Watching the Sun Go Down

In the most fractious time in American history, Abraham Lincoln said, “I am an optimist because I don't see the point in being anything else.” A few days ago, in times that are in rhetoric if not yet cannon fire a runner up to Lincoln’s era, Kevin McCarthy expressed the same sentiment on the eve of his eviction as Speaker of the House.

I’m with them.

I’ve never considered the philosophical roots of my own optimism, it’s just the way I am. When cause for pessimism growls, I start looking for a way to get past the monster without getting eaten. In that way, optimism is more than just a state of mind, it’s a survival mechanism for spotting and avoiding danger.

Lately, the growling is pretty loud. And the path to a safe exit isn’t obvious.

Trump. MAGA. Or, if you prefer, the commie Democrat party. Whatever side you’re on, it’s pretty obvious that the battle has now devolved into partisan trench warfare. We’ve got everything but barbed wire and mustard gas. Remind me, how did that work out in WW I? In our Civil War (still called the Lost Cause by many in the South) how many boys were carried home to die in their mother’s arms? How many more died in an anonymous ditches? 

Well, A. Lincoln preserved the Union, so maybe he was justified in his optimism, for the life of the Union, if not his own. Maybe a modern Lincoln will pull us together. And maybe there won’t have to be bloodshed this time. 

But we got dangerously close on January 6, 2021. If Trump gets back in the oval office, I’m confident he won’t leave. Just as Hitler insisted that the good people of Austria cried out to him for liberation from the Jews, when it comes time for him to leave, Trump will bellow that American patriots demand that he declare martial law and remain in office to save the country.

When Meg and I walk along the shore at the end of the day, we often pause to watch the fiery ball that gives us warmth and life slide into the sea. It sinks slowly at first, almost imperceptibly. At the end, though, it goes fast. And in a blink, it's gone.

If I had Been Kinder

When I was a boy, not yet even a teenager, I trapped squirrels and tried to keep them as pets. They didn’t like it. They rubbed their noses red trying to break out of my wire mesh walls. I’ve never thought I had a cruel streak—I didn’t vaporize ants with a magnifying glass—but I did trap those squirrels, so what was that?

In law school, I found another outlet for my instinct to dominate. Combat by verbosity. Early on, the stuff I did was boring. No chance for a well-placed dagger to the soft belly of opposing counsel. The only thing opposed to me were shelves of dusty law books.

Eventually, though, I broke out of that research cloister and began doing corporate acquisitions. Papering them, really, but I thought I was an indispensable warrior in my clients’ battles to take over companies that were underperforming and needed a shot in the arm…or a kick in the pants.

I had been ambling along in my law firm to that point, working hard but not zealously. Something changed in me when I suited up for combat, which was the way we viewed it. To the companies being pursued, or at least their managements, it was a life-or-death struggle. The lawyers on each side were the mercenary troops. I was one of them. Through field promotions, I became platoon leader, a persona I retained even when I became a white-collar general.

I’ve never been in actual combat, but I understand about motivating people to do a job. We were an elite squad, we told ourselves. Indispensable, ready to give our all to win our battles. (Our all in this case was largely sleep and time with our friends and families.)

Not everyone in a fighting platoon is the strongest member, but each is crucial to the success of the unit. If there is a slacker, he has to be convinced to dig in and work harder…or he has to go. 

Usually there was time between battles to adjust staffing so that every member was as dedicated to the mission as the others, but sometimes adjustments had to be made mid-battle. When a deal we thought was dead sprang back to life, one person on vacation refused to return. He was cut from the squad and his reputation sullied.

Even now, many years later, I feel badly about that. Wasn’t there a kinder, more humane way to make that transition? After all, we ended up getting along fine without him. Couldn’t I have just made a substitution on the fly and let him enjoy his vacation? I told myself at the time that a tight squad could only function on loyalty and commitment. If he didn’t want to make the sacrifice, he should just go work peacefully somewhere else and leave the fighting to the warriors.

