Tom's Musings

It is a matter of great interest to me how false perceptions emerge and solidify as they become an accepted consensus, at least among some. Really, how did the Republican Party become the stewards of economic stability and growth when they have been behind every economic disaster since Coolidge and Hoover drove us into the abyss in 1929.

If you examine the record over the last few decades, Democratic leadership is associated with job growth, wage increases, and overall positive economic activity, including gains in the equity markets. Since World War II, the stock market increased the most in the administrations of Barak Obama (plus 148%) and Bill Clinton (plus 227%). Correspondingly, the market fell in only two administrations during this period, both Republican. They fell by 16 percent during Nixon’s tenure and by 22 percent under Bush Junior’s watch.

Nevertheless, Joe six-pack today thinks the Dems are death to their financial future, their job security, and their cherished values. That was not the thinking in my world growing up. I heard the adults in the 1950s chat about the two parties, claiming that Republicans always ruined the economy while Democrats tended to get us into war. Such easy categorizations had an implicit rationale back then. World War I, II, and Korea all started under the Democrats, while the global depression started under the Republicans, who were clueless about what to do when it did begin. Of course, this was Massachusetts which was never considered a mainstream place in any political sense.

Even in good old Wisconsin, there were large swaths of western and northwestern counties, largely rural in character, that were strongly Democratic when I first moved to the state in the early 1970s. The farmers and small business people living there yet recalled the time when New Deal programs helped them weather the bad economic times, kept the family farms from going under and the towns from declining into ghostly apparitions.

Over time, and certainly aided by the growing drumbeats of right-wing propoganda, their gratitude was replaced with growing suspicions and raw fears. The Democrats, they were told again and again, were helping those people who were not like them … lazy minorities living in dangerous urban areas. The elites were poisoning the minds of their children in Universities like UW Madison, clearly a bastion of socialist and Communist thinking. They were permitting alien forces to invade our nation and crime to run wild as those liberals and other ‘woke’ types coddled the evil doers while failing to protect their kind. There was no end to the perfidies to be laid at the laps of the State’s Dems. Today, the rural arts of the state are Republican while the Dems are found huddling in the larger urban centers.

Crime is a good example. Nothing like the irrational fear of rampant rape and pillage to scare people into looking for a strong savior, a Trump or Desantis type. An ongoing survey taps the perception of whether crime in the respondent’s area is growing better or worse. Before Trump emerged on the national scene, Republicans were more pessimistic but the gap was not large. By the time Donald was ousted from ofiice, the gap was some 30 percentage points with 42 percent of Dems saying worse and 72 percent of Republicans saying the same. This was the case even though more from the GOP camp lived in these rural, fairly crime free areas. Trump, and his propoganda outlets, hammered away at the theme that the world in Democratic-controlled areas was falling apart in civil disorder.

One reason behind this ‘the sky is falling’ consensus among Republicans is apparent … the relentless push by the conservative propoganda machine that liberals were permitting evil to run amok. I need not say the obvious, this fear tactic is straight out of the traditional Fascist playbook. Fox news anchors and their guests spotlighted crime some 80 percent more frequently than their MSNBC peers. And they did not emphasisze the good job law enformement was doing.

What was the truth? Well, like all social issues, it is complicated. Reported violent crimes were down in 2022, after Biden took office. However, you would not know this from the continued drumbeat from conservative sources which doubled-down on their pushing of tired shibboleths that crime was rampant wherever and whenever Dems ruled. In fact, homicides were at 8.2 per 100,000 people at the end of the Trump administration. To put that in perspective the rate was 10 per 100,000 when Clinton took office and fell to 6 when he left. The rate was about 5 at the end of Obama’s rule. While many things might contribute to such trends, the rates were highest at the end of each Republican administration. The Dems apparently did a decent job on their watches.

Think about the right-wing prescriptions for violent crimes. They want to put more guns on the streets. They pass ‘stand your ground’ laws where you can shoot down someone whom you believe threatens you. The cowtowns in the old west had much stronger gun laws, often restricting them within city limits. Today’s Republicans want everyone armed and dangerous. And so, when some folk in Texas asked a neighbor to quiet down (he was shooting off a loud gun from his porch), his response was to kill five people including a child. One witness said the assassin claimed ‘that he was on his own property so he could do what he wanted.’ Never forget that gun-related deaths on a proportional basis are much higher in red states as opposed to blue states. Guns do not save lives. Commons sense laws do.

As I have said in the past, the American foundational myth is that of the lone individual immersed in a Darwinian struggle for survival and triumph. When stripped of all rhetoric, the American dream is a few fortunate individuals rising to the top while most struggle to stay afloat. As the nation’s wealth and income inequality worsen to levels not seen since the great 1929 crash, so do the ties and bonds that keep us together. It is hard to sustain a sense of togetherness when unfairness abounds and the consequences of failure so obvious and final. It is difficult to remain sanguin or optimistic when a few reap all the rewards, often because of a rigged system that give huge advantages to those well connected, likely those with the correct skin color and enjoying fortuitous backgrounds. My oft repeated mantra is that if you want the ‘American Dream’ you best emigrate to one of several Scandinavian countries that top the list for happy citizens.

When that preferential system favoring the established elite is threatened, fear arises which is followed by uglier possibilities. WASPS once had a comfortable control of the levers of power. Now, that hegemony is seen to be slipping away. Caucasions represented some 76 percent of the nation’s population in 1990. They are down to 58 percent now and will lose their majority status by 2045. This has led to uncomfortable outcomes like the creation of an ‘American First’ caucus in Congress that is dedicated to the preservation of ‘Anglo-Saxon traditions.’ In the past, this would have been labeled a Klu Klux Klan rally. It has led to Trump and Desantis and other autocratic types who wage ‘culture wars’ to keep their followers stoked in a blind fury and thus less able or willing to identify the real sources of their discomfort.

The undisputed ruling group has never been comfortable with the potential loss of power. Their fear leads to hate, which leads to violence. Thus we have the January 6th attack on the Capitol. However, the storm troopers breaking down doors and clubbing police officers were not the white elite but the less educated who could easily be manipulated by blatant forms of propoganda, the ‘Proud Boys’ and their ilk. The easily led are the ones now going to prison, not the ones who fed them lies and pushed them on their way up the Capitol steps. The MAGA hats they wore, and the slogans they shouted, could have been heard by Hitler’s Brown Shirts and Mussolini’s Black Shirts in a prior era. It was the same slogans, the same fears, the same hate, the same violent solutions.

This widespread fears among adults seeps into the consciousness of the young. We have seen depression and anxiety among teens ramp up dramatically over the past decade in particular. Some of their worries are my worries, like climate change and the loss of careers to advanced computers (though I’m too old to wrorry much about either of these). But mostly they look with foreboding toward their futures. That is so different from my youth where, though raised in a family of very limited means, I saw abundant opportunities in front of me.

I strongly think that the young feel the loss of connectedness. The Republican God of ‘each person for himself’ is a lonely and frightening place to be. The Darwinian fight to keep going as the opportortunities for success recede wears on you over time. It affords each of us little succor or hope, which is why the happiest countries are those where government and people care about each other.

Our pervasive despair among the young is first seen by their teachers who, in turn, are battling despair and hopelessness. According to a recent survey, only 12 percent of American teachers are happy in their vocations and some 55 percent are considering bailing out. They are not paid nearly enough to take on the challenges they face or reverse the anxieties of those in their charge.

Is the fat lady singing? By the way, the lady in question presumably belts out a great song at the end of some opera. Since operas are not in English, a numbnuts like me can only figure out when the agony is about to end is when she comes on the stage to sing.

So, once again, I turn my one ear that works to listen for her. I do hear something. I hear that some 75 percent of those supporting Trump yet believe he won the 2020 election despite all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I hear that in a ranking of countries on a democracy-autocracy scale created by the CIA, some political scientists have recently downgraded America to the status on an ‘anocracy.’ This would put us somewhere between a mature democracy and an autocracy. This status typically is associated with a heightened risk of social unrest and even civil war. Then I stop listening.

I shake my head and thank my stars that my time here is limited. But some singing still reaches me despite my efforts to shut it all out. Only time will tell if it is her that I hear.

First, a personal note. The surgeon found three small polyps (is there a plural for polyps?) in my colon yesterday, all easily removed. She told me after that, given my age, this might well be my last one since something else, like my atrocious eating habits, will do me in first. I was actually a bit sad at the news, not about passing on but about no more colonoscopies. After all, the young surgeon could pass for my grand-daughter and was very cute. I was surprised, though, when she asked me for a date after the procedure. Then, again, she did see my best side … LOL. But what hit me was an untapped business opportunity, the ‘colonoscopy diet.’ If I had one of these every week, I’d lose all that extra weight I have … and with no freaking exercise.

