Saturday, April 18, 2020
The Scapegoating of the Named Patient
Those who have followed my blogging for a long time know that I originally began blogging in order to document and reflect on my experiences in an abusive fringe evangelical church in the United States. That church was founded by a dysfunctional husband-and-wife team and their two dysfunctional sons. These four formed the original leadership core of that church (or, to use their terminology, that "Assembly"), and I am convinced that from the very beginning the sons knew fully and accurately just how much of a counterfeit their parents were, and therefore knew fully and accurately just how much of a scam their "Assembly" was. Quite naturally, the dad appointed himself the "head honcho" of that sorry bunch (or as he put it, "the Head Steward of the Work!").
As time passed, the Assemblies grew both in the total number of groups and the total number of members in each group, and this necessitated the promotion of certain ambitious members of each group to places of leadership. Once a person was inducted into a leadership role, he almost always found himself in a select inner circle whose members were allowed to see aspects of our head honcho that were hidden from the rest of us. Those aspects consisted of embezzlement, corruption, hypocrisy, secret malignancy, and exploitation (including sexual sin) - although from time to time, all the rest of us could see the open malignancy, pride, narcissism, and bullying that flashed forth from the leadership and from our head honcho.
The interesting thing that happens to people who exist for a long time in such an environment is that they tend to become like their environment. This means that most of us tended to become jerks (and few things are more annoying than a religious jerk), and because our head honcho was a king-sized jerk, the people closest to him - his deputy leaders - became some of the biggest jerks in our group. Many of us who were not in the inner leadership circle did not recognize the extent to which we were becoming corrupt in our zeal to become like our leaders. When that corruption was pointed out to us by outsiders, we were able to justify it by saying that our gung-ho zeal, and the pushiness of our proselytizing/recruiting of others, and the way we disparaged anyone who had a life outside our group was all actually evidence of our spirituality. (I guess it was! Just not the way we thought.) We also justified our attempts to find people whom we could boss around by claiming that this was an evidence of our desire to "grow in stature." I must say, though, that our inability to recognize the foolishness of the things we were being taught to emulate is no excuse, but rather an evidence of almost criminal stupidity. (And for every finger I point outward, I recognize that there are three pointing back at me.) But the men (and some women) who comprised the inner circle of leadership knew something the rest of us didn't know - that the leading family - the head honcho and his wife and sons - were engaging in criminal behavior, including domestic violence. Yet they became the chief enablers of the head honcho and his family. Not only this, but many of these deputy leaders became petty tyrants and bullies in their own right, causing much distress for the people under their authority.
Although this system was corrupt, it did seem to possess a certain durability, in large part because it had evolved a very efficient means of dealing with any honest, non-corruptible people who were recruited into its midst. Such people usually left soon after being drawn into an Assembly, and when they left, the leaders would tell very convincing lies about how these leavers left because of some hidden "sin." Some of these leavers made the mistake of trying to persuade us "stayers" that they left because they saw holes in the head honcho's doctrine and preaching. Whenever that happened, the leaders would simply say that the leavers left because of "spiritual pride." But the leaders and the head honcho got something more than they could handle when a few of these leavers and some of those in the process of deciding to leave found out about the domestic violence, financial irregularities, and adultery going on with the head honcho and his family. Our "Assemblies" therefore suffered an existential crisis from 2000 to 2003, and it was a crisis which most of our groups did not survive.
Now what is interesting about this crisis is that the vast majority of the members were forced to face the reality that the head honcho we had all been following was a thoroughly corrupt hypocrite. A corollary to this realization was the realization that our deputy leaders had been corrupt enablers of the head honcho. As this additional realization began to be spoken openly among us, the deputy leaders began to try hard to portray themselves as fellow victims with us against the head honcho. Some of them even went as far as trying to say that they tried without success to rein in our head honcho. And all of them condemned the head honcho and tried to wash their hands of him. Based on what I know of some of these leaders, I think their vehement final public rejection of the head honcho was motivated by a desire to pick up the pieces of the small-time religious "empire" which the head honcho had created, so that one or more of these deputy leaders might crown himself the new "head honcho." In other words, by their condemnation of the head honcho, these deputy leaders tried to scapegoat him (as the most obvious target) in order to draw attention away from their own complicity in perpetuating a toxic, abusive system. The thing that thwarted these deputy leaders in their ambition was the fact that the rest of us had by this time awakened to the fact that not only had we all suffered abuse at the hands of the now deposed head honcho, but that we had also suffered abuse from his deputies, and that these men had acted like jerks toward the rest of us. So it was that most of us, me included, walked away completely from that mess.
Years later, I found myself dealing with other dysfunctional systems, and this pushed me to read a large amount of literature on the dynamics of dysfunctional organizational systems, whether on a household level or on the level of something larger. One of the things I learned is that in dysfunctional systems controlled by an obviously sick, evil, or deranged person - the "named patient" (also known as the "identified patient") - the other members of the system frequently bear significant culpability for the continued survival of that system. Yet it is usually convenient for them to blame all the problems of the system on the "named patient."
So we fast forward to April 2020, and I have to say that a few recent essays in popular online news sources have raised my eyebrows. The essays have all been about the coronavirus pandemic and the completely and utterly dysfunctional response of the Trump White House to the pandemic. And while I agree with the fact that Trump botched things "bigly," what strikes me is that some of these essays have called for Mike Pence to take over the Federal coronavirus response because of Trump's malignant incompetence. The author of one such essay pleaded with Pence to "remove Trump and save us from the coronavirus." Another essayist stated that the coronavirus crisis would not have gotten as far out of hand in the United States had someone else been president - "Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Mike Pence, really almost anybody else..." I am not a huge fan of Hillary Clinton, but I will agree that we would not be facing what is likely to become an economy-destroying crisis on account of the coronavirus if she had become President in 2017. But what I see in the mention by these essayists of Republicans who might have done a better job than Trump reminds me uncomfortably of the attempts by the deputy leaders of my former abusive church to rehabilitate themselves by means of loud public denunciations of our former head honcho. Except that this time, it seems to be certain members of the Republican Party and the conservative political establishment who are trying to rehabilitate themselves by condemning Trump.