Really, that’s the way we thought about it. War metaphors. It was only money and ego that were being fought over, but we worked ourselves up to the same fever pitch I imagine in real warriors.

Why did we do that? Why did I do that? Obviously, it was an effective way to get deals done, just like it’s an effective way to win battles, but was it worth it? And, as importantly, what atavistic urges underly bringing that level of life-or-death intensity to mere business transactions?

Maybe some of us just can’t help ourselves. We want to cage squirrels to see if we can domesticate them. We don’t outgrow those domineering impulses, we just re-direct them. We tell ourselves we are the masters of the universe, when the truth is we are on an ego trip. If you’re not in our platoon, you don’t matter. If you’re in the opposing squad, it's a fight to the death.

The Godfather famously said, “It’s not personal, it’s just business.” But there is nothing more personal than lives damaged in pursuit of a bigger fortune or another notch on a corporate gunslinger’s belt. 

Changing the World

    We thought we could change this world

    With words like love and freedom — Eagles, “The Sad Cafe”

So many of us did. All of us young. All of us idealistic. Our world was so small in our youth that it did seem manageable, and changeable. We grew up, saw how big it is, how diverse, how Darwinian, and soon enough we settled for trying to make it a better place. We marched and carried signs, we volunteered for causes. Some of it helped. I hope.

I do think the world is a better place for many than it was when I came of age. Less global poverty, more literacy. Nations have their ups and downs. Dictators rise and are overthrown. But rise again. Democracy is a messy, unorganized effort, and fragile, as we are sensing in the US today. Some days hope seems naive. Why do so many people still support Trump?

I know, they’re angry about being left out, or behind, or both. Angry about being dissed by the elites. We should strive to give everyone a good shot at making their way in the world, no doubt about that. We are having a tough time agreeing on the best way to do that. Kill off government and let everyone fend for themselves? Or give everyone a guaranteed basic income, regardless of whether they do anything to earn it? Or something in between those extremes?

And what is the best way to steer the policy ship? Top down? Bottom up? Ban what we think hurts us, or tax it so it is just too expensive to be practical for most of us?

I realize now that these debates have been going on for longer than I have been alive. They started before I was a gleam in my parents’ eyes. Long before that. All the way back to the beginning of time. They will never be settled. We can hope that the means by which we seek to resolve them trends away from violence toward reason. Even that hope is tested every day. Even in a country as thoughtful as ours. There was nothing thoughtful about the Capitol riot. There is nothing thoughtful about “If you go after me, I’m coming after you.”

So where is the hope?

It’s in our children.

I have five. All of them have good moral compasses. All of them are kind and thoughtful. All of them are generous and loving. None of them stormed the Capitol. None of them thinks Trump won the election. None of them thinks migrants should be left to drown in the Mediterranean or the Rio Grande. None of them thinks anyone in the US should have food or healthcare insecurity.

When I was born, the global population was 2.3 billion. Today it is 8.1 billion.

That’s a lot of new people. Who knows what their values are. It’s clear to me that not many of them are listening to anything I have to say. I’m not going to convince anyone that we should all be responsible for cleaning up our own negative externalities. Or for helping our neighbors who don’t look like us. The reason I know this is because I’ve tried and haven’t, as best as I can tell, made a dent in anyone’s opinion.

But their mothers and I did raise five excellent citizens of the world. I’m proud of that, and of them. They are my hope for changing the world. It’s just going to take a little longer than I originally thought.

Businesses United for Stability

Businesses like stability. You generally can’t trust them to look after anyone but themselves, but they and the general public share a lot of common ground. Businesses make things we need. They innovate. They strive for efficiency. They do all that in the name of profit, but we all benefit from those efforts. Historically they haven’t been great stewards of the environment, and they are slow to fess up to other harms they cause, but we have laws and regulations to keep them more or less in check in those areas.

Businesses have to plan ahead, sometimes far ahead, so they don’t like unexpected changes in the rules of the game. They don’t like trade wars. They don’t like economic conflict. Businesses who need lots of workers like sensible immigration policies.

