"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
-- Sinclair Lewis
Saturday, October 03, 2015
Weekend meditation: In human interactions, there are forces more powerful even than yoga, feng shui, and Irish dancing
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Can there really be a force more powerful than Irish dancing?
by Ken
The pen is mightier than the sword, we've been told, and it's a theory, at least. No doubt there have been time when it has been true. There are fewer claims, you'll note, for the superior might of the sword of such weapons as handguns, automatic rifles, conventional bombs, and thermonuclear devices.
You'd think more attention would have been paid to what we might call the Hierarchy of Forces. So as a weekend thought provocation, I thought I would throw out a couple of choice contributions to the literature I've stumbled across.
First there was yesterday's Dilbert. I think we've all noticed Dilbert's Pointy-Headed Boss growing steadily -- um, what's the clinical term? -- nutsier lately. And encountering, at least in his familiar corporate world, depressingly little pushback. And then came this demonstration of force:
[Click to enlarge.]
BUT A FIST, LIKE ANY OTHER WEAPON, HAS TO BE ACTIVATED
And tonight I happened to be watching a rebroadcast on one of my local public TV stations of a 2004 Midsomer Murders called "The Straw Woman," in which DCI Barnaby is enmeshed in a string of murders in the village of Midsomer Parva involving witchcraft, or so the gullible villagers are being led to believe. Naturally this isn't helpful to the inspector in cracking the case, and we find him venting his frustration at one of those famous Barnaby family dinners. His daughter Cully offers this interesting perspective on the subject of witches:
"Everyone needs to have something they can feel good about hating."
And, we might add, something they can feel good about fearing.
SPEAKING OF YOUR FIST --
A fist thing
I found this photo of a fist accompanying a 2012 ZME Science post titled "Punching may have shaped evolution of human hand." The post describes research reported by University of Utah researchers. After discussing the adaptability of the human fist to punching, the report note points out:
Researchers note that the human hand is also shaped for an increased dexterity in handling a number of objects and tasks, so they presume that the hand evolved both for dexterity and punching force – two things which don’t exactly go hand in hand.
There may, however, be only one set of skeletal proportions that allows the hand to function both as a mechanism for precise manipulation and as a club for striking,” the researchers write. “Ultimately, the evolutionary significance of the human hand may lie in its remarkable ability to serve two seemingly incompatible, but intrinsically human, functions.
As you know, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote an op-ed recently in which he discussed Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Here's part of what he said (my occasional emphasis):
Ernest Hemingway once said that courage was “grace under pressure.” Two presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, have recently tested this proposition. And how each man responded revealed the type of person he is and the type of president he would make: Trump authored his own doom, and Sanders opened immense new possibilities as a compassionate person and serious candidate for president.
Here’s where it went fatally wrong for Trump. During the GOP debate on Fox, when Megyn Kelly famously queried him about his attitude toward women (whom he has called “fat pigs,” “dogs,” “slobs” and “animals”) he hit back by threatening the questioner: “I’ve been very nice to you, although I could probably maybe not be, based on the way you have treated me. But I wouldn’t do that.”
Bad enough to alienate women in this way, but there’s even more insidious political crime here: attacking the First Amendment’s protection of a free press by menacing journalists. “I wouldn’t do that,” he said coyly. If you wouldn’t do it, why bring up that you could? For no other reason than to stifle other journalists who might want to ask tough but reasonable questions. If Americans learned that a leader in another country was threatening reporters, we would be outraged. Yet here it is. Right here. Right now.
Later, after Trump had blamed her attitude on her menstrual cycle, Kelly went on what Fox says was a planned vacation. Nevertheless, Trump suggested he may have been the cause. What kind of candidate takes credit for bullying the media? And last week, Trump allowed Univision reporter Jorge Ramos to be ejected from a press conference for asking questions about immigration without being called upon. Ramos was later readmitted and permitted to ask about immigration, during which he said Trump could still deport immigrants compassionately. “I have a bigger heart than you do,” Trump replied. Trump’s non-specific answer to the question ended with a personal insult directed at the reporter.
And:
Trump’s vendetta against the press extended to the Des Moines Register. When the paper issued an editorial calling for Trump to withdraw from the campaign, he refused to give the paper’s reporters credentials to attend his campaign event in Iowa in July. He also called the paper “failing” and “very dishonest.” Other journalists he thinks have treated him harshly he refers to as “losers” or unintelligent, as if the definition of lack of intelligence is to not agree with him.
Attempting to bully the press to silence criticism of him is anti-American.