Okay, there is a lot of more serious stuff to worry about out there, or so it seems. Economists keep warning of an impending economic collapse even though nothing has happened yet. Donald Trump, who seemed to be on the ropes not that long ago, has surged back into the GOP lead after his legal woes increased, and America’s gun carnage seems to be worsening as talk of widespread civil strife increases. Of course, there remains the international wild card in Putin, a Trump-like figure who might easily ignite a scorched earth policy as his autocratic rule is threatened by an ill-fated incursion into the Ukraine. But our real worries are internal.

Let’s take the economy. Various pundits have been predicting a recessions or even a 1930’s – type depression for a year now. Some experts point out that some 12 economic indicators point to a crash of some magnitude. Most recently, it has been pointed out that the M2 money supply has shrunk by 4.1 percent since last year. This is a tectonic change, not seen since the great crash of almost a century ago. Though I have no idea how we lose money in the aggregate, this sounds ominous. Yet, the markets have rebounded since the beginning of the year and Armageddon keeps getting put off. So, are the doomesday predicitons real? Should we listen to see if ‘the fat lady is really singing.’

Who knows what to believe these days. What is real and what not. The thing is, we have been inundated by clearly ‘fake news’ since the Gingrich Revolution of the early 1990s. It existed before that of course but not on the scale we now face. I’m not talking about misinformation from Russian bots enclosed in military basements in St. Petersburgh Russia who swayed the 2016 election toward their favored candidate Donald Trump. No, I’m talking about our home grown propoganda machine that would have made the Russian Communist print outlet Pravda appear to be a beacon of truth. Those old style Commies could have learned a lesson or two from the today’s Republican Party in the art of sophisticated misdirection and outright lying.

George Washington once said that “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the powers of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to their unjust dominion.” Either he was very prescient and able to see two centuries into the future or he was talking about Thomas Jefferson who, disagreeing with the oh-so popular Washington’s beliefs in a strong national government, waged a quiet campaign agasinst him and then an overt and salacious campaign against his Federalist successor John Adams. Newspapers, in those days, often were aligned with specific candidates and philosophies. But somewhere in the 19th century, they adopted a more independent posture and pretended to print the truth, leaving opinion to their editorial pages. Amazingly, some of them did just that.

Something happened about three decades ago that restarted the age of propoganda and outright fabrications with a renewed vengeance. A good starting point would be when Newt Gingrich and some 300 Republican members of Congress stood on the Capitol steps on September, 1994 and announced their ‘Contract with America,’ or what some of us called the ‘Contract ON America.’ Though only a few minor promises in their expansive reworking of the country ever saw the light of day, it was ‘the show’ that mattered. That summer, I went back to the U. of Wisconsin after a year’s leave in D.C. to work on Clinton’s welfare legislation. I recall a top Republican operative on the Hill telling me one day about the new language they were required to use. The inheritance tax was always to be called the death tax, or you were fined by the party (the Republican and not the Communist party). Capture the language and you capture the heart. More to the point, the show was about to become big time.

In 1960, there were only two radio stations that had a talk-show format. In 1995, there were 1,130 such stations across the nation with 70 percent of them explicitly conservative in perspective. The march to the right was jump-started in 1988 when Rush Limbaugh went from a local show to a national frenzy reaching some 20 million faithful listeners at one point. Soon several heavyweights entered the scene. The conservative muckraking outlet called the Drudge Report started in 1995, Fox News began its rise to prominence in 1996, and Newsmax in 1998. Succcess breeds imitation and others joined a crowded field of far-right outlets.

The Evangelical Church collaborated with the Republican National Committee (RNC) to form the Christian Coalition, led by Ralph Reed with much support from evangelicals such as Jerry Falwell. That group organized a smear campaign based on total fabrications about Democratic candidates across America. The lies worked and the Republicans secured the House of Representatives for the first time in four decades. With such success, the web of deceipt went into high gear. Limbaugh, the first superstar was followed by Hannity, Beck, O’Reilly, Carlson, Coulter, and too many others to mention. There was much money to be made in feeding the public BS and plenty of greedy types lining up at the trough.

One of House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s first moves was to eliminate the Office of Technological Assessment (OTA). This office, created by a former Republican President (Nixon, no less) before the party had gone off the rails saved only $20 million at the time even though it was touted as a cost saving measure. More importantly, it provided Congress with objective information and thus was seen as dangerous to the apparatchiks of the GOP. In a moment of transparent projection, Gingrich hilariously accused President Clinton of “treating truth as a transaction.” Are any Republicans self-aware or don’t they care?

Today, I have time for one example of how wild lies infest the public consciousness. In July, 1993, White House Counsel Vince Foster, a close Arkansas friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton, committed suicide by shooting himself through the head in a national park near to Washington. In a suicide note, he wrote about heinous Republican attacks on him as part of their ridiculous Whitewater scandal campaign. He was too decent of a man for such scurrilous attacks, became depressed, and ended it all. Vince pretty much blamed Republicans for this. So, how did the new Party of Gingrich respond?

First, a Gingrich acolyte, Dan Burton somehow took a simulated shooting of a melon as proof that Foster was murdered and did not die of a self-inflicted wound. They were soon off and running, aided by Limbaugh and the growing far-right propoganda machine as well as millions poured into this campaign by billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife who created the infamous ‘Arkansas campaign’ to dig up dirt on the Clintons whether valid or not. That grew into some four distinct investigations, one of them being by Ken Starr, the lead investigator in charge of House campaign to impeach Clinton. They spent millions trying to prove such silly fabrications that the Clinton’s killed their friend because he knew too much about their scandalous behaviors, that they rolled him up in a carpet and dumped him where he was found, and that this was just the tip of the iceberg. They did all this for years despite the fact that every single responsible official said over and over that all the evidence supported suicide, every last bit.

Guess what, at the end of the day (or propoganda campaign), none of these ‘investigations’ found any proof of the suicide lie … not a single thing. Yet, only 35 percent of the public by this time believed that Vince Foster killed himself, though fewer blamed the Clintons. Buoyed by their early success, the purveyors of falsehoods eventually had the Clinton death toll up to 60 and then 90 victims, eventually leading Hillary to complain about the ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ that attacked them without end, without mercy, and without any real justification.

That was at least a generation ago. Does it matter now? Well, Hillary Clinton went into the 2016 presidential campaign hindered by a great amount of distrust after a quarter century of continuous attacks. She lost to a man who, by any measure, was totally unsuited for the office. In the Covid pandemic, the right-wing propoganda machine convinced many Americans that vaccines would kill or cripple them, that Dr. Fauci was the enemy, and that most prevention measures were a Democratic plot to ruin the economy and weaken Trump. As a result, the death rate from Covid in those counties with the highest support for Trump was 5 to 6 times higher than in the top Democratic counties. Their lies were killing their own kind, but why would they care? And now we have the famous‘Big Lie’ campaign, much like the Vince Foster matter or the Benghazi campaign during the Obama years where multiple investigations also came up with absolutley nothing. So much time and effort spent on election fraud to sate the malignant narcissism of one demented wanna-be autocrat.

Oh, I remember watching Walter Cronkite on the evening news in the 1960s. Surely not everyone agreed with him. However, he gave us reasonably objective news in a non-hyperbolic style. We pretty much were operating out of the same playbook. Now we have at least two oppositional worlds where the members of each hate one another. Not a good sign for the future … the divided house and all. Let me end with a quote from John Adams (1814): “Remember, a Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

I should use the my one ear that still works to see if the ‘fat lady’ is yet singing.

Here’s the thing. I’m prepping for my colonoscopy later today. Yes, more information than you wanted, I know. Nevertheless, it is difficult to balance a laptop and be creative while sitting on the male throne. So, I will entertain you with a few bad jokes.

……………………………….

Three Nuns. Three nuns were talking. The first said, “I was cleaning Father’s room the other day and do you know what I found? A bunch of pornographic magazines.”

“What did you do?” The other nuns asked. “Well, of course I threw them in the trash.”

The second nun piped up, “Well, I can top that. I was in Father’s room putting away the laundrey and found a bunch of condoms.”

“Oh my,” the other two nuns gasped. “Did you throw them in the trash as well.”

“I thought about that. Then I decided it would teach him a lesson and poked small holes in all of them.”

At that, the third nun fainted.

………………………………

Wonder Pill. a man goes to the doctor with twitching fingers and a bad stutter. He finally manges to say, “doc, I have a probem with sexual performance, can you help me?”