Not surprisingly, businesses want to have a say in government to assure their needs are considered. So, they liked the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which gave them broad rights to contribute to politicians. 

Many of us, including me, thought that decision was a bad one. We thought businesses didn’t need more political clout. 

I think I may have have changed my mind. Why? Because I like stability too.

Trump gave us the opposite of stability. The rest of the GOP is not much better. These days, businesses are looking like my friends. They are like a gyroscope on our national clown car to keep it from careening out of control.

Businesses got us where we are economically. So, if they want to make big donations to politicians who share their interests, fine. At least I know that most of their interests align with mine. I can’t say that about the MAGA wing of the Republican party, which seems to hold sway over most of the GOP these days.

Family Ties

What happens when siblings remember their parents differently? Dad was abusive. No, he was charismatic.

The truth is, he was both. What’s different is not so much our memories, as our willingness to accept the effect he had on us.

Many of us worshiped our fathers. All the more so if they were out of the house a lot and when they were home swung between playing with us and lecturing us, sometimes with a red face and a wagging finger.

B.F. Skinner first demonstrated that inconsistent rewards produce the strongest reinforcement of behavior. If you’re never quite sure whether you will win a parent’s approval, you try all the harder for it.

That explains a lot about how young children and adolescents relate to mercurial parents. As we age, we become able to see a parent’s erratic behavior for what it is, and stop seeing it as a reflection on our own worth. We learn that parents who periodically rage at children are the ones with the problem, not the children.

But what happens if you are a child of such a parent and he dies before you have come to that mature understanding of his behavior? Your emotional response to it is frozen in the time of your adolescence. 

When your siblings say, “You know, Dad was a little crazy,” you might offer that being a little crazy is the flip side of brilliance. The adult in you cannot hide from the fact of his inappropriate behavior, but the child in you still sees it as part of his bright sun, the one you longed to be in the warmth of.

The trouble comes when a sibling tells you that he hurt him. Emotionally and physically. Or your mother tells you he hurt her, emotionally and physically.

What do you do with that information?

Impugn the source, likely as not. He was weak. She was unstable. Secretly you might even tell yourself they deserved it. They weren’t as strong as you. He didn’t love them as much as he did you. It’s wrong for them to attack his memory. He can’t fight back, so you do it for him.

Families are a separate thing from the people who make them up. They don’t exist except in relation to one another. The good memories may be there, but the bad ones always come up. As William Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”

When these dynamics are at play, it may be too hard to keep going back over the past. Nothing is solved. Old wounds are ripped open and bleed as freshly as when first inflicted.

We’ve been taught that nothing is more important than family. Maybe that’s so. But it may also be true that sometimes family is not as important as the individuals in it.

How Much Am I Worth?

I recently wrote about medical treatments I would be receiving. I said I was grateful to live near a first-class medical center and to have medicare to pay for it all. I lamented that so many others do not.

I finished those treatments and got the bill. Or, actually, I did not get a bill. Instead, I got statements from medicare and my medigap insurer about how much was charged by the hospital and doctors and how much they were paid. My share of the payments was zero.

So, that’s great, right? Well, I suppose. For me.

As I write this, the nation has once again reached its debt ceiling. Now Congress will fight over raising it. Fiscal conservatives will demand spending cuts, targeting programs like medicare. I don’t agree with their tactics—and certainly not their rhetoric and factual distortions—but we need more rational discussion about how we raise money (taxes) and how we spend it.

My treatments were billed by the hospital and doctors at over $500,000. Under medicare, the providers got paid about five percent of what they charged. (My private medigap insurance paid another one percent.) They accepted that. As I said, I owe nothing.

Great program, right? A ninety-five percent discount. Let’s do that for everyone. By that reckoning Medicare For All would be dirt cheap.

Of course, it wouldn’t be. Our national system of healthcare providers may be charging too much, but they could not take a ninety-five percent haircut and stay in business. In a health system that covered everyone, reimbursements would have to be greater, which would raise the cost to government, which would have to raise taxes to pay for the added cost, or cut services.

