Can She Excuse My Wrongs?

If not, why not?

 

In Us We Trust

Is it just me or is this the strangest presidential election ever?  The clock is ticking; change is mandatory; but the country seems stuck in re-run mode. A Trump versus Biden rematch is seemingly inevitable, and for a good dose of dysfunctional nostalgia, how about throwing Jill Stein into the mix?  The sameness is not limited to presidential politics, or to the US for that matter.  The whole planet seems to be spiraling into a toilet of retrograde nationalism (at least in the parts of the world that western capitalism has not yet turned into a toilet of climate catastrophe).  To feel better about things, I could take drugs or practice my Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or I could write once again about an obvious solution to the cesspool of electoralism: universal sortition-- the random selection of our leaders for short non-consecutive terms through a scientifically equitable process from among the pool of all of us.  Scientifically randomized universal sortition is the cure because it removes money, careerism, influence peddling, partisanship and all of the myriad barriers and issues (natural and manufactured) to people's ability to vote and to get representation.  It doesn't end with selection.  Legislatures (and judiciaries and executives) selected by sortition convene to get the same non-partisan information about issues of the day, to debate and to deliberate without having to answer to parties or to donors or to special interests or to worry about re-election.

A common objection I hear from people when I raise the possibility of sortition as a replacement for the current system is that government, leadership and politics require an intelligence that random selection among people (let's come out with it, among Americans) is unlikely to find.  The complexities of the modern world make the stakes too high to be trusted with the average Joe or Jane.   By definition of course statistically the intelligence of the group will be average unlike the higher concentration of brains we presume are in a hierarchy based on achievement (or historically secured for itself by a clever bloodline).  Call me a little slow (or of average speed),  but I still think average human intelligence is much smarter than we presume and is suppressed by our measurements of it and by our expectations.  I also think the proof of the intelligence of our current elite is in the pudding.

People are more intelligent than they get credit for, though the application of this innate capacity of humans is not encouraged in public life.   A huge part of what makes people stupid about government is partisanship.  Money in politics incentivizes the cultivation of stupidity.  Every now and then  I’m surprised to learn that a very intelligent colleague has ridiculously inane politics. Doing away with partisan politics will give people much less incentive to nurture their stupid side and provide occasions to exercise their native intelligence. A society that runs on sortition will have its structure transformed.  Currently we teach people they’re stupid from a very young age to keep them from pursuing power (because we want them to work, not to lead or to own—our education is designed around this).  What if we give people the respect they deserve-- that we ourselves demand-- as human beings with human brains?  When our leadership is randomly selected among our fellow citizens, it will be in our interest to structure public education in a way that nourishes everyone's intelligence.

All of this said, the fact remains that some people are just plain stupid. But don’t stupid people get a say?  I say yes.  If everyone has a shot at non-partisan power, I believe that’s incentive for people to  be at least somewhat less stupid-- to rise to wisdom as the occasion demands.  Face to face, person to person, people will try harder I think to get it right. 

Will people still make decisions against their interest or best judgment?  Perhaps, but if we ourselves are our leaders, we will have a more direct engagement with the issues that face us.  Our experience of politics will be not merely as judges in a beauty contest between scoundrels who have their own interests and agendas and careers at heart.  We will not have the luxury of letting the professionals fuck things up.  There will be no need to appeal to greater, more gifted and advantaged authority. There is no greater, more gifted or advantaged authority to appeal to, so the lawmaker must appeal to herself.  This is the point of universal sortition.

About 1% of those selected for the legislatures, judiciaries, councils governing our world by sortition will be miserable with their loss of representation, but this is the 1% that thanks to their masterful manipulation of the electorate,  are easily 5000% over-represented now anyway.  Their representation needs to be "trued-up" to their number. The reckoning is long overdue.

About this small segment of society and its potential for mischief, I saw a discussion on a recent book about Jury trials-- the most familiar practical application of sortition already in place-- and the authors’s thesis is that basically we don’t have jury trials anymore because of plea bargaining.  They’re becoming so rare as to be statistically non-existent.  And it’s pretty safe to say that the ones that do happen are very carefully designed so that the fate or liability for damages of any Harvard dude on trial is rarely if ever going to get decided by a resentful dummy.  The point is our legal system is designed to be manipulated by the clever weasels who run it. We’d just have to make sure that clever weasels don’t get to manipulate sortition to their favor in a similar manner. 