The only problem is, they can't succeed. Not if they're honest with themselves. Just as the former deputy leaders of my former church condemned themselves by condemning our former head honcho, these must realize that they condemn themselves by condemning Trump. Don't get me wrong - Trump needs to be denounced, like my former abusive church head honcho needed to be denounced. But the voices on the right who are condemning Trump must admit that they themselves are the very people whose desire for moral impossibility combined with their ungodly access to concentrated wealth and power to bring us the regime of Trump in the first place. Trump is therefore a symptom of a wider dysfunction. Aren't the Republicans the same people whose narcissism refused to acknowledge that their desire for what they want needed to be tempered by the recognition of the rights of the other peoples who live on the earth? Are not many of these people the same people who paid large amounts of money years ago to create the Tea Party movement? Many operatives from this movement are now loudly demanding that the restrictions on gatherings and businesses imposed by state governors in order to halt the spread of COVID-19 be immediately lifted. And are not many Republican politicians just as insane as Trump? Do you think that a Sarah Palin presidency would look any different by now? Who among these people was protesting during the days of Trump's Muslim travel ban? Which of these people rebuked Trump for stationing U.S. Border Patrol agents and military personnel at the southern border to rip Mexican children out of the arms of their parents and throw them into cages? How many of them approved of the destruction of social safety nets in Wisconsin by former Governor Scott Walker? How many of them have secretly or openly agreed with some of the nutcase statements from Governor Sam Brownback about "God, guts and guns" - especially about his disdain for gun control even after high school students across the nation expressed outrage over the lack of effective gun control in this country? How many of them refuse to acknowledge anthropogenic climate change even to this day? How many of them are trying to disenfranchise voters in states controlled by the Republican Party by refusing to allow mail-in voting during the present pandemic?
These people are infected with the same malignant narcissism which animates Trump. Some of them may not be as far along in their disease as he is, yet they are all moving inexorably in the same direction toward a singularity of moral impossibility in which they demand supremacy at all costs, regardless not only of the rights of others (including both nonwhite and white others), but of physical reality itself (including the actual science of epidemiology and its bearing on the propagation of viruses). Blogger Olga Doroshenko describes this narcissism thus in its effects on Soviet Russia: "During [the Bolsheviks'] 73-year rule, the Russian narcissism reached the final stage: total separation from reality and hence, self-destruction of the nation." (Emphasis added.) As the United States and its leadership are wholly taken in their own narcissism, our own self-destruction looms as a distinct and unpleasant possibility. We'll see who finally takes the fall for that self-destruction. But if you are a Trump supporter, and you find yourself one day with a mouth full of gravel, don't just blame him. Blame yourself also.
Saturday, March 28, 2020
Playing With Matches In A Paper House
Today, 28 March 2020, as I write this, the United States of America has for the last few days been the world leader in confirmed coronavirus cases. What's worse is that even though the number of confirmed cases has climbed to over 116,000, the growth rate continues to be exponential, as seen here. The site captured in the last link also shows that the COVID-19 death rate continues to climb exponentially. In light of these events, I thought it might be helpful to provide a short list of things we now know about the course of coronavirus infection in humans.
As I look at the ways in which Trump and his cohort have tried to spin this crisis, I have found myself asking questions, such as, what drives Trump? What are his strategic motivations? What is his long-term thinking? (Sometimes I ask these same questions about either one of my two cats as I see them staring off into space. But they are cool and not sinister, whereas Trump is evil.)
To the extent that he thinks at all, Trump seeks to rebuild White "great power" autarky as it existed over 100 years ago. However, it was never really "autarky", was it? What really happened was that the great colonial powers, after they had exhausted their own resource base, sought to keep themselves great by stealing the bodies, lands, and stuff of all the other peoples on earth, laying claim that "this piece of land which we 'discovered', along with its people, now belongs to this particular Northern nation." This has been the motivation behind American military and economic interventions under Trump, as well as his thwarted desire to build a wall to keep the nonwhite nations of the earth from coming to the United States in search of that which was stolen from them. But it has also been the motivation behind the efforts of the United States and Russia to neutralize and destroy any independent power centers that are not European or Slavic. Hence, Trump has sought to "weaponize" the coronavirus in a soft-power sense by calling it "the Wuhan virus" or "the Chinese virus" in his bid to demonize and other-ize people of Asian descent. Unfortunately, there are knuckleheads in the United States who have followed his lead and perpetrated recent hate crimes against Asian-Americans. But this response is typical of the narcissism which says, "If there's any imperfection among us, it can't possibly be with me! It must belong to someone else!" Such a response is not helpful, because it ignores the fact that white people can transmit the coronavirus just as easily as anyone else. Consider Boris Johnson, Rand Paul, and the flocks of high school and college students who went to beaches in Florida on spring break, got infected by each other, and brought the COVID-19 infection back to their fellows at their home campuses.
But while we can acknowledge the possibility that Trump "thinks" in some sense, it is also true that he "feels" - that is, certain situations produce in him strong visceral reactions. As a narcissist, therefore, he cannot handle having to deal with predicaments that are beyond his control, predicaments which require a collective response shaped by many diverse points of view, a response that patiently takes a long view, a response that acknowledges that there are no quick fixes, a response that is humble and open in the face of difficulty. The current COVID-19 outbreak is just such a difficulty, and Trump has acted like a fish out of water in the face of it. Thus he has tried desperately to spin this crisis into something where he can be seen as decisively in charge, the leader of the cavalry coming over the hill with a promised quick fix. This is what is behind the gaggle of questionable "medical experts" seen on Fox News who have backed Trump's assertions that the coronavirus was no worse than the "seasonal flu" or who have pushed questionable remedies such as chloroquine as a cure.