You can’t get anything repaired today for less than market rates, not well anyway, and not for long. Plumbing, electricity, roofs, kidneys, lungs, hearts. When it comes time for a new water heater, we have to make choices. If our budget is tight, something less important might have to wait.

The same is true of healthcare. We see that reality in every country that has free healthcare for its citizens. As The Rolling Stones said, “You can’t always get what you want...”

As our population ages, we are spending more and more of our healthcare dollars on old folks like me. The question is obvious: are we worth it?

Even in a country as prosperous as ours, we don’t have boundless resources. We have to make choices about where to invest. In a child of five with many years ahead of her, or in a man of seventy five, who is coming to the end of the line?

Every human life is worth something. None is worthless. But is each one worth the same investment from the public treasury?

When put in those terms, the question answers itself.

Goodbye to All That

This was the year:

Putin showed his true colors…and Ukrainians theirs.

So, so many died, not just of covid but of drug overdoses, gunshots, long undiagnosed maladies, storms…and yet we carry on.

Crypto lived up to its name, crypt being a burial site.

The stock market reminded us that trees don’t grow to the sky.

Elon Musk reminded us that he really is a jerk, and that being smart is no excuse for stupid behavior.

China pivoted from zero covid to a full-blown health emergency, because “it’s the economy, stupid.”

U.S. tech decided it’s time to come home, because it’s a long way from China when you need your chips in a hurry.

Joe Biden settled us down and got a few important things done, so that Republicans would continue to have something to complain about.

AI showed promise on so many fronts…and lord knows we can use any added intelligence we can get, artificial or otherwise.

It’s been a rough patch, but we always do better when pulling together to deal with adversity. Let’s hope we’re smart enough to remember that in the coming year.

Thirty Days of Biking

I’m getting some medical treatments at Stanford. I have to go in every day during the week for seven weeks. As of today, I’m halfway through. For me, that mid-point benchmark is like the winter solstice: psychologically, my days will get brighter from here on.

I’m in no danger of dying. Indeed, the point of the treatments is to assure that, at least with respect to the current bête noire. One never knows when another might pop out of the shadows of my inner workings, but I don’t worry about that, I just deal with the ones I can see.

It’s true, I have to admit, that I’m not as young as I think I am, as I feel. But both my grandfathers lived to be almost a hundred, so I think I have some miles left, with, as Bruce Springsteen says, “a little touch-up and a little paint.”

Meg and I live in Carmel now, too far for a daily commute to Palo Alto, so some very kind and generous friends loaned us their guest house for the two months. We brought our bikes, and I bike every day to and from the hospital. I wear a garish orange jacket that cars can easily see, and that I feel the need to explain to the wonderful hospital staff is not a fashion choice.

There’s something about biking that makes my soul take flight. The effortless freedom of gliding along in the sunshine and fresh air. It’s my decompressor, both going and coming. I’m so grateful for it.

Which, since it’s almost Thanksgiving, brings me to the many other things for which I am profoundly grateful. For Meg, most of all, my lover and my guide through good times and bad. For my children, who are as attentive and loving as any parent could hope, in good times and bad. For our friends, like the ones in whose house I am writing this.

Last, but certainly not least, I am grateful for the chance to keep living with vigor and purpose. Both Stanford hospital and I have deep wells of support buoying us. A first-class medical center has first-class doctors and equipment. I’m getting the best of that. I have Medicare. Based on past experience, I don’t think this amazing treatment is going to cost me anything.

I feel a little guilty about that. So many people in our country don’t have that advantage. Medicare is only for old folks. Medicaid, which is for poor folks, isn’t available to everyone. And in the middle, private insurance can be hit and miss. If a first-rate medical center isn’t in you health insurance network, you’re going to have to accept second best…or third, or worse.

The way we handle health care in our country is inequitable and dumb. Many states have refused to expand Medicaid to cover more of their poorer citizens, even though the federal government pays over ninety percent of the cost. It’s hard to conclude they are acting out of any motive other than ill will toward the people who are on the lowest rung of the socioeconomic ladder. And it’s stupid, from a purely fiscal standpoint, because we have shown over and over that prevention is much cheaper than treatment after health problems become chronic or acute.

