The Lion of Idaho series: Borah and the end of US neutrality during World War I

At the outbreak of World War I, the United States was a neutral country wondering: “Should we go to war?”  At issue was the sinking of the RMS Lusitania (sunk May 7, 1915) which claimed the lives of 128 Americans.  Was the US now involved?  Senator Borah urged his fellow legislators to take a hands-off approach.  He begrudgingly accepted the US’s invasion of Mexico during the coincident Pancho Villa Expedition and felt that the Lusitania did not merit breaking neutrality.

More importantly concerning whether to stay neutral or not was the selling of weapons to European belligerents.  In tail-wagging-the-dog fashion then – as today – the role of weapons manufactures was in question.  Is it a breach of neutrality to sell weapons to other states involved in war?  Borah’s Senate colleague Robert La Follette, a remarkable statesman in his own right, took up this issue.  “It is repugnant to every moral sense,” La Follette said, “that governments should even indirectly be drawn into making and prosecuting war through the machinations of those making money by it.” (197)

The war drums were beating steadily by this time.  Calls to go to war were made in the name of patriotism.  And the weapon sales that La Follette was arguing against were already taking place.  Although in 1914 Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan had “advised bankers that loans to belligerents would be inconsistent with our ‘true spirit of neutrality’”, the US government decided on the laissez-faire option.  And war became good for business:

[T]he Government announced that it would not approve or disapprove credits made by American banks for the purpose of facilitating belligerent purchases in the United States. […]  So much prosperity arose from the purchases made by the Allies in the United States that in August, 1915, the Government of the United States agreed that the belligerents might float public loans in this country. (198)

JP Morgan & Co. positioned the United States to support the Allies which “fueled charges the bank was conspiring to maneuver the United States into supporting the Allies in order to rescue its loans”.  The bank funded Russia, France and England.  After the war Morgan & Co. managed the reparations from and loaned money to Germany.

Borah eventually voted for joining the war saying, “I make war alone for my countrymen and their rights, for country and its honor” (203).  Was Borah picking one current among many leading to war that he deemed acceptable, running with it, arguing for it almost as a proxy?  Liberty is quite the concept to fight for but can also serve to blind one to the complexities of many situations, especially ones involving world politics.  Near the end of his life, as the next world war was breaking out, Borah infamously said, “Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler – all this might have been averted,” garnering scorn.  But who knows what would have happened if Borah could have addressed the German as men discussing pure concepts of liberty, etc.

I feel that in the events of war Borah maintained his integrity: another post could be the topic of his relation/opinion about banks.  I will let Claudius Johnson conclude with these stirring words re: Sen. Borah:

By inheritance, by instinct, by environment, by education, and by profession Borah is an individualist.  By the same token he has always stood for national individualism.  Political isolation and political isolation only, will, in his opinion, give us peace and the opportunity to work out our own democratic destiny.

Populism, democracy, aristocracy and dictators - post-election thoughts/complaints

The Bernie bumper stickers are fading.  All the hopes and dreams represented by a candidate are now forgotten as we move forward in our new reality.  This is the forgetting of the casually involved, those who activate their attention/have their attention activated for them only for the duration of the presidential election process.  Others remain involved: “the involved minority” always active on the periphery.

How much do you research politics and economics?  Oh, if you’re like me do you (sometimes?) spend more time reading about sports than you do about topics that actually matter to your life?  And keep in mind these ideas of state are debated by motherfuckers who study this shit full time.  Which means your part-time, exclusively tuned-in only during the months around the election research amounts to a drop in the intellectual bucket.

What is the right way?  Kaleidoscopic, myriad interests.  Fundamentally different moral bases that people operate from.  Different levels of intellect demanding different levels of stimulation.  What are the foundational ideas of a nation?  Of a people?  Of a family?  How do you debate merits of a presidential candidate when you cannot agree to common definitions of words you debate with?

Is it not time to reach a consensus on fundamentals instead of the clusterfuck of interests that our distracted attention spans so cloudily focus on for brief periods of electoral time?  Can we not cede – if we do not already in practice do – the responsibilities of deciding our interest to those who are more intelligent?

We do cede decision-making powers to others since our government, fed-state-local, is representative.  How do you decide what being intelligent is, though?  That is a big question and recently I was considering the work of Jose Ortega y Gasset in this light.  Basically, let an aristocratic class solve our problems – this has been the state of affairs in so many times and places throughout history.  Heck, you may even say that it is the case today, though we celebrate some kind of ideal of democracy.

