No no

For some reason the concept of taboo has been on my mind and I aim to use this opportunity to get to the bottom of it.  I want to spell it tabu for some reason, probably because it's shorter and more exciting.  As it turns out it's more linguistically correct.  The origin of the word is Oceanic -- tapu in Tongan and Maori, tabu in Fijian, kapu in Hawaiian  (verboten in German, trayf in Yiddish, haram in Arabic, right out in Monty Python).  The word and its spelling were brought to the West by James Cook who described it as he observed it being practiced among the Tongans he visited on his South Pacific voyages in 1777 (quoted from the Wikipedia article on the topic):

Not one of them would sit down, or eat a bit of any thing.... On expressing my surprise at this, they were all taboo, as they said; which word has a very comprehensive meaning; but, in general, signifies that a thing is forbidden.

Ever since Cook we like to think of taboos as being something other and primitive, but taboos abound and indeed proliferate in the West.  Many taboos exist around dietary practices-- abstaining from pork in some traditions, from beef in others, from human flesh almost universally.  From anything animal in many personal taboo systems.  Freud famously identified incest and patricide as behavioral taboos that he supposed were observed everywhere and that formed the basis of society.  He was wrong about this too, but in any case, if there is a universal behavioral practice that forms the basis of civilization it may be the mere establishment of taboos. 

There are historic, anthropological or sociobiological explanations for some taboos.  The taboo against incest is in force, probably naturally, to reduce the proliferation within a population of sometimes lethal recessive traits that are more likely to be passed on in pairings of closely related mates.  Some dietary prohibitions may have been introduced to stop the spread of food borne diseases and encoded into a culture's laws far beyond the time of the threat that inspired them.  Taboos always exist in opposition to choice.  We don't proscribe the impossible, we only prohibit behavior that humans are capable of choosing to engage in.

Most taboos still in force are cultural at the root.  Those that are not proscribed by religion or encoded in law are transmitted by social signals-- modeled in schools, decried by moralizing editorials and PSAs, omitted via censorship,  discouraged by the human resource departments of prospective employers.  We must not kneel for the National Anthem.  We must not be silent about our gratitude for the service of our military personnel or question their cause or recognize the vanity of their deaths in action and of their killings.   We must not wear beige at debates and our sleeves must not be unrolled when we shake hands with the voters.  We must not demur to assert that we are capitalists.

Some taboos seem natural, right and proper, for instance the one that says you can't just come up as close as you like behind someone you don't know, smell her hair and kiss her on the back of her head.  We can't have this.

Other taboos seem rather arbitrary and imposed, often in a presumptuous way.  There is a new taboo especially among younger people against using a third person pronoun not of the choosing of the person referred to.  I don't know how I feel about this one-- it is challenging to understand a justification for a person prescribing how others should refer to them when they are not around-- but given the historic reasoning behind it, I do not want to be the one to violate it, let alone to forbid it from being implemented.

Our president breaks taboos all the time.  He cusses like a fucking sailor in front of crowds.  Not merely shedding but shredding the dignity of the office he calls out his predecessor by name and taunts opponents with belittling nicknames.  He breaks treaties to suit his own poor taste and judgment.  He blurts out state secrets to visiting dignitaries. He has only nice things to say about his autocratic dictator boyfriends and his Nazi fanboys.  There is speculation in some circles that he may not willingly leave office when his time is up.  He is such a cyclone of faux pas that there is no starting point for anyone who would hope to put a lid on it.  The root of his revolution in presidential decorum is ultimately shallow as a dish. There's nothing of substance at the core of it; he's just an empty-headed, poorly raised, selfish boor who doesn't know any better.  You can only watch in fascinated horror, and yet, if you're honest with yourself, you have to admit it's not all bad to have your reflex to recoil-- white gloved hand daintily covering your gasp-- occasionally smashed about the respect due his office.

Without a doubt, some taboos are meant to be broken.  It used to be taboo in the South (too recently for comfort) to drink water from the same fountain-- or to pass it in the same toilet-- as someone from another race.  To question the authority and wisdom of this interdiction was taboo.  It could not be questioned because there was no wisdom at the center of it.  This is the peril of such taboos: their power is only enhanced by the willful ignorance they encourage you to have about them.

The taboos that really gall me are the products of think tanks and marketing departments, such as the one that recently distracted us from the message that Ilhan Omar intended to convey in her tweets about the influence of money in politics.  The story became (conveniently for the targets of her criticism) about her breaking of the taboo.  This was not merely an excess of sanctity on the part of her critics; the intentionally missed point in the context of a violation of a sacred put her life in danger.  Aversion to taboos can be exploited for mischief.  In Afghanistan as recently as 2015, a mullah who was scolded by a woman for selling amulets on the grounds of the mosque falsely accused the woman of destroying a Quran, which inspired the crowd in the mosque in which the incident took place to drag her out of the mosque, stone and beat her to death, run her over with a car, burn her body and throw it into the Kabul River on the spot.  Our president who fanned the flames of outrage over Rep. Omar's audacity is well aware that his most impressionable supporters are no less human than those Afghanis.