So, not only do I get first-class medical care for free, just because I’m old, but I get to ride my bike to it in my ugly orange jacket, and feel the sun on my face, and the freedom of gliding effortlessly along the road of life that has been smoothed out for me by the lawmakers of decades ago who gave us Medicare. Forward thinking men and women who, sadly, did not fully succeed in passing along to their successors their common sense and compassion.

We can do better. We need to keep trying.

Mob Psychology

Crowd psychology refers to altering one’s views to go along with those of others. We may do this to win friends, fit in, or not look stupid. 

There is another term for this phenomenon: mob psychology. This conjures up angry townspeople outside the jail tossing a rope over a nearby oak limb as they demand retribution. If there’s a sheriff in the way who tries to reason with them, he might fare no better.

Or angry and frightened villagers storming Dracula’s castle with torches, crosses and holly stakes.

These are more than just crowds. They are mobs. There are fewer old west lynchings now, and vampires are confined to movies, so if you’re looking for a good old fashioned mob frenzy today, you have to go to a Trump rally.

There you will be able to cheer loudly with all the others around you at a fairgrounds in Robstown, Texas, when your hero suggests that journalists withholding the names of leakers should be sent to jail where they will be other prisoner’s brides; raped, in case that wasn’t clear.

Why do they cheer? Well, it’s simple really: they’re a mob whipped up by a master manipulator. Like Hitler. Like Mussolini. 

I don’t like Trump, but he’s just one man. Without his rabid crowds, he would be no more a threat to us than the odd eccentric on a soapbox in a public park telling everyone that the world is coming to an end.

Why do we listen to Trump when we don’t listen to the nuts on soapboxes?

That’s the million dollar question.

Social scientists and politicians theorize that he is speaking to the grievances of his followers, making them feel included and hopeful when they have fallen on tough times, or at least giving them someone to look down on and hate.

In other words, he is inciting them to hatred, often to violence.

He’s not going to help them. Those of us not in his thrall know that. He’s just using them for his own pleasure and aggrandizement. And they love him for it, for giving them purpose—hatred.

What is there to do about it? Many of us have thought his crowds would wake up and see what a fraud he is, what a false prophet. So far, they have not.

They are the problem—their weakness and susceptibility to being misled and abused—but getting rid of him is the only practical way we can deal with them. Without him, his mobs will still be discouraged and angry, even hateful, but there will be no one to gather them together in the torchlight and direct them to storm the castle (or the Capitol).

The unfortunate truth is that we are a danger to ourselves. For reasons I’m not sure we fully understand, there is a little bit of the mob in all of us. Lying dormant, waiting for the stimulus that awakens some atavistic urge that no doubt helped us survive in grittier times but which now stands in the way of the cooperation we are going to need from now on to thrive on our increasingly hot and dry planet.

The Queen in a Soundproof Cage

Here’s a heretical question: why is it considered a good thing that we had no idea what Queen Elizabeth thought about anything? Well, that’s not precisely true. We know she loved horses and corgis. We know she was frustrated with her family now and then. We also know she thought it her duty, for the sake of the survival of the constitutional monarchy, not to express her opinions.

She did a good job, both at keeping mum and at not blowing up the monarchy. With the ratty ermine she inherited, stained by her kingdom’s brutal colonialism and worn thin by the feckless behavior of so many in her family, past and present, it was a remarkable achievement. Her people loved her. Like them, I too was sad to see her go. She had pluck. She did the job she set for herself about as well as anyone could. 

Tina Brown wrote about her recently, saying the Queen loved her job and proved once again, along with Elizabeth I and Victoria, that women are very good at it. So, what was her job, exactly? Brown called her the CEO of the institution of the monarchy. That’s a fair description, I think. She was the boss of the inner workings of royal public service and of castles, lands, titles and pageantry, the glittering trappings of the time when kings and queens actually ruled. Some think the English monarchy continues to survive because it is good for the economy. Disneyland needs a CEO, so no surprise the monarchy-as-tourist-attraction needs one too.