Everyone is equal and gets to have a say.  Mob rule.  Isn’t this the ideal?  Is this possible?  Desirable?  I’ll be honest: based on the way my fellow Americans behave I would like a beneficent dictator to take over.  Remember, dictator did not always have a negative connotation.  If only those that rule today had the interests of the people in mind . . . um, never gonna happen, right?

Efforts toward perfection

There’s your choice: no fucking choice . . .  Sad, what are our options?  I am firmly ensconced in the choices I’ve made – happy, really – in a redoubt of familial obligations, duties by choice.  This limits, in my mind, what I can do, what I should do.  Also this redoubt jibes with the idea of primarily changing oneself.  First yourself and then the world and how goddam true that is.

We want the United States to change but ignore that role in ourselves – a bit ingenuous though.  I will say that some of those out acting (striving, being activists) have made the turn, have changed themselves, are the change they want to see.  Good.  A single man as I once was might live simply – ask a lot of questions – and go forth as an agent of change, go fight for what is right.  That is what some of those activists are.

But back it up a minute.  What change is on offer?  You took to the streets for Trump but didn’t do anything during Obama’s time?  Whoa, whoa, whoa, I need to slow down and back up a minute myself.  Think Standing Rock.  Yes, people have been involved.  The structures run deep and the Standing Rock people are experiencing what a challenge to these structures gets you: attacks by dogs, acoustic bombardment to achieve psychological disruption, being sprayed with water while it is fucking freezing out.  Oh, and even more insidious: you get to stand up for a cause while most of the nation carries on in ignorance which allows the powers that be to continue with their sundry mistreatments/criminal acts.  That is the cruelest thing of all.

And it is what any person questioning any system must face: How docile has the status quo rendered the great masses of people?  How has this docility been countered?  By protesting?

I want to say that if on an individual basis everyone examined their lives we would have a populace that would have moved past fossil fuels for rational and spiritual reasons. And perhaps that is assuming too much.

But there is this idea of mass man, of mass society and it is undeniable and it stares one in the face every day.  In deciding tactics, this fact of mass society must be considered.  In deciding whether or not to even act, this fact of mass society must be considered.  The bull is still caged.  The bull writhes and bucks, relaxes then violently kicks.  What good to stand outside the cage and attempt to dictate right action to the bull?  One must prepare for and contemplate what to do once the gate is opened and the bull emerges.

In talking about mass society, Ortega y Gasset (OyG) contrasts the mass of people with minorities, minorities being groups where each member must “separate himself from the multitude for special, relatively personal, reasons”.  Minorities used to run the world, OyG argues.  But now the majorities have stepped forward and live as an unquestioning, non-deciding mass that follows rather base pleasures and who live unexamined lives.

Striving is what separates the two groups, as OyG elucidates:

For there is no doubt that the most radical division that it is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any effort towards perfection; mere buoys that float on the waves.

Damn.  Never mind, it’s off to Standing Rock for this chap.  But again, hold on a minute: is that my “effort towards perfection” as OyG states?  It sure as heck would involve “piling up difficulties and duties”.  Après election and being in this world in general I will at least keep asking questions.  And read some more Ortega y Gasset as well.

Not Really, Literally

I believe my first exposure to the word/concept of “literally” was in an academic setting, used in a class or as a word to remember for spelling.  And that definition was something like: “adhering to fact or to the ordinary construction or primary meaning of a term or expression”.  To my mind, simply put, the term literally was used in cases where a common figure of speech or colloquial saying actually happened.  For example: you would say “It’s literally raining cats and dogs” only if an airplane carrying cats and dogs exploded in the sky creating such a downpour.

Alas, literally has seemed over the last decade or so to mean the opposite of this cherished definition.  Now, in a crazy downpour, you are likely to hear someone say, “It’s literally raining cats and dogs”.  No cats.  No dogs.  Literally is used for emphasis, it is an intensifier.

The benchmark of critique of this apparent change in usage is David Cross’ bit about the word.  How galvanizing that was in my critical view of the word: “[B]ecause when you misuse the word literally you are using it in the exact opposite way it was intended.  When you fuck that up you fuck that up so bad it’s not like a little goof, it’s not like when you said penultimate and meant ultimate where you’re off by one, you completely fucking misuse it.  You should stop using the word, forever, until you figure it out.”  Excoriating.