Bernie Sanders was recently at the center of another breach of a sacred. During a CNN town hall, Sanders was asked by a Harvard centrist provocateur and future 1%-er whether felons should be allowed to vote while still doing their time.  In spite of the question being posed in Boston and framed with the hypothetical of the Boston Marathon bomber as the potential voter, Sanders forcefully replied yes and elaborated several reasons for his answer (paraphrased below):

• Convicts can already vote while serving their time in Maine and Vermont (and have always had this right).
• Convicts are already being punished (and not always justly) by serving time-- disenfranchisement does not enhance the justice.
• If you believe that voting is everyone's right in a democracy then no one (not even terrible people) should be denied the right.
• Stripping anyone of the right is a slippery slope.  (Experience in the other 48 states bears this out.)

At the suggestion from the CNN anchor that he'd handed his opponents a sound bite, Sanders merely shrugged knowingly. The difference between Sanders' iconoclasm and Trump's is that there is reason and principle behind Sanders', and furthermore, the impulse is to empower not himself,  but -- in spite of the risk of some political harm to himself-- those disempowered by the taboo.

Sanders' increasingly undeniable popularity can be attributed in some degree to his success at purposeful taboo smashing.  For years the conventional wisdom has been that in spite of the prosperity, security, equality and progress that could be attributed to the socialist policies that defeated the Great Depression and Hitler, that embarked on Civil Rights and landed us on the moon by the end of the 1960's, socialism is forbidden.  Our way of life is owed to our capitalist system of economics!  There is nothing that the Invisible Hand of the free market cannot accomplish!  The entrepreneurial class must be kept free to do what they do now and always so that the rest of us can benefit eventually perhaps!  It took a democratic socialist to point out that it is true, our sick way of life can indeed be blamed entirely on capitalism, that capitalism's cyclic epic failures of itself and of us are a feature not a bug, and the cure therefore is not just more capitalism.  After 40 years at least of the imposition of a state religion fetishizing the market, we have been conditioned to start back from heretic challenges to it.  The leader of the opposition party to Trump recently said in an interview about Democrats that "by and large, whatever orientation they came to Congress with, they know that we have to hold the center. That we have to go down the mainstream."  This is not opposition.  This is orthodoxy, the manifestation of Stockholm Syndrome that comes with being held hostage to corporate donors. As Sanders' approach makes clear, the antidote is heterodoxy: telling the truth.

Beyond presidential politics, for decades, the strategy of the right has been to commandeer the reins of state and federal legislatures,  governorships and the presidency, and thereby to stack the judiciary.  At this they have been exceedingly successful, culminating in the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court last fall.  The upshot of these decades of struggle and expenditure is that for the first time in years, the 3 branches of government are in their hands.  (The unruly congress was won back in a progressive wave last November, but for now they maintain a grip on that absurdly lopsided relic of Hamiltonian aristocratic confederacy, the Senate).  The effort has already borne fruit in the largest tax cuts in generations to the top tenth of a percent, and the enshrinement of Citizen's United which legitimizes whatever contributions corporations would like to make to the candidates and causes of their choice.  They will have their hands on social benefits of government that they are deeply intent on eliminating: Social Security, guaranteed health care, environmental protection, corporate regulation, public education, equal protections under the law.  The rationale for the strategy is predicated on a well established taboo-- that there is such a thing as natural law, and that capturing the flag of the Supreme Court is victory since it necessarily implies capturing the law.  But laws are only paper.  Laws and taboos are observed by choice, and minds can be changed.  It's happened on this soil before: the social contract can be voided by the people, and the power vested in authorities can be rescinded.   But first we must recognize the taboos that keep us in chains.

Adagio from Gayane

The opening of the Jupiter Mission sequence from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: 

The Art of the Squirm

Rep Katie Porter of California, another Freshman congresswoman to watch, poses a math puzzle to JPMorgan Chase's Jamie Dimon concerning a hypothetical single mother with a 6 year old working for Dimon's own bank for a very unhypothetical wage (as advertised on Monster.com), in a hearing of financial executives a decade after the financial crisis of the late aughts:

Yet another Freshman representative, Cindy Axne of Iowa asked Dimon in the same hearing to explain how his bank spent the $3.7 billion tax break the company got in the 2017 Tax cuts, forcing the fellow to admit that of the total, only $100 million, or 2.7% of the cut was reinvested-- the vaunted intent of the cut per the administration and the Republicans who passed it.  The remaining $3.6 billion was used to buy back shares, essentially artificially raising the price of JPMorgan stock, a manipulation that is designed to maximize the compensation of the board and of the company's executives through market shenanigans alone-- not productivity or performance.  As Congresswoman Axne points out, Dimon's compensation is already as much as 350 times the median pay of the company's employees (and more than 880 times that of the Monster.com job used by Rep Porter in her questioning), a fact which undermines the case of the executives for further easing of financial regulations-- a move which would encourage further speculations on spurious causes potentially precipitating if not merely accelerating an even more intense repeat of the previous disaster.