Unlike Howie, who discussed this op-ed earlier, the part I want to focus on isn't the First Amendment, nor the press, nor Bernie Sanders, nor even Donald Trump as a person. It's the bullying.
Bullying in the World of the Wealthy
Play the clip at the top again (it's just over 40 seconds), and notice the sneering, the arrogance, the presumption of power. Notice also, at the 0:17 mark, how he uses just his lips to signal his — what, bodyguard? — to act like a goon squad and physically force Ramos out of the room. Trump sneers, smacks his lips to summon the goon, and the goon lays hands on the reporter.
This is exercise of power, presumption of power, and comfort with the presumption of power — all three — on Trump's part. It's a way of saying and showing, "I'm at the top, I deserve to be at the top, and I'm going to use all of the power that being at the top provides me."
At the tip of the pyramid, the very top of the U.S. (and international) food chain, this kind of sneering, bullying, and presumption of the right to bully, is almost the norm. This is really the way a surprising number of people in that position regularly act. The fact that we rarely see it, and therefore rarely associate them with this extreme arrogance, isn't a function of their not doing it. It's a function of their invisibility. Until Donald Trump.
That's obviously true, once you think about it. You can't vote for David Koch, just Scott Walker. You can't vote for Sheldon Adelson, just Marco Rubio. And so on.
It's also true that we almost never see the puppeteers, or their world. We don't see their homes (their gold, crystal and mahogany palaces really), their jets, their yachts, their servants, their private schools, their privileges. We imagine that they have estates. We don't imagine that they have dozens of them, each.
For example, Jeff Greene is a New York billionaire — literally billionaire — who made his money in real estate. This is how he lives, via New York magazine:
It’s incredible, right?” shouts Jeff Greene over the roar of the two-seater dune buggy’s motor. “It’s 55 acres!” Still in his whites from this morning’s tennis match, he’s giving a personal tour of his Sag Harbor estate, barreling at 30 miles per hour through the vast forest of scrubby pines and soft moss of its gated grounds. “Beautiful nature here!” A blur of deer goes by, and the trees break to reveal the summer sun glinting off a grassy lagoon. Greene slows by its shore. “This is our swan pond, and this is our private beach,” he says, gesturing toward a slip of white sand encircling the edge of the North Haven Peninsula. “It goes all the way to the ferry. Three thousand feet of beach,” he adds, a smile spreading across his tanned face.
The punch line?
[2009 is] when he picked up this property for around $40 million (half the 2007 listing price), which he and his wife have christened “Greene Haven.” “I wish we could spend more time here,” he says. “Honestly, we have so many great homes.”
When you imagine great wealth, do you imagine it on that scale? Likely not, because that world is invisible. Until Donald Trump.
... Is Being Revealed by Donald Trump
What's different about Donald Trump? He's not just the puppet, meaning the candidate — he's his own puppeteer. This means that for the second time in modern electoral history, a puppeteer has put himself on center stage. The first was Mitt Romney, he of the "47%" speech. Before him we've had just puppets, financed solely by others.
If it's true that you can't vote for Sheldon Adelson, say, only his puppet Mario Rubio, it's even more true that you can't even see Sheldon Adelson most of the time, or David Koch, or Jamie Dimon. (Do you know what any of their voices sound like, for example? Do you know if Jamie Dimon is tall or short?)
But occasionally one of them makes an unwanted public appearance, and then we see who they are. This is Sheldon Adelson, courtesy of a must-read 2012 piece by Rick Perlstein in Rolling Stone:
Why GOP Mega-Donor Sheldon Adelson Is Mad, Bad and a Danger to the Republic
... Adelson's company Las Vegas Sands (LVS) spends more on security for him and his family than any other publicly held corporation, $2.5 million – two and a half times more than Dell, Oracle, and Amazon spend on their CEOs. He usually ambles around with an armed former agent of the Mossad, Israel's spy agency – for instance, into a deposition for a lawsuit filed by employees (including security guards!) claiming they hadn't been paid overtime. It was quite a scene – and one that you can see for yourself, because once Adelson tried to have the plaintiffs' lawyers cited for contempt after a TV station received and aired a videotape of the deposition, the publication Vegas Inc. ran the video as part of their coverage of this latest Adelson legal action. It reveals a creepy sourpuss who is a blatant liar: Adelson said he brought in the muscle because he felt threatened when the plaintiff lawyer "attempted to throw books at" him. See for yourself (at 2:40) if such a thing ever happened, then his astonishing petulance when a lawyer objects to continuing a legal proceeding with an armed janissary staring him down.
