Manafort? Are you Kidding?

The new chief in the Trumpster’s campaign is Paul Manafort. This move is so funny, so sad, so predictable in so many ways that it’s as hard to get your head around it as it is to make sense of the whole Trump fantasy train ride.

The guy is Establishment, serious ESTABLISHEMENT — an Insider, a Washington power broker, a Lobbyist, fer chrissake. He’s been around since Reagan and has advised every Republican candidate since including both Bushes, Dole and McCain.

The Donald has been running on the full-bore, locked and loaded, anti-establishment band wagon and now, when he weirdly and unexpectedly is confronted with a pure crisis moment (he could win!), he turns to a character whose insider-cred qualities have made him a legend in DC.

The transition from Cory Lewandowsky to Manafort is, not surprisingly, not going exactly smoothly — but that’s to be expected and beside the point. What’s really interesting here is the naked hypocrisy of Trump. As most observers have concluded, it’s an adolescent narcissism that drives him. He gets a kick out of the adulation, the chanting of his name at rallies and revels in the angry, ineffective rebuttals from his opponents, Priebus’s people at the RNC and a freaked-out press.

Trump entered this little farrago on a post-adolescent ego trip whose aim was the promotion of the brand name. Now he’s confronted with an accidental, horrific reality: he could win the whole damn thing. He could actually become the POTUS.

To do so he has to shed Lewandowsky and distance himself from the rabble that got him where he is. He needs to embrace the insiders he professes to hate. He has to bring on board exactly the people whom he has been railing against.

So we have Paul Manafort who, as they say, is a “piece of work.” This is a political operative who suckled at Lee Atwater’s teat, embraced Roveian political strategy, who sells his services to the highest bidder including, notoriously, Viktor Yanukovych, the ousted president of Ukraine. Manafort is basically a political mercenary whose firm’s moral compass has an unerring attraction to conservatives with connections and money.

How it works out is yet to be seen. Manafort may turn out not to be most astute of operatives. His first move was to try to make Trump appear more “presidential.” He floated the balloon that the Trump we’ve been seeing to date, the one who has been drawing the crowds and amassing the votes and stockpiling delegates, is a fraud, just an actor playing a part.

“There are two Donald Trumps,” he said, echoing a sentiment offered by Ben Carson in his less-than-enthusiastic endorsement. “Now we will see the other personality, the presidential one.”

Perhaps in the days to come we will hear no more about crazy walls built with magical Mexican money, or the delusional plans to deport millions of immigrants, no more ridiculous schemes to bar any and all Muslims. No more insanity, just a Dole-like, leaderly calm voice.

It’s far from clear how this is going to sit with his base — even if Manafort manages to rein in his client. They like the red-meat lunatic they’ve got and they’re not going to be happy being told that it’s all been a charade, that The Donald has just been playing a role, that he’s really a part of the hated establishment.

It’s not my place to tell Manafort how to do his job but I think a better strategy would be to use the social media to leak the opposite message to Trump’s supporters. Tell them that he’s now going to embark on a fake campaign pretending to be reasonable to trick the Establishment rubes into supporting him.

Hillary Derangement Syndrome

The amount of anti-Hillary vitriol coming from my friends on the left is almost as toxic and filled with loathing as that issuing from the wackadoodle right. It’s so prevalent that it’s got a name: “Hillary derangement syndrome.”

It’s been thoroughly worked over by pundits and commentators. Just punch it into any web browser, sit back and take a wander.

However, there’s not been a lot of discussion about how it became an Internet meme and, most importantly, how it drifted from being part of the decades-long right-wing attack on all things Clinton to being a staple of the left-wingers who support Bernie.

I think its roots are simple and, interestingly, from a remark Hillary made in an interview with Rachel Maddow, she understands it.

It’s a case of the “there’s-gotta-be-a-pony-in-here-somewhere” bit, one with negative overtones. For those who don’t know, this is the punch line of an old joke about a kid who is so totally upbeat and optimistic that his parents try to see if there’s anything that he won’t find engaging. So they put him a huge stable filled to the rafters in horseshit. They come back an hour later and he’s just swimming in the stuff and laughing, “with all this horseshit there’s ….”

In Hillary’s case it began when she was FL of Arkansas. She didn’t stay home like a good southern gal, bakin’ cookies for the locals, wearin’ floppy hats at fairs and smiling at her man. She acted like she belonged, like she was a co-governor. It didn’t go over well and the mudslinging began.

