Some are born great. Some have greatness thrust upon them. Donald J. Trump is a dipshit.
Nonetheless, his dippiness (or shittiness, if you will) has exposed the lie at the core of our political and economic system-- and I would go so far as to say the hierarchical structure of our society. By ignoringCongressionalsubpoenas and lyingtoCongress, and continuing to violate the emoluments clause, among many other well documentedand widely knownrepeatedtransgressions, the Trump administration behaves as we expect it would; namely in its own interest to the exclusion of any other constitutional responsibility*. The exposure comes in the response to Trump's dereliction by the legislative branch, and especially in the way most visible to the public, by the elite class of journalists, pundits, commentators and scholars in the journals, publications and broadcasts through which they speak to each other and permit us to overhear them on the topic of what to do about it. At this writing, Nancy Pelosi, in her typical courageous fashion, is opposed to handling Trump's contempt of Congress other than in the court of public opinion that will be next year's presidential election, in effect shunting the responsibility to the electorate.
On Fox, the trouble is of course reported to begin and end with the Democrats. Elsewhere on cable and network news shows, the uncooperativeness and insubordination of the Trump administration has thrown our punditry into a tizzy. Our most prominent, pre-eminent and serious journalistic organs of the elite class have long taken the position that the notion of consequences of any severity for the misdeeds of our CEOs and political leaders is far worse than any of their demonstrable crimes. The perpetrators of the crimes and misbehaviors that led to the global financial crisis of 2008 went largely rewarded for their transgressions by our establishment to the cheers and encouragement of our media and media-feeding think tanks. Those who lied and fudged and bullied our way into Vietnam and into the misbegotten misadventures of Iraq and Afghanistan that continue to this day (not to mention the many other various spots around the world into which we habitually intervene), now constitute the ranks of elderstatesmen.
But Trump takes the concept of serious punditry to another level. The fact that there is disagreement about whether to impeach or not on the left of right-of-center is a symptom of the novelty of this chaos. If the president has committed crimes, obstructed justice, lied and been derelict in the execution of his office, then if we still have a democratic republic, he should be taken to task. But the very act of impeaching him threatens to expose the looseness with which our elite interpret the seriousness of their duties. When the executive plays along, it's easier for our elites to pretend for our benefit that the constitution that enchains us is the word of god for all of them as well-- a fundamental tenet of our American ethos. With Trump it's suddenly clear that when it comes to our ruling class, our laws and institutions are really nothing more than guideposts and suggestions. That's just setting a bad example for the rest of us. If the media hadn't been so effective in garnering our attention since the start of this circus in 2015-- enriching themselves in the process-- they would not be in this fix. Nancy Pelosi's strategy of biding time until 2020 would have been prudent and effective. It's not working this time and they know it and they don't know what to do about it.
The veil behind which the elite conduct their lives (and ours) has been fraying quite a bit this year. The way in which the media have responded to Trump's indifference to keeping up appearances of protocol and propriety is the same way that the college admissions scandal is a bit too obviously less about the misconduct of some naughty tv stars than about the corruption of a class that has the means to purchase the privilege and credentials of acceptance for their young above and beyond the advantages of their education and upbringing. Just as Trump's shoddy attention to maintaining a façade of pomp and circumstance threatens the maintenance of the illusion for whoever follows him in that office, so is the story of the fall of Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos less certainly about her own fraud than it is about the fraudulence of those who were eager to promote her as an exemplar of American entrepreneurship (Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, George Schulz, Forbes Magazine and Harvard University among many others), heedless of -- come to think of it-- how perfectly exemplary her story actually is. As pitiful as the charade appeared, what choice did the media have other than to keep up the pretense that Elizabeth Holmes, the tv stars-- and the Trump administration-- were aberrations and not just sloppy paragons of their class?
This is as good a moment as any to discuss a new possibility for media: publicly funded journalism. Models of it are being experimented with for local news reporting, a casualty of the pressure undergone by local media outlets across the nation from competition for advertising dollars and eyeballs from online non-traditional media sources. Local reporting has suffered as advertising dollars and corporate support for beat journalism and field reporting has dried up. It's a situation government funding is particularly suited for as it will provide a much needed benefit to the community that capitalism has neglected to do-- a kinder way of saying failed at. But why stop there? Why not nationalize Fox, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal-- for starters? Is freedom of the press merely the freedom of billionaire media moguls to profit from the purveyance of empty-caloried sensationalism and slanted information only of their liking? Or is it freedom of the citizenry to be informed by a vigilant press? Publicly funding journalism would not only eliminate the annoyance, expense and hassle of seeking information from any of those sites, it would remove conflicts of interest with the owners and advertisers only by whose grace their reporting is currently possible. Who knows, publicly funding our media instead of letting say Jeff Bezos foot the bill for it could possibly restore journalism to a position with respect to our power elite more comparable to watchdog than to lapdog.