When you get down to it, it's just a place people live

Work Life Imbalance

Because I work from home, I need to be in the house at 10:00 am tomorrow, a Saturday, so I can sign for the delivery of new equipment sent to me by the main office-- a laptop, a monitor, a usb port, a keyboard and mouse.  Making sure it doesn't get absconded with from my front porch is the least I can do, I suppose.  In return I have to send back my old laptop.  I've been using it for the past 6 years, and wouldn't you know I finally stopped hating it, but because I dragged my heels on the transition to the new equipment, I have to say a very hasty good bye to the old.  I'm sending it back, hoping everything i needed to keep from it is on the new machine and nothing I needed to vanish forever has been overlooked. 

Being required to be home for the delivery of work equipment on a Saturday is one of the many ways in which the remote office lifestyle has blurred the line between home and work.  When I was commuting everyday, though I always tended to work long hours, before "work-life balance" became one of those suspiciously ubiquitous buzzphrases of corporate speak*, I never mixed work and home life.  Once at the office, I was at the office, and at the end of the day, I never had any trouble turning off the work mind when the door shut behind me as I hit the street for home of weekday evenings.  Now that I'm remote, there is scarcely any separation between work mind and home mind.  Hardly a day goes by when something needed for home life isn't hindered by something needed for work or vice versa.  Yesterday, I needed to find time to meet via Zoom with the COO to provide some assistance before taking my dog to the vet.  I couldn't very well leave the house unshowered, so I needed to sacrifice time that could have been spent on another project approaching a deadline in order to perform my ablutions.  I've been home by myself for the past couple of weeks as the wife and daughter have been on an excursion and we hadn't talked in a few days, but I had to wait until after a weekly meeting to return a call from them.  

I'm young at heart (which is a kind way of saying stunted).  There aren't a lot of things I feel too old for but work is one of them.  Unfortunately I'm too young to retire and underwater enough that I can't stop working but beyond the age where I could look for work I really want to do; but working from home at what I suspect will be my last employment has stretched the boundaries of my tolerance.  Trapped is an awfully harsh word, but it has a ring in this instance.  This working remotely business is too appealing for a hermit to pass up, and I understand that it's a privilege not everyone can take advantage of, but there is a side of me that can't help but feel there is something really wrong with not having a door, a commute and another door between home life and work life.  Having been given the option, I couldn't refuse.  But part of me feels it might have been wrong, exploitative even, to have been given the option to conduct the firm's business within the walls of my home. 

For instance, units of time by which to measure one's exploitation are blurred. Time once spent commuting is now spent working, adding hours to the day.   The transition from work day to home life is too subtle not to miss some days.  With the end of daylight savings' time, there isn't even a slice of daylight between them.  

In order not to use up Paid Time Off I worked through COVID last year, taking not one day off.  It was my choice to do, but along with my head and chest, the clarity of what to do was clogged by the advantage that I could take of working from home.

Worst of all: there's no such thing as a snow day anymore.

Isolation from colleagues means that solidarity with co-workers happens on the company's terms.  To compensate for any tendencies of the workforce to drift from cohesion with the mission of the firm, puerile  team building activities are introduced.  In the absence of other people's reactions to these efforts against which to gauge my own I can only judge them for myself.  I was never a fan but they seem lamer now.  Even hostile.  Many of the activities center around diversity and inclusion and ways that I can be a better ally and in general feel bad about myself rather than about the inequality of the system and about the ways in which diversity overindulgence can keep us separate from each other.  They think I think they're being good but they don't realize I've read Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò's Elite Capture and Catherine Liu's Virtue Hoarders.  

