Behavior

Nothing To See Here

Jun 16

A Roundup of the Ridiculous

The IRS investigated several 501(c)4 organizations. We grant these businesses tax exempt status because they, “. . . operate exclusively for social welfare.” That’s great, except the outfits in question were spending nearly all of their money for political attack advertising. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Chairman of the House Mandate On Reproducing Obviously Nuitty ScandalMania (“MORONS”) Committee, thinks there is a problem because the IRS was doing its job. More, his own investigation has completely exonerated the White House, but he has refused to release those testimonies and he has continued to implicate the Administration in this scandal that does not actually exist.

On the other hand, the IRS got caught spending taxpayer money in what can reasonably be described as irresponsible, stunningly stupid ways. Good that the fools got caught. Great that Congressman Trey Gowdy (R-SC) reamed them publicly on the deeply personal implications of their actions.

Antony Weiner is running for mayor of New York. This is political comedy at its finest.

Speaker of the House John Boehner wants officials jailed and the Attorney General impeached over the AP cell phone records issue. He demanded that even before anything had happened other than wild accusations. How do you suppose he would define “due process?”

Benghazi is still in the news, as Obama opponents struggle to alchemize nothing into horrific political scandal.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) has announced that she won’t be running for re-election. She declared in no uncertain terms that her decision has nothing to do with her having just squeaked out a win in 2012 (by 0.8%), her being behind in polling in her district for the 2014 race or that she and her election campaign are under federal investigation for fiddling with funds and other no-no stuff.

Sen. Saxby Chamliss (R-GA), a member of the Senate Armed Services committee, explained away a big problem in the military by saying to the top brass testifying before his committee, “The young folks coming in to each of your services are anywhere from 17 to 22 or 23. Gee whiz, the hormone level created by nature sets in place the possibility for these types of things [rapes] to occur.” So, according to Senator Explain-Away-Rape, the assault that is rape is just a youthful hormone thing, not the brutal, demeaning and destructive act of aggression that people who actually have information about such things know it to be. Bear in mind that Chambliss, who was of draft age during the Vietnam War but who never served in the military, is the same guy who won his senate seat by questioning the patriotism of Max Cleland, his senate seat opponent and a Vietnam War triple amputee.

Rahm Emanuel is closing 49 public schools in Chicago, this being a gift, in that he won’t be closing five more. This was done in the face of clear and consistent data that shows that the single most powerful driver of academic success and its follow-on, life success, is student preparedness created during pre-K, kindergarten, first and second grades.

The gun bill failed in congress due to Republican manipulation of the process and a bunch of legislators who lack the starch in their spines to stand up to the NRA, but that’s old news. The new news is that we’ve killed over 30 people per day with guns since then. News flash for tough, “cold, dead hands” guys: Those people who were shot dead are all still dead and will remain dead, including those little kids murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School. There is nothing theoretical about gun violence and failing to take action assures a continuation of the killing of our children.

“Safety is at the heart of everything we do,” says the British Petroleum spokesperson wearing a hardhat and narrating the currently running, feel-good PR commercial. Actually, the record clearly shows that not to be true. From 2007 – 2010 two of BP’s refineries accounted for 97% of all flagrant refinery violations. BP has been convicted of three environmental crimes, including felonies in both Alaska and Texas. There were dozens of safety violations at the Deepwater Horizon oil platform, including disabling emergency alarms just weeks before the rig exploded, killing eleven men (no bodies recovered) and dumping four million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Then they dumped hundreds of thousands of gallons of toxic, potentially carcinogenic dispersant onto the oil so that we wouldn’t be able to see the mess they had made. After all, out of sight is out of mind and maybe they would be able to limit the cost of their irresponsibility through such chicanery. Which they did. “Safety at the heart of everything they do?” Really? It is short term profit that is at the heart of everything BP does, safety be damned. Oh, and how about some gulf shrimp for dinner tonight?

Mitt and Ann Romney announced they are planning to rejoin the national dialog, perhaps as “severely conservative” voices or possibly to give a progress report on the construction of their car elevator. Surely, they can’t think that after all the gaffs, the 47% elitist attitude and the rest that they have something to offer Americans or even Republican candidates. Oh, wait, they probably do think that.