(Trump's obsession with chloroquine deserves special mention. The only reason he heard about the drug at all in connection with COVID-19 is because of a certain French microbiologist with sketchy credentials and practices, who contacted Fox News and told them that he had successfully treated COVID-19 infected patients with the drug. Note that chloroquine has never been used as an antiviral drug. Note also that the Chinese government ran a study of their own which showed that chloroquine had no effect on the course of COVID-19 in patients. Lastly, it should be mentioned that at least one person has died from trying to self-medicate using a form of chloroquine found in fish tank cleaner.)
And now, Trump has already long since tired of trying to act "presidential" in the face of a crisis which does not offer quick fixes. (He and his friends are also tired of losing money to a crisis which they let get out of hand.) Hence, he wants the United States to return to being "open for business" by Easter, with no restrictions on travel or gatherings (or, most importantly, shopping!). That brings up some interesting possibilities. Right now, his approval rating is hovering around 50 percent. Say that represents 150 million Americans. Say that they also do what he says and return to "life as normal" starting on Easter. This means abandoning social distancing and self-isolation. Say also that 70 percent of these people wind up becoming infected with COVID-19. That would equate to 105 million people. To make the numbers easier to deal with, let's say 100 million. Out of these 100 million, 20 million will get sick enough to require hospitalization. But long before we reach the 20 million mark, the health care systems throughout much of the United States will be overwhelmed. That means that between 5 and 10 million could die.
The COVID-19 outbreak will cause an inevitable contraction of the American economy. If the people of the United States do the right thing and continue to aggressively self-quarantine and self-isolate, the only thing we will lose is money - and we will be taking the shortest route to recovery in the process. If we try to push our re-opening too soon, our economy will contract for another reason - the economic and social disruption that results from millions of us dying. In seeking to re-open the country for business by Easter, Trump is playing with matches in a paper house.
- We now know that of all people who become infected with COVID-19, approximately 80 to 81 percent will develop mild illness and fully recover. However, 19 to 20 percent will develop severe disease, with five percent developing "critical disease" according to this source.
- We also know that while early reports stated that young people were significantly less likely to develop severe disease than older people, later data has shown that young people are still at significant risk of developing severe disease. This source reports that nearly 40 percent of those hospitalized in the United States for COVID-19 were under 55 years old. The majority of hospitalizations in New York are for people under 50 years old. And there are sources such as this which present the personal stories of strong, accomplished young athletes who have been seriously sickened by COVID-19.
- We know that the death rate as a percentage of total cases of COVID-19 has been climbing in the United States. When the first outbreaks occurred, the U.S. death rate was from 1 to 1.5 percent. However, the latest percentage for New York City is approximately 1.7 percent. (Click this link and then do the math.) What happens when the health care systems of the various states are overwhelmed is another matter. Consider, for instance, what would happen to the 19-to-20 percent of an infected population who develop severe disease, yet who don't have access to health care because their health care systems have been overwhelmed. Then the U.S. death rate might almost certainly exceed 5 percent, and might even go as high as 10 percent.
As I look at the ways in which Trump and his cohort have tried to spin this crisis, I have found myself asking questions, such as, what drives Trump? What are his strategic motivations? What is his long-term thinking? (Sometimes I ask these same questions about either one of my two cats as I see them staring off into space. But they are cool and not sinister, whereas Trump is evil.)
To the extent that he thinks at all, Trump seeks to rebuild White "great power" autarky as it existed over 100 years ago. However, it was never really "autarky", was it? What really happened was that the great colonial powers, after they had exhausted their own resource base, sought to keep themselves great by stealing the bodies, lands, and stuff of all the other peoples on earth, laying claim that "this piece of land which we 'discovered', along with its people, now belongs to this particular Northern nation." This has been the motivation behind American military and economic interventions under Trump, as well as his thwarted desire to build a wall to keep the nonwhite nations of the earth from coming to the United States in search of that which was stolen from them. But it has also been the motivation behind the efforts of the United States and Russia to neutralize and destroy any independent power centers that are not European or Slavic. Hence, Trump has sought to "weaponize" the coronavirus in a soft-power sense by calling it "the Wuhan virus" or "the Chinese virus" in his bid to demonize and other-ize people of Asian descent. Unfortunately, there are knuckleheads in the United States who have followed his lead and perpetrated recent hate crimes against Asian-Americans. But this response is typical of the narcissism which says, "If there's any imperfection among us, it can't possibly be with me! It must belong to someone else!" Such a response is not helpful, because it ignores the fact that white people can transmit the coronavirus just as easily as anyone else. Consider Boris Johnson, Rand Paul, and the flocks of high school and college students who went to beaches in Florida on spring break, got infected by each other, and brought the COVID-19 infection back to their fellows at their home campuses.
But while we can acknowledge the possibility that Trump "thinks" in some sense, it is also true that he "feels" - that is, certain situations produce in him strong visceral reactions. As a narcissist, therefore, he cannot handle having to deal with predicaments that are beyond his control, predicaments which require a collective response shaped by many diverse points of view, a response that patiently takes a long view, a response that acknowledges that there are no quick fixes, a response that is humble and open in the face of difficulty. The current COVID-19 outbreak is just such a difficulty, and Trump has acted like a fish out of water in the face of it. Thus he has tried desperately to spin this crisis into something where he can be seen as decisively in charge, the leader of the cavalry coming over the hill with a promised quick fix. This is what is behind the gaggle of questionable "medical experts" seen on Fox News who have backed Trump's assertions that the coronavirus was no worse than the "seasonal flu" or who have pushed questionable remedies such as chloroquine as a cure.
(Trump's obsession with chloroquine deserves special mention. The only reason he heard about the drug at all in connection with COVID-19 is because of a certain French microbiologist with sketchy credentials and practices, who contacted Fox News and told them that he had successfully treated COVID-19 infected patients with the drug. Note that chloroquine has never been used as an antiviral drug. Note also that the Chinese government ran a study of their own which showed that chloroquine had no effect on the course of COVID-19 in patients. Lastly, it should be mentioned that at least one person has died from trying to self-medicate using a form of chloroquine found in fish tank cleaner.)