Among the benefits trumpeted by the firm are an array of services offered as a way of ensuring my mental health.  Grief training, individual counseling including text-based consults on demand, seminars on presence and gratitude.  It isn't like I'm not in greater need of mental health, and no question the increasing inability to extract myself from my job is largely responsible for it.  Perhaps I could at least be grateful to see some evidence of culpability on their part in the procurement of tools for addressing the insanity.  Yet something about the firm's benignly insisting insinuation into my "headspace" as some of their memos call it, puts me in mind of an unforgettably acute observation I came across in Micha Frazer-Carroll's Mad World.   She was writing about the ways in which society at large places responsibility for the causes, treatments and repercussions of mental illness on those whom its madness-making ways make mad.  But I find myself applying it here in spite of myself: 

The transformation of complex social experience into diagnostic language may mute our political realities. In the same vein, it can serve as a smokescreen for various forms of violence. When people die by suicide while waiting for benefits or for trans healthcare, suicide may be read as a result of illness that originated from inside the person’s mind. The state’s responsibility for social murder is therefore diminished. This process of medicalisation also leads the living towards overwhelmingly medical ‘solutions’ for distress; we are prescribed drugs or cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) instead of revolution.

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* The neoliberal corporation's ostentatious interest in its employees' work-life balance is a way for it to concern troll about the quality of the portion of a worker's time spent at home so that it can claim the balance.

Unsettling Preoccupation

It may be my imagination but for the past month and a half or so, it seems to me that everything I'm reading is about Israel and Gaza.  Three books in particular that had been in my queue for weeks before October 7 had eerie consonance with current events.  In early October I was reading Naomi Klein's Doppelganger, her rather epic new meditation on The Double, particularly as observed through her personal troubling experience of being chronically confused with the recently anti-vax and conspiracy obsessed Steve Bannon crony, Naomi Wolf.  As Israel began its campaign of vengeance on Gaza in response to Hamas' October 7th breach of Israel's "Iron Dome" defense which resulted in the killing of 1200 (nearly half of whom were civilians), I had reached the conclusion of Klein's book, which centers on the complicated contrast between the notion of the Old Jew as the bookish perpetually stateless victim of the Nazi holocaust and the New Jew personified by the robustly aggressive settler colonialism of the Zionist government of Israel.  Klein's reflections are profound; perhaps, the highlight of what for me is the best book of 2023 so far. (Klein has since spoken at the Jewish Voice for Peace rally for ceasefire in Gaza in Washington October 18 at which Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush also spoke and 300 were arrested.). 

Astrotopia, by Mary-Jane Rubenstein is ostensibly about the danger of the religious rationalizations behind capitalism's designs-- through the auspices of unilateral governmental support-- on space; and yet as the author explicitly states in her introduction, it bears a strong kinship to the settler colonialism of the West, and to Israel's version of it in Palestine.  

Tip of the Spear by Orisanmi Burton is not at all about Israel-Palestine, but about Attica and related prison riots in New York State in 1970-1971.  But the parallels between Attica and Gaza are impossible to miss.  The Attica uprising was of a subjected population -- in this case a heavily oppressed prison population -- against a supremely dominant colonial power that viewed the Attica prisoners as less than human. As it was the brutal carceral state itself that created the explosive conditions that erupted in Attica, so the conditions in Gaza that fomented the Hamas attack against Israel were engendered by Israel's subhuman treatment of Gazans.  Attica was heralded as a riot-proof prison , a claim that turned out to be easily belied (much like Israel's failed "Iron Dome") by a spontaneous turnaround of an incident of brutality against prisoners on the part of Attica guards.  A guard's killing in the siege escalated and intensified the state's brutal response.  Hostages were taken, and as hostages were released in return for the granting of some demands-- not unlike reports from Hamas held hostages on their release-- they reported their treatment by their captors to be humane, even kind.  In the action that ended the siege, nearly 40 were killed by state forces, among them 9 hostages whose safety had been  exploited for PR purposes by the state as a justification for the its aggressive response but was apparently secondary to vengeance in its carrying out of the operation.