“Oh, that’s not a problem anymore,” says the doc. “They just came out with this wonder pill that does the trick. You take the pills and your problems are history.” The doc then gives the man a prescription and sends him on his way.

A couple of weeks later, the doc runs into his patient on the street.

“Doctor, doctor,” yells the man excitedly, “I’ve got to thank you. This drug is a miracle. I’ve had sex 22 times in the past 10 days!”

“That’s great,” the doc responds, “and what does your wife think about it.”

“Wife? Oh, I haven’t made it home yet.”

……………………………..

Milk Bath. A blond heard that baths in milk would make her even more beautiful. So, she called a local dairy farm and left an order for 25 gallons of milk.

When the dairy farmer read her note, he felt there must be a mistake. She probably meant 2.5 gallons and someone wrote it down wrong. So, he called her to clarify things.

When the blond answered, he said “I got your order for 25 gallons but surely you meant 2.5 gallons.”

“No,” the blond corrected him, “I want at least 25 gallons. I’m going to fill my bath tub with millk and take a bath in it. That way I can stay young and beatiful.”

“Okay,” the farmer then asked, “do you care if it is pasteurized?”

“No, not really,” the blond replied. “I just need it up to my boobs. I can splash some on my eyes if needed.”

………………………………..

Yes, I am ashamed and will go stand in my corner.

Just a heads up, I may not stay with a daily blog which, as you can imagine, is a lot of work. I told several neighbors who asked about this daily grind. I lied and told them I have an addiction to writing. True, I do enjoy the writing process but the real reason is that it gives me an excuse to avoid cleaning the house or going out to get some exercise.

Alas, I can’t avoid those things forever.

Back in my old days, when I shared my versions of truth, justice, and the American way on Facebook to thousands of adoring followers, I would occasionally use my alter ego (Father Tom or Pastor Jim). It would take too long to explain why the different names but the allusion to a religious vocation is simple enough. On that day, usually a Sunday, I would be writing about ethical or spiritual or even religious matters. Guess what, that is what I am doing today.

Now, you may ask what right a depraved lech and morally bankrupt leftist like me has in expounding of such divine topics. My claim to expertise in these matters is decidedly weak but, in my mind al least, has some redeeming merit. I took my Catholic religion seriously growing up. This might have been a bit strange since my parents were more interested in having a good time than attending church which would have been more attractive to them had they served wine to the parishioners during Mass instead of wasting it on the Priest as part of the religious ceremony. No matter, for some reason now inexplicable, I was a good boy, an unforgivable transgression for which I made up later in life, or tried to at least.

Exploring why I developed a heightened sense of purpose as a young man is way beyond the scope of this blog though I would suggest my memoir (A Clueless Rebel) which explores my coming of age with great wit and occasional wisdom. Still, even as I drifted toward entering the Seminary, I would sit in my religious instruction at my Catholic boys high school and argue with the teacher in my head about Church doctrine. Even then, my innate rational side struggled with this strong desire to perfect some kind of ‘moral compass.’ What the hell is that, you ask? After all is said and done, a moral compass is the sense of right and wrong we carry about inside of us. It is the core from which our behaviors presumably arise.

Despite my prevailing doubts at the time, I entered the Maryknoll Seminary in 1962 (I spelled it wrong in a recent blog which people were kind enough to point out, though I now have your names in my book). That experiment lasted only a year and a half, during which time I labored toward at least one partial epiphany. It turned out I wanted to do good in the world even as I strayed further and further away from any sense that the Catholic Priesthood was the vehicle for doing so. My confusion as a boy graduating from High School was that, in my world, there were few avenues for expressing this internal sense of obligation or what I would come to label my moral compass. I would soon find that there were many such vehicles.

It took me a little longer to get to the core of my confusion. I was drawn to the essence of Christ’s teachings while finding the institutional trappings of formal religious institutions off-putting, if not ridiculous. Okay, I’ll admit that the reverance shown the clergy back then, and these mysterious powers assigned to Priests by the faithful (e.g., turning the Host used in the Mass into the body of Christ), was a further draw but not of sufficient power. Again, I always had my doubts. And back then, there were few public scandals respecting the clergy and I never saw any pedophelia or even heard a whisper about such or the other sins now associated with men of the cloth. Amazing how much we ignored, or refused to see, at the time.

Still, as I shed my affinity for the institutional trappings of religion including the exclusionary premises contained within each of these, and the silly rigidity of specific doctrines (really, how many fights can you have over the nature of the Trinity?), one thing remained to me. I found Christ’s core teachings, as I had embraced them as a kid, both instructive and compelling. Even today, I watch those who pretend to love Christ so much, and who invoke His name so frequently, behave in ways totally contradictory to the New Law he brought to his Jewish audiences at the time. His go-to message was, above all, that love and acceptance were all that counted. You didn’t have to sacrifice a goat, or pay attention to all the freaking rules the Rabbis and Pharisees of the time enforced. Reach out to everyone, no matter who or what they were, and do your best by them.

In the 1960s, I would watch these good Christian folk screaming at a 6 year old black girl who merely wanted to get a decent education. I would wonder what was in the hearts of such people whose venom and hate demanded that this girl be surrounded by Federal Marshals just to get into a freaking public school. What did the screaming mob hear in their Sunday services? It was nothing like the lessons I had absorbed, that was for sure. And soon I stumbled upon perhaps my most critical epiphany of those years … being a member of a formal church said nothing, nothing at all, about the character of your ‘moral compass.’

Well, when I escaped my cultural coccoon while attending Clark University, a secular local institutions known among Catholics in the area as a den of ‘Atheists and Communists,’ my mind exploded with new thoughts and ideas. THANK GOD! As I perused a broader array of thought, not necessarily for classes, and talked with my peers (few were now Catholic), I could put things into a more comprehensive perspective. Essentially, all major traditions, when you cut out all the collatoral nonsense, focused on a singular message (see below):

There you have it. You might call it the ‘golden rule’ or simple ‘common sense’ or a ‘biological imperative’ that motivated some of us to cooperate and collaborate, not hate and kill one another. These more positive tactics were better strategies for the survival of the species. In how many of Christ’s parables did the protagonist reach out to others, whether strangers or friends, sinners or saints, similar in appearance or very different in color or creed, and call them brother (or sister). Yet, how many who were indoctrinated in narrow and exclusionary creeds somehow managed to create contrary belief systems and behave in totally opposite manners. Of course, I do see individuals whose organized belief systems make then better people. It is just that I see no correlation bewteen belonging to a specific tradition and the quality of their internal moral compass, or at least not in their behaviors.

Perhaps some 15 years ago, my late wife wanted to connect with a church, mostly for the rites which she thought might be comforting. I agreed to the Unitarian-Universalist church in Tarpon Springs, Florida (where we Wintered) because the town in which it was located had great Greek food for the after-church stuffing of my mouth. But this sect proved to be fine. The minister was a graduate from Harvard Divinity School who, in my eyaes, came out of central casting. He was an avuncular presence, wise and thoughtful, who even made me think … not an easy task. More importantly, the Congregation accepted all, drew from all traditions, and focused on social justice and doing good for others. You could be devout or an atheist, it mattered not to them. Just be good and do good. Period.

My spiritual journey, while I never assigned a label to my destination, probably led me to Humanism. It focuses on mankind, rationality, and hope (see above meme). It is not where we are now that counts but where we are headed, unless we screw things up. This reminds me of the one Catholic religious figure that had the most profound impact on me as a young man. He was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He was a Jesuit Priest, more philosopher than anything else, who spent his life in China (before the Communists took over) doing archeology while studying the past. This led him to articulate an evolutionary perspective that was immersed in spiritual meaning. His attachment to the theory of evolution had him constantly battling with Rome. In any case, he laid out exciting possibilities for the future of the species … perhaps even a God in the making perspective.

Now, I read him a long time ago, in high school, so what I recall may be touched with what I want to recall, not what he wrote. And his speculations may well not pass muster with today’s scientific community. But I loved my recall of his message. (Besides, I once experienced a very, very rare success in seducing a female when she learned I was a Chardin devotee. Who knew?)

Chardin convinced me that it is not where we are now but where we might be going. And all of us are on this journey together. So, let us walk down this path toward destinations we can barely envision as global brothers and sisters. To me, that is the most compelling moral code of all. Perhaps it is the only way we will get there, or anywhere that counts.