But, inevitably, things change.  I remember my Linguistics prof in college saying that the task of language was to get across meaning.  If what you say conveys what it is you meant to convey then you are correct.  If tend to agree with that.  So, I thought, let’s not be so critical of the misuse of literally.  Apocryphally, I heard somewhere that the definition had changed since the misuse is now so common – fair enough.

But when I went to track down proof of the change of the definition of literally I came to a stunning discovery: the definition, for as long as the word has existed could mean BOTH.  I should have known.  Merriam-Webster’s definition No. 2: in effect : virtually.  Shucks.

Still, to not let it go.  I would say definition No. 1 is the dominant definition.  The feeling is that those not familiar with the intricacies of language have co-opted the word.  In an unknowing fashion.  That is the what the critique of its No. 2 use is picking up on, whether or not it actually is correct be damned.  Does it represent a decline in national literacy?

Metaphorically, I see the misuse (yeah: misuse.  Why not, let’s be a militant grammarian.) as a sign of people’s need for certainty.  They need concretize what they are saying, to disambiguate what they are saying.  It is a running away from the horrible vicissitudes of life, the gnawing sensation that reality is not what it seems.  There are questions that people have about life – and especially life in the United States right now – questions which they cannot quite formulate.  Metaphor is shunned.  What is on the surface is simple, graspable.  I feel like using the word literally (misusing) is a code for all these feelings.

Post election observations, or, Fuck you mainstream media

My joy in this election result comes from sticking it to the mainstream media.  Apparently ridicule can only go so far, or loses its efficacy once the insult has been cast and the laughing has subsided.  A liberal media?  Fuck that.  The mainstream media are basically the cheerleaders of Corporatism and ignorance – don’t think motherfucker, consume.  How long has it been since the mainstream media has served the people instead of simply serving the people to advertisers?  (There are some bright spots in the press: Democracy Now, The Intercept . . . Russia Today – really a Russian news agency that does a better job than most American outlets.)

And joy from watching the election coverage as the commentators grappled with the idea that not everyone is a college-educated bandwagon-rider who benefits from the system (i.e. enviro-destruction with a green face, off-shoring of jobs, militarism, and finance, finance, finance) like they are.  Fuck them!  And really a fuck you to the average American whose wagons are ridiculously tied to this bandwagon so mindlessly, emulating those they actually have only a tenuous connection to – most of that connection comes from laughing at the ridicule heaped on those who want to change the system.  Wake up!   Where do you truly get rewards from?  Who is making you throw your goddamned God-stamped morals out the window?  Don’t you realize it?  Break the fucking spell!

And to see the reaction by media pundits, anchors and show host: what is it that you decry in this election result?  What garners such looks of disbelief and shock and your outraged responses?  Surely not your complicity in the system that has steadily impoverished the average American?  Surely not you lack of coverage of the increasing wealth gap, the freezing of any increase in real wages over the last 40 years?  Surely not your lack of covering the link between policy and arms manufacturers?  Surely not calling out the bullshit companies that make so-called “food” and that you so hungrily accept advertising money from?  How can you criticize someone newly elected president who has not done anything with the office yet while at the same time have such a damning laundry list of misdeeds and inaction hanging around your neck?  Fix that goddamned problem first.

Trump may prove to be whatever, whatever, etc. – we’ll find out soon enough.  And his average follower is most likely a fucking moron – that typifies Americans supporting both of the candidates this election anyway.  But, to my sources of joy:  hooray! for the sentiments of change and hooray! to the ridiculous confusion of mainstream culture.

Kony(Clinton/Trump) 2016 -or- Kony Baloney

Remember the Kony 2012 thing?  “One thing we can all agree on”?  Critical observers met this with frustration since Joseph Kony was one of many in a line of disreputable characters and issues: it took slick production and deft social media manipulation to get people involved.  Why this?  Because it is the way of the world.

It is the same today with the presidential election.  The points to get involved before the election are legion – so many ways to get involved, so many topics to study-up on and make decisions about.  But it is the presidential election, with all its history and glamor that stirs people from their slumbers.  Like when white people protest, novel things happen each election cycle.  As with white people protesting, things get fucked up.  It seems with each prezzie election the wheel is remade again and again and again.