Israel it seems to me in this truly unprecedented time is losing the story.   To be sure it still has the ears of many in the media and in the governing class, including Joe Biden and the US State Department who continue to enable Israel's aggressions against the Palestinians (over 11,000 killed in Gaza since the October 7th attack as of this writing, including more than 5000 children and who knows yet how many of the 250 hostages taken into Gaza that day; low estimates place civilian casualties at 75% of the total but some estimates suggest as many as 90% are civilian deaths; 1.6 million in a population of just over 2.0 million have been displaced from their homes) under an increasingly indefensible pretense of "self-defense."  But among the people, including myself but especially the young of all ethnicities and religions, not least among them Jews, it has lost any semblance of justice in the pretext of its murderous response to the tragedy of October 7.  

Several kinks in the chain of the narrative that Israel and its intolerant-of-debate champions would like to force you to believe have snapped.  My yielding to the special pleading of Israeli on the topic of its behavior in the world has broken with it.*

Israel has a right to defend itself, they say. Perhaps, but the opportunity to defend itself was October 7 and it failed.  Its actions since October 7, in which along with the cutting off of supplies including food, water, electricity. and the destruction of thousands of homes, businesses and hospitals, so far, ten Palestinians (nearly half of them children) have been killed by strategically deployed Israeli bombs for every victim of Hamas' attack,  have  revealed themselves to be not defense, but a part of  the Netanyahu government's long criminal strategy to eradicate Palestinians from Israel after all.  Opting to indiscriminately kill the so-called "civilian shields" you'd like us to believe are pawns in your enemy's game (rather than calling your victims what they are-- civilians!) is not defense, and there is no longer any defense for it.

Palestinians engage in terror against their imprisoners because life is cheap for them, I've heard.  For Palestinians?  For a people whose autonomy has been taken from them; for a people forced into a refugee life from birth; who have been living in an open air prison for decades; whose food, water, housing, electricity, movement are strictly controlled from without?  Life is cheap for me and for you who subsist here in America and in the America like suburbs of Israel with an effort of struggle that is laughable compared to what is forced upon those in Gaza.  Life is dear for Palestinians. Its dearness has been thrust upon them.  

Never again means never again, I've heard.  And of course it does because never again should we stand by while a subject people are systematically scrubbed from the face of the earth out of the hatred stoked by the fascists in power.  But it's clear that never again for the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu-- who keep Palestinians in an open air concentration camp and drop bombs out of all proportion to the tragedy that rationalizes this response, killing innocent children and their families like shooting fish in a barrel in order to bring their people closer to extinction and out of the way of Israeli settlement-- means never again only to Jews. 

I must not criticize Israel or Zionism because that is Anti-Semitic, they say.   How convenient!  And single payer healthcare costs too much, and peace is not serious, and freedom is not free. Criticism of Israel and Zionism is criticism of Israel and Zionism-- and it is sometimes done only out of love for the Jews who take no part --and especially the pervasively large number who resist-- in the sanctifying of the crimes that Israel commits in their name, and not least of all for those who love Israel so much for the best of reasons that they must blind themselves to its atrocities-- atrocities they would not forgive if they were committed (and not merely enabled) by the US   This why the anti-BDS laws that no one asked for sprang up unbidden across the United States thanks to the stealth machinations of moneyed groups supportive of Benjamin Netanyahu's ultra-conservative anti-Palestinian government in Israel; laws that punish those caught expressing views not to the Israel lobbies' liking.   In the United States!    

What the government of Israel is doing is playing with fire.  The edifice of sacreds it has stacked up to protect itself from exposure of the rot at the core of its mission-- a rot that is very familiar to an American or a European from our own settler colonial heritage-- is falling apart.  And the violence that it has wielded to protect its rot from showing could very possibly come back on itself.  And let me be clear, that is not good. Shame on us for enabling it. 

If my tolerance of the accepted version of  Israel's mission in Palestine is broken by the genocide being committed in Gaza, what else is broken?  I don't know how this will end.  I can voice my pain but I can't control the impact of my words.  For the most part I can only watch in horror.  But I very much hope for an outcome that will quickly with as little blood as possible put an end to this brutal era, and mark the beginning of an era of true peace and autonomy and literal co-existence in the sense of existing together in the middle east and around the world.  Amein.

~~~~~

* Then 22 House Democrats who voted with Republicans to censure Rashida Tlaib for civilly exercising free speech broke me again.