Can you imagine the smell of vetiver and flop sweat permeating that room?  It's a lovely start.

Reason To Believe

A two-part CNN focus group with bona fide Democratic types on the subject of the 2020 race so far demonstrated some contradictions in the expectations that democratically leaning voters exhibit.  Asked who they liked so far, some names that might be considered almost mutually exclusive were held in the same thought.  One gentleman liked Kamala Harris and expressed openness to Bernie Sanders.  A woman liked Corey Booker or Beto O'Rourke.   One panelist said she preferred to reserve judgment because there were several women already in the race who all deserved the chance to demonstrate a reason to inspire loyalty-- effectively entertaining the possibility of either an Amy Klobuchar or Tulsi Gabbard nomination.  There was one Elizabeth Warren fan, one affirmed Sanders supporter, and one woman who vehemently rejected Bernie Sanders on the basis that he was "divisive" in 2016.  This same woman, who unreservedly raised her hand in support of centrism, who unironically advanced the notion that what Democrats needed was someone like Hillary Clinton (yes the same Hillary Clinton who failed to keep Trump from winning in 2016), nevertheless later echoed the enthusiasm of her fellow panelists for the message of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  The other "pragmatic centrist" was a woman whose number 1 issue was climate change but who implicitly rejected Bernie Sanders on the basis that he is not the right gender.

In these charged times, it is difficult to communicate, and for lack of communication, to persuade, but if ever times called for coming together, these are them.  Like it or not we are in the midst of a make or break period for climate change and something must be done.  There is no time for hesitation and the time for deliberation is dwindling.  We need leaders who will without delay set us on the path toward mitigation of what could be disaster for the species, for life on earth, for the planet in a very short time.  Therefore it is worth the effort to reach out, persuade and ourselves be open to persuasion to the best of our ability.

For me, the Green New Deal is an excellent starting place.  It is in fact the de facto starting place as no credible alternative has been put forth for comparison.  Using the historic precedent of Roosevelt's New Deal that defeated the crisis of the Great Depression in the 1930's as a model, the plan is ambitious, calling for dramatic restructuring of key sectors of the American economy.  The ambition of it demands the participation of all, or put another way, creates opportunities for employment in a time when demand for labor has been in retreat.  The universal economic benefits of the plan sweeten the deal for everyone.  Who should feel threatened by it?  Billionaires, who will not particularly care that their progeny's futures could be secured by their mandatory sacrifice.  Make no mistake, it's the economic reshuffling mandated by the Green New Deal that will inspire the massive expenditures that will be undertaken from the billionaire class on propaganda to defeat it and on showy but meager measures to make it appear unnecessary to those not paying attention and above all to preserve the current lopsided, disastrous, immensely dysfunctional order with its current, messed-up priorities.

For this reason, the presidential election of 2020 is perhaps the most critical for generations.  Only five candidates for the 2020 Presidential election-- Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren; all of them Democratic, natch*-- should be under consideration by anyone who considers this "existential threat", in the words of Green New Deal sponsor Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the primary issue facing us.  The degree to which any candidate-- including the five just listed-- supports or continues to support the Green New Deal or promotes ideas that rival it in effectiveness should be a major factor in choosing among them.†

Beyond the primary, whoever wins the 2020 election will of course necessarily have won the electoral vote.  It's been statistically demonstrated time and again for the past several election cycles: only a victorious Democratic candidate will have also won the popular vote.  It's critical that Donald Trump's opponent be someone capable of both.  While I personally would not reject a candidate on the basis of gender, I sympathize with those who hope for and are perhaps ideologically intent on the Democratic nominee being a woman.  To whatever extent someone feels a desire to settle scores from the bitter defeat of 2016 at the hands of a demonstrably misogynistic contingent of the opposition, I see little to blame.  I recognize in this requirement of a candidate, however, a less than solid foundation that could spell trouble in the general election.  Advice for all of us to heed, including myself: are your motivations for supporting a candidate transferrable theoretically to anyone with an open mind?   As noble as the sentiment behind a gender test for a candidate is, it does not strike me as the relevant priority for 2020.  If that candidate does not also support the Green New Deal or a viable alternative to it and does not inspire confidence in her ability to defeat Donald Trump, I will have tremendous difficulty being persuaded.

Please disregard for now that if it comes down to it, it will not be the first time-- but rather merely just another time-- that I've voted without being fully persuaded.  I'm holding out hope that 2020 will be different.
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*[Updated!] New Yorkers: If you have already registered to vote in New York as of May 31, 2019, you must declare your affiliation as a Democrat by October 11, 2019 in order to be able to vote in the April 28, 2020 Democratic primary.

† If you're considering Joe Biden at all I have seven words for you: "I wish I could have done something."  If you're getting ready to board the Beto O'Rourke or Pete Buttigieg trains, first read these.