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), America’s most unpopular senator, tells us that it was wrong when Richard Nixon used the IRS to target his political opponents and it is just as wrong for Barack Obama to do that. Of course, he conveniently fails to give any specifics and instead damns with that vague accusation. It is reminiscent of half-governor Sarah Palin during her “Obama is un-American” campaign following her 2008 election loss that she screeched, “It isn’t wrong to love your country.” Damning by vague accusation. Here is a heads up for Sen. Flake: Unlike President Obama, Richard Nixon was guilty of multiple felony violations of law. Are you able to understand that distinction? (Am I now damning Flake by vague accusation?)

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), who voted against the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, as well as the Paycheck Fairness Act, said that women, “. . . don’t want” equal pay laws. Surely, that will come as a surprise to the millions of women who are paid a fraction of what their male co-workers are paid for doing the same job.

It is just a couple of ordinary political weeks in America. Our problems expand and our elected officials make sure that they don’t get solved. But we do get continuous political posturing and accusations, manipulation of facts and a never ending string of stupid stuff that, strangely, we voted for.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

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What do you think?
Keep the conversation going by adding your comments below and passing this along to three friends.
That’s how things get better.

Melting Pot?

May 18

Since the first immigrants arrived this has always been a Euro-centric place. Surely that’s understandable, since it was Europeans who were the primary immigrants for a very long time. Of course, after a while we started importing Africans to be our slaves, but there was no need to change our orientation, since Africans weren’t considered full human beings. Some time later people began to arrive from Asia, Mexico and Central America, but the Euro-centrics were the huge majority of the population and continued to be the powerful, the culture controllers.

The Euro-centrics were something else. too: they were mostly Protestant. The Founders and most of the immigrants and most of their descendants where Protestant, so that has been the dominant religious orientation from the start. That the Founders inscribed freedom of religion into the Constitution (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof: . . . “) had no impact on that, so white, European Protestants have been the dominant force in America.

In the early 1960’s I overheard a conversation between two men. One was saying with obvious concern, perhaps anger, that Ernie Banks, the Chicago Cubs star, had purchased a house a couple of blocks from where he – the speaker – was living. This was in Chicago, a starkly divided city of neighborhoods where Poles, Italians, blacks, Jews and others pretty much stayed in their own area. It was birds of a feather flocking together for safety. And here was good ol’ Ernie, a black man, purchasing a house in a white area. So, I asked what seemed to me to be an obvious question: “Are you going to picket his house with your neighbors, or ask for an autograph?”

My question wasn’t received well, as you might imagine, as my irreverent attempt at humor was a poke in the eye to this fellow’s quite serious, “He’s not like us and I don’t like him and don’t want him living down the street from my children” attitude. His ignorance led to fear, which led to hate. He was not alone in his behavior, nor has that ever been unusual.

Seema Jilani wrote a stunning and deeply disturbing piece for the Huffington Post about American racism today. Read this piece with the knowledge that your sense of right and wrong, fairness and even simple courtesy are at risk of feeling violated. And know that hers is similar to the day-to-day experience of millions of non-white or non-Protestant Americans. If you’re feeling really courageous, do a gut check on your own prejudices. Unless you’re somehow immune to the messages that bombard you daily to fear what is different from you, stoked continuously by political manipulators, you may find something there.

We humans do reasonably well with what is known to us and typically fear what is not known. It’s a survival instinct and it worked well when our ancestors were living in caves and every day brought existential threat.

Almost on our doorstep is something that is not known – what American life will be like when white Protestants are a diminishing minority, incrementally losing power and control. Just imagine all that racism reversed – shoe on the other foot, so to speak – and having to endure the slicing and bleeding of discrimination a hundred times a day just to function in every day life.

Did you say that you just want to be tolerated by those who are different from you? No, you did not say that. Nobody wants to be tolerated. Other than Dick Cheney, we all want acceptance. Toleration, by definition, suggests that others are willing to hold their noses in your presence, as though that is somehow better than beating you up.

So I’ll tell you what: I won’t tolerate you and you can stop trying to tolerate me. Let’s instead pull a Rodney King: “Can we all just get along?” King didn’t live long enough to see that happen. We haven’t yet either, but perhaps we can do something about it now.

It Ain’t Easy – And Their Mothers

May 11

Before you decide that those who see the immigration issue quite differently from the way you see it as having brains operating at sub-optimal levels, consider a few things.