L. Jean Lewis, a thoroughly discredited investigator, hammered away at the Clintons during the ’70s and ’80s, claiming that they were, somehow, implicated in illegal loans and other underhanded dealings with the failed Whitewater development company. Despite numerous investigations, including one in the US Senate in the ’90s, nothing came of it.

In 1993 Vincent Foster, a friend and former law partner of Hillary’s, killed himself. Soon after rumors began to spread that she had hired a contract killer to take him out because he “knew too much” about the Clintons. Like Whitewater, it was all crazy paranoid thinking and nothing came of it. But, like Whitewater, it hasn’t died. Google “Vincent Foster” and the conspiracy sites will pop up with 2016 dates.

When Bill won the presidency he let it be known that he considered Hillary an unofficial “co-president.” She quickly took positions of authority not seen since Eleanor Roosevelt, specifically heading up the health care initiative. The response from her critics was predictable. It showed, once again, that she was just another uppity woman who didn’t know her place. Rejoicing and laughter rippled along the right flank of Congress when her efforts fell short.

When Bubba got caught up in the Monica mess Hillary got hammered yet again. Some opined that the reason Bill wandered was she wasn’t doing her “wifely duties” and he had to get his blow jobs elsewhere. And since Bill’s past peccadilloes with Jennifer Flowers were also fodder for the tabloids, the word was that it all just showed how useless Hillary was as a wife.

Oddly, those with a more feminist bent also complained she showed weakness by staying with him, arguing that a truly strong woman would have left and filed for divorce.

When she ran for the Senate from New York she was called a carpetbagger for having only moved recently to the state. She was vilified in the press — far more than a real carpetbagger like Scott Brown who, after losing his seat in Massachusetts, ran (and lost again) in New Hampshire.

By now the scene was set. Nothing she did would or could be right. Every slip was magnified. If she voted for the Iraq invasion (along with 208 other Democrats) she was forever labeled a warmonger. Her repeated apology for casting this misguided vote has made no difference — earlier this week Bernie hit her with it again. Others maintain that her admission of error is phony and that she’s just trying to curry favor with the anti-war crowd and still others say that it shows she has no principles and is a flip-flopper.

Then there was Benghazi and now the email dust-up.

Nothing has stuck. None of the charges have been substantiated despite the dozens of official and unofficial committees, investigations and inquiries.

But what has stuck is the feeling, vague but tenacious that something’s amiss, that somehow she appears untrustworthy or dishonest or will do anything to win.

Lately it’s gotten kicked up a notch as scores of bloggers, commentators and Internet trolls repeat the charges: She’s untrustworthy. She’ll start another war. She really is complicit in Benghazi. She doesn’t believe the progressive things she’s now saying. She’s in Wall Street’s back pocket. She won’t release the transcripts, etc. etc. etc.

Each new blog fits into the already established mental set. The accumulation of the attacks, the accusations, raised eyebrows, whispers in the halls and we have the basis for the derangement syndrome: “With all this shit around there’s gotta be a pony in here somewhere.”

We are, all of us, subject to the “pony-in-here” effect. In fact, in situations like Hillary’s you have to work not to let it creep up on you. 

We need to step back and look more objectively at her voting record (virtually the same as Bernie’s) and her time as Secretary of State (upon retiring she was regarded as the most effective since Dean Acheson) and her struggle to get the nation’s first universal health care program and, importantly, her ability to remain calm and focused under even the most withering attacks (Trey Dowdy’s Benghazi Committee’s eleven hour grilling). We’re going to need to do this because she’s going to be the nominee and any vote not cast for her will be a vote for whatever cretin the GOP puts at the top of their slate.

The South is Seceding -- Again

The official Civil War ended over a hundred and fifty years ago but the unofficial civil war never did. The Jim Crow laws, anti-miscegenation laws, state-mandated segregation and the so-called “separate but equal” school sytems, all imposed after the war, were eventually overturned by the courts or repealed.

But the tug of secession never died. The original eleven states of the Confederacy have been joined by other southern states (Oklahoma, Kansas, Kentucky) in a new secession movement designed to separate themselves socio-culturally from the rest of the country. And it’s working.