And here's that video. Feel free to focus on the fact that Adelson brought "muscle," armed muscle, into a deposition. But also focus just on his manner. How like Donald Trump is Sheldon Adelson?
If the above video does not appear or play in your browser, go here, or play this link in a media player. But please do watch; it's a doozy. It's also the second video in this three-video piece.
My point? Donald Trump is peeling the mask off the world of the mega-rich, the very very rich. And far too many of them are like what you see here. Bullies and proud of it.
Conan the Politician
It's almost like they've taken lessons from this man, isn't it?
And that's your third video. If you want the single reason your descendants may be hunter-gatherers, to take one consequence, you're looking at it.
Three views of success -- from Dilbert's Wally, Tyrell Wellick (of "Mr. Robot"), and the great Robert Benchley
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DILBERT by Scott Adams July 9: "Hard Work Is Necessary For Success"
[Click to enlarge.]
"I take Life as it comes, and although I grouse a great deal and sometimes lie on the floor and kick and scream and refuse to eat my supper, I find that taking Life as it comes is the only way to meet it. It isn't a very satisfactory way, but it is the only way. (I should be very glad to try any other way that anyone can suggest. I certainly am sick of this one.)"
As suggested, it didn't come quite out of nowhere. Thursday's strip came out of Wednesday's, with poor clueless Asok demonstrating his cluelessness by listening to Wally on . . . well, on pretty much anything.
If there's any consolation, it's that poor Asok would be paralyzingly unlikely to be able to take any real advantage of advice way better than this.
(2) TYRELL WELLICK FROM MR. ROBOT
Our second authority on success is Tyrell Wellick (Swedish actor Martin Wallström) from USA Network's Mr. Robot, who as suspected (see my Tuesday "TV Watch" post, "Mr. Robot brings us yet another of those fiendishly world-conquering villains from Scandinavia") came into his own in Wednesday's Episode 3. Tyrell himself describes the mot I've quoted at the top of this post as "a bit of a sillly expression," a bit "reductive." Even so, he likes it.
To me it means that power belongs to the people that take it. Nothing to do with their hard work, strong ambitions, or rightful qualifications, no. The actual will to take is often the only thing that's necessary.
Noted, Tyrell, noted.
AND FINALLY: (3) THE GREAT ROBERT BENCHLEY
Some time ago I did a fairly long-running nightly series devoted to great American comic writing, which grew out of an extensive "Thurber Tonight" project. The "Thurber (et al.) Tonight" series eventually came to include Woody Allen, Robert Benchley, Bob and Ray, Will Cuppy, Wolcott Gibbs, Ring Lardner, S. J. Perelman, Jean Shepherd, and E. B. White, and I wish I had figured some way of enabling it to live, because a serious chunk of my soul went into those pieces (the index is here) -- and nothing in the series more than the pieces by the great Robert Benchley.
Following our initial foray last night into the, shall we say, singularly dimensioned world of Robert Benchley, "The Five (or Maybe Six) Year Plan," we have now his -- and perhaps, I think, anyone's -- definitive statement on the subject of success, or rather Success, and even disposing (as you can see in the bit I've extracted above) of Life. This is another of those pieces I've spent ages trying to cherry-pick or synopsize or paraphrase. It just doesn't work, though. The piece really needs to be, as it were, swallowed whole.
Again, you can read the whole piece here. For our purposes, though, I can say that eventually our Bob spins one of literature's most peculiar fables, concerning "a very, very brave Knight who had a very, very definite yen for a beautiful Princess who lived in a far-away castle (very, very far away, i mean" and "a Magician who could do wonders with a rabbit" -- and also, eventually, the Princess's not-previously-mentioned husband ("who, it must be admitted, was a little disappointed at the way things had turned out").
Beyond that, you'll have to read the thing for yourself, and I can't encourage you heartily enoough to do so. The point is . . . well, let's let Master Robert explain it:
Now, this little fable shows us that Success may be one of two things: first, getting what we want; and, second, not getting what we want. [Emphasis added. -- Ed.]
It was Voltaire who is reported to have said: "Plus ça change -- plus ça reste," meaning, "There isn't much sense in doing anything these days." Perhaps it wasn't Voltaire, and perhaps that isn't what the French means; but the angle is right.
Can you say the same of yourself?
I don't know about you folks, but I sure can't, Bob (if I may).
The former labor secretary begins with three cases he diagnoses as examples of people feeling powerless:
A security guard recently told me he didn’t know how much he’d be earning from week to week because his firm kept changing his schedule and his pay. “They just don’t care,” he said.