First, let’s be clear that the issue is about non-citizens who are in America without the legal right to be here. Many of them are people who arrived with a valid visa and stayed beyond the expiration of their documentation. Some arrived without the legal right to do so. Likely, there are other descriptors for these folks, but all share an important characteristic: They broke the law.

It doesn’t matter if they did it with that intention before entering America or things changed once they were here and they did not want to or could not leave. All of those are simply stories of explanation and they do not change the fact that they broke the law.

There is a substantial imperative from our sense of right and wrong that wrongdoing deserves consequences. Our sense of right and wrong is offended when a wrongdoer gets away with it. Doubt that? Consider your feelings about the Goldman Sachs creeps who promoted worthless mortgage backed securities to their clients while at the same time dumping their own holdings of those securities. That’s called fraud, but not one of those guys has been prosecuted. One more time: How do you feel when wrongdoers get away with it?

Of course, our immigration issue isn’t that simple. If the estimates are correct we have somewhere in the vicinity of 12 million people here without permission. Catching, prosecuting and deporting that many people is simply not do-able – that’s a limit of logistics. Sure, we can make a show of it, but that would be substantively meaningless.

The 14^th Amendment to the Constitution says that people who are born in America are American citizens, regardless of the nationality of their parents. What will we do with the Made-In-America children of our non-citizens? We tried to take a step forward on that with The Dream Act, but the knuckle-draging, fanged droolers in Congress shot it down. Do we prosecute and deport the parents, leaving their minor children to be wards of the state? Do we deport the kids, too, even though they are American citizens?

The people who are here illegally are paying Social Security tax, Medicare fees, sales taxes, real estate taxes and they help to support our communities in many ways. They contribute to society as friends and neighbors and many of them do jobs that you won’t do, but which need to be done. That complicates things.

But what about the people who have been standing in line for a long time, following the rules to become naturalized Americans? How could it be fair to them to allow those who broke the law to have the same opportunity and to be in line with them? It seems that there are a lot of balls to juggle to arrive at a solution that is fair and reasonable to everyone.

And there is one more aspect to consider – it’s found in the mirror.

We have all been complicit in allowing people to be here illegally because we have liked and benefited from the low skill jobs that get done because there have been people here we could exploit. We haven’t prosecuted employers for knowingly employing those folks and paying them poorly. We’ve made stabs at requiring employers to verify the right to work of employee candidates but at the same time we have prevented employers from being able to access the information necessary to know whether they are complying with the law. We have consistently refused to dedicate the necessary resources to stop people from entering this country illegally. To put all the blame and consequences onto those here illegally is hypocrisy.

There is a good chance that Congress will either find a compromise that satisfies nobody and frustrates everybody or it will do its now-familiar polarization dance, with the knuckle-dragging, fanged droolers once again trying to sound like tough, patriotic Americans, but succeeding only in preventing us from solving our problem. Whatever we decide to do and whatever your point of view on this issue, just get that immigration is a lot like many other issues, in that it is more complex than we’d like it to be and a simple black-and-white analysis is willfully blind and of no value.

Okay, this is switching topics – slightly – but it may help to understand the black-and-white types in our midst.

That “no value” part of a simple black-and-white analysis is true, unless you’re up for re-election. Then doing whack-a-brain stupid stuff like casting a polarized vote that goes against the will of the American people may get you lots of special interest campaign cash. Think about that the next time some American flag pin wearing legislator googles their eyes and proudly froths out dingbat stuff. How proud their mothers must be.

Special Ice Cream Edition

May 10

Whatever your issue, budget, debt, global warming, immigration, guns, healthcare, civil rights or any other topic, the reason things aren’t getting better is because of something that controls your issue: Money. Big money. Big money that influences elections, politicians and distorts the will of the people into the will of the very few enormously wealthy people. For more on that, take a look at Larry Lessig’s TED talk.

Should you doubt that big money influence is preventing the will of the people (that’s you) from being done, just recall the recent vote on background checks prior to gun ownership. Have you ever seen an issue in the United States where 90% of the people were in agreement? That’s highly unusual and one would expect those who represent us to get the message and vote accordingly. Didn’t happen that way. Enough of our politicians flagrantly voted against our wishes because of big money influence and they caused the wrong result.

The Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream guys have something to say about that. You can read about it here on the CNN Opinion blog. They explain it better than I do.