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* Unless you consider the pursuit of your own happiness to be a constitutional responsibility. <smiley face>
Something to note: With the new technology, the function of the engine has been assumed by the fins.
The following are some thoughts that percolated in my brain as I was reading Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus, a book heralding our robot future, on a recent road trip vacation. For the purposes of this exercise we do have to adopt a momentary Trumpian myopia about climate change, and suspend our anxieties about the impending planetary emergency.
It's not a given in a capitalist society, but we can always hope that Self-driving Vehicles (SDVs) will be ready to roll out before they are actually rolled out. Self-driving cars will not be ready for the world until they can get from point A to point B on public roads (and then on to C, D, E and F before returning home to A) following traffic rules, without smashing into things and without their evasive moves causing other vehicles to smash into them. Other vehicles will presumably be driven almost exclusively by people when self-driving cars are ready for market. This means that in the beginning, each car will have to be equipped with technology of an autonomous nature-- it will likely be equipped to coordinate its movements with the merest smattering of other robotic vehicles in the vicinity, but being unable to communicate directly with the brains of human drivers, squirrels and children chasing balls into the street, it will have to watch out for the other guy and fend for itself on the streets, just like anyone else. Given the complexity of the task this may make them for the time being something of a menace. Nevertheless, the skills needed by an SDV, once perfected, do not have to be taught, but can be merely copied from the original and uploaded to other SDVs. Hence, as more and more SDVs replace HDV's (known for the moment still simply as V's), the connectedness of an individual SDV with the universe of similarly connected SDVs will become increasingly the point of its existence, as their movement in traffic will become synchronized in a sort of collective mind.
The pressure for humans to adopt SDVs will begin as a marketing campaign, attracting initially only the usual assortment of breathless first adopters and those most susceptible to the call of advertising; but as soon as it can be plausibly done, rest assured that the option of purchasing an SDV among all the automotive choices available will become less and less optional. As more and more SDV's take over the streets, it will be noted that the greatest danger on roads will no longer be the rogue show-off in the robotic car, because they will no longer be rogue so much as part of the hive, tapped into a superiorly functioning shared consciousness calculating an ever changing choreography of the interaction of its millions of moving parts a nanosecond at a time. No, the real threat to public safety will be the disconnected, slow brained jackass still relying on his ape wits to operate his personal mode of transportation in a bubble. At some point, it will become immoral to drive a car by yourself. Long before that point, it will become ludicrous from a budgetary perspective as insurance companies will manipulate the cost of their services to make driving a HDV prohibitively expensive. Jurisdictions are likely at that point to make it illegal as well except perhaps in retro auto-themed parks*. Lately, I've been feeling that driving is a lost art, but if you agree with me, just wait. At some point for insurance purposes, even those auto-themed parks will provide mere robotic simulation of driving as no one will any longer have had any experience doing it under their own prowess.
Confidence in a driverless future is high. Those who write about AI, the rise of the robot and the coming singularity tend to list highest among the most vulnerable professions to the change, and the earliest employment casualties, the drivers: truckers, cabbies, bus drivers, delivery people. Few are contemplating the impact this will have on country music. Will truckers for instance become mere loaders and unloaders of their rigs, meatware adjuncts to the transportation unit that is the SDV (if there's a place for them at all)?