I’ve been asked. “Tom, where do you come up with ideas for a daily blog given your busy schedule of strenuous sessions at the gym, the daily jogs, and the hours spent over the stove preparing exquisite baked goods?” (Damn, I’ll have to go to confession now.) My point is that ideas are all around me, no further away than a glance through my phone at the latest nonsensical antics from Republicans or my last conversation with just about anyone.

For example, just yesterday I had a session with my new ear doctor at the University of Wisconsin hospital. My previous doc, a specialist of some repute who had removed a glomus tumor from my left ear before the pandemic struck had retired. I had been told he was one of two physicians in the state who were comfortable doing what turned out to be a 5.5 hour procedure of delicate surgery. He will be missed. Then again, it seems like all my docs are retiring. For a moment, I considered whether I was the one driving them from this honored profession. But not even I am that self centered, well not most days except for the ones that end in the letter Y.

I recall my conversation with my eye doctor (another well-regarded specialist associated with the University Hospital) just before he retired to the golf course at Blackhawk Country Club. When I mentioned that I thought docs worked until they carried them out on a stretcher, he looked at me seriously and said “not any more.” I will miss him, we had traded insults for many years as he checked for glaucoma (I was a prime candidate given the shape of my retina etc.) which never came.

Back to me ear doc. He is young and at the beginning of his career. During my session with him, he was acompanied by a resident which is normal since this is a teaching hospital. Usually this is fine except for the time when I was half out of it during my cataract surgery and my former good friend, the eye doc, asked if I minded if the resident doc watching him do his thing took over the operation. This was halfway through the procedure. (I was fine until my real doc started saying things like “after a few more mistakes like the one you just made and you’ll by ready to go.”) Nice of him to ask my permission when I was in la-la land, but I figured I would still have one eye left so why not. Besides, as a university teacher myself, he knew what my answer would be.

But I digress as I’m want to do. Back to my hearing doc. Somehow, and I can no longer recall how, I got the conversation away from my left ear, which does not work anyways, and on to the state of medicine in America. Why were doctors rushing to exit a profession that had once been the vocational aspiration for so many? While I had my hypotheses, I wanted to hear what someone at the beginning of his career had to say.

He held nothing back. Those running medical facilities now were treating doctors and nurses like, in his words, ‘widgets.’ They were being pushed unmercifully in the name of the bottom line … corporate profits. Hospitals, even great ones like UW, were becoming profit centers. Things had gotten worse during the pandemic but he saw this as a permanent trend now. Not only that, but physicians were changing how they did their jobs. I was not totally clear what he said next but it sounded like his peers were selecting what they would do differently in an effort to ensure quantity over quality. Keep pushing patients through which might require ignoring more problematic issues and difficult cases and time-consuming diagnoses.

He mentioned that he had been ‘on-call’ that week and had to do procedures he was not trained in because they had been left untreated earlier by others. Apparently, he had strong feelings that accounted for the rush of medical staff to the exit doors. They were no longer respected professionals, merely cogs in a larger corporate machine (these are my words but his meaning). I was a bit shocked at his honesty. After all, he was meeting me for the first time.

Then he and the resident went on to chat about how good dentists have it. That confused me at first since my own dentist also retired last year at a relatively early age. But all became clear when the resident mentioned that his girlfriend is a dentist. Poor gal, she must be endure great hazing at the social gatherings where docs gather. When I brought up that I knew one doctor, my neighbor, who had been doing 12 hour shifts well into his 80s, my ear doc knew him by reputation. Every one does, he is an infectious disease doc of national repute who was front and center during the pandemic. The ear doc reflected my suspicions when he observed that my neighbor was from the ‘old school’ and that ‘they don’t make them like that anymore.’

In the interest of balance, I should note the conversation I had with my accountant as he was working on my taxes not long ago. I mentioned the general unhappiness among professionals such as doctors, lawyers, and even academics (as compared to when I had decided that working at a university was far better than getting a real job, an insight that hit me sometime during the Triassic period). I wondered whether accountants felt the same. He responded that he was quite happy, but that only happened after he left a large firm and struck out on his own. But I doubt that many doctors or academics will set up shop on a street corner and operate outside larger institutional settings. Perhaps Aristotle and Galen could get away with that but not likely to happen today.

You are probably asking where I am going with this story. Either that, or you stopped reading a couple of paragraphs ago. My point, and I do believe there is one, is that more and more people, even those functioning in once top professions, are unhappy.

My former medical internist would spend a great deal of time with me during routine check-ups. In additon to chats about the horrible state of my body, we would touch upon world events and share our digust at what Republicans were up to. I cannot even imagine how angry he would be today with our politics. He would automatically run a number of tests, do EKGs, take Xrays, and so forth. And he found several things early, like a case of TB that erupted about a decade after my return from India. He loved his job, as does my neighbor, and took pride in doing it well. My first internist did not retire until, in my opinion, they gently nudged him out the door as he approached 80 years of age.

My current internist is widely regarded as very good. When I selected him, it was because he ‘spent a lot of time with his patients.’ As the years passed, those long ago days of personal treatment and even a personal relationship, slowly disappeared. Now, it takes months to see a real doctor, if you are lucky, and each session seems like a pressure cooker where the focus is on how quickly they can get you out the door and on to the next one. If professionals now feel like widgets, totally plausible to me, today’s patients feel worse. And this is in Madison Wisconsin which has the best doctors (they want to live here) and a medical facility on every freaking corner. I oft joke that in the Boston area, where I grew up, there was a Dunkin Donuts Shop on every corner while here there is a medical facility, perhaps two, on every block. Each often focuses on a narrow part of the body … the “U.W. Digestive Clinic for the Lower Foot of Your Colon.” or the “Dean Clinic for the Treament of the Left Heart Ventrical.” This is specialization run amok. Heaven forbid anyone look at the whole patient.

I started this blog with a totally different topic in mind which demonstrates just how chaotic is my mind. Let me touch briefly on my original point which was the obsession with profits by both corporations and institutions that appear to be distorting American life. This is a huge topic so I’ll just introduce a little bit here.

In early 1925, Cavin Coolidge said to a group of newspaper reporters that “the business of America is business.” Government should keep its hands off things and let corporate leaders and financiers have their way. All went well for several more years until the ‘laissez-faire’ approach to our economy collapsed under its own contradictions. Then, a new model spawned by John Maynard Keynes introduced a new paradigm stressing public sector involvement to correct market failings, especially of the magnitude leading to a global depression. Things worked well for some five decades until a concerted Republican campaign was undertaken to bring us back to the 1920s. We are not quite there yet but close enough for me to worry (a lot).

Recently, the Fortune 500 companies generated $1.8 trillion in profits from $16.1 trillion in revenues. That is a fair chunk of chain. Explaining economic phenomena remains as much craft as sceince which is why economists argue so forcefully. But one contribution to these excessive profits is due to recent patterns in what is termed ‘mark-up growth.’ In short, this is the gap between the cost of production and what a firm charges for its products. Over time, prices and costs generally have risen or declined in tandem reflecting a rather fixed relationship between these two metrics. In the past few years (especially after the housing crash of 2008), prices have run ahead of costs after accounting for both raw materials and labor. This unusual trend has been going on for a decade now. The excess profits are going to investors, top managers, and the economic elite. Wages have inched up during the pandemic but not nearly as much as expected.

Only one graph today. This is a trend line of wages for worker bees, the guys and gals working on factory floors and in retail shops. It is normed for inflation and anchored in 1972 prices. Clearly, these people lost ground from the late 1970s through the mid 1990s before flatlining. They are not the one’s getting rich even as they started voting Republican in greater numbers, a fact they yet baffles the crap out of me. Neither have they gotten richer even as profits have soared recently.

What’s going on? Why are profits rising even as costs (including labor costs as reflected in the above chart) have been sluggish. After all, the market is supposed to be self correcting? While there may be temporary periods of excessive returns, competition is supposed to smooth things out over the longer run. Sure, and I have some land in Florida that is a steal at the price I’m offering you. Bottom line, the ‘mark-up growth’ continues unabated with no mechanism to correct things within market dynamics. Some call this ‘GREEDFLATION,’ or the very human tendency for avaricious folk to grab all they can as long as they can. A few suggest that, if continued unchecked, it could destabilize society in fundamental ways.

I can still remember Paul Ryan (Congressman from the area just south of Madison, former Speaker of the House, and VP candidate with Romney) saying that the U.S. health system was the best in the world because it operated largely on market principles. Parsing that statement would take more time than I have but the essential point is patently ridiculous. Ryan was widely touted as a Republican intellectual, which he may well have been. Then again, they do not set the bar high over there. I doubt he would have done well in my policy classes, relying on Ayn Rand as his economics guru as he does.