Just because those gun money politicians defeated the sensible gun ownership background check that you wanted doesn’t mean that they can defeat everything that we want. We Americans are united in opposition to big money buying our elections and our country. So, get off your Barcalounger, get a stamp here and get the message out so that next year we will elect candidates who will begin to make things right.

Is this issue important to you? Comment below and then email this to 3 friends.

For Purist Lefties and Windshields

May 05

I’m surely talking to myself here, but this just might fit for others, too. JA

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The Radical Right provides enough material in a single sentence of extremism than can be corrected in a 750-word response. I’ve heard as many as three fictional facts in a single short sentence. Let them go on for two minutes and it’s such a dizzying array of fantasy that it’s impossible to know where to begin to correct the falsities. Those guys know how to spray incendiary, divisive and destructive language. They’re really good at demanding that everything be decided their way and insisting that that they never make mistakes.

For example, don’t you just hate it when the far righties tell us how safe George W. Bush kept us? Try telling that to the kids whose mother or father was crushed to death in the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings.

Those far righties want to end Medicare and Social Security and they have concocted fatuous, misleading names for the programs they designed to do just that. Then they have had the gall to tell us that they don’t want to end those programs.

When 20 little kids were gunned down in Newtown, CT the far righties made sure that we didn’t do anything to begin to limit access to the kinds of weapons that make it easy for violent people to do such things. They insist with self-righteous fervor that they have the one true interpretation of the Second Amendment and they ignore the demands of the rest of us, as they pursue campaign cash to support their careers.

So we call these people crazy. They are hateful and mean. They are dishonest in sixteen different ways. Our guts snarl and our spittle flies as we yell at our windshields.

To pull a Columbo, there’s just one more thing.

What is it that you were saying as President Obama worked toward compromise with congressional Republicans during all those iterations of budget and debt issues? What was it you were saying as he failed to press for universal health care? Now he’s offered chained CPI as a negotiating chip. I’ll bet you had serious juice about those issues and your words for him might have sounded a lot like your comments about crazy righties.

Obama let the Republicans kill his jobs bill, even as they were telling us it was all about jobs, jobs, jobs. You pilloried the Republicans, but did you also lambast Obama for his lack of leadership on the issue?

How many times did you wail that Obama gave up his negotiating leverage by caving in at the beginning of discussions with Republicans? It seems that President Obama just won’t be the absolutist leftie some want him to be. Maybe you’ve sprayed a coating on the inside of your windshield over that.

We can keep strolling down the path of all the ways Obama and the Democrats have failed – surely that has happened. Yet here’s the key point: governing is compromising and nobody gets all of what they want all of the time.

The Radical Righties have done a really good job of strong-arming America for over a decade. Their demand that everything be decided in the far righty way is incomprehensible to many; just get that a similar demand from the far left is just as incomprehensible.

For those who get off on anger, who feel powerful by living in their disparagement of anything and anyone who disagrees with them, I have a news flash: You are a lot like those whom you pillory.

Fight for what you believe in. Oppose what you disagree with. Just don’t be so certain that you have the one and only true vision of what is best, lest you become a yet another ideological roadblock and put the inside of still more windshields at risk.

An Island of Clarity

Mar 18

As a student of human behavior I have been trying to understand the craziness that is our social and political culture. So many blatantly false things have been said with great earnestness and an odd assumption of integrity. The absolutist behavior and mean spiritedness displayed for years has been confounding and dismaying. What’s going on?

I feel as though I am incrementally getting a handle on our collective dysfunction, yet I’ve wanted a social scientist, someone who actually studies such things and does experiments and collects statistics – you know, science stuff leading to actual facts – to help me with this.

Happily, my pal Brian Muldoon and I were exchanging some emails following one of my essays and he pointed me to a Bill Moyers interview of Jonathan Haidt. This is the guy I’ve been looking for. I mean, I’ve wondered how two people can look at the same thing and have such different interpretations and reactions to it. Turns out, they’re not looking at the same thing and Haidt explains that and lots of other things.

I invite you to watch the interview. HIs book was released this week and I’ve just started reading it. It’s a page turner for behavioral geeks like me. More about that another time.

Human Being 101 – No, Really

Feb 13

83% of Americans – including NRA members – want universal background checks before gun ownership changes. That means mandatory background checks before sales at retail stores, at gun shows, private sales and even when Grandpa tearfully hands his lovingly preserved hunting rifle to his grandchild. We want to ensure that the recipient of the firearm isn’t a homicidal maniac.