And now, Trump has already long since tired of trying to act "presidential" in the face of a crisis which does not offer quick fixes. (He and his friends are also tired of losing money to a crisis which they let get out of hand.) Hence, he wants the United States to return to being "open for business" by Easter, with no restrictions on travel or gatherings (or, most importantly, shopping!). That brings up some interesting possibilities. Right now, his approval rating is hovering around 50 percent. Say that represents 150 million Americans. Say that they also do what he says and return to "life as normal" starting on Easter. This means abandoning social distancing and self-isolation. Say also that 70 percent of these people wind up becoming infected with COVID-19. That would equate to 105 million people. To make the numbers easier to deal with, let's say 100 million. Out of these 100 million, 20 million will get sick enough to require hospitalization. But long before we reach the 20 million mark, the health care systems throughout much of the United States will be overwhelmed. That means that between 5 and 10 million could die.
The COVID-19 outbreak will cause an inevitable contraction of the American economy. If the people of the United States do the right thing and continue to aggressively self-quarantine and self-isolate, the only thing we will lose is money - and we will be taking the shortest route to recovery in the process. If we try to push our re-opening too soon, our economy will contract for another reason - the economic and social disruption that results from millions of us dying. In seeking to re-open the country for business by Easter, Trump is playing with matches in a paper house.
Friday, March 20, 2020
Of Houses, Storms, Sand and Bedrock
Everyone therefore who hears these words of mine and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on a rock. The rain came down, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it didn’t fall, for it was founded on the rock. Everyone who hears these words of mine and doesn’t do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. The rain came down, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it fell—and its fall was great.
The current storm, however, is exposing a lot of shoddy workmanship, bad carpentry, and substandard building materials in these "houses". Consider that Angela Merkel's Germany is weathering the coronavirus storm much better than the United States right now, because of two factors: a robust public health system, and a chancellor who tells the straight-up truth. Consider also the robust, clear-eyed responses of South Korea and Singapore to the current crisis. And lastly, consider the response of China, which after initially fumbling, took such steps as making testing free, removing all payment requirements for new patients seeking care, and enforcing of self-quarantine. As a result, new cases of COVID-19 are now declining in China. Compare that with the response of a certain Mr. Donald Trump, which can only be described as one long, continuous fumble. As a result of Trump's fumbling, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed today below the level it held on the day when President Barack Obama left office. And coronavirus cases in the United States continue to climb.
Trump's initial response - namely to downplay the severity of the crisis while doing nothing to help the people of the United States - is remarkably similar to the response of Boris Johnson, the current prime minister of Britain, whose government decided that the best way to protect Britain was to allow the virus to spread naturally in order to build up "herd immunity" among Britons. ("God save the Queen," you say?! How about "God help Britain!" With friends like these, who needs enemies?) Political pressure forced him to abandon this plan, but its replacement still looks a lot like "doing nothing."
Russia, on the other hand, seems to have adopted a different approach. According to the World Health Organization, Russia has only 199 confirmed cases of COVID-19 infection as of the time of this writing, with no confirmed deaths. Russia is therefore nearly perfect, the very thing every narcissist wants to be...except that a large number of Russian doctors are now saying that the Putin government is forcing them to under-report cases of COVID-19, and that the Russian medical system is so decrepit that accurate assessments of the current situation in Russia are impossible. They are also pointing out the extremely limited number of test kits available, the inaccuracy of these kits, and the fact that they are all made by one Russian monopoly. There also seems to be a sharp spike in cases of "community-acquired pneumonia" and "community-acquired influenza", with entire hospital wards being emptied of other patients in order to accommodate the new cases. Maybe Putin's government doesn't know the difference between COVID-19 and other viruses, but it does know how to try, at least, to capitalize on an opportunity to weaken nations that are better than Russia - as witnessed by an EU report stating that pro-Russian media outlets are sowing disinformation about the current pandemic in order to try to aggravate the public health crisis in the West. Nice to see what Putin's priorities actually are.
But it's not just heads of nations whose work is being tested by this storm. It's individuals and families as well. I am thinking of what our responses to a crisis say about our individual character. Of particular note is the extent to which each of us is addicted to mass media, including social media with its news feeds. And I am thinking of the mindset which I encountered when I was first exposed to the concepts of peak oil and resource depletion - the mindset which at the time was called prepping, but which I now call hoarding. It is a particularly dysfunctional kind of hoarding which makes people go to Winco and buy out all the Top Ramen, toilet paper, and beans they can get their hands on. And four times within the last nine months this behavior has appeared. The first three times, it was because the weather reporters on the news predicted heavy snow. Now, note - this happened in 2019 and early 2020 in Portland, Oregon. Yet people seem to forget that in 2008 it snowed for two weeks, and everyone managed to live without resorting to hoarding. People can be such...people...sometimes... Is it possible that many of us have built our lives on a set of poisonous assumptions and bad moral choices? How is your house holding up in all this rain?
- Matthew 7:24-27, World English Bible
The words of the Scripture quoted above came to me this week as I pondered the progress of recent events worldwide and nationally. The quoted parable defines wisdom quite specifically - namely as the willingness to do the things commanded by Jesus. But it also points out a couple of other facts, namely, that everyone is building something, and that storms come from time to time to test every person's work. If a person's house gets knocked down by the storm, he can't blame it solely on the storm - he must also admit admit that he was a stupid builder.
Thus the coronavirus pandemic might be viewed as a storm of a certain kind, and the leaders of nations might be viewed as those whose house-building is being tested. In particular, two kinds of leaders are being tested:
- those who understand as the Proverbs say, that a king's glory is his people, and that the king had therefore better provide for the common good of his people so that his kingdom can be strong;
- and those who cannibalize their people in order to enrich themselves.