Health care is a market sector that is rife with informational issues and limitations in competitive dynamics. Consumers cannot shop for medical services as they might for a new suit. Unlike other countries where prices for most procedures are fixed by the government or through negotiations with large insurance systems that cover everyone, here pricing is totally opaque. Can you figure out your bill? I have a doctorate and I can’t. Moreover, how can a consumer determine who is providing the best bang for th buck, or any buck. When you have had a stroke and are being rushed by the EMTs to a medical facility, you are not likey to say … “hey, let’s stop at a few places and comparison shop.”

Going back to my starting point, what happens when our medical system is captured fully by market forces. I’ll give you one clue, it is not the utopia Paul Ryan imagines. It is the dystopia of medical professionals leaving in droves as the ill and sick wait forever for a freaking medical appointment.

I’ve been writing about deep political and philosophical issues of great moment recently. So, I almost gave myself some time off this morning, mostly because I had an early doctor’s appointment and then a busy day. Still, before the day ends, I will touch on a serious topic close to my heart, or should I say waist … defending obesity. Why do this, you ask? Simple, I am one of those so inflicted with this condition.

This issue popped into my head when my good friends and neighbors returned from a hiking trip to Italy this week. Such a trip puzzles me. Really, do you have to go all that way to engage in self-abuse. There are plenty of trails right here in and around Madison if you wish to torture yourself. Or, if you are in to more extreme forms of pain, you simply can read one of my lengthy books.

Anyway, when I saw the two of them I thought to myself that there is no way they have more than 3 percent body fat. Then Ann came up and gave me a big hug (she was a social worker and they hug a lot) which enabled me to more accurately assess the extent of her anorexia. I revised my estimate down to 1% body fat. Now, while that enables them to walk up a flight of stairs without calling 911 for help, does this make them really happy or, more importantly, healthy? Good question.

Let us overlook the fact that I wheeze getting out of bed in the AM, or that it takes me half our to get my socks on. Distracting, for sure, but are these the most important things when considering the merits of adding additional fat to one’s perimeter. I would pose the following scenarios for your consideration before you respond:

You are stuck in the arctic. It is 30 below zero. Who is going to survive longer. A tubby like me or someone with 1% body fat.

Or lets say their is a world wide famine after an asteroid strike. Who will last maybe 4 or 5 weeks longer than those skinny bastards falling over in the first few weeks. Us fatties will, no doubt.

And when your significant other poisons you and dumps you into a body of water to hide the evidence while claiming you ran off to Mexico with your lover. If you are skinny, the chain and weight might actually keep you submerged and undiscovered. But if you are fat, you will bloat more easily and rise to the surface before she can get away with all your worldy goods.

Skinny people, those who spend their lives at the gym and on the hiking trail, don’t think about these things. They should. So, when you are tempted by that last piece of pie, go for it. It will not only taste good but protect you from all sort of mayhem and disaster.

You can thank me later for this sage advice.

We all search for answers to the big questions … how did we get here and where are we going and what is this all about? This is an inherently human aspiration, to figure things out and to understand the world about us. Moreover, as far as we know, we are the only species (on earth that is) with suffiicient self-awareness to pose such abstract queries. Well, perhaps the dolphins have but they are not on Facebook yet, so we don’t know. Not only that, this quest for ultimate answers has been going on for a long, long time.

Check out the the ‘FACTS POST’ below. Somewhere in our distant past, we homo-sapiens prevailed over our neanderthal cousins to start us on our way toward what we are today. When you consider the number of improbable events that had to fall into place just right to first create life, then to facilitate complex biological forms, then generate consciousness, and now to bring us to a state where we might create our own immortality (or singularity where we merge our understandings and thinking into some form of artificial intelligence), it is wildly improbable that we exist at all. The number of factors that had to go ‘right’ are beyond counting. But we do exist, either because some omniscient and omipresent being willed it so or just due to the laws of probability.

Somehow, we have reached our current state where, as a species, we are peering back to the origins of the universe and looking ahead toward immortalizing ourselves in forms of advanced artificial intelligence. This accomplishment defies the odds. So many individual factors had to fall precisely into place over an immense period of time. Even f each event had a .5 probability, the aggregate odds are infinitessimal. That would not happen by chance unless the law of large numbers comes into play. There are trillions of stars and galaxies out there, the chances that a few would permit an outcome in which beings like us would evolve and thrive is better than 0 … perhaps significantly so. Howeverm it would have been a sucker’s bet. Still, all we know is that it has happened here, assuming we are not a fabrication of someone else’s artificial intelligence.

We have the advantage of modern science and technology. Think back to the time when our long ago ancestors huddled in caves and tried to make sense of simple things like thunder and lightning, disease and death, how to survive against so many daily threats. The primitive members on our family tree had to figure things out pretty much on their own. With faulty logic and little clear evidence, answering the unanswerable through appeals to supernatural forces made as much sense as anything else. It also made sense to take elements of their own attributes and merely make them more impressive. For most of human history, our gods were anthrpomorphic in character … much like us but way more powerful, including having robust versions of our own shortcomings and failings.

After one short experiment with monotheism in early Egypt, the notion of single, omnipowerful deity emerged to stay among the Jewish tribes wandering about the middle-east as they tried figuring out how to survive. Their Yahweh, a being so sacred that the word ought not to be spoken, gave them a psychological advantage when facing powerful enemies on all sides. It also provided leverage to the tribal leaders to enforce minimal social conformity among otherwise unruly peoples. You can imagine Moses thinking one day, ‘I’ll wander off and come back with these rules and tell people they are from God. That will bring them into line.’ Even today, religion is employed to support acceptable behaviors essential to the survival of ever larger human groupings. Break these commandments and it is everlasting brimstone for you. I have already ordered a poweful air-conditioning unit for my afterlife.

Yes, the picture above is me during my early religious period. Most people who know me as the depraved lech of my adult years find this fact hilarious. You … religious? No way! But it is true. Just like the cave dwellers of long ago, I sought to make sense of things as I grew up within a Catholic, working class, ethnic cultural cocoon. I only stayed in the seminary a year and a half (and this pic was a posed bit of humor) but it made sense then and now. I wanted to lead a useful and meaningful life. Joining a missionary order (the Maryknollers for you Catholics out there) seemed a way to do that. By my second year of training for the Priestly life, it hit me that I really wanted to save people, not their souls. My faith in a traditional notion of God was not nearly strong enough. But the impulse to do good would lead me to go from the Church to leftist (anti-war mostly) politics and then into the Peace Corps. Later, I studied poverty and taught social policy as a career. The inner drive to make sense of things and live life accordingly never went away.

For me, my rational side could never support a belief system absent some empirical basis. Church leaders often told me to be aware of one’s intellect, it was where Satan lurked (along with all those pretty and sexy lasses). The pretty lasses ignored me totally (I had no occasion of sin in Catholic parlance) so my actual downfall was my intellect. I recall sitting in my High School religious classes (in an otherwise excellent academic Catholic Prep School) questioning so many of the Church’s doctrines. Of course, I did all my questioning silently. That should have been clue number one that a life as a priest was not in the cards. But I had to try.

On a larger scale, society confronts similar struggles. In the Western world we are most familiar with the Renaissance that emerged in 15th century Europe. This revolution in the arts and thought shifted our attention from a rigid set of fixed beliefs to patterns of explorations in which humans began to question things. They started to observe and rely my on actual observations and more rigorous deductions as oposed to given doctrines as the source of understanding. Slowly, we shifted our perspective from an unknowable God to an empirical understanding of our world though the road forward was decidedly rocky. Copernicus only published his findings refuting an earth centered view of the universe upon his death while Gallileo promptly recanted his finding when the Pope challenged him. It was not until the 18th century that the Biblical understanding of time (the earth is older than 6,000 years) took root. That insight also took many years to be accepted, and still isn’t among many evangelicals and Republican politicians.

All that aside, here is the question that I’ve noodled on many an occasion (I do need to get a life). Do we need some divine judge and arbiter of what is good to keep us moral and good? Are Heaven and Hell essential to morality and social cohesion? It is not like the historical evidence is clear on this point. Pope Urban II called for good Catholics to go on a crusade in 1095 to battle the infidels in the Levant. These crusaders for Christ went of a rampage of rape and murder in their God’s name. Islamic warriors did the same as they charged out of Arabia some five centuries earlier to conquer the infidels (in their eyes) and slay those who resisted their truth. And let us not forget the various inquisitions that tortured, hung, burned, and quartered untold numbers of victims for infractions of the most arcane doctrines. Belief can be a most messy affair.