Fine, if that’s all we’re hoping for. But it seems to me that an opportunity is lost when a head of state, even a strictly ceremonial one, plants their head, crown and all, in the sand. There are politicians aplenty, so we don’t need more of those. Indeed, deference in politics is necessary for the monarchy to coexist side-by-side with a democratic government. But Elizabeth II was a queen. Her opinions could have mattered, could have been a positive influence, a steady guide through turbulent times. I know times were different then, but we knew the opinions of the other two great women monarchs Brown mentioned, Elizabeth I and Victoria. We even knew Bob Iger’s opinions when he ran Disney.

Elizabeth’s son Charles is king now. It will be interesting to see how he walks the line laid down by his mother. Since 1968 he has been a strong advocate for action on climate change. Will he now pretend that is no longer something he can talk about?

Perhaps the greatest lesson of the English monarchy is that to survive it had to adapt to changing times. So, too, we humans can't go on merrily plundering our planet, metaphorically chopping off the heads of those who displease us. Charles has our attention now, and he has the credibility of one who is the head of a once mighty institution that adapted to survive an existential threat. Whatever the evident merits of his mother's political abstinence, it is time now for Charles to lead by a new example, one that continues to embrace humility and perseverance, but which also nudges us to face the reality of the threat to our home.

If I Had a Gun I Might Shoot You

If I had a gun, I might shoot you. 

Don’t worry, I don’t. I turned in my 20 gauge skeet gun to be destroyed ten years ago. I thought too many guns were a societal problem. I wanted to do my part by getting rid of mine.

Since then, with the flood of guns, practically encouraged by the Supreme Court, I’ve once or twice thought I might be the last unarmed person around. My self-preservation instinct runs pretty hot, so I’ve wondered if I’m being naive. Maybe I should be carrying.

I haven’t been in a fight ever. I got punched once when I was a mouthy teen, by the son of a waitress I was bitching about. (Never saw it coming; deserved it.) Every time fight or flight has been activated by my base brain, I have chosen some form of flight. Mainly because I don’t want to fight. Also, plenty of guys are bigger and stronger than I. It would be beyond stupid to take a swing at them.

But what if I could, in the blind rage that sometimes comes over us, reach into my waistband and pull out a gun? A gun is a great leveler. How big the dude is doesn’t matter.

I say “blind rage,” because that’s an easy way to think of escalation to violence. There must be something wrong with someone who gets in a blind rage, right? Well, maybe there is if we’re talking truly black-out rage, but there are plenty of states of anger on the way to that that are plenty dangerous.

Our amygdala goes into overdrive when we are threatened. It floods the zone with a bias for action over reflection. That’s how we survive. The choice of what action to take in that situation is based on an instant assessment of risk. Fleeing is almost always less risky, but men (I, at least) have a strong impulse to stand our ground. I don’t know where that comes from. It doesn’t strike me as particularly evolutionarily adaptive, but it it there nevertheless. States like Florida have even made it a legal right. 

I’m not likely to stand my ground if I know I’m going to get pounded to a pulp. But, if I had a gun…

I think you get my point.

We’re going the wrong way to arm ourselves. We are falling victim to our biology. It’s like not carrying condoms. We’re going to have sex, so we should be prepared. We’re going to get mad, sometimes very mad. The way to be prepared for that eventuality, though, is not to carry a gun. It’s just the opposite.

The Death of Me

Remember that old expression, “You’re going to be the death of me”?

You may not. You may have been better behaved as a child than I was. As I recall, it was usually spoken to me by an older relative. I never took it too seriously. In fact, I thought it was vaguely flattering, an implicit acknowledgement that I was too active, and by extension, too clever, for them to keep up. By merely trying they might collapse in exhaustion. Now that I think about it, that might have been my strategy. Not an actual collapse by my wardens, but at least a resigned relaxation of surveillance.

