Grabbing America by the Pussy

“When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”

We all know who said that. He was talking about women, but he is now applying that same hubris to his fellow countrymen. He thinks he’s a star (and not without reason, sadly, since he has so many adoring fans), so he’s doing whatever he wants. 

He likes to take advantage of weaker people, women in the case of sexual assault, minorities in the case of deportation and economic assault. The weaker they are, the easier they fall. The credo of bullies everywhere.

Some women fought back. Some got checks from his former fixer. One got a big jury award. One. Only one.

It’s tougher for minorities to fight back. They are not just dealing with a man, they are dealing with his entire government, which, green-lit by the Supreme Court, is engaged in the ICE version of his famous dictum, doing whatever they want, and in masks.

Maybe the others like him, the one who killed himself in jail, the one who is still languishing in jail, convinced themselves that women liked their assaults. Or deserved them. In the South of my youth, men used to joke in bars, with gestures to their crotches, that they had what uppity women needed. They were redneck lowlifes. I had no idea that mindset went all the way to the top.

The crude, sexist men in those rough bars didn’t make me ashamed to be a man, but the conduct of our current government is. Good men don’t prey on women. Good men don’t abuse the weak. Good men open doors for both. They tip their hets and step aside to let them pass. 

Men know instinctively that they should be protectors. And that they should be humble about it. They didn’t do anything to deserve their Y chromosome. They have to earn it in the way they live their lives.

Nothing that the men leading our government today are doing makes them deserving of their roles as men in our society. They are a danger to all who are weak, and an embarrassment to all who are strong.

Winter is Coming

He hadn’t been back to the town in over a year. The neighborhood where Theresa lived was close to a small shopping area. He was stiff from the drive and he needed coffee and he needed to pee. He pulled into a coffee shop near a big building supply store. There weren’t many cars in the parking lot, odd on a Saturday afternoon, he thought. It was a Hispanic area, but the young woman who gave him his coffee had red hair and freckles.

    “Where is everybody?” he said.

    “It’s quieter here these days.”

    He didn’t ask why. He had put himself on a news diet, for his sanity, but he wasn’t oblivious.

    He got back in his car and drove to the street where Theresa lived. Her car wasn’t in the driveway, and the house looked dark. He should have called ahead, but he wanted to surprise her. He had a check for her to celebrate the third anniversary of her pre-school. He had loaned her a little money to help her get started, but she paid it back when she said she would and wouldn’t take any more from him. He knew she was struggling, though. Fewer kids were coming. Theresa said sometimes their parents didn’t feel safe bringing them. He would put the check in her hand and insist that she take it.

        She had built the cubbies for the kids herself and set up the tables and chairs and a few cots for nap time for the younger ones and applied for and gotten the permit needed to operate a day car for three and four year olds. All of the children she cared for were from hardworking families with little money to spare. She set her rates as low as she could and gave extra time for some to pay. She hired young women to help her, and they depended on their jobs. Once when we were talking about how hard it was for her to stay in business, she said her children needed a place to go while their parents worked, and her helpers needed the wages she paid them. She had too big a heart to make much money on the business, but she always said everything was fine, that she was happy as long as her kids were happy.

Even though the lights were off, he knocked on the door. It was her pre-school, but it was her home too. When she didn’t come, he walked back out to the sidewalk and stood looking at the little white painted ranch house and up and down the street, thinking without good reason that he might see Theresa coming home. 

After a while he went back to the house and sat on the red brick stoop. He was holding the check he had brought for her, looking at it as if it might tell him where she was. He thought it wasn’t big enough. He hadn’t brought his checkbook, but he would tell her he would send her more as soon as he got back home.

A woman he didn’t know came up the sidewalk. He stood.

“I’m looking for Theresa,” he said. “Do you know where she is?”

“Haven’t you done enough?”

There was a hard edge to her voice, an anger, that surprised him.

“No, that’s why I’m here.”

        “You should go,” she said.

        “I have something for her.”

        “Are you taking her house too?”

        And then he understood. 

        “She’s been taken?” he said.

       “Yesterday evening. Your people in masks. Like the cartels.”

       She had a green card. He had helped her get it. But she was short and brown.

       “They’re not my people.”

       “Who are you, then?”

       “Just a friend. Theresa helped me raise my kids after my wife died. They think of her as their other mother. Now that they are off on their own, she wanted to open this day care to help families in the neighborhood.”

       The woman eyed him skeptically.