But let us not be overly harsh here. There is a huge difference between those who employ religion and spirituality as a weapon and those who use it for a force for good.

Mr Rogers, the TV peronaity who taught a generation or more of kids clearly was a man of faith. But he never seemed to rely upon his religious affiliation or background to do good nor seek a fortune (I doubt he was in it for the money as so many evanglelical preachers are). He embraced the message of love, compassion, respect, and kindness which he brought to millions of children (and adults). His contributions to better understandings of one another and caring for each other were endless. They included having an African-American as a regular character on his show. This was when racial apartheid was yet part of the American landscape and showcasing a Black actor risked losing part of his audience.

I chose the Marknollers for a similar reason. Many of their Priests and Nuns of that order worked in places like Central and South America were political strife was rampant in the 60s. So many Maryknollers were on the side of the peasants as they battled the oligarchs and coprorations (many foriegn). Some lost their lives for their work and beliefs. Those sacrifices inspired me.

It strikes me that we are yet caught in a transformational era, and there have been several such discrete transitions where mankind has gone through a qualitative change. Our conquest of the Neanderthals (or killing them off with new diseases), agriculture, urbanization, monotheism, the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, and now being on the theshold of the AI revolution. Yet, not surprisingly, we are stuck between world views. None of these ‘revolutions’ happened over night.

Thus, some of us (not me of course) are working on technologies that will alter the very concept of consciousness and what it means to be human. Those on the cutting edge are exploring the capacity to capture and use all stored knowledge in a new form of artificial intelligence, including mimicking and improving (we hope) human emotions and morality. The consequences of the future are beyond reckoning. At the same time, so many are yet stuck on issues like the age of a 6000 year old earth, whether sex is inherently sinful, and on so many myopic and unanswerable notions such as exploring the nature of a divine which simply are beyond our empirical reach. Such divisions are always present during transitions and have the unfortunate consequence of invoking great passions and bitter conflicts. Let us hope for the best.

No forum captures our extant conflicts better than our political arena. We see Republicans rise and say that we need not worry about climate change because God can save the earth if He wishes. Or no need to take the Covid Vaccine since it is all up to Jesus. We see logical abominations such as the argument that guns save lives, and ownership of such is a religious duty just as we cement our reputation as the outlier nation for gun violence and death. We witness countless conservatives argue we need to become a Christian nation (e.g., like the Taliban in Afghanistan) by banning objectionable books, replacing public libraries with Christian alternatives, and replacing parts of the Constitution with the Bible. They push such frightening measures as they vote against every public law and regulation that reflects Christ’s message of love and compassion. It is hard to imagine how these polar opposite perspectives can coincide with one another.

In the end, I mostly thank the stars that I am old and probably won’t be around when homo-sapiens ‘screw the pooch’ as the old saying goes. That means screw things up royally and end the human experiment before we can find out where it might lead.

And that is the big question. Where are we headed? I look at the unbelievable images of the Universe out there (see above) and marvel at the majesty of it all. Perhaps a divine being or force is responsible but such knowledge is beyond my poor talents to determine (and sciences) though I could never accept a personal God who wastes time checking on my attendance at some religious observance on Sundays.

I fervently hope we don’t screw things up. I am comforted by the knowledge that humans just might crack the code to those core questions we have been asking for eons. And that could happen sooner rather than later. How exciting is that? And what if we are the only species in the vast universe capable of doing that. That is frightening one one level and special, even flattering, on another.

One final wild thought! Maybe, just maybe, we are in the process of becoming the very God we have been seeking over the long history of our spiritual and religious searching. Wow! On that note, I see it is time for my nap.

Tucker Carlson, the darling of hard-right ideologues, was sacked by Fox News immediately after that media outlet settled with the Dominion Voting Machine Corporation for about $750 million dollars. While Fox cleared some $2.1 billion last year, this amount probably caused Rupert Murdoch to grab for his ant-acids. As disgusting and smug as Tucker might have been, he was the undsiputed star of the network, ever since Bill Oreilly exited after a string of sexual harrasment suits. Nothing like the family values crowd to engage in a little hanky-panky.

A number of the conservative darlings have been forced off the network over the past decade or so starting with Glenn Beck back in 2011. Glenn was an over the top conspiracy theorist who may even have stretched the credulity of the Fox brass. Roger Ailes, a well placed GOP activist and consultant, bit the dust in 2016 after acusations of sexual harrassment by another Fox luminary, Gretchen Carlson. The next year, 2017, saw two more casualties. Eric Bolling, another on-air star was let go for, guess what, sexual misconduct. But the big news of that year was the release, a polite way of saying the firing, of Bill O’Reilly, their chief far-right purveyor of nonsense and holder of their prime evening time slot. Finally, in 2020, White House correspondent Ed Henry was pushed out the door for, guess what, ‘willful sexual misconduct.’ Females are advised to enter the Fox empire at their own risk, or at least bring their own security forces.

What does this all mean? Is Papa Murdoch no longer calling the shots or, less likely, trying to make amends for a poorly led life as he nears his own demise? Are his sons and heirs taking charge and leading the network in a more responsible direction? These accumulated changes leave Hannity as the one bright star at Fox and the one remaining household name to push nonsense only believable to the tin hat crowd.

Some have suggested that Fox wants to be considered more of a ‘mainstream media outlet.’ In effect, they would be signing on to the ‘fake media’ world they have attacked with such exuberance in the past. For the network, the problem will be a huge hit to their bottom line. Their core, or target, audience thrives on the red meat thrown to the unthinking bubbas of the world. This core audience wants their priors validated and the their personal hatreds acknowledged … in a sense, blessed. They turn to Fox for a kind of perverse comfort in the fact that their comical, if it were not so tragic, view of the world makes sense and is so widely shared by others. If Fox goes any more mainstream, many of their viewers will seek alternatives to feed their deepest ideological passions in droves. What we can say is that the demise of Fox as a propoganda outlet will not automatically return America to sanity.

This raises a question in my head, which is an interesting place to be. As you may know by now, I don’t always think in a straight line. Granted, my favorite activity involves enjoying the discussions I have with myself. They are scintillating and brilliant and, best of all, no can object or insert any contradictory facts or interpretations. At the same time, my imaginary dialogues wander about in strange ways with unusual connections continuosly being formed. Surely a fun place to be.

Here is my wandering for today. We normally surmise that outlets like Fox generate the kinds of far right beliefs and attitudes shared by a large share of the U.S. population. How else would people embrace such obvious follies as Republicans best represent working people or Obama was a disaster for America or (almost hard to put this in writing) that Trump was sent by God to save us. It makes more sense to conclude that Voodoo is the path to Nirvana.

But here is the disconcerting thought that keeps popping into my head. Outlets like Fox do not create the divisive political climate that dominates the American landscape today. It merely reflects and amplifies what already was out there and which had been lurking throughout our history. The hate and narrowness we see among today’s Republicans has always been there though, in the past, had been muted by the buffer provided by rational members who are now long gone. I recall being repelled by the news that many in Texas and the South cheered at the news of John Kennedy’s death by an assassin, and that plots to attack JFK as a traitor to America flourished in parts of the country. Irrational fear and hate were always there, they just had fewer avenues to flourish given that a limited number of outlets broadcast their version of reality. Walter Cronkite was such a soothing and reasonable father figure during the 1960s.

Fox news thrived, not because it created a demented fan base but because that base existed and insisted on an outlet that would support their priors. The hard right, bigger in America than in most places, needed this kind of network to exist. Rupert Murdoch merely saw the opportunity to provde this demanded service. Fox’s array of stars mostly were college dropouts (with some exceptions) who saw a way to make an easy buck.

I can’t prove this of course. However, I’m a firm believer in two things in policy analysis. One should always get the question right and one should think hard about causal connections including, even more importantly, their direction. It makes a huge difference whether propoganda (the real fake news) shapes belief or those alreadt existing preferences create the demand for certain forms of propoganda. We can more easily work on the former while the latter will prove more difficult to remedy.

My mind then wandered in a slightly tangential direction. We are experiencing a heightened sense of angst and malaise in America. There are small signs everywhere. Mass shootings on a daily basis is one clue. Or take the fact that 1 in 3 high school girls reported serious suicidal thoughts in 2021 (according to CDC data). Persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness has jumped from about a third of all girls in 2011 to 57% a decade later. For boys, the corresponding rise went from about 20% to almost 30%. The upward trend took off right around Trump’s inauguration and kept rising though the subsequent pandemic which offered additional stressors.