Over 65% of us believe that climate change is both real and that human beings are contributing to it in significant measure. Two out of three Americans believe we should be taking action to stem the tides that trash our coastal cities and the drought that is scorching our fields and limiting our agricultural yields.

99% of Americans believe public education is both right and necessary for the future welfare of our children and our nation. 67% believe we need to expand pre-school education because studies have shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that early childhood education leads to greater success in life. Not surprisingly, parents in America want that for their kids, regardless of their present economic situation.

Over four out of five Americans believe in a strong national defense, while at the same time they believe that we cannot and should not engage in continuous war. Over 90% of Americans believe that we spend far too much on military hammers, toilet seats, and unnecessary hardware and want to see a substantial reduction in those expenditures and a lot of common sense applied to the Pentagon’s activities.

Just short of 100% of Americans believe that we should stop granting tax exemptions to the world’s most profitable entities, like big oil, big finance and big anything with idyllic island locations to park their billions of dollars tax-free.

The frog boil of healthcare cost escalation that has run concurrently with a worsening of medical outcomes relative to the rest of western civilization has at last caught the attention of the majority of Americans. They want the system fixed, not more scary slogans. They want reasonably priced healthcare and world-class outcomes. They want an end to the one out of two personal bankruptcies that are caused by catastrophic medical bills. In short, they want what so many other western countries provide.

Q. What do all of these situations have in common?

A. Congress refuses to act in accordance with the will and desires of the majority of Americans.

Now, why is that? The people we send to Washington to represent us are privy to the same information as the rest of us. They certainly aren’t so bereft of intelligence that they don’t get it. So, what explains the refusal of congress to do our will?

Turns out that it’s all about Human Being 101 and its first imperative, preservation of self. To see how that works, you have to step through a logic tree. Here is how it works:

Politicians very often act like people, in that they focus on self-interest, which for them is to get elected and then stay in office.
A successful campaign requires lots of television and radio advertising, which is hideously expensive, so candidates must raise a lot of money.
It is very difficult to raise anywhere near enough money for a successful campaign through small, individual contributions, so candidates must solicit big contributions.
By far the biggest contributions come from corporations and big money individuals who can contribute unlimited “soft money” to SuperPAC’s, which will air lots of television advertising for its candidate.
The money from all of those people and corporations is necessary for the next election, too, so politicians, once elected, refrain from actions and votes that might be objectionable to the big bucks contributors.
Sometimes, that puts politicians at odds with the vast majority of Americans, as they vote in favor of the interests of people who are their big contributors, and against the will and interests of those who are not.

At root, if We The People want our will to be done, like the issues listed above, we have to remove the core driver of our political dysfunction. We cannot change human nature and politicians will continue to do what is in their self-interest. What we can do is to demand change to political fund raising, the engine of our national political dysfunction. Until we do that, we’re just swatting at symptoms.

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Editorial note: The statistics presented in this essay are approximate due to time limitations for sourcing. However, they are spot-on correct in their meaning. You can look it up. JA

I Hope The President Fails

Jan 20

That’s what he said in mid-November, 2008. A colleague was expressing his fondest hope for the newly elected president. What is most significant about this is that he didn’t say that he disliked the president’s policies or that he fervently wished that they would not become law. He did not hope for a resolute senate that would moderate President Obama’s initiatives. He stated clearly that he hoped that the president would fail.

I put my best effort into making sense of that, of seeing his comments in a constructive light. I imagined that this colleague was simply saying that he preferred a conservative world, so he didn’t want to see progressive/liberal ideas become successful. That thinking refused to last, though, as the full depth of this guy’s meaning sunk in. He really wanted a failed president and presidency.

His is the point at which present day conservatism departs from traditional conservatism, and from patriotism, as well as from any semblance of good sense. How could a true conservative want to see our institutions fail? How could a true patriot want his president to fail? And where in the world did good sense go in wishing for America to fail?

Weirdly, the Republicans hate President Obama more than they love America. They killed the jobs bill, they took the country over the fiscal cliff, they threatened national default, they dragged feet on providing disaster relief from Hurricane Sandy – the list goes on and on and all of the crazy stuff that was designed to make the president fail instead hurt the economy, veterans, job seekers, homeowners, workers, the elderly and even the world economy.