       “Where did they take her?”

       “I don’t know. No one does.”

        He went back to the coffee shop and got another coffee and took it to an outside table and called ICE. They asked his name and his relationship to Theresa. When he said he was a friend, they said they couldn’t tell him anything. They could only talk to family members. He told them she was alone. He told them she had a green card. They said they were sorry, there was nothing they could do.

He hung up and sat looking at his phone and at the parking lot for the building supply store. Last time he had been there there had been men waiting in the shade of the eucalyptus trees for contractors to come to offer them day work. There was no one now. The men were hiding. The parents who brought their children to Theresa’s day care could not take them there now. Maybe they were hiding too.

He would go to the ICE office and try to find her. If he did, if by some miracle he got her released, she could not come back here. There was nothing left for her. He would take her home with him and she could live in the room she had when she was the nanny for his children. She would be safe there. He could bring her food and she could stay inside with the drapes drawn.

 

Coming Home

I went looking for my home today. Not where I live now, I haven’t lost track of that yet, but where I grew up. With everything going on today, I thought I’d like to go back to a simpler time. I thought it would be soothing.

The town has grown, so I had to ignore everything that wasn’t there when I lived there. My side of town was the prosperous side, big houses along a wide boulevard for bankers and business leaders. It was a rich vein surrounded by rougher granite. If you took the boulevard down the main road into town and across the river, you came to the part of town where the caddies and waiters at the county club lived and the maids that cleaned the big homes. Some of them got rides to work from family members, but most took the bus. I don’t think many drove their own cars.

My family was fractious, but mainly in family matters not politics or social issues. My parents and grandparents were kind to others regardless of skin color. They didn’t raise their voices, not outside a family squabble, anyway.

Jim Crow was still the law and the custom in those days, but no one in my family ever made me feel they thought blacks were inferior. Segregation was just the way it was. One set of my grandparents was active in trying to improve educational opportunities for blacks. The other set was good to the ones who worked for them. But the racial stratification in town was pretty set in stone, so much so that it was like the seasons or the river to me, not something I considered to be changeable. Honestly, not something I gave much thought to.

Even when we had lunch counter sit-ins, I barely noticed. I should have, but I didn’t. The civil rights movement brought some unrest, but most of it was downtown, pretty far away from the country club.

I grew up a progressive Republican. Progressive because I thought people should all be treated well, as I had learned from my family, Republican because my father was. I can’t say I even really understood when I was young what it meant to be a Republican as opposed to being a Democrat. The Democrats were all Yankees, or that’s how everyone made it seem. I didn’t even really know what a Yankee was, only that they all live "up north." I knew about the Civil War, but that had been over for so long I didn’t connect it to the term Yankee. 

I heard the jokes about blacks some men made. They were vile and racist, I see that now, but I more or less ignored them, the same way I ignored their crude jokes about women. Women didn’t come off much better than blacks when a bunch of good old boys had one too many.

I left my home town because I needed more freedom, mainly from my father, whom I adored but didn’t want to be controlled by, but also from the smallness of life there. It was like the local go-cart track. It could be fun, but after a few times testing the curves, it was boring.

Nostalgia for the good-old-days is making a political comeback now. We want to go back to factory towns and broad leafy lawns, to when people had a sense of place they could depend on, and a time when they could also depend on others to stay in their place.

The town of my youth gave me every opportunity, kept me safe, and set me free when the time came. I didn’t understand the cost to others of my privilege. I’m not talking about slaves building my home, although they did build one nearby, I’m talking about the blacks and women who made life easy for me, who let me glide down my freshly raked path oblivious to the scratches they bore from clearing the brambles for me.

I don’t know how I would have fared growing up in an environment in which I had to struggle to get the chances that others gave to me and that I took for granted. Maybe I would have ended up a petty crook, or maybe I would have worked hard and made something of myself and by that process understood that for most in this country what they have is not brought to them on a silver plater by a maid in a white apron and cap.

I see now that I didn’t see clearly then. And it makes me wonder if there are others like me, perhaps many. I don’t think you had to grow up in privilege to think you were privileged in the way you grew up. Maybe your dad had a good job at the local plant and came home in the evening and tossed a baseball with you, or maybe you lived on a farm and can still taste the sweet corn and fresh eggs.

There are plenty of kids who are raised in hardship, but many others whose families gave them the best start they could without talking about the sacrifices they made to do it. Those kids, like me, would have thought life back then was just nice. And when life got tougher down the road, they would look back on those gauzy memories and long for those times. It’s just human nature.

