Month: October 2017

Richard Nixon was, of course, an extremely divisive figure.  He clearly despised his enemies; he even made a list of them.  He understood, however, that part of his job was to try to keep the country united at the height of the culture wars.   If you listen to some of his speeches today, he even comes across as being sincere.

Trump is different.  When he talks about national unity, he sounds like a child who has been told that he has to eat his vegetables.  Dividing the country comes naturally for him, because:  (a) he has no other political skills; (b) it’s a lot more fun than mouthing platitudes about unity; (c) he values loyalty over every other quality, including competence; and (d) his temper and thin skin almost always get the best of him.

The whole point of his campaign was to expose the divisions within the GOP.   Things are worse today.  Don’t expect any improvement in the near future.

My wife and I visited the museum commemorating the first meeting of the Chinese Communist Party when we went to Shanghai in 2012.  I found the place interesting for two reasons.  First, you would have thought that there would be lots of negative comments about the Qing dynasty, but there weren’t;  all of the anger about the state of China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was directed at foreigners.  Second, the Party openly admits that the Cultural Revolution was a mistake.  There is no such admission about the Great Leap Forward, however, even though it resulted in the deaths of far more people.

The difference revolves around the identity of the victims.  In the Great Leap Forward, they were millions of faceless peasants, but in the Cultural Revolution, they were primarily the urban intelligentsia and members of the Party leadership.  The Cultural Revolution is best understood as a populist movement led by Mao that was intended to regain control of the Party from an establishment that he felt was controlled by corrupt bureaucrats.  The current leadership is understandably determined to see that this kind of Trumpian-style populism is kept firmly under control.  That’s why Bo had to go, and why the public is repeatedly told that the Cultural Revolution never should have happened.

The last few weeks have been pretty grim, so I’m going to change direction a bit to have a little fun.  I’m taking a poll:  the question is, as the title suggests, what’s Trump’s worst trait?

There are so many contenders!  Here’s my list, in no particular order:

1.  Incompetence
2.  Lack of empathy
3.  Lack of restraint
4.  Lack of respect for the law and constitutional norms
5.  Narcissism
6.  Lack of respect for the truth
7.  Ignorance
8.  Penchant for self-dealing

I’ll be taking comments until Thursday, October 12, at which time I will announce the “winner.”  Don’t feel bound by my list; all entries will be accepted.

I went to Puerto Rico bearing paper towels!  Call me Lord Bountiful!

Once upon a time, the internet seemed like magic.  Today, it has been overrun by trolls, bullies, and hackers.  Every time you get on line, you’re putting yourself in danger.  Something needs to be done to get this under control.

Is this China or the US?  The rationale for regulation here is essentially the same as the Chinese government’s justification for the Great Firewall.  One would hope that we can find a more suitable middle ground, and soon.

Life in the time of Trump.

Another shooting spree.

The NRA

And all they say

Just drives me up a tree.

It’s happened lots of times before.

It’s bound to come again.

You needn’t ask how many more.

We’re nowhere near the end.

 

Note:  It was reported that Bill O’Reilly said on his blog that incidents like this are “the price of freedom.”  I probably should be indignant about that, but I’m not, because from the NRA’s perspective, he’s just telling an inconvenient truth.  To some people, gun ownership is such an empowering experience that a few massacres here and there are nothing more or less than acceptable collateral damage:  just like the relationship between hurricane victims and fossil fuel industry workers.

Here’s what I’ll remember about Petty:

1.  The Heartbreakers were a genuinely great band–the closest American equivalent to the Rolling Stones.  They could play anything, and loved doing it.
2.  Petty was a horribly underrated songwriter.  Among other things, he crafted the best, most succinct definition of middle age I’ve ever heard:  I woke up/In between/Memory/ And the dream.
3.  He managed to write passionately about life in the South without being sentimental about bigotry.  In that, he has much to teach the Democratic Party, and the whole nation.

The Chinese have been around so long, they can almost always find an analogy for a current person or event in their history.  Hence, the popularity of historical dramas on Chinese TV.