Well, now that strategy is being turned against me. I’m the sluggish old fogey. My tormentors aren’t my children or nephews, they are zealots pursuing their mad objectives as hyperactively as I pursued minor delinquencies.

They’re going to trash my neighborhood, but not with eggs, water balloons and toilet paper. They’re armed cultural vigilantes. It’s as if my boyhood friends and I weren’t satisfied with occasional freedom to do our private mischief but wanted to terrorize our parents and grandparents into never coming out of the house.

Need and abortion? Better not Google that. Someone is watching. Want to go to the corner grocery? Better keep an eye out along the way to make sure no one is carrying, which of course is going to be tough if their piece is tucked into their waistband and concealed by their shirt.

Want to call the cops for protection? Sorry, too late. The Supreme Court says it’s all perfectly fine. Like your favorite outrageous uncle might say “boys will be boys” when someone gets all wet from your assault with a hose. Except this time what is being shot is bullets and what we are getting wet with is blood.

It’s enough to make you just want to give up and stay inside. Of course, if we do that, we’ll never be safe to go out again. It will have been the death of us.

Roeing Against the Current

The roadsides of my youth were festooned with blazing demands to “Impeach Earl Warren,” the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court throughout most of the fifties and sixties. That’s the last time I remember the Court being so out of step with the citizenry in general, especially the Southerners who were my neighbors at the time. The Warren Court’s impeachable offenses were desegregating schools, assuring criminal defendants the right to counsel, reading criminal suspects their rights, and demanding that states’ electoral district lines count every person’s vote equally.

The Warren Court was an activist court, expanding individual rights and protections. The Jim Crow South wasn’t quite ready for that. I thought they’d gotten used to it, but I was wrong.

Embracing a new “Lost Cause,” they steadily chipped away at the progressivism they abhorred and finally packed the Court with a majority that resurrected the misogynist, racist zombies who had lain in their sepulchers these many decades, waiting for this moment like the undead in a bad movie.

The misogyny of the decision to overturn Roe is obvious. The racism a little less so, until you focus on the fact that it is primarily poor minorities who are most grievously affected. Richer people, mostly white, can simply travel to a state where, for now, abortions remain legal.

The same is true of the Court’s expansion of gun rights to permit guns to be carried outside the home. Everyone is a potential victim of gun violence, white or black, but the cities that have struggled hardest to reduce gun violence, like Chicago, New York and Washington, DC, are the ones where gun deaths are devastating minorities. Richer people move to the suburbs, behind a gate if necessary.

The social and political upheaval of the fifties and sixties, culminating in the Civil Rights movement and the protests against the Viet Nam war, led to violence and bloodshed. Martin Luther King urged non-violence, but Huey Newton and Bobby Seale were more impatient. “Burn, Baby, Burn.”

As in Iran in the seventies and Afghanistan today, theocrats have taken over the United States Supreme Court. Christian morals drive their decisions. Our laws grew out of some of those same moral principles, but laws and religious dictates are not the same thing. Until, suddenly, they are. Until Sharia law in the Middle East. Until something like ultra-orthodox Christianity in America.

It’s hard to overthrow the Taliban. It may be just as hard to wrench public policy from the Puritanical death grip of today’s Supreme Court.

But we must try. We must take to the streets. We must vote in every election, state, local and federal. We have been out-hustled and out-flanked by the radical religious right. The decisions by their Supreme Court picks are a call to action. We must heed it.

Unless of course, you’re rich and white and male and like where the Court is leading us, or are too self-satisfied and insulated to care. 

Our Struggle

On this Memorial Day, I remember and honor the men and women who sacrificed to sustain the American Dream. Thank you.

I would like to say to those who gave so much that their sacrifices were not in vain, that we have built upon the foundations of liberal democracy they shored up brick by bloody brick, but I am ashamed to say I cannot. We have failed them.

Today in America we protect unborn life but not those living, breathing and dreaming among us. The guns our fathers and grandfathers put away when they returned from war are now being taken up to turn not on our enemies but on each other. When Japan attacked us at Pearl Harbor, we declared war and defeated them. Now, as we attack one another, we sit by idly as if nothing can be done. Worse, as if taking action to halt the slaughter would make us un-American.