By passing blatantly discriminatory laws on the flimsiest of grounds, reducing tax revenues on the most debunked, regressive economic models, promoting religious rights over human rights, cutting the heart out of education by underfunding and promoting curriculums based on anti-science models, removing regulatory oversight by downsizing government, imposing draconian voter ID laws designed to disenfranchise minorities, students, the poor and the elderly, the southern states are slowly forming a separate sub-nation marked by poverty, a poorly educated citizenry, high rates of obesity, shorter life-spans and diminished quality of life.

Of the six states with the highest poverty rates, five are from the original Confederacy.

Of the six states with the poorest overall educational achievement, four are.

Five of the six states with the highest obesity rates are in the south.

Ditto for the states with the shortest life expectancies.

Eight of the ten states with the worst infant mortality rates are in the south.

Five of the six states with the highest teen pregnancy rates are southern.

Of the eight states with the highest incarceration rates, seven are in the south (the other is Arizona).

Of the 1433 executions carried out in the past forty years 81% have been in southern states (mainly in Texas and Oklahoma).

Only two southern states (Arkansas and Virginia) have unemployment rates better than the national average.

Four of the six states with the lowest median incomes are in the south.

The south is tops in religiosity with nine of the ten most religious states. The other, not surprisingly, is Utah.

The southern states are all controlled by Republicans and they are passing laws at a stunning rate to ensure that this decline in the quality of life for their residents will continue. A quick rundown — there’s little doubt that others will enact similar laws in the coming months:

Anti-LGBT laws: North Carolina, Mississippi and Tennessee. Georgia’s was vetoed by the governor but the legislature could still override it.

Right to discriminate laws (or what the legislatures euphemistically call “religious freedom” laws): Mississippi and North Carolina.

Refusal to enroll in expanded Medicaid programs under Obamacare: Every southern state except Louisiana.

Voter ID laws: every southern state has imposed strict voter ID laws designed to make it harder for groups that normally tilt toward Democrats from voting.

Ironically, every one of the southern states takes more from the despised Federal government than it contributes. The Republicans like to talk about “givers” and “takers” where “taker” is another dog whistle for poor black folks but, in fact, not one of the original eleven could survive without being takers. South Carolina leads the pack. For every dollar in Federal income tax paid the state receives $7.75 back from Washington. Florida gets approximately $4.50, Louisiana and Alabama about $4.25 and Mississippi roughly $4.10. Only Georgia and Arkansas are close to the break-even point with about $1.10 coming back for each $1.00 in tax revenue generated.

The economic situation in southern states is only going to get worse. The states that passed the anti-LGBT and pro-discrimination laws are suffering already. Several major corporations including PayPal and Deutsche Bank have withdrawn projects that would have brought hundreds if not thousands of jobs to North Carolina and popular performers like Bruce Springsteen and Bryan Adams have cancelled concerts.

The really serious problems are still in the future. As a careful analysis in The Guardian revealed, the ripple effects will accumulate as universities begin having difficulty recruiting faculty and students, public education is underfunded, tax revenues continue to drop, tourism declines and the infrastructure crumbles.

Businesses understand that discrimination and prejudice are not good ways to do things. Over 150 have signed letters asking these states to repeal the anti-LGBT laws.

Other states already see opportunities to grow from the south’s misguided moves. Connecticut recently made a pitch to the Bank of America to relocate its offices from North Carolina.

If the south wishes to continue its centuries-long effort to dissociate itself from the rest of the US, they are going to have to be willing to live in what will be the only third-world country in North America.

Fear of Change, Fear of the Different, Fear of the Future

The last few years have witnessed a blizzard of “anti-” bills and laws emerging from states dominated by conservatives. Anti-voting rights, anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-lesbian, anti-transgender, anti-reproductive rights, anti-immigrant and anti-women bills have been introduced and, in many states, passed and signed into law.

Along with these have come the real head-scratchers like Indiana’s and Mississippi’s efforts to legalize discrimination against anyone whose actions or appearances or beliefs violate one’s supposed religious convictions.[1] Defenders of these bills like to point to the meme of the florists whose religious beliefs supposedly bar them from providing arrangements for a gay wedding.[2]

What we were seeing here is disturbing but shouldn’t really be surprising. It’s a classic conservative reaction to change and America is undergoing dramatic shifts in demography, ethnicity, age and expressions of sexuality and identity.

Non-Hispanic whites[3] now number around 195 million or a tad above 60% of the population. That’s down from 90% in 1940 and demographic projections have 2040 or thereabouts as the point where this once-dominant group becomes a minority. Part of this drop is due to low birth rates and the surprisingly high rates of mortality among middle-class whites. Since 2013 deaths among white Americans have outpaced births. The shift is inexorable.