Kony was effectively (if not explicitly) condoned by our national security apparatus.  The aims of the movement would have helped move the American pieces on the chessboard in a beneficial way.  So too, the presidential election allows for beneficial manipulation of the American public.  It’s like: “This is your time to express yourself through your vote and don’t forget: your vote counts!”  With the subtext: “Oh yeah, and don’t do anything else.  Don’t pay attention to anything except the mainstream media.  Keep giving a fuck about sports.  Keep watching TV shows and movies.  And . . . vote!  Good job!”

With the election we have all come to the alert and are paying attention.  Let’s not talk about the Deep State.  Let’s not talk about leaving the world in a livable state seven generations from now.  Let’s not talk about the selling of our souls for Saudi crude. 

Extreme Metaphor: US Election Edition

Voting itself is a metaphor – I’m talking about the big one, the prezzie election held every four years.  (Local elections don’t dip their toes into metaphor to such a colossal extent.)  To start, e.g., Trump’s phrase “Make America Great Again” flies in the face of what the Presidential Election (PE) stands for: the election itself stands for greatness.  Voting stands for democracy since just about everyone gets to do it.  How dare you Donald for suggesting a return to greatness!  Indeed, Hillary has tapped into this narrative saying she thinks America is already great: greatness embodied by the election itself.

But let’s take a step back.  Let’s ignore the differences between the two.  In this anno domini 2016 let’s meld the candidates together and then we can look at the conditions that permit them to be there, the conditions that permit them to be there but are not discussed. 

In effect, what are the candidates metaphors for?

First and foremost they represent the idea that one man or woman can fix things.  The office of the President is sacrosanct.  The President is the leader of the free world, the captain of the great and gleaming ship that is America, the States so painfully and exquisitely United. 

The President is a fixed star.

And what about America rotates around this fixed point?  The idea that the United States is the savior of the world, no less.  To me this is the toughest code to crack: things have changed but we pretend to live in an unchanged world.  It ain’t the years after WWII.  A blind eye may so easily be turned to the US’s role in the world.  What am I talking about?  I’m simply talking about selling ones soul.  It is in our faces every day (well at least on page 2 or 3 of the newspaper, maybe at the bottom of the front page): our involvement in the Middle East.  Our involvement in Central America.  Our 800 bases outside of the United States.  The story seems so old by now, so banal.  “Yeah, we’ve propped up third world dictators but that’s how the game is played.”  “We need to support our allies overseas.”  Do people think about our past?  Do people think about our present?  That we are still doing shit like that today? 

I feel like there is a moral rule that I never learned and that rule is: you can do bad shit as long as you ignore the fact that you do it.  Done.  No biggie.  We support Saudi Arabia for oil interests, duh – but also for stability in the Middle East.  Get it? 

And this is not to be talked about in the debates.  And this will not come to a referendum vote come November.

It’s got to be something in the DNA of America itself.  Keep moving west and don’t look back.  Or things are so awesome in day-to-day life here that it is just too easy and convenient to ignore – or turn that blind eye towards – the fucked up stuff.

And that is the level that the candidates for President are approached on: they represent us and we are much more concerned with salacious sex-style scandals than the soul of America gliding inexorably down the halls of hell.

A vindication of the system

Recently the journalist/author Russ Baker was on the Tim Dillon is Going to Hell for a fun and insightful discussion.  The conversation focused on things that influence our government “behind the scenes”, so to speak.  Russ broke down historical information to the hosts, Tim and Matt, some information that has been known and some that has come to light recently.  One particular intelligence agency looms particularly large and the dad of the President during 9/11 was the head of it for a year (trying to be oblique).

Russ provided fodder for my perhaps Snarxist sensibilities – information that is not widely known or particularly cared about, but that is important.  Others pigeonhole me into being ironic because of what is permissible to talk about.  And this election cycle what can and cannot be discussed is revealing.  And goddam frustrating.

In the TDGH interview Tim asked if he gets annoyed when people get really worked up about what is presented in the dominant narrative: like the above-board discussion of the merits and demerits of the two (only two!) candidates.  Russ:

“This is a continuation of the distraction of the public from what actually matters and from what actually affects them.  They don’t really understand the extent to which this is some sort of entertainment, a spectacle, bread and circuses.  Yes these things matter in certain ways on certain levels but the fact of the matter is it doesn’t matter if it’s Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump: they would never be allowed to deviate substantively from the course of American policy over the biggest issues affecting the wealthiest people.  You’re talking about resource extraction, you’re talking about the constant use of the military to control much of the world, you’re talking about the dominance of the financial sector – these things are inviolable.  Where they differ is at least in the way they talk about hot button issues that get people riled up.  But there are even limits to what they can do in those areas.  Yes it’s important but should it suck all the air out of the room and make us so exhausted that come November we stop paying attention right when the real work begins?  No.”