We also know that kids respond to the world created by their parents. How could they not, even as they pull away to become independent. We see higher levels of pathology among adults these days. Some 53 million have some form of mental illness or impairment in 2020. About 28 million alone abuse alcohol and let’s not even get into meth and opioid addicitons. Moreover, some 61% of adults report experiencing one or more serious stresses as kids themselves. We appear to be passing on the accumulating stresses in life from generation to generation.

My wandering internal conversation now takes me to a topic I shared in a recent blog. There are some very happy countries and they are happy year after year. What do most of them share? They have robust and well developed public spheres that ameliorate life’s stresses. Public services such free access to medical care, inexpensive child care, free education through college, labor market assistance to ensure fair treatment to workers, programs to care for the elderly, and so on, take a good deal of uncertainty out of life. Citizens in such countries prize these things so much that are willing to pay high taxes.

In the U.S., we approach things very differently. We foster conflict and competition under the guise that it produces character and innovation, and that it rewards the best people in some Darwinian struggle for success. All this is wrapped up within the soothing mantle of personal freedom and independence. It is the so-called American Dream, you too can be a millionaire. And a number do win the brass ring. But many more struggle amidst lives caught up in uncertainty and the fear that one slip might cast a person and their loved ones into the economic and social abyss. No wonder so many kids, fighting for some advantage starting in elementary school and drowning in debt as they finish college, are so anxious and despairing. The rampant bullying we see in our high schools is merely preparation for the coming battles as adults within America’s demented zeitgeist.

All this is speculation of course. But I have a few dots I’d like to connect. Our conflict and competitive American culture leads to a higher levels of anxiety and angst which in turn generates a pervasive sense of fear and a distrust of others which, in turn, leads to forms of isolation and the search for those responsible for one’s unhappiness. Buying an AR-15, or publicly displaying a weapon around your waist, may provide some comfort. But another balm is watching your favorite pundit lay out for you, in simple terms, why you feel the way you do and whom to blame for it. This becomes your new fix. You can’t really live without it.

If any of this is true, the remedy for our national ills will not be firing a few firebrands on Fox news. It will require rebuilding our society from the ground up. Alas, I am too old to take this on. Time for my nap!

I don’t watch horror flics. Seeing young college kids killed off in various demented ways holds little allure for me. Yet, sometimes art, if you can call these movies art, does reflect life and might afford us some form of illumination on our national persona.

In this movie genre, a famous villain named Freddy Krueger was introduced by producer Wes Craven in a 1984 release titled Nightmare on Elm Street. This slasher movie evolved into a successful franchise that spawned, and may still, numerous future works of art. But herein lied a dilemma for Craven. Audiences, for the most part, wanted to see the lead protagonists escape a gruesome end and, at the same time, see the emodiment of evil meet some final retribution for his horrific actions. Just how to do that? Why not kill off the bad guy, or appear to at least, but resurrect him somehow in future flics. Far fetched? Perhaps! Still, Freddie kept getting killed, or so it seemed, only to miraculously be resurrected in future films. Who cares about plausibility as long as the money keeps rolling in. Freddy became our nightmare that never ended.

We expect this garbage from Hollywood, or wherever these atrocities are made. For some reason, we expect better from our public institutions and leading political figures. We want to elevate our leaders to a higher level, above the ordinary plane where real people trod. We don’t expect them to resurface after repeated violations of the public trust. When I was young, scandal would easily spell the end for a national candidate. Republican Nelson Rockefeller ended his Presidential aspirations when he divorced his wife and took up with a woman known as ‘Happy.’ Senator Musk from Maine fell by the wayside in the early 70s when he was thought to shed a tear in response to vicious dirty trick attacks by the Nixon camp. A decade earlier, President Kennedy escaped consequences for his womanizing ONLY because the press ignored all the evidence before them. Not even his fabled charm would have saved him if the truth had been revealed. In the most shocking example of all, the nation was remarkably ignorant of the fact that FDR was paralyzed as he led the nation out of a global depression and through a world conflagration. It was agreed that the public was better served by keeping his infirmity a secret. We went to great lengths to preserve our national institutions and leaders,while still discarding them for the most minor of moral infractions.

Up through the 1970s, Americans had confidence in our public institutions. By a wide margin, most told pollsters that they trusted and respected the Courts, Congress, and other vital pillars of Democracy. Today, those figures occasionally approach single digits. Perhaps the last gasp where character and respect mattered in our political life came during Nixon’s fall from grace. When evidence of his shenanigans regarding the Watergate affair could no longer be ignored, Republicans joined Democrats in signaling that it was time for him to go. In that moment, principles still counted over partisan advantage and pure power. Those days, like our longing for the illusory Camelot during Kennedy’s brief tenure, now seem like a lost dream.

Today, there seems to be no bottom to our cynicism and despair. Consider the following. What made America the envy of the world was that it was seen as a ‘land governed by laws.’ When an election was lost, you congratulated the winner and stepped aside. That hallowed tradition started when John Adams found he had lost to Thomas Jefferson, his bitter political enemy. He accepted the results, got in his carriage, and headed back to Boston. Okay, there were a few blips on the way, but the peaceful transition of power remained a relatively sacrosanct foundation of our public life. Most reasonable observers believe that Kennedy only won the razor close election in 1960 because boss-man Richard Daley stuffed the ballot boxes in Cook County, Illinois. But Nixon, of all people, did not contest the outcome since he felt that would damage our Democracy.

One inkling that things had changed came in 2000. Florida held the key to the election. There were all kind of problems with the vote counting including terribly designed ballots and disputes over ‘hanging chads.’ Compounding the doubts were the fact that the Republican candidates’ brother was Governor of the State. Though the recounting and legal battles went on for many weeks, the consensus was that if all the votes were counted fairly , Democrat Al Gore would have been elected. In the end, delays in completing the count and premature court decisions handed the election to Bush. The U.S. Supreme Court ended the sad matter along partisan (excuse me, ideological) lines. Democratic candidate Al Gore, like Nixon some four decades earlier, accepted a flawed process to prevent irreparable harm to the country. The reputation of our highest Court, however, would never recover.

Fast forward to 2020. We have a Republican candidate running for reelection who was so marred with scandal that it would take several volumes to cover the basics. He was routinely accused of incompetence, sleaze, and various mental aberrations even by those who worked in his inner circle, which appeared more as a revolving door than any foundation for a stable and sound government. Let’s focus merely on what happened after he lost by seven million votes in the overall count and by a large margin in the electoral college. Did the Donald, like Adams in 1800, congratulate the winner and graciously hand over power. Hardly!

He immediately declared the election stolen.

He pushed officials in toss up states to find additional votes for him.

He hatched a plot to send fake electors to Washington on January 6.

He tried to get V.P. Pence not to cerify the electoral results.

He tried to get his Congressional allies to throw the election into the House of Representatives.

He mounted the January 6th armed attack on the Capitol to stop the certification of the results from going forward.

He had his media minions continue to attack the integrity of voting machines resulting in a $700 million plus Court judgement against Fox News.

He had other minions conduct expensive after-the-fact audits in several toss-up states which found no wrong-doing, even when conducted by his supporters.

All this adds up to treasonous actions, a total disregard of our laws and traditions, and a breach of any semblence of good or decent behavior. All but one of the dozens of court actions brought by Trump against the election results went against him, whether those making the rulings were liberal or conservative jurists. He still never stopped in his unsupportable claims of victory which only served to undermine our confidence in the election process.

One would think that the public would conclude that his refusal to accept reality to be either the insane delusions of an unbalanced, pathological narcissist or the acts of a political Freddy Krueger bent on destroying our Democracy in the pursuit of ultimate power. How could this not be the case? Yet, Trump even today garners a 70% approval rating among Republican voters. After he was indicted in a New York case for actions associated with paying hush money to a Porn Star, his ratings among the faithful shot up. He retook the lead over his closest rival Ron DeSantis of Florida in the race for the 2024 top prize. Indeed, we have come far from those days when a divorce would preclude a candidate from our highest office. Apparently, we have millions out there who rooted for Freddy Krueger character in his slasher movies.

But Trump is finshed, right? He lost by 7 million last time, won’t he lose by more the next time around? Maybe. But remember that a shift in about 50 thousand votes in several strategic states could have thrown the electoral college his way. And think about this. In his first administration, those trying to control him could only get him to back off his most extreme and bizarre ideas by claiming they were illegal or (in more bizarre moments) merely ignored him hoping he would forget them. That would never work the next time around. Now, he and his closest supporters and sycophants know how to manipulate the process more effectively and will be under no compunction to obey any rules. He has recently said that he would subject all federal officials to a ‘test,’ and would fire all that failed. That is tantamount to saying he would absorb all power to himself.