The current storm, however, is exposing a lot of shoddy workmanship, bad carpentry, and substandard building materials in these "houses". Consider that Angela Merkel's Germany is weathering the coronavirus storm much better than the United States right now, because of two factors: a robust public health system, and a chancellor who tells the straight-up truth. Consider also the robust, clear-eyed responses of South Korea and Singapore to the current crisis. And lastly, consider the response of China, which after initially fumbling, took such steps as making testing free, removing all payment requirements for new patients seeking care, and enforcing of self-quarantine. As a result, new cases of COVID-19 are now declining in China. Compare that with the response of a certain Mr. Donald Trump, which can only be described as one long, continuous fumble. As a result of Trump's fumbling, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed today below the level it held on the day when President Barack Obama left office. And coronavirus cases in the United States continue to climb.
Trump's initial response - namely to downplay the severity of the crisis while doing nothing to help the people of the United States - is remarkably similar to the response of Boris Johnson, the current prime minister of Britain, whose government decided that the best way to protect Britain was to allow the virus to spread naturally in order to build up "herd immunity" among Britons. ("God save the Queen," you say?! How about "God help Britain!" With friends like these, who needs enemies?) Political pressure forced him to abandon this plan, but its replacement still looks a lot like "doing nothing."
Russia, on the other hand, seems to have adopted a different approach. According to the World Health Organization, Russia has only 199 confirmed cases of COVID-19 infection as of the time of this writing, with no confirmed deaths. Russia is therefore nearly perfect, the very thing every narcissist wants to be...except that a large number of Russian doctors are now saying that the Putin government is forcing them to under-report cases of COVID-19, and that the Russian medical system is so decrepit that accurate assessments of the current situation in Russia are impossible. They are also pointing out the extremely limited number of test kits available, the inaccuracy of these kits, and the fact that they are all made by one Russian monopoly. There also seems to be a sharp spike in cases of "community-acquired pneumonia" and "community-acquired influenza", with entire hospital wards being emptied of other patients in order to accommodate the new cases. Maybe Putin's government doesn't know the difference between COVID-19 and other viruses, but it does know how to try, at least, to capitalize on an opportunity to weaken nations that are better than Russia - as witnessed by an EU report stating that pro-Russian media outlets are sowing disinformation about the current pandemic in order to try to aggravate the public health crisis in the West. Nice to see what Putin's priorities actually are.
But it's not just heads of nations whose work is being tested by this storm. It's individuals and families as well. I am thinking of what our responses to a crisis say about our individual character. Of particular note is the extent to which each of us is addicted to mass media, including social media with its news feeds. And I am thinking of the mindset which I encountered when I was first exposed to the concepts of peak oil and resource depletion - the mindset which at the time was called prepping, but which I now call hoarding. It is a particularly dysfunctional kind of hoarding which makes people go to Winco and buy out all the Top Ramen, toilet paper, and beans they can get their hands on. And four times within the last nine months this behavior has appeared. The first three times, it was because the weather reporters on the news predicted heavy snow. Now, note - this happened in 2019 and early 2020 in Portland, Oregon. Yet people seem to forget that in 2008 it snowed for two weeks, and everyone managed to live without resorting to hoarding. People can be such...people...sometimes... Is it possible that many of us have built our lives on a set of poisonous assumptions and bad moral choices? How is your house holding up in all this rain?
Tuesday, February 11, 2020
The Coming Shenanigans of November 2020
For many of us who live in the United States, the November 2016 election shows overwhelming evidence of election fraud and tampering by the Trump regime and the Russian government. The nation was pacified into accepting the election results by the argument that it was really Trump's capture of a number of "battleground" or "swing" states, combined with the peculiarities of the Electoral College, that allowed Trump to "win".
Lest the same strategy is being revived to condition Americans to accept another fraudulent "victory" for Trump in 2020, I thought it would be good to re-post a 2017 interview I held with Rick Lass of the United States Green Party in which he described what happened when members of the Green Party asked for recounts of vote results in three of these "battleground" states. The response from the governments of these three states is illuminating, but hardly surprising, as the leaders of these states value earthly power above truth-telling. If you want to listen to the interview, there is a download link in the original post.
Lest the same strategy is being revived to condition Americans to accept another fraudulent "victory" for Trump in 2020, I thought it would be good to re-post a 2017 interview I held with Rick Lass of the United States Green Party in which he described what happened when members of the Green Party asked for recounts of vote results in three of these "battleground" states. The response from the governments of these three states is illuminating, but hardly surprising, as the leaders of these states value earthly power above truth-telling. If you want to listen to the interview, there is a download link in the original post.
Friday, December 27, 2019
No Room At The Realtor's
I am increasingly trying to live a disconnected life - as, in, disconnected from digital media. It's one of my ways of coping with a world ruled by very bad actors who want to make very bad news. (Another coping mechanism of mine is to work to create collective expressions of good news via collective constructive organic work. But I digress.)
This week, however, a bad actor managed to insert a bit of bad news into my consciousness. It happened while I was driving in Southern California on one of my regular visits to family. If you don't have streaming Internet because you don't want to be addicted to your smartphone, and yet you do want to know why you're stuck in traffic (and boy, was I stuck!), you have little choice but to listen to the radio for traffic updates. Being exposed to alarming headlines is an unavoidable risk of getting your information this way. So it was that I heard that Donald Trump is starting to attack Democratic leaders from states that have been experiencing a surge in homelessness.
This piqued my interest for a number of reasons. First, almost the only claims to legitimacy which Trump has are the performance metrics of the visible, formal economy. Those metrics paint a wildly optimistic picture of the American economy. (NASDAQ sets new records! Dow sets new records! Unemployment below 4 percent!) Yet the "boots-on-the-ground" reality which many of us see paints an entirely different picture, One of the parts of that picture concerns the epidemic of homelessness whose rate of increase jumped drastically under the Trump regime.