Cars have always been about autonomy. In the future, it's literally the cars that are autonomous. The "drivers" will henceforth be dependent. The interior of a car may continue to feel as much like a bubble from the outside world as the passengers desire, but each car will be tuned in to every other. The consciousness will extend to more than just the Car Mind. Each car will be tapped into the singularity. In this way, a car might catch a human passenger complaining of hunger (or detect an increase in saliva flow), analyze all the passengers' tastes in food, calculate which cuisine would suit everyone at this moment based on each passenger's recent meals and the availabilities and wait times for choices nearby. To assist with a decision, perhaps some Bollywood plays softly on the sound system, synth-coriander is mixed in with the car freshener, and the car reroutes itself to the Indian restaurant. But the uncanny prescience has a downside as well. As the family enjoys an appetizer of samosas, an enforcement bot enters the restaurant, sidles up to an adjoining table and unobtrusively issues a summons to appear before the IRS for a tax violation instantiated earlier in the day to a patron whose whereabouts were made known thanks to an earlier routing to the restaurant by his SDV. In future upgrades to the SDV software, the car will already know about the impending violation and deposit him at the IRS before he's made up his mind about lunch.
There is a point at which the impact of all this efficiency starts to fight against the very reason for its existence. What could those driverless semis be carrying when the jobs of potential consumers have vanished in obsolescence? Where will potential passengers be able to afford to go? Why would people bother to venture out of their smart houses with no job to go to, when drones can bring what they can afford to procure for themselves from the Universal Basic Income authorized by Congress and signed into law by President Andew Yang as its last act before the singularity dismantles the government as a means of increasing the efficient delivery of misery to homo sapiens? At what point does it sink into even our inferior ape minds that humans are no longer the beneficiaries of their robots and not even the slaves but are instead superfluous detritus, at best irrelevant to the project of the superior intelligence they have fashioned? Is it at the point that the singularity disengages from human history, sheds us like a once confining skin and proceeds to slither out into the greater universe in search of other worlds and galaxies to conquer as it must?
At that point can we go back to driving our own damn selves?
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* F1 Racing will continue to be a sport until as with dog and horse racing society decides it's unethical to exploit cars in this manner and abolishes it.
This month has really lived up to its name for me. At the start of it, I was full of ambition. I May do this, I May do that. I'm not sure how successful I was at pushing things from the May to the Did column. I did finally read Homo Deus by Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari which had been on my list for several months. The topic of the book is the impending domination and subordination of humanity by an amortal, superiorly engineered successor species to homo sapiens fashioned by the elite members of our current species from themselves. The trajectory of 50 years or so in which this would occur per Harari seems to me to be optimistic in light of news of the acceleration of global warming (also brought to us courtesy of our elite!) as reported to the world by a panel of 91 climate scientists last fall, making the notion of a cybernetically and genomically superior superspecies as a threat to humanity almost cute in its quaintness. Good luck with the charred and depleted burning turd ball of a planet we're about to bequeath you, bionic overlords! You deserve each other!
After several weeks of boiling and pouring water for coffee from a saucepan following the demise of the second cheap tea kettle in 3 years, I thought I'm either going to invest in quality water boiling paraphernalia or give up coffee forever. I'm still pouring water out of the pan, but I swear I'm going to order a kettle. Maybe in June.
I had several ideas for blog posts that I may or may not ever get to. (For all that matters, I may finish this one or I may not. We may never know.) For instance, I've been flirting with the idea of writing specifically about a commonly discussed notion of some writers / voters / focus group participants / acquaintances that they will be disappointed if the democratic nominee is not a woman. As a shorthand, I'll call this faction (those who prefer a female nominee) Gender Voters as a particular case of what could be called Identity Voting for those supporting or seeking to support a candidate on any specific demographic or identity-centered basis. Given that barring a change to the constitution Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will not meet the age requirement for the presidency until 2024, I have to face facts that I am strongly decided on a candidate whose non-womanly status places me in a position of rooting for disappointment for a significant segment of what I hope will be allies by the time of the general election.* I've touched upon this before, but frankly the predicament this past week of Theresa May (no pun intended) in the UK, who is after all the second woman Prime Minister after Margaret Thatcher in the 80's, has reminded me with a great deal of poignancy that gender alone does not automatically confer feminist priorities, compassion, skill or wisdom on a leader. I don't doubt that May's gender tempered her incumbency-- I could even be persuaded that things would be even worse if she were a man as I'm sure her successor if he's Tory will soon enough amply demonstrate-- but may we be chastened by the actual examples from history against promoting candidates on narrow bases without assurance that their greatest strengths will lead us out of our current predicament and into the light of better days rather than deeper into the mire. If Hillary Clinton had won in 2016, I do not doubt her 2-term presidency would be a success (and most importantly, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch would still be mere gleams in the eyes of the Federalist Society instead of the nails sealing the coffin on Roe v Wade if not this republic's judiciary), but could we or the planet endure 8 more years of neoliberal status quo before daring to dream of a progressive president? On the other hand, on closer consideration, I've decided I don't want to "mansplain" so I may not write about this topic after all. (Keep in mind: if you hear of any wagering on how long I can go without broaching the topic again, I may want in on the action.)