The make-up of Congress has undergone dramatic change. In 2001 there were 63 non-whites in Congress. In 2016 there are 91. That still under represents their number in the population at large but it is a 44% jump and, interestingly, two of these representatives are Muslims.

Gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people used to have the good grace to stay in the closet — though perhaps that was more out of fear than graciousness. Now they’re everywhere (of course, they always were). Openly gay CEOs and corporate presidents head up Apple, Gawker, NBC Entertainment, BP, John Hardy Jewelry and Nike Information.

Caitlyn Jenner, once the world’s greatest male athlete is transgender, as are Chaz Bono, RuPaul, Carmen Carrera and Emmy nominee Laverne Cox. Eddie Izzard, long a cross-dressing comedian, actor and social commentator recently came out as transgendered.

Homosexuals Rachel Maddow, Don Lemon, Steve Kornacki and Anderson Cooper bring us news and commentary, Ellen Degeneres is the eponymous host of a popular daytime show, David Hyde Pierce, Alan Cummin, Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellen, Jim Parsons, Nathan Lane star on TV and Broadway. K. D. Laing, Elton John and Ricky Martin sing to us all. Wikipedia lists roughly 1,100 actors and entertainers who openly identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered.

DADT was repealed, DOMA reversed and the SCOTUS ruled that gay marriage is a Constitutional right.

Colorado, Washington and DC (with restrictions) legalized recreational marijuana and twenty-three states permit medical use with a doctor’s prescription.

The climate is changing and, slowly, even the most ferocious deniers are acknowledging that something seems to be amiss with the weather.

Fossil fuels use is dropping. Coal is becoming the unwanted fuel. Electric cars are increasingly popular, solar panels are gracing rooftops and green energy systems using wind, the tides, water and the sun are emerging. Robots are doing human jobs, winning chess and Go matches and even beating top poker pros at the most complex game humans routinely play.

All this is welcomed with applause and calls for more freedom of expression, more openness, diversity, innovation, more new foods and dress and music — by some.

But others, especially that fading cohort that identifies as white, thinks of itself as middle- or working-class and Christian, is middle-aged and relatively uneducated, sees it as nothing short of terrifying. Women in head scarves conjure visions of suicide bombers. Gays holding hands, kissing at their nuptials evoke Pavlovian spasms of revulsion. They look about them seeing atheists in the woodwork, climate change scientists on talk shows, “elitist” intellectuals talking “at” them not “to” them and always, always there’s that Black face sitting in the oval office.

For the most part they aren’t bad people; they’re scared, confused, unsure. The cultural rug is being pulled out from under them. They don’t understand what’s happening or why and they’re just doing what seems right, lashing out, looking for help, lining up behind anyone who says that the future can be like the past.[4]

When angry white voters say they want to take their country back they are telling you they want to take it away from these strange, different people with darker skins, odd ways of dressing (and cross-dressing), unwelcome music and art, peculiar foods with odd spices, unacceptable ways of making love and worshiping who have inserted themselves into an America they once called their own.

When Trump and his supporters say they want to make American great again, “great” is a dog whistle. They hear it loudly and clearly. They know what it means.

But they are a minority, increasingly so. They cannot reverse time. They cannot control the demographics or force society to accomodate to their fears.

It’s too bad. They’re going to miss out on a lot of really cool shit. 

---

[1] As Katherine Stewart noted in a piece in The Nation, the Mississippi bill was drafted by the American Family Association which has a good bit of skin in the game. The AFA, which has been classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, has been hearing whispers that their tax exempt status might be revoked. Bills like the one in Mississippi would give them cover to continue to foster discrimination and hatred.

[2] Frankly, I’m looking forward to a Fundamentalist Muslim refusing service to a woman who entered his store with her head uncovered and unaccompanied by a man.

[3] Note that the census counts include those with European, Middle Eastern and (some) North African ancestries. In today’s world, especially in the eyes of many white conservatives, not all these demographically white individuals are treated as equals. Middle Easterners and North Africans, particularly those who embrace Islam are routinely discriminated against.

[4] There’s been a good deal of work in social psychology on these issues, much of it done under the rubric of Terror Management Theory. TMT provides intriguing insights into not just the current socio-political scene; it also aims to make sense of the key question, why do we have so much trouble getting along with people who are different. I’ll post on it later.