Trump's tweets this week about the homeless crisis contain a note of outrage over the lack of help which the homeless are receiving, yet as noted in at least one of the articles linked in this post, Trump is proposing actions which would exacerbate the homeless crisis even further by reducing the availability of affordable housing. His outrage is therefore hypocritical.
It might be good to examine the roots of homelessness in the United States, for I want to suggest that homelessness is a feature (and not a bug) of the very system of oligarchic capitalism and radical individualism that characterize American society. I don't have time today to get into a rigorous defense of my hypothesis, but I think it good to list a few items of history:
Two further observations. First, it is useful to see Trump as, among other things, a symptom of a greater evil. We know that Russia worked hard to insure that Trump would capture the White House, so we can see Trump in a very real sense as a manifestation of the will of the oligarchy (and its chief oligarch Putin) who now rule Russia. If the symptoms of extreme wealth inequality are now ballooning in America under Trump, it is only logical that we should see them ballooning in Putin's Russia as well, as has been noted in journalism covering the Russian homelessness crisis. See "St. Petersburg Tackles a Homelessness Crisis Moscow Won't Address," for instance, where you will read that Russia treats its homeless population the same way a narcissistic parent treats an imperfect child - as a limb to be amputated. One other similarity between Russia and the United States is that even during Russia's 21st-century supposed "roaring decade" (or more, accurately, "roaring few years" of high oil revenues from 2008 to 2015-2016), there were between one and five million children living on the street in Russia.
Second, both Trump and the Russian leadership find it useful to maintain a narcissistic facade of perfection, and to project their actual imperfections onto scapegoats who can be demonized by being "otherized." But on closer examination, the perfection which they seek to portray looks unsettlingly similar to the fragile bubble-film perfection of America in the Roaring Twenties. Most of 1920's America was suffering, yet the nation was deluded by the media portrayals of the good fortune of the rich. It required only a very small shift in consciousness to burst that delusion. The shift occurred once the wealthy were confronted with a crisis they could not handle. And then suddenly those who had been suffering all along began to become "activized." A similar phase change may be in our not too distant future.
This week, however, a bad actor managed to insert a bit of bad news into my consciousness. It happened while I was driving in Southern California on one of my regular visits to family. If you don't have streaming Internet because you don't want to be addicted to your smartphone, and yet you do want to know why you're stuck in traffic (and boy, was I stuck!), you have little choice but to listen to the radio for traffic updates. Being exposed to alarming headlines is an unavoidable risk of getting your information this way. So it was that I heard that Donald Trump is starting to attack Democratic leaders from states that have been experiencing a surge in homelessness.
This piqued my interest for a number of reasons. First, almost the only claims to legitimacy which Trump has are the performance metrics of the visible, formal economy. Those metrics paint a wildly optimistic picture of the American economy. (NASDAQ sets new records! Dow sets new records! Unemployment below 4 percent!) Yet the "boots-on-the-ground" reality which many of us see paints an entirely different picture, One of the parts of that picture concerns the epidemic of homelessness whose rate of increase jumped drastically under the Trump regime.
Trump's tweets this week about the homeless crisis contain a note of outrage over the lack of help which the homeless are receiving, yet as noted in at least one of the articles linked in this post, Trump is proposing actions which would exacerbate the homeless crisis even further by reducing the availability of affordable housing. His outrage is therefore hypocritical.
It might be good to examine the roots of homelessness in the United States, for I want to suggest that homelessness is a feature (and not a bug) of the very system of oligarchic capitalism and radical individualism that characterize American society. I don't have time today to get into a rigorous defense of my hypothesis, but I think it good to list a few items of history:
- Homelessness has been a feature of American society since the 1870's, and has been closely linked to two phenomena: the enforcement of the cultural notion that the only respectable living arrangement is for people to own their own homes (thus eliminating shared housing, boarders, and other "non-standard" arrangements), combined with the increasing expense of achieving this ideal. (Source: "Home and Homelessness in the United States: Changing Ideals and Realities", A. R. Veness, 1991)
- Homelessness was a surprisingly strong feature of the "Roaring Twenties", which has been widely taught to children by historiographers as being a time of rising prosperity for the majority of Americans. In reality, it was anything but. (Source: "Poverty in the Prosperous Years: The Working Poor of the 1920's and Today," B. Payne, 2013)
- During the 1920's, more than 60 percent of Americans lived below the poverty line. (Source: BBC GSCE CCEA, Retrieved 27 December 2019)
Two further observations. First, it is useful to see Trump as, among other things, a symptom of a greater evil. We know that Russia worked hard to insure that Trump would capture the White House, so we can see Trump in a very real sense as a manifestation of the will of the oligarchy (and its chief oligarch Putin) who now rule Russia. If the symptoms of extreme wealth inequality are now ballooning in America under Trump, it is only logical that we should see them ballooning in Putin's Russia as well, as has been noted in journalism covering the Russian homelessness crisis. See "St. Petersburg Tackles a Homelessness Crisis Moscow Won't Address," for instance, where you will read that Russia treats its homeless population the same way a narcissistic parent treats an imperfect child - as a limb to be amputated. One other similarity between Russia and the United States is that even during Russia's 21st-century supposed "roaring decade" (or more, accurately, "roaring few years" of high oil revenues from 2008 to 2015-2016), there were between one and five million children living on the street in Russia.
Second, both Trump and the Russian leadership find it useful to maintain a narcissistic facade of perfection, and to project their actual imperfections onto scapegoats who can be demonized by being "otherized." But on closer examination, the perfection which they seek to portray looks unsettlingly similar to the fragile bubble-film perfection of America in the Roaring Twenties. Most of 1920's America was suffering, yet the nation was deluded by the media portrayals of the good fortune of the rich. It required only a very small shift in consciousness to burst that delusion. The shift occurred once the wealthy were confronted with a crisis they could not handle. And then suddenly those who had been suffering all along began to become "activized." A similar phase change may be in our not too distant future.