Look, I’ve covered the idea of voting before.  And I agree that at the local level issues are clearer and change may be easier to institute.  The national elections are something else – a mass ritual, really.  The presidential election is a sanctioned event that allows each and every one to have their say – at least have their say about what is printed in mainstream newspapers.  Now is the time to express your feelings as long as it falls within the narrow purview permitted by the media and permitted by the intellect of your fellow fuckwit citizens.

What?  You think you’re better than voting?  How else are you going to express yourself?  This is it.  You get this one chance so you better fucking get involved.  How – well creepy is the word that first comes to mind – how creepy that Chris Wallace implored the TV/Web audience to vote.  I’m sorry but it came off as cajoling, manipulative:

Now the decision is up to you. While millions have already voted, election day, November 8, is just 20 days away. One thing everyone here can agree on is we hope you will go vote. It is one of the honors and obligations of living in this great country. Thank you and good night. 

By voting you say you approve of the system even if your morals have been fit into the Procrustean bed of “the lesser of two evils.”  I’ll just continue to shake my head and wonder why the world I live in is so different than the world that it is embodied by the debates and politics and people’s attitudes to this bizarre (but not if you understand it goddamit!) system/pageantry of politics.  To let Tim Dillon conclude (min 35): “By the way all you people that are going to be dancing and celebrating a Hillary Clinton victory: you are celebrating a vindication of the system, that’s it.”

Feeling numbers (Our too-Roman numerals)

The facts – as they pertain to our nation and its economy – stream fast in front of us.  A relentless torrent of good facts.  Knowledge, numbers and trends.  They say that some may see the stats of a baseball game and see the game played in their mind’s eye. The numbers tell the story.

And it is great that these facts are so readily at hand.  I mean, we don’t live in a totalitarian society, where one may not even have access to the numbers.  Do we take this for granted, this wonderful availability of tell-tale numbers?

E.g.: we have Piketty and his work.  Important numbers.  At what point do the numbers make one act?  What is the number in any given category that makes one go forth into the street with revolutionary purpose and fervor?  Piketty provides some eye-openers – and he was widely reported on.

Ah, the numbers must be felt.  The number describing inequality comes second to the lived experience of inequality.  Yet ghettoized in our “media enclaves and technological enclaves and geographical enclaves” (minute 55) our reactions are isolated, pigeonholed.  If we could read the common language of numbers we could perhaps overcome our insular states and realize our common potential.  In the end it seems another story of hope dashed by the unfelt façade of the too-Roman numerals.

Class resentment: debate edition

A provocation offered by our favorite Archdruid:

“[T]he affluent classes from which the leadership of the liberal movement is drawn, and which set the tone for the movement as a whole, benefit directly from the collapse in wages that has partly been caused by mass illegal immigration, since that decrease in wages has yielded lower prices for the goods and services they buy and higher profits for the companies for which many of them work, and whose stocks many of them own.”

Sacred cows, things tough to talk about.  He has his arguments for the idea that an influx of more folks corresponds with depressed wages, an idea of whose mechanisms I’ll leave alone.

But the idea that one class might benefit from the immiseration of another – what a powerful idea. This is a true zero-sum outlook.  Is that what is going on?  Are some jobs created by offshoring other ones?  Perhaps the jobs held by a more upper-middle class group?  So that lower-wages are experienced by what we would call a lower class?

And let’s map this onto the current (2016) national election (even though I continuously and, obviously, ineffectually swear off thinking about or spending any amount of effort on).  Do the candidates bases – the core group/demographic that supports each of the two candidates – match up with the two participants in a zero-sum game mentioned above?  I think this makes things just that much spicier.

Two classes that are not simply at odds with each other when it comes to, say, values but whose very existences rely one on the other.  A negative relationship that isn’t broached publically.  Not talked about in the debate.  A clear source of resentment that goes on not being expressed.  What benefits the elite impoverishes the poor.  The elite being those with degrees who have jobs that require degrees and the poor being those with zero post-high school education not making much money if not any at all.

How embarrassing!  Embarrassing?  Is that the right word?  That sounds weird but, man, it is an awkward relationship.  That link and the link doesn’t get talked about.  Not just free agents pursuing life in different but still unencumbered ways.  No.  What is going on in this case is an elite, the upper-middle class being in a position of power, holding sway over an underclass.  The two groups come to the table as un-equals.   But, as though some fairytale curse had been cast, they find themselves incapable of putting words to this idea.