Doubt and Certainty: On the Incoherency of Belief

Philosopher William Irwin wrote an interesting piece for “The Stone,” an ongoing series of essays on “timely and timeless” philosophical issues that appears in the New York Times. In it Irwin argued that both religious faith and secular non-faith should, properly, be encased in doubt.

Blind religious conviction, like unthinking atheism, he argued, just isn’t very interesting. Total acceptance makes him suspicious. If one believes without question (from either side of the theological divide) it suggests, to Irwin, that they haven’t listened to the other side’s perspective.

Needless to say, the article attracted quite a few readers’ comments — 2,237 of them, to be precise. The Times selected seven of them and published them the following week. They’re thoughtful and focus on issues of faith, belief, doubt and certainty. They come from both believers and atheists and several intriguing points are made. But no one touched on what, for me, is the key issue: the incoherence of a deity.

I used to teach a course titled “Parapsychology: A Critical Examination.” One topic we looked at was the nature of belief. Invariably, a student would realize that God was a paranormal entity and we’d end up in usually fascinating discussions about religion and belief. The students always wanted to know what I believed. I’d duck and weave and refuse to answer till the semester of 9/11. The classroom windows gave a clear view of the towers. We saw them come down and I really couldn’t stay silent.

My belief is simple, I told them. Religion is just not relevant. It plays no role in my life. They said that made me an atheist. I demurred. Atheism means taking a stance on God, specifically, his (or her — some didn’t like that) existence. I’m not doing that. They didn’t like that either.

I told them I didn’t believe in 20-foot tall, four-headed purple unicorns. Confused looks ensured. It’s like that. I don’t deny their existence. I just don’t think about them. They’re irrelevant. It’s unlikely they exist but so what.

A young woman countered by noting that surely I’d thought about God.

Of course, I told them, but only when someone else brings the topic up.

That pretty much covered matters. I didn’t want to get into the incoherency argument because that was not my job. We were in that room to examine the cognitive processes involved in human belief, not what we believed.

But the issue of the coherency or lack thereof of deities is important and it was missing in the exchange in the Times though several comments raised the classic, “The existence of God can’t be proven or, for that matter disproven. It’s a matter of faith.”

This is, more-or-less, true. Efforts at proof usually turn on variations of the ontological argument, and have pretty much failed to satisfy theologians let alone logicians. In that sense, belief in the existence of God (or any other deity) is, indeed, dependent on faith.

The other side, the secularist, non-believer side, actually can make a better case based on the argument-from-incoherency principle.

Take my mythical unicorn. Everything we know about evolutionary biology, biochemistry and biophysics points to the impossibility of such a creature. So it just doesn’t make sense to offer ontological claims. Similarly, with deities. Everything we know about cosmology, astronomy and physics, about the age, size and nature of the universe, the age of our planet and the point in time when life emerged renders the very notion of a transcendent supreme being incoherent. It simply makes no sense.

Until recently we thought we were pretty much alone, our planet was all there was and it really felt like it was prepared, readied for us. We now know this terra-centric view is very wrong.

There are several hundred billion galaxies in the known universe. Each contains several hundred billion stars. Virtually every star we get a good look at turns out to have planets. It takes a stupendous dose of hubris to think that a supreme being oversees all this but selected our little dust mote of a planet for his/her largesse.

But even if you do think this way, the manner in which this supposed deity went about things is just nutty. Why wait some seven hundred million years for the first life forms? Why hang around for 4.5 billion years before getting to humans? Why would this entity cool his/her heels for another 300,000 years before giving us his blessings? And what was the sense in creating at least three different kinds of species of Homo before letting our kind knock off the others?

It just doesn’t make any sense. Not to me anyway and I’m just not comfortable with the line that “God works in mysterious ways.” I like a good mystery, especially a scientific mystery but those have, in principle, empirical and theoretical answers.

Is this a proof that God doesn’t exist? No. Proving non-existence isn’t easy to do when dealing with well-defined entities that lend themselves to empirical exploration and the ontological status of mysterian concepts like supreme beings isn’t one of those.

Perhaps thoughts like these are more common than we realize. Gretta Vosper, a minister of a church in Toronto has acknowledged that she is an atheist saying she just got to the point where she couldn’t believe in a supernatural being and claiming that she is far from alone. Many liberal congregations, she said, are headed by atheists, ones who value the good works that churches do and the role they play for families and communities.

I guess you don’t have to believe in God to do “God’s work.”