We are at war with ourselves, and we are losing.

When I was a young man, the future was clear to me. We were making progress on many fronts: technological, economic, legal and moral. Prosperity abounded. Ignorance was sent slinking back to its dark caves. The troglodytes living in the shadows didn’t trouble me; they were a minority, and maybe they would eventually die out altogether.

It turns out, though, that like Germany after the WW I Treaty of Versailles, they were licking their wounds, nursing their grudges and regrouping for an all-out panzer attack. Their heavy treads are grinding along the streets of our towns and cities, where we have become too complacent to recognize their danger, or so bitter and radicalized that we welcome them with flags and cheers as the Austrians welcomed Hitler at the start of WW II.

I don’t glorify the past. Intellectually, I realize that in may ways we have never had it better. We have indoor plumbing, antibiotics, vaccines and social security. Emotionally, though, it feels like we are sick with a disease for which we may not have a cure. Feeding on the same hatreds and prejudices that I had hoped we had put behind us, it is resurgent; and not having recently fought it in the stinking trenches and forests of Flanders and Ardennes, we seem to have lost our immunity to it.

Recently, when I asked someone I respect which nations he admires, he offered that America today is the least bad. That’s not the kind of dream I had for us. And at the rate we’re going, I’m not even sure that pale distinction will be a lasting one.

So, to come full circle, to those of you who came before and gave so much that we might live in freedom and prosperity, I apologize for our careless stewardship of your legacy. There will almost certainly be another great crisis that stirs our nation to unified purpose, a time when we will again as one take up your war-torn banner. I only hope that we will have not waited so long to be stirred out of our selfish indolence that we lose this next great struggle. We’ve never lived in totalitarianism. I don’t think we’ll like it.

Something's Happening Here

I’ve just read that the latest large language model AI (GPT-3, not to be confused with the adorable but less understandable R2-D2) can write novels better than I. Well, I suppose that’s a relief. I can quit banging my head against that wall. I mean, GPT-3 can crank out a good one, in any style, in seconds. Who can compete with that?

AI has always been my unrequited love. So it’s appropriate that having stolen my heart she would also steal my avocation. She’s not going to get away with it so easily, though. I’m going to stalk her.

GPT-3 came from OpenAI, which came from a dinner meeting in 2015 at the Rosewood hotel in Palo Alto, where I used to live, attended by four AI pioneers, including Elon Musk, who moved on to electric cars, spaceships and tweets. The rest of them hung in there and gave us our new storyteller.

Palo Alto was always a fairy tale for me. There was a pot of gold there, and leprechauns, but I never saw them. Once I met the founder of the startup incubator Y-Combinator on the sidewalk where we bonded over our mutual contempt for gas-powered leaf blowers. And my neighbors and friends were atomic scientists, tech inventors and venture capitalists. I knew them and enjoyed them but I was always just a kid with my nose pressed up to the candy store window. My own fault, I guess, for not asking where the sweet magic was made.

But now, suddenly, achingly, I want to know.

My son Nick was programming machine learning in high school, ten years ago. When he went off to the University of Michigan, we met John Laird there, the head of a prestigious AI lab. AI seemed romantic and fanciful then, futuristic. 

If GPT-3 is any indication, we’re getting there; and it’s damned exciting. 

What does it mean? I’m not sure. To quote Buffalo Springfield, “There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear.”

But I am sure that pretty soon nothing will ever be the same. This is our century’s Industrial Revolution. I want to be part of that. It feels like taking a prairie schooner across the plains; or maybe it’s going to be like the Donner Party. It’s a new era, though, and those don’t come along that often. It would be a shame to just keep going through the same old motions and miss the world changing as I tie my shoes and brush my teeth. 

This is a wake up call, for me, at least.

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Credit to the excellent article on GPT-3 by Steven Johnson in The New York Times on April 15, 2022.