Don’t bother trying to find refuge in this “hoping that the president fails” business by seeing it as solely that of my former colleague or just within the R’s in congress or the far right talking heads. A recent poll showed that 40% of Republicans want the president to fail. Clearly, a lot of them don’t care who else gets hurt by their destructive attitude, as they pursue their agenda of hate.

The real problem is that they don’t just hate the president’s policies. In fact, the R’s themselves introduced and supported many of those same policies that would have helped Americans, right up to the moment when President Obama agreed with them. Then they beat a retreat and shifted into name-calling and derision. It wasn’t about policy at all: It was about hating and wanting to defeat President Obama. For the R’s, that overrode everything else.

Some say that’s race-based, and surely some of the obstruction answers that description. The R’s did the same kinds of things, though, to Bill Clinton. Remember that Speaker Newt Gingrich shut down the government while trying to neuter Clinton. They launched investigations into everything that happened during the Clinton Administration, effectively tying up much of the executive branch resources and the president’s attention.

That’s the single strategy in the Republican playbook: oppose anything a Democratic president supports, national consequences be damned. Our country is tied up in knots by people who don’t care how badly the rest of us suffer, by politicians and pundits who have lost their focus on a better America and instead are focused on destruction.

There was precious little many of us found to support during the eight years of the presidency of George W. Bush, but I never heard anyone hope for his failure. You might want to mention that the next time you hear someone voice a belief in the equivalency of the political parties in their craziness. That 40% of Republicans who want the president to fail are clear about what they hate. Try asking them what in America they love and support. See if they can get past their vitriol. I bet they can’t.

Fundamentalism

Dec 08

Staying informed requires that we do more than exchange views with the smart people – you know, the people who agree with you. Indeed, much more important is that we listen to the people who do not agree with us and hear what they have to say – actually seek to understand. Often that is less comfortable than being validated by those aforementioned smart people who agree with us, but we have to listen to all views if we are to learn anything.

And so it was with great pain that I watched a piece on Fox News with Suzanne Venker telling me that boys and girls are different and that women are either less than men or should act that way, so, honey, get back in the kitchen. Okay, she didn’t say the kitchen part. She does, however, seem to subscribe to the same attitude modeled by Gov. Huckabee (included in her interview video) of women as “other” creatures and needing the protection of men. It’s a “ women as less-than,” paternalistic worldview.

This seems to be yet another piece of retro thinking, the kind of simplistic, anachronistic attitude that has brought us self-justified science deniers, religious extremists, fiscal rejectionists and white supremacists. Come to think of it, that kind of fundamentalist polarization is reminiscent of Islamic fundamentalists. You know, the guys who strap bombs to their kids and send them into restaurants to blow themselves up, all in the comfort of religious justification; the people who learn to fly an airplane but not to land it, so they can suicidally/homicidally fly it into a tall office building and kill lots of people to promote their notion of justice; the butchers who mutilate and kill their own people in the name of Allah.

Wait – Americans are like Muslim fundamentalists? Well, how would you characterize us when President Obama receives over 30 death threats per day – from Americans?

The head scratcher for me is not that we Americans are impassioned or that we disagree with one another. From the time of the Articles of Confederation we’ve always had disagreements and will continue to do so. A case can be made that we are better for our disagreeing. What is curious is how we came to the point where we just shout at one another and don’t listen at all. We have made this a country of self-righteous, “my way or the highway” attitudes.

Us-Them is now the flesh searing brand on the American brain. If that is to change for the better, we have to figure out how we became this dysfunctional. Exactly when did fear and hate take over as the official attitude of American culture?

Recently, I attended a talk by Jim Kenney, co-founder of Common Ground, and I asked him what he thought was behind our fundamentalist, absolutist fervor. He’s a well-educated, well-informed guy and he answered without hesitation that the primary cause is The Big Lie.

That’s “Big Lie” as in Josef Goebbels-type propaganda. It’s about a program of disinformation, telling the lie over and over until people believe what you want them to believe, like calling our president a Muslim or a Kenyan, like dividing Americans into creators and takers, like saying that people of color are not like “us” and, the ultimate, that those who don’t believe in God exactly as you do are doomed: there is neither god nor heaven for them. There are millions of people persuaded by such messages and they eventually carry them and justify their resulting hatred with their fundamentalist fervor. They think they are bedrock right.