But beyond the resort to storytime curses there are real structures and concept to apply here.  Resentment was mentioned above and perhaps that is a good way to look at how poor sees rich – and, heck, even how rich sees poor.  The sense of injustice that the word resentment carries with it is easy to see from the perspective of the poor.  What a shitty relationship to be in, being the one who has been wronged!  And those that wronged you have more power.  But flip the script and think of the awkwardness the rich must feel – I’m being serious.  They are in the position of feeling like their well-off existences is the product of greed – and then they have to (maybe occasionally) rub shoulders with those that they’ve wronged.  They must be all like, “Umm, sorry?  Suckers? . . .  I stole it fair and square.  You don’t know what it’s like”. 

So, for the elections . . . bring on more spectacle!

Bombs are good and I don't care

This article.  The impetus to write my thoughts down in a weblog.  The article a cause of ire and consternation.  Perplexity: this is acceptable now?  To casually claim that being an accomplice to murder is okay since the manufacturers of the armaments provide jobs?  Let me paraphrase the sentiment offered by the interviewer:

Mmm, okay, you mentioned morals.  So, yeah, that’s bullshit first of all.  I mean listen to the tone of my voice . . . morals do not concern me in the least and sure as hell do not come primary in my view of reality.  “We” need those jobs and who even really cares about what Saudi Arabia is doing with these weapons.  Jobs.  JOBS.  And I’ll go ahead and state what I’ve implied about these jobs.  These jobs are the best jobs ever.  The only jobs we will ever need.  Screw using this money for education or aid or rebuilding domestic infrastructure.  No.  Boom, boom, boom!  And when those bombs hit and those lives are ripped apart in every which way, I DON’T CARE.

How common this attitude?  Is it a belief?  Or is it just a sign of the absence of any questioning or concern.  And this cultivated understanding of the world and understanding of how our economy works is coming from the smart people.  Someone voting for either of the candidates for president thinks this.  Even someone voting for the “lesser of two evils” must think this.  Bombs are good and I don’t care.

Virtues are vices, the modern world is less than times past

Look at the modern world and consider that it is a de-evolution. A regression.  Examples of progress are mapped over the faults.  If they are not in fact themselves faults: technology, democracy, equality – go down the line.  Maybe some good.  What is good and great and is an exemplar of our modern world is, it turns out, unjust and perverted.

Perhaps this is manifested in the healthcare system of the US.  For profit (docs earn a pretty penny), big business, allied with the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.  Allied with the soft drink lobby.  All in cahoots.  This inversion is not to be fought against though it is meant to be understood.  These are the shackles that define the outlines of our slave status, a world where the slave permits the chains on one condition: that he may criticize anything but the chains, i.e. that he has the right to live in a fantasy, the chains untouched and ignored except for periodic perverse maintenance done on the chains by the wearer in acts called voting, consumer choice, patriotism, inclusiveness and the principled acquiescence to war.

That technology will deliver us from the ills that it created is “magical thinking” as James Howard Kunstler says – though, well, erm, okay I guess I don’t have a beef with term “magic”.  It’s true.  Magic itself is not inherently good.  It can, in fact, be used to influence people to consume, to “buy into” the status quo. We marvel at our own bedazzlement.  We laud our actors who entertain us into a state of distraction, whose fictions capture our imagination.  We believe, or suspend disbelief, in the ability of consumer goods to deliver a solid, seamless reality where product types are improved each year and “coolness” may likewise be perennially purchased.

A bad myth, a celebration of captiveness.  Everything is opposite.  Constraining our life energy into a safe standard conduit – it will never change; can’t I use this as a decisive argument that utopias – where all are equal – will never, ever materialize.  To help realize that those utopias by definition will never exist because their definition includes man, groups of men and women . . . therefore mass behavior will exist.  Might I use this definitive understanding to do away with the moral pangs that want to turn an idea like magic into an operative of some assumed good?  Might I still have compassion?  Do I have to scale the ideas of love, the good, and compassion into the redoubt of the family or of the tribe?

A small thought that pops up, I will welcome it into the circle as it arises and make peace with it in order to nullify it.