Saturday, November 9, 2019
A Clarifying of Stance
As regular readers of this blog know well, from October 2017 until a few weeks ago, I took a break from writing posts in order to focus on things that very much need to be done in realspace with real people and not disembodied clouds of electrons. Many of those things require ongoing work, so my posting will continue to be spotty for the next several months.
However, I do check my stats from time to time, and I noticed that this blog got several hundred hits during the last few days. I also noticed that visitors to this blog have been reading the extensive back catalog of posts I have written. There come times in the history of anyone who uses words when they have to eat a few of their own words, and I have lately realized that I need to eat some of mine. So here goes...
I started blogging back in 2006-2007, when I was just beginning to awaken to the real nature of white American power. I had been (and still am) a Christian, and a big part of the teaching I received from mainstream American evangelicalism was the notion that I should support American supremacy wherever and whenever possible because America was God's nation, and that the Republican Party was the party of true Godliness and Christian virtue. My process of detoxing from that Kool-Aid began with my leaving an abusive church run by a family of petty criminals. From that point I began to notice the patterns of abuse which not only appear in abusive churches whose leaders are not held accountable, but also extend to corporations, political parties, and nations whose leaders put themselves above accountability.
I had voted for George W. Bush in 2000 and in 2004 while still under the influence of mainstream American evangelical Kool-Aid, but in 2006, the contradictions and injustices of the Bush administration proved to be too much for me to swallow. As a person of color, what especially triggered my gag reflex was the appearance of overt anti-Latino racist campaign ads sponsored by the Republicans.
From 2007 onward, therefore, I began to search for and be drawn to writers whose perspective was not jingoist American patriotism. That unfortunately was the time during which writers such as Dmitry Orlov were becoming popular. He was a smooth talker, and his writing accurately captured many of the criticisms I had of America and of the historical and ongoing use of American power to oppress the vulnerable.
Over time (and especially as the police murders of unarmed African-Americans became much more obvious), the criticisms voiced by Orlov were joined by criticisms voiced by other Russian writers and media outlets like Russia Today. What I did not know was that these voices were not being raised in order to call America to repentance or to provide a viable alternative to the things they were criticizing, but to divide America in order that Russia might take the place of global hegemon. I also did not fully understand the extent to which national narcissism, exceptionalism, racism, white supremacy, and intolerance of other cultures had become part of the bedrock of Russian culture and society.
Thus it was that if you were reading my posts from 2007 up to 2016, you would have detected a strong pro-Russian bias. But those days are over. What ended them was the election of Donald Trump and the revelation of the part played by the Russian government in installing neo-fascist leaders and governments in many nations of the Global North. What ended my pro-Russian bias was also the revelation of the role played by people like Aleksandr Dugin in the formulation of Putin's geopolitical strategy. The words I must eat are the words I spoke in praise of Russia (and Putin) as some sort of viable alternative to the oppression which characterizes American power. Russia is no alternative. To steal a bit from Tolkien, Russia is to the United States what Boromir and Gollum were to the One Ring.
So...if you want to read my back catalog, please also read a few of these posts:
However, I do check my stats from time to time, and I noticed that this blog got several hundred hits during the last few days. I also noticed that visitors to this blog have been reading the extensive back catalog of posts I have written. There come times in the history of anyone who uses words when they have to eat a few of their own words, and I have lately realized that I need to eat some of mine. So here goes...
I started blogging back in 2006-2007, when I was just beginning to awaken to the real nature of white American power. I had been (and still am) a Christian, and a big part of the teaching I received from mainstream American evangelicalism was the notion that I should support American supremacy wherever and whenever possible because America was God's nation, and that the Republican Party was the party of true Godliness and Christian virtue. My process of detoxing from that Kool-Aid began with my leaving an abusive church run by a family of petty criminals. From that point I began to notice the patterns of abuse which not only appear in abusive churches whose leaders are not held accountable, but also extend to corporations, political parties, and nations whose leaders put themselves above accountability.
I had voted for George W. Bush in 2000 and in 2004 while still under the influence of mainstream American evangelical Kool-Aid, but in 2006, the contradictions and injustices of the Bush administration proved to be too much for me to swallow. As a person of color, what especially triggered my gag reflex was the appearance of overt anti-Latino racist campaign ads sponsored by the Republicans.
From 2007 onward, therefore, I began to search for and be drawn to writers whose perspective was not jingoist American patriotism. That unfortunately was the time during which writers such as Dmitry Orlov were becoming popular. He was a smooth talker, and his writing accurately captured many of the criticisms I had of America and of the historical and ongoing use of American power to oppress the vulnerable.
Over time (and especially as the police murders of unarmed African-Americans became much more obvious), the criticisms voiced by Orlov were joined by criticisms voiced by other Russian writers and media outlets like Russia Today. What I did not know was that these voices were not being raised in order to call America to repentance or to provide a viable alternative to the things they were criticizing, but to divide America in order that Russia might take the place of global hegemon. I also did not fully understand the extent to which national narcissism, exceptionalism, racism, white supremacy, and intolerance of other cultures had become part of the bedrock of Russian culture and society.
Thus it was that if you were reading my posts from 2007 up to 2016, you would have detected a strong pro-Russian bias. But those days are over. What ended them was the election of Donald Trump and the revelation of the part played by the Russian government in installing neo-fascist leaders and governments in many nations of the Global North. What ended my pro-Russian bias was also the revelation of the role played by people like Aleksandr Dugin in the formulation of Putin's geopolitical strategy. The words I must eat are the words I spoke in praise of Russia (and Putin) as some sort of viable alternative to the oppression which characterizes American power. Russia is no alternative. To steal a bit from Tolkien, Russia is to the United States what Boromir and Gollum were to the One Ring.
So...if you want to read my back catalog, please also read a few of these posts:
- The Black Hole At The Imperial Center
- No Strangers to Самовлюбленность
- The Resistance Heats Up In Russia
- Or, any of the posts that fall under the heading of "The Revanchism of the Third Rome."