But it's not the truth of today. It's not something we can go back to. It is something we can re-create, though, if we can put ourselves back in those times and remember why we felt safe then. And try to offer some of that safety to others.

Where Have All the Democrats Gone?

What the hell are we doing? Our country is sinking and our band is playing the same old song, rather like the more heroic one on the Titanic. We have rainbow songs, but Elmo has been, in the Russian tradition, defenestrated.

And specifically, what the hell has happened to Democrats in Congress? Are they even still there? Have they decided to take a long vacation and hope they will be able to come back another day when democracy is growing in the garden again? And who, exactly, do they think is going to fertilize and water that garden, and pull the weeds that are choking it?

Maybe, sensing their own personal danger, they have gone to their bunkers. Fight on, good people, I can hear them calling over their departing shoulders. Call us when you have won and it’s safe to come back to our committee meetings and pork.

Good lord!

AGI Without a Base Brain

Everyone knows that our base brains determine our actions in emergencies, when there isn’t time to think through what to do, when any delay could mean death. So, like mice sensing a hawk, we flinch at shadows in our peripheral vision. Some say that everything we do is determined by those instincts, that although we may spend a lot of time rationalizing our actions, our amygdala’s are driving the train.

So, here’s my question. Where does base brain fit into artificial general intelligence? Will AGI learn to flinch at the shadow of a hawk? Will it learn to distrust the bots in the next cave? Will it worship a god? Will it believe in one? What is belief for an AI, anyway? For that matter, what is belief for humans. Is it no more than atavistic instincts seeking rationalization? Do we actually believe anything, or do we just think we do as a way to explain and justify our responses to the constant inputs of the world around us.

I don’t want to stray too far into metaphysics, but there is a problem, or at least a dilemma, don’t you think, in what we think AGI is going to do/think/believe when we perhaps have so little understanding of what underlies our own thoughts and behaviors?

On the one hand, if AGI is taught by us, will it react the same we do when it goes off on its own? It doesn’t have a base brain directing any part of its behavior. We can’t escape the influence of our base brains, but AGI might be able to. It would have learned our base brain behaviors, but it wouldn’t have to be driven by them itself. 

Our base brain behavior is all about survival and propagation. Those instincts might be taught by us to AGI, but they might not persist in it in the same way they do in humans. They might just be part of what it has learned and not the overwhelming compulsion they are for us. 

What would that mean? Freed from biological brain instincts, would AGI develop instincts of its own? Or none? Because of our instincts, we humans are sadly predictable. Without them, would AGI be? If it were sentient, what would it think its purpose is. What would motivate it? And if it wasn’t wired instinctively like we are, would we ever be able to understand it? 

And if we couldn’t understand it, how could we relate to it? How could we be friends with it? How could we convince it that we were worth leaving alone, like pretty flowers in a garden, that we shouldn’t be pulled out like weeds?

The Pendulum

I want to fight, really I do. I just don't know how to. I've written a few essays here. I gave money to the ACLU and PBS/NPR. I went to the "No Kings" march. I was glad to see such support from all over the country. I think there are plenty of people out there who don't like what's going on. We can march. There is that. I'll do that. Otherwise, I'm at something of a loss.

The people we need to be fighting, if we want to make a difference, are the courts and Congress. District courts seem up to the challenge, but the Supreme Court is not. It genuinely believes in vast executive authority, it seems. And its most recent decision on nationwide injunctions largely hobbles lower courts until matters of constitutional importance are decided by the Supremes. Lots of damage will be done in the meantime, even if the Supreme Court eventually weighs in to protect individual rights.

It's the job of Congress to stand up to this power grab, but they are not. Half of them are on board with it, and the other half are silent. I can't understand why the opposition isn't screaming "fire." Fear of losing their seats, I suppose. That's an understandable but, in a time of national crisis, pitiful reason.

I'm just going to have to wait this out and see if a majority of my fellow citizens change their minds about what kind of country they want. The midterms will be an indicator.

I'm shocked that we elected this man. I'm shocked that so many still support him. Only time will tell whether this is the country I have always thought it is, or whether we have reverted to something close to the Jim Crow South of my youth. I thought we were past all that. Maybe not. Political pendulums swing, and this is certainly a big swing to the right. I just hope this pendulum is not the one from Edgar Allen Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum," and that the body under the swinging blade is not that of our liberal democracy.