Do I really believe that Trump can become the dictator he dreams of being. No, I don’t. But then I think of Russia during first part of the 20th century and Germany during the global depression. The ‘left’ in Russia tried a revolt in 1905, which failed and sent Lenin into exile. The Nazis tried their November, 1923 ‘Beer Hall Putsch’ in Munich, Bavaria. This uprising (a forshadow of Jan. 6?) failed and sent Hitler to prison and into a banishment from politics for a while. Most reasonable people thought that Lenin and Hitler would never take power. They were too extreme with Communism being an ill-fit in a backward, agricultural nation like Russia and Germany being too cosmopolitan to fall for a buffoon like the Fuhrer. The overconfidence of the elites and those with common sense proved premature. These first insurrections proved to be dress rehearsals for the real things later on.

The 70% of Republican voters yet supporting Trump represent a minority of all Americans. That should be reassuring. no? But think of this. Right after the October Revolution in 1917, Lenin permitted scheduled elections to take place. The Bolsheviks lost badly, the results were dismissed and the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ replaced any reliance upon public sentiment in running the nation. The Nazi’s, in Germany, never received more than 37% of the vote in any free election. Again, the will of the people mattered not. Upon the flimsiest of fabrications, the Reischtag was dissolved and all powers temporarily assumed by Hitler which, to no ones surprise, became a permanent condition. In America, many states are governed by Republicans even though a majority of the voters lean the other way. Gerrymandering and voter suppression are powerful tools to offset the one-person and one-vote principle. Since 1990, only one national election has given Republicans a majority vote though they have won several of these contests through the Electoral College.

The very term Bolshevik means ‘the majority.’ But during Russia’s revolutionary period (roughly 1900 to 1922), they never were a majority. The more mainstream wing of the Communist Party, known as the Mensheviks, dominated the ‘left.’ But a minority of hard liners prevailed during an early international meeting and took this moniker in a brilliant marketing move. The label stuck. We look at the Republican Party today and see a hard core that is reluctant to compromise on extreme principles. They care not one whit about governing but are committed to seizing and securing power. Extremists inevitably brush aside inconvenient niceties such as checks and balances and the rule of law. Such niceties built into our Constitution are mere impediments and inconveniences to them.

As a final reminder, Lenin was exiled after his first grab for power. Hitler was sent to jail when he went after the brass ring prematurely. Trump has yet to see any consequences for his willful and ongoing efforts to subvert our democracy. How empowered must he feel?

We comfort ourselves by saying we are too eductaed, sensible, and sophisticated as a nation to permit any extreme element to assume total power.

Can we be so sure?

The latest international ranking on national happiness is out. I bet you have been waiting with baited breath. The report, which has been released annually since 2002, is a publication of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network and draws on global survey data from people in more than 150 counties. Rankings are based on their average evaluations in each nation over the preceding 3 years [2000 to 2002].

And the winner for 2023 is Finland … again! This is the 6th year in a row that the Finns have taken the top spot though they always react with a bit of surprise, a kind of ‘who … us’ reaction. Their shock might be a tad disengenuous. After all, the other competitors for top spot are, for the most part, their close neighbors. Denmark, as usual, takes the runner-up prize while Iceland seems an annual lock for 3rd place.

There are occasional results that raise an eyebrow. Israel jumped several spots to grab the 4th position, somewhat of a surprize given their constant war footing and political wrangling. After that we have more Nordic countries like Sweden and Norway, along with EU members the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Luxembourg. Is Luxembourg really considered a country? New Zealand, a candidate from the other side of the globe sneeks into 10th spot. The United States, in case you are interested, is in 15th place. This ranking might be higher than you expected given the daily carnage on our streets and our intense ideological divisions. In last place is poor Afghanistan, but they do have some very reasonably priced vacation tours.

While there is always some shifting among spots in each year’s rankings, the overall patterns are very stable. Not even the global pandemic upset them much. As we have seen, the Nordic countries do very well with 5 in the top 7 positions. Moreover, they are always at the top, year after year. How can this be? After all, these places are cold, have virtually no sunlight for half the freaking year, and pay taxes at rates that would have most Americans grabbing their AR-15s and randomly shooting IRS officials. Moreover, I have never seen a single University from that area of the world ranked in the top 25 U.S. College football polls. What could they possibly be happy about?

Okay, they do have pretty nightime displays of the Northern Lights. That has to be impressive but, again, you have to go out in the freaking cold to enjoy them fully. And what about those freaking taxes. Handing over at least half your income to Aino, the tax collector, cannot ge fun. By the way, it matters not if you are a native Finn or an immigrant merely living there. Both groups are equally happy so the results are not based on some inherited brain abnormality. Nope, people like living in these places even with the frigid temps and high taxes.

Of course, humans being the inquisitive sort, researchers and journalists have sought to uncover the mystery of why freezing your butt off makes folk so content. Perhaps there is no definitive answer but there are some intriguing clues. The Finn’s, for example, talk about liking the small things such as family, friends, and nature. In fact, there is a law there termed ‘Every Man’s Right’ that permits all citizens to enjoy access to most land irrespective of ownership. This sense of sharing common goods spills over into feelings of trust. People expect others to do the right thing. In one Helsinki experment, wallets with cash were intentionally left in public places and over 90 percent were returned to the owners with the money untouched. Contrast that with America where we have have courts sagging under the weight of a litigious society in which suing one another is a national pasttime.

When Nordics talk about what makes them happy, they focus on basic human connections and speak remarkably little about material possessions. The Finnish, as opposed to the American, dream has little to do with accumuating a lot of crap. A rolex watch is far less important than elementary social associations. This often is expressed in their satisfaction with a more humane work-family balance. They have shorter wordays and more vacations. When they have a child, public support starts during the pre-natal period. In Iceland, for example, midwives start providing whatever might be needed as soon as the pregnancy is registered. Upon birth in Finland, the parents are eligible, by law, for extended paid family leave for both mother and father. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, some Nordic countries give up to year of family leave which can be shared between the mother and father. In the U.S. we have nothing, nada, zero.

In addition, so many of life’s anxieties has been eliminated by a strong and extensive safety net that serves all as a matter of right. Medical care is universally available at virtually no out-of-pocket costs, child care is heavily subsidized, education is virtually free through college, and the elderly are taken care of by the state. People in these happy placed do not wake up in the morning fearing that their world will fall apart with a costly medical procedure or a lost job. All this public support costs money, no doubt. The Danes pay well over half of their income in taxes. But they see what they are getting for such a significant investment. One survey found that 88 percent of Danes were happy to pay for the public goods they received. My uninformed guess is that all have a sense of hope, each individual has a shot at security and a reasonable life. Too many in the States face hopeless propsects from day one, with shockingly little support (for such a rich country) on their life’s journey.

There is a greater sense that the citizens in these countries are all in this together. There is a common culture and sense of civic participation. Most are willing to put a good deal of their wealth into public program investments that enable all to ‘thrive socially, physically, and mentally.’ This is a far cry from the ‘me against the world’ sentiment that governs ordinary life in the States. Here, our national foundational story (and national myth) focuses on the indpenedent loner who beats off all others to reach the top of the economic pyramid for himself and perhaps his family. Once there, the winner must remain vigilant against all others who wish to dislodge them from their position of privilege. More over, there is never enough. You must always grab more for yourself or risk sliding down this steep mountain top. How freaking sad. That is not an American Dream, it is a dystopian nightmare.

Perhaps, someday, we as Americans can revisit our foundational myths. Perhaps we can create one based more on collaboration than conflict. Not only might we be happier but we just might save our sorry asses in the end.

I love telling the story that contrasts what happened to a group of boys abandoned on a remote island. In the fictional telling of the story, Lord of the Flies (which was published in my youth), a group of kids found themselves alone on an island after a plane crash. Absent adult supervision and established laws, the kids degenerated into anarchy and violence. The lesson was that savagery was the primal instinct of man unless mastered by some superior power or authority.

Lo and behold, in the 1960s, that very same thing happened in real life. A group of Australian schoolboys went sailing (without permission), got caught in storm that blew them way off course before finally beaching upon a deserted island (called Atta I believe). Unlike the fictional ‘Lord of the Flies’ kids, these real life Robinson Crusoe types organized themselves well and established a crude form of functioning govennment. In short, they cooperated with one another with a one for all and all for one attitude. It was well over a year before they were discovered by accident (it was assumed they were all dead). Given their ordeal, they were in remarkable shape.

The lesson? Perhaps we can all do better if we work together, you know… like that happy place, Finland.