A traveler I met in the Dallas Fort-Worth Airport last week said she’d been there eight hours but the airline responsible for her trip wouldn’t help her find another flight leaving that evening. “They don’t give a hoot,” she said.
Someone I met in North Carolina a few weeks ago told me he had stopped voting because elected officials don’t respond to what average people like him think or want. “They don’t listen,” he said.
Why does this make people feel powerless? Because we are.
The companies we work for, the businesses we buy from, and the political system we participate in all seem to have grown less accountable. I hear it over and over: They don’t care; our voices don’t count.
In good part, he says, because "we have fewer choices than we used to have. In almost every area of our lives, it's now take it or leave it."
In the workplace, where once upon a time "a third of private-sector workers belonged to labor unions," which gave them bargaining power that in fact extended to many non-union workers:
Companies are treating workers as disposable cogs because most working people have no choice. They need work and must take what they can get.
Although jobs are coming back from the depths of the Great Recession, the portion of the labor force actually working remains lower than it’s been in over thirty years – before vast numbers of middle-class wives and mothers entered paid work.
Which is why corporations can get away with firing workers without warning, replacing full-time jobs with part-time and contract work, and cutting wages. Most working people have no alternative.
As consumers too we're mostly helpless, with the "muting" of the consumer movement that arose in the '60s "demand[ing] safe products, low prices, and antitrust actions against monopolies and business collusion." He cites the consolidation of the airline industry into just a handful of major carriers, little competition among Internet providers and digital platforms, giant health insurers and hospital chains.
All this means less consumer choice, which translates into less power. Our complaints go nowhere. Often we can’t even find a real person to complain to. Automated telephone menus go on interminably.
And finally, he says, "as voters we feel no one is listening because politicians, too, face less and less competition." In federal, state, and local elections there are fewer competitive "battlegrounds," and in those battlegrounds "so much big money is flowing in that average voters feel disenfranchised." Gone are the days, he says, when "political parties had strong local and state roots that gave politically-active citizens a voice in party platforms and nominees." Our two big parties "have morphed into giant national fund-raising machines."
No, he doesn't pull a rabbit out of a hat at the end. No convenient solution. I sure don't have one. But as always, to have any shot at finding solutions, you have to figure out what the problem is.
Our economy and society depend on most people feeling the system is working for them. But a growing sense of powerlessness in all aspects of our lives – as workers, consumers, and voters – is convincing most people the system is working only for those at the top.
From the "Is There Life After ----?" File: Former NY City Council Speaker Christine Quinn
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Former Speaker Christine Quinn back on the steps of City Hall on Tuesday, looking relaxed and apparently sounding so too. "Life is good," she said.
"The former City Council speaker and failed Democratic mayoral candidate said she has passed the last several months enjoying time with her wife, Kim Catullo, and resting at the New Jersey shore."
Probably there was a day when, pretty much en masse, her phone number was lost by erstwhile gladhanders throughout the five boroughs of NYC. And when she makes calls now to anyone but friends and relatives, she's probably not shocked when they aren't returned lickety-split. Nevertheless, all in all, there may be compensations to suddenly stepping -- or being pushed --- out of the limelight.
Since the City Council speakership is a relatively recent position, there isn't much in the way of history or precedents for its exes. And now with the advent of term limits, the process has been almost comically speeded up, so that the fall from power may not be that much more precipitous that the rise to it.
Not that the job carries immense power. Mostly it's exercising the option to make the mayor's life either easier or harder. But there's enough power -- what with stuff like heavy influence over committee assignments and chairmanships (which inevitably includes influence over the flow of money) as well as the legislative agenda that: (a) people covet the job, even knowing it can't be a long-term deal, and (b) other people covet access to the holder of the job.
Plus, at least in theory, there's the city-wide visibility to thrust the speaker into the thick of contention for higher office, meaning of course the mayoralty. Again, there isn't much precedent to fall back on, but there aren't a lot of other jobs toward which the Council speakership seems a likely stepping stone. And indeed, for a good part of the administration of "Mayor Mike" Bloomberg, Speaker Quinn's name topped most lists of possible successors in the event that Mayor Mike was ever pried out of City Hall. For the mayor that meant an impossibly difficult balancing act between remaining safely within the orbit of the mayor's benevolence and yet establishing herself as Not Mayor Mike.