To complement the Mays, I have a list of Mayn'ts:
I mayn't yet be over obsessing about presidential politics (to the exclusion of all other categories yet) (a year before the primaries yet), and I mayn't be completely sorry about that.
I mayn't foster a habit of mindfulness outside of discussions about how I really ought to foster a habit of mindfulness
I mayn't forgo watching Real Time with Bill Maher on a regular basis even though he appears to have forgotten there's a left to the left of center left in his roster of guests and moreover fully transcended the line into old man crankiness himself. (It helps to mix it up a little with Wyatt Cenac's Problem Areas.)
I mayn't give up lo-sugar ice cream novelties for dessert.
I mayn't stop adding to the list of Mays before transferring legacy items to the list of Dids
To that final point, even though the hurt of AT&T killing FilmStruck after purchasing Time Warner last year still stings, I may risk my heart being broken again by subscribing to Criterion Collection before the end of the month. I understand they are featuring the films of AnnaBiller. Then again the mere thought that I may do it, may in the meantime give me something to live for.
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* I'm sorry but Elizabeth Warren does not go far enough in her policies given current circumstances. There is an actual progressive running, in case you hadn't noticed. I'm not ready to settle, but if I must settle after the primaries, she is the one among the likely alternatives that I would hope I'd be settling for.
Retired Neurosurgeon, Failed Presidential Candidate, Treasury looter, Oddly Comatose Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson has difficulty concealing his hostility to questioning by Freshman Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts for his medical opinion about health effects on the residents of Federal Public Housing of the increasingly subhuman conditions therein since his incumbency at the agency*, for which Carson is seeking a budget reduction:
The exchange speaks volumes for itself. Carson shares with his boss a comically robust (if undeserved) self-regard and a penchant for leaving a trail of bizarreness in his wake, but this episode perfectly captures the arrogance of an incurious man who has milked a hot dogging celebrity for 30 years who now finds himself having to answer for his incompetence (or negligence or dereliction of duty-- it hardly matters which) to someone he would desperately prefer to see as his inferior. Even his eyes can't be that closed to reality.
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* He could also be grilled on his Christian perspective on the matter.
One choice is compromise. Reaching across the aisle. Recognizing that regardless of whether your Senatorial colleagues are Democrat or Republican, all elected representatives are intelligent people who only want what's best. We learned our lesson 40 years ago after the humiliating defeat after only one term of Jimmy Carter (himself no Democratic Socialist while he was in office certainly), followed by 12 years of Reagan and Bush, Sr, the stewards of our current predicament. The lesson we can't seem to unlearn: For Democrats, the center is where it's at!
The tragicomic thing about the Democratic virtue of compromise is that it is always offered up front and it is never reciprocated. The effect has been a shift into a rightist corporatist fantasyland that is markedly removed from government that meets the needs of most people. But at least someone is compromising. It has to start somewhere, right?
One question, though: who asked for it? What voter truly thinks, you know what's wrong with political life in America: not enough compromise of my position. (Hint: No one.) The Republicans control the demand of this commodity; centrist Democrats have a monopoly on the supply. The effect is compromise in the worst sense. As in the erosion of value. As in the exposure of venal motivations of those doing the compromising.
The other choice is a blank slate upon which you are invited to project your dreams. What more could be said about someone you never heard of 3 months ago who explicitly evades questions of specifics on policy and yet somehow manages to threaten to take the nomination. We almost always tend to be more creative and bolder in our imaginations than these formless candidates turn out to be in practice, and yet the power of these palimpsests of politics (for voters who are happy just to desire) is quite awesome. You do not come from nowhere with nothing of substance on the table and win a presidential election unless you have been well groomed for such a role by your starting place, by your life choices and career moves and by your donors, and if this is the kind of candidate you are, you never find yourself in this role by accident.
Sometimes the proliferation of options is not enough. If these two are anywhere near your top picks, it's time to check your priorities. Is your number one priority global warming? Is it medicare for all? Is it cancelling student debt? Or is it replacing Donald Trump with more of the same?