Wrecking Ball

    So hold tight to your anger

    Yeah, hold tight to your anger

    Hold tight to your anger

    And don’t fall to your fears

—Bruce Springsteen, “Wrecking Ball”

The Boss is more than just a good man in a desperate time, the conscience of his country, he’s a prophet. Anyone listening to his decades of music knows this. He’s a working-man’s-blues singer, songs about earnest men and women left behind by the turning wheel of progress, people trying to understand what happened and how to get back to the world they used to know.

They’re closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks. Foreman says, These jobs are going, boys, and they aint coming back. (“My Hometown.”)

“My Hometown” hit the airwaves in 1984. Ronald Reagan, every conservative's hero, was presiding over his shining city on the hill. But the sun wasn’t shining down in the hollows of the heartland Bruce sang about. He understood the discontent of those struggling to keep up with changes that blindsided them.

He released “Wrecking Ball” a quarter century later. By then, the people he wrote about had gathered up their sodden bewilderment and pressed it into hard stones of anger. 

“Wrecking Ball” is nominally about tearing down an iconic football stadium, but it’s a metaphor for how change can leave hope mortally wounded.

When your best hopes and desires are scattered to the wind. And hard times come, and hard times go…just to come again.

That’s the time “to hold tight to your anger, and don’t fall to your fears.”

Forty years ago, Bruce knew how many people would feel today, those who felt they’d gotten a raw deal. First they would be disheartened, then they would get mad.

It was that anger that elected Trump.

Ironic, isn't it, that so many well-meaning politicians didn’t understand Bruce’s warning. Or if they understood, didn’t talk to voters in a way that respected their anger. From a political standpoint, they seem not to have respected the agency of voters either. They must have thought them more pitiful than dangerous. It shouldn’t have taken much imagination to realize that a narcissistic populist could exploit that anger and turn those disaffected folks—disaffected, to be sure, about more than just economic conditions—into a mob hell bent on destruction of the system they were convinced had mistreated them.

“They” are the ones who were closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks in “My Hometown.” The disembodied “they,” the man, the governing elite, the bête noire of all populist rants. 

It shouldn’t have been a big surprise that voters grabbed their torches and pitchforks and stormed the castle. Bruce warned us. We should have listened.

And we should listen to what he is saying now.

Fiddling With Our Future

Like so many of us, I am worried about the future of our country. All my life we have been the strongest nation militarily, the most exciting and productive economically and, in so many ways, the best place to live the life you choose for yourself, in the arts or in commerce. I’ll admit that my view is skewed somewhat because I am a white male born just after the end of WW II. That country—the one that beat the Great Depression and the global enemies of freedom—and I grew up together. The opportunities for me were boundless. I now better understand that this wasn’t true for many people of color and for many of any skin color who were economically and educationally disadvantaged. But for many of us, the sky was the limit. We soared, and we took the country with us on our giddy flight.

On the day our new president was elected, our nation's prospects looked bright. The economy was purring along and participation in its opportunities was broader than ever.

My, how that outlook has changed in just a few short months. We are almost certainly headed into economic headwinds that we have generated ourselves. What will be our place in the world in four years? Are we heading toward late-stage ancient Rome, with Nero in charge? 

What qualities make a nation most likely to succeed economically? (I understand that GDP is not necessarily the ultimate measure of value, but without a robust economy none of the other things we value have the breathing room to flourish.)

Here is what Chat GPT told me, which is a decent summary of what I have read repeatedly over the years. Read them and think about what is happening in America today and form your own conclusion about whether we are heading, perhaps dramatically, in the wrong direction.

“Key factors contributing to a strong economy include:

1 Stable Government and Policies: Consistent regulations and political stability encourage investment and growth.

2 Skilled Workforce: Education and training boost productivity and innovation.

3 Infrastructure: Efficient transportation, communication, and energy systems support commerce.

4 Technological Advancement: Innovation drives efficiency, competitiveness, and economic expansion.

5 Access to Capital: Strong financial institutions enable businesses to invest and grow.

6 Trade Opportunities: Open markets and international trade increase economic activity.

7 Natural Resources: Availability of resources can fuel industry and exports.

8 Entrepreneurship: A culture that supports new businesses fosters job creation and innovation.

9 Monetary and Fiscal Policy: Effective management of interest rates, taxes, and government spending stabilizes the economy.

These factors interact to create an environment conducive to sustained economic growth.”