Saturday, October 12, 2019
Fall-Winter 2019-2020: Please Drive Less
Why, you may ask. Well, you may have noticed that gas prices have been on the rise here in the U.S. However, my reasons for asking you to drive less extend a bit beyond trying to save you some change. My reasons actually extend into the realm of geopolitics, as you might have guessed. Here are some geopolitical reasons for you to chew on:
First, Russia is largely a petro-state whose economy depends to an excessive degree on exports of raw materials. This means that the stability of the Putin regime depends on a high price of oil and other exported extractive resources. The high price of oil between 2007 and 2012 allowed Putin to make a sort of bargain with the Russian people: allow Putin to be an autocrat in exchange for "stability", "order", and "prosperity." Low oil prices and sanctions have undermined this bargain - hence Putin's attempt to deflect attention from Russian domestic woes by his invasion of the Ukraine and his military operations in Syria. (Indeed, his intervention in Syria was meant to distract Russians from the failures of his operations in the Ukraine.)
Second, the unraveling of the Russian economy has provided the Russian opposition to Putin with a huge window of opportunity. The economic stagnation (nay, even contraction!) which Russian society has experienced from 2014 onward has exposed the hollowness of the bargain which Russian citizens were enticed to make with Mr. Putin. As a result, resistance against Putin has spread like wildfire - especially from 2017 until now. Russians are increasingly experiencing "cognitive liberation", with the result that the attempts by the Russian government to use harsh punishment to quell public protests have instead made an increasing number of Russians even more determined to protest. This is a prime example of the dynamic of "backfire" at work in a civil resistance struggle. Once backfire starts to happen in a sustained way in an oppressed population, the oppressor or autocrat is in dire straits!
Third, it is quite possible that recent events related to the rise in oil prices may be an attempt by Putin to scrape together enough cash to re-instate his "bargain" with his own people. Consider the drone attack against Saudi oil production facilities a few weeks ago. Some blamed "Houthi rebels" while Trump blamed Iran. I certainly do not claim to have the proof needed to tell you exactly who did it. But I do know that Saudi oil production facilities experienced a cyberattack in 2018, and that that cyberattack originated from the Russian "Central Scientific Research Institute of Chemistry and Mechanics". It is also known that Russia has initiated cyberattacks against Ukrainian power distribution infrastructure and other Western targets. And it is known that Russia and Saudi Arabia are oil production rivals. The 2018 cyberattack was not the first against Saudi oil facilities. It seems that whoever wants to knock Saudi Arabia out of the oil exporting game has gone from throwing electronic signals at them to throwing bombs and bullets. And this past week an Iranian oil tanker was attacked off the Saudi coast. These are the reasons why oil and gasoline prices have been climbing lately. High oil prices might prop up Putin's regime a little longer.
Fourth, whatever we on the outside can do to deny Putin what he wants helps to remove from the earth a threatening regime that wants to take over the world. This reason should actually have been first on the list. Don't like Putin (or his familiar spirit, Aleksandr Dugin)? Then walk, bike or take public transit to the places you need to go. Save a few bucks (and the world) in the process. By the way, for every finger I point at you, there are three pointing back at me! If I get up early tomorrow (contingent on getting to bed early tonight), I can bike to work...
First, Russia is largely a petro-state whose economy depends to an excessive degree on exports of raw materials. This means that the stability of the Putin regime depends on a high price of oil and other exported extractive resources. The high price of oil between 2007 and 2012 allowed Putin to make a sort of bargain with the Russian people: allow Putin to be an autocrat in exchange for "stability", "order", and "prosperity." Low oil prices and sanctions have undermined this bargain - hence Putin's attempt to deflect attention from Russian domestic woes by his invasion of the Ukraine and his military operations in Syria. (Indeed, his intervention in Syria was meant to distract Russians from the failures of his operations in the Ukraine.)
Second, the unraveling of the Russian economy has provided the Russian opposition to Putin with a huge window of opportunity. The economic stagnation (nay, even contraction!) which Russian society has experienced from 2014 onward has exposed the hollowness of the bargain which Russian citizens were enticed to make with Mr. Putin. As a result, resistance against Putin has spread like wildfire - especially from 2017 until now. Russians are increasingly experiencing "cognitive liberation", with the result that the attempts by the Russian government to use harsh punishment to quell public protests have instead made an increasing number of Russians even more determined to protest. This is a prime example of the dynamic of "backfire" at work in a civil resistance struggle. Once backfire starts to happen in a sustained way in an oppressed population, the oppressor or autocrat is in dire straits!
Third, it is quite possible that recent events related to the rise in oil prices may be an attempt by Putin to scrape together enough cash to re-instate his "bargain" with his own people. Consider the drone attack against Saudi oil production facilities a few weeks ago. Some blamed "Houthi rebels" while Trump blamed Iran. I certainly do not claim to have the proof needed to tell you exactly who did it. But I do know that Saudi oil production facilities experienced a cyberattack in 2018, and that that cyberattack originated from the Russian "Central Scientific Research Institute of Chemistry and Mechanics". It is also known that Russia has initiated cyberattacks against Ukrainian power distribution infrastructure and other Western targets. And it is known that Russia and Saudi Arabia are oil production rivals. The 2018 cyberattack was not the first against Saudi oil facilities. It seems that whoever wants to knock Saudi Arabia out of the oil exporting game has gone from throwing electronic signals at them to throwing bombs and bullets. And this past week an Iranian oil tanker was attacked off the Saudi coast. These are the reasons why oil and gasoline prices have been climbing lately. High oil prices might prop up Putin's regime a little longer.
Fourth, whatever we on the outside can do to deny Putin what he wants helps to remove from the earth a threatening regime that wants to take over the world. This reason should actually have been first on the list. Don't like Putin (or his familiar spirit, Aleksandr Dugin)? Then walk, bike or take public transit to the places you need to go. Save a few bucks (and the world) in the process. By the way, for every finger I point at you, there are three pointing back at me! If I get up early tomorrow (contingent on getting to bed early tonight), I can bike to work...
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