In the end, as we know, that all didn't work out so well. And while this may just be me, I'm imagining that after the frenzy of those last few years, it must have come as more a relief than anything to escape back to the real world. I don't recall even heareing her name mentioned before yesterday, and for her, dramatic as the fall from the heights may have been, this may not be such a bad thing.
Where has Quinn been? According to AM New York's Emily Ngo, she said "she has passed the last several months enjoying time with her wife, Kim Catullo, and resting at the New Jersey shore." Mind you, I didn't see her brief public appearance yesterday, and I'm probably reading a certain amount into what I read about it, but it struck me that Quinn seemed, well, relaxed, which certainly wouldn't describe most of her time as speaker, in particular the last couple of years.
Christine Quinn returned to the political spotlight Tuesday for the first time since her last City Council meeting in December, saying, "Life is good."
She led a news conference on the steps of City Hall about the newly formed Women's Equality Party and later said she was doing so at Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's request.
The former City Council speaker and failed Democratic mayoral candidate said she has passed the last several months enjoying time with her wife, Kim Catullo, and resting at the New Jersey shore.
"It feels great to be back. I got to see a bunch of friends I haven't seen in a while," Quinn said. "It's great to be here with such an important issue and to support such great candidates."
City Councilman Mark Weprin (D-Hollis Hills) greeted her mid-news conference with a "Welcome home!"
Quinn said she has stayed busy serving some nonprofit organizations boards, joking that she loves "torturing those poor executive directors. I think they all regret having ever asked me to be on the board. ... Life is good."
Prompted by reporters, she weighed in on recent local political news. She called successor, City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, "brave" for going public with her HPV concerns and added that Mark-Viverito is compelling more women to get screened.
Quinn said she reimbursed taxpayers for political and personal use of her city-issued car and driver when she was in office. She would not say whether she believes Mayor Bill de Blasio should do so. De Blasio has faced criticism for sticking the city with his subway and out-of-town travel bills when he travels for business or with an NYPD-mandated escort.
Zimbabwe opposition leader seeks refuge in the Dutch embassy as President Mugabe makes good on his promise, "Only God will remove me!"
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“Only God, who appointed me, will remove me, not the M.D.C., not the British. Only God will remove me!”
--Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe [right], in Buluwayo Friday
Latest word is that Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who yesterday withdrew from the presidential runoff election scheduled for Friday because of the murderous violence directed against opposition supporters, has sought refuge in the Dutch embassy in Harare, while police raided his party's headquarters.
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The lust for power is one of many things about human nature that I don't understand but surely acknowledge. It's different from plain old greed, which is to say wanting lots and lots of stuff, stuff that other people don't have. There's nothing mysterious about that. And while power can be useful in the exercise of greed, this compulsion to have control over other people is still something else.
It's something I'm always aware of when I look at the seeming unfixability of the U.S. political system. Power doesn't have that effect on absolutely everyone, but it's pretty remarkable what it does to an awful lot of people, including many people you don't expect it from. The fact is, you never know about someone until he/she has faced the temptation.
There may be a worse example of what power can do to a person than Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, but it doesn't leap to mind. Back in 1980, who thought of Mugabe as anything but a liberator? (If we were to go back in time we might well find people who saw something else in him, but it certainly wasn't evident then.) Yet as Mugabe, now 84, has clung ferociously to power over the last decade or two, presiding over the destruction of the country he played such a large role in creating, it's hard to think of any word for what he has become but "monster." Zimbabwe, so rich in resources and once boasting one of Africa's most functional infrastructures, is an economic ruin, and yet to retain his hold on power, Mugabe has shown all too clearly that there is no limit to the violence and terror he is prepared to unleash on his tortured countrymen.
Of course Mugabe already lost his latest bid for reelection. Is there anyone who doubts that his bitter enemy, Movement for Democratic Change leader Tsvangirai, won a clear majority of the vote in the March 29 election? The government machinery couldn't overturn the election result, but it could and did maneuver the numbers down to a mere 48-to-43-percent lead, thus requiring a runoff. Then the government unleashed an onslaught of violence that first led Tsvangirai to absent himself to South Africa and finally yesterday forced him to withdraw from the runoff.
About the only hope at this point is postponing the election, in the hope that . . . well, something can be done. The NYT reports that Marwick Khumalo, who is leading a team observing the election on behalf of the Pan-African Parliament, said yesterday: “How can you have an election where people are killed and hacked to death as the sun goes down? How can you have an election where the leader of one party is not even allowed to conduct rallies?”
Mugabe's standing among fellow African leaders has diminished considerably, but it remains to be seen whether his neighbors are prepared to do anything about the war he is waging on his own people.