I can’t help but wonder who the analogy to Donald Trump would be.  Surely it would be some sort of swaggering, uncouth barbarian from north of the Great Wall.

If anyone has any ideas, I would love to hear them.

The fact is that this latest tragedy could only have been averted by a relatively broad ban on gun ownership.  It wasn’t a failure of security, either on the part of the hotel or the concert promoters, and the guy didn’t have any history that would have prevented him from buying guns legally, so you can’t call it an enforcement issue.

I would like to think that this one will make a difference, but I know better.  As I’ve noted previously, guns are more potent as symbols than as actual objects.  To a certain kind of person, a gun is as meaningful as the cross;  it stands for power, self-reliance, masculinity, and independence.  It’s the last bastion of “real America” against secularism and political correctness.

And so, these kinds of events will continue to occur.  American exceptionalism, indeed.

 

People my age will remember the running gag on SNL about the death of Franco, but when he was alive, he was no joke;  as the story goes, he was such an icy bastard, even Hitler was afraid of him.  His efforts to defend traditional Spanish values against its perceived enemies extended to Basque and Catalan nationalism as well as left-wing political movements.  As I understand it, it even encompassed soccer games between Barcelona and Real Madrid.

The Spanish conservative party, the PP, is a genuinely democratic party, but there have always been suspicions that it retained a few strands of Franco’s DNA. After yesterday’s gratuitous and short-sighted display of force against the Catalan referendum, everyone in Catalonia, Spain, and the world knows the answer to that question, and the Spanish political system will be feeling the effects for years to come.

At the end of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese economy was in a shambles. Today, China is the second largest economy in the world.  Most of the credit for that should go to the Chinese people, whose resilience and ingenuity never cease to amaze me, but the government is entitled to a large slice of it, too.

The success of the government has undoubtedly won it a large supply of goodwill from people who can remember the bad times.  The fact is, however, that a large and growing segment of the population has no memory of those years.  They have known nothing but growing prosperity, and they will expect no less in the future.

What will happen if the government stumbles in the future?  All of the many fault lines in Chinese society will be exposed.  It could be a rough ride.

Atul Gawande takes on this question, which is at the heart of the health care debate, in an article in this week’s New Yorker.  He surveys a number of Reactionaries from his home town and finds that their attitudes on the issue revolve around the concepts of the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor.  This is consistent with the narrative in “Hillbilly Elegy,” and with my argument that the welfare state only enjoys public support when people are seen to have “earned” their benefits.  As a result, measures like increases in the minimum wage and tariffs are favored over more effective redistribution policies like the EITC.

My reactions to the question and the article are as follows:

1.  The state’s ability to provide a decent level of health care is tied to technological progress and per capita GDP.  This only became a serious question within, say, the last 100 years.  A “right” to health care is not, therefore, on the same plane as our fundamental political rights.
2.  While there frequently is a connection between race and the “undeserving” poor, it doesn’t always exist, particularly in areas with a small African-American population.  Are you listening, Mr. Coates?
3.  Bernie Sanders thinks his plan to provide everyone with free health care will be received warmly by the kinds of people who were questioned by Gawande.  He’s wrong, for the reasons set out in the article.
4.  Even Reactionaries will concede that the “undeserving” poor are entitled to emergency treatment, so, in a sense, the battle has already been won.  It is a question of degree.
5.  The “undeserving” poor get the benefit of police protection, the judicial system, public schools, road maintenance, environmental protection, national parks, etc. All of these are essential goods that are shared by all regardless of ability to pay. Why should health care be treated differently? It certainly isn’t any less important.

If the Spanish government somehow thought that a heavy-handed police response to the referendum was going to turn the Catalan people against independence, that is going to prove to be a terrible mistake.  All they’re doing is reminding the Catalans of what life under Franco was like, which was a large part of the case for independence in the first place.

Regardless of the outcome of the referendum, my guess is that support for independence will increase significantly after this fiasco.