Melancholy and somewhat aggressive thoughts on work

This is the working hour,

We are paid by those who learn by our mistakes

- Tears for Fears, “The Working Hour”

We want work.  We want jobs.  We want the things that an income helps provide.  But how to structure work?  Do we base it solely on what people are capable of doing, how much water can be squeezed from a stone? 

We don’t have a say in how much we work.  In the past workers’ movements got the work week reduced to 40 hours – perhaps we would be better off if those controls were removed.  Maybe then people would be healthier, less fat.  Maybe then people would better prioritize their off-hours and peel their eyes at least momentarily from the torrent of shit presented on whatever kind of screen.  Maybe if 60 or 100 hours a week were the norm people could grow some compassion and fellow-feeling for their co-slaves being worked harsh hours around the world.

But keep in mind the US worker already works more than any other worker amongst developed nations – more than the stereotypically harried Japanese worker.  We have no mandated vacation time.  39% of Americans work 50 hours a week or more.  This in a country where so many simply want a job. 

This will never go away.  Work and toil are part of the human condition in whatever age, whatever epoch.  Work is a part of human life from the blind work of the body itself out to the visible working world.  Structured differently at different times.  Serfs didn’t organize, at least not when the kings sat solidly on their thrones.  We are subjects today, subjected to working regimes dictated from above.  The rhetoric around schools is likewise captive: we strive for better education and for call for students to “go on” to higher education in order to get better jobs.  Is this a cargo cult?  Can I walk around town wearing a suit, advanced degree tucked securely in my briefcase and expect an employer to run up to me, offering a sick job?

The regulations and standards surrounding work will change and disappear in the future.  In 10 years, 20, 50, 100 years work here in the United States will look like work now in China.  Or the Amazon.  People will be forced to work untold hours.  Or they may live under some feudal regime that dictates their work schedule.  Who knows what the people of the future will think of our working lives today.

Existential musing no. ?

In the wake of finishing True Detective, Season 1 (finished a month ago or so) plus reading Colin Wilson's The Outsider:

I am an American – a United States citizen – here, now, on Planet Earth.  I am one of those who have not only rad some Existential thought but have deeply identified with this thought.  I feel for Meursault, another denizen of this realm into which we are thrown.  Made flesh.  Incorporated in these meat suits.

All structures of life seemingly arbitrary, the right way to live subject to idiosyncratic manifestation in different times and places.  Ways of living – morals – crystallize.

But it is all still the Wild West.  We are subject to frontier justice.  We must make our stated religious/secular moral systems conform to the world as it is – the mental gymnastics people are so disappointingly well-suited to.  The Wild West populated with children.

I am an existentialist in this Wild West.

Can’t other see the absurdity of things?  How they are hypocrites who cannot acknowledge their tiny-ness, the inconsequential-ness compared to, well, any picture whether that picture is big or small.  Fools.  I live among fools.

But that is the world.  I’ve made my peace with this world, though I still ask questions.  On a lot of cars I ask what each is capable of, what its characteristics are.  Human society is one type of car.  Its stats are on print-out taped to the driver’s side window.  I will not ask that the car go faster than its known and stated max.  I won’t cry that the car has already been painted.  I won’t wish that the sedan drive over mountains or that the sports coupe carry more than two people.

The cars on the lot are what they are.

And the perpetually new super car that we always mistake America for is really just a base-model Ford Taurus.  Don’t ask for more.

But there are other cars on the lot.  And some of those come only in inchoate form, their outlines a sparkly glow, a true mystery in car form.

My existential world is not a purely materialistic one.

We all struggle for control, understanding, maybe enlightenment.  Our Christian God is cloaked in mystery, an entity with an ethnic history that Himself has found (another?) apotheosis, become capital “G” God, the one and only, assumed the platonic form of God that before had room for other entities.  This God the big boss who doesn’t even live in town your office is in.  he surly isn’t manifest in our lives, or if he is, those he talks to are not exemplars of humanity.  The movie hasn’t changed but people keep paying the price of admission. 

But in the bible people talked to God.  They supplicated themselves before him and he made them special.  In America today we have jettisoned the Christian God of mediaeval Europe.  We have passed through.  We are in Heaven.  We are different and special and unique in history.  We are the apex of history.  A story told a thousand times.  A story recited the loudest while walls are being breached.  Told the loudest while cities burn and the citizens left alive flee to the wilderness.  The exceptional ones of history each and every one.

We’ve diversified religion today, polytheism that doesn’t call itself polytheism.  There is the Christian God, yeah.  