or median happiness levels. Yup, these are the places that provide those environments for which our most religious Americans presumably pray to live in. But I don’t see them packing anytime soon.

Why, you ask? Here’s the irony. Formal religious affiliation is virtually non existent in these places. It is as if prayer and belief have little or nothing to do with virtue. Hmm! I wonder how Joel Osteen would explain away that anomaly.