Presidents Nixon and Bush II both promoted an us-them attitude by overtly saying that you’re either with us (meaning their administrations) or you’re against us. Bush told us that you either supported the Patriot Act as originally written, including the illegal wiretapping, illegal search and seizure, perpetual detention without charges or trial (the end of habeas corpus) and illegal CIA investigations of Americans in America, or you were unpatriotic.

You can hear Big Lies any time, as they are pounded through the airwaves and online in a nonstop parade of vilification, fear and hatred. The repetition somehow creates an altered perceived reality for many and the divisiveness is expanded. Daniel Gardner’s book The Science of Fear will help you to understand just how easy it is to manipulate people.

Those manipulated by The Big Lie think they are adhering to fundamental truth, but maybe they’re just terrorists, like the thirty nut jobs who threaten the life of our president every day. We can’t let them win, because if they do, America loses.

The way out of this national polarization is not through hitting back with frenzied counter-hatred. It is through seeing those with whom we disagree as opponents, not as enemies and it surely doesn’t mean seeing them as less than.

So, the next time you hear someone saying things you passionately disagree with, observe where you go with your reaction. Are you having an amygdala moment of fear response? Do you instantly judge and dismiss the other person in some way, labeling them with disparaging adjectives and nouns?

Not much will get a lot better until we stop vilifying one another and start listening to someone other than the Big Liars.

It Isn’t About The Message

Nov 13

Here are some comments made by political pundits following the election.

“The Republicans will have to change their messaging if they are going to appeal to Latinos.”

“Mitt Romney had to pivot to the center in order to attract independents.”

“Republican candidates have to stop saying things like, ’A woman’s body has a way of shutting that down [in cases of rape],’ and ‘[Pregnancy from rape] is God’s plan.’”

All that “how to win elections” talk is completely misguided, wrong-headed and even dishonest. It seems to say that all that matters is winning an election and, therefore, that manipulation of the message and of voters is what is important.

To which I say, “Nuh-uh.” What is important is not the verbal pivot to the center, the crafted messaging and avoiding making stupid, physiologically erroneous statements. All that pivoting and messaging is about attempting to fool people. It is the beliefs and the values of the candidates as indicators of what they would do that is important and however you dress up those rape related statements, it’s clear what these goofballs would do. Fixing their words to be more palatable would leave them just as radical.

Mitt Romney has shown his true value to America, that of being a finely honed example of dis-ingenuousness. John Huntsman called him, “a perfectly lubricated weather vane,” and that makes him useful and instructive about this messaging business.

Romney was “severely conservative” during the primaries, telling far righties what they wanted to hear. If the principles he espoused at that time are his core principles, then what are we to make of the opposite views he declared during the general election campaign? He pointed his messaging weather vane in whatever direction he figured might be to the liking of his then-current audience, even lying about his previous statements, leaving us to wonder what his actual principles (other than getting elected) might be on issues like abortion, healthcare, the auto industry bailout, Libya, a date certain for our troops to leave Afghanistan and so many others. That left us clueless about what he might do if elected.

The abandoning of his prior, polarized positions and then claiming a moderate middle left President Obama apparently perplexed and nearly speechless during the first debate. If you weren’t perplexed by Romney’s pivots to moderate positions, perhaps instead you felt insulted by his apparent lack of respect for your intelligence, as though he assumed you lacked memory function.

Now that the Republicans have lost big, the hand-wringing over Latino voters has begun in earnest and the talk is all about the messaging that will be needed to attract them for the next election. All of that misses the point. What is important isn’t the messaging; it’s the meaning.

MESSAGE TO FUTURE POLITICAL CANDIDATES: You need to understand that Latinos don’t care much about what you say about immigration reform; they care about what you would do about immigration reform. They don’t care any more than any other Americans how you flap your lips about Medicare and Social Security; they care about what you would do about those programs. What can they count on from you? If you’re all about the hot air of your messaging, then all you are is a manipulator and Latinos are as good as any of us in sniffing you out.

This election was about many things, including voter disenfranchisement backlash, big money influence and the price to be paid for lying to Americans. All that pivoting and crafted messaging and biological stupid stuff gets seen for what it is, sooner or later.

So, it turns out that Lincoln was right: You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Eventually, they will figure out who and what you are. You may have had your way with them for a while, but if you have been dishonest with the American people they will swat you like they would an annoying housefly and flick you away.

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JaxPolitix

Disambiguation from the political and social musings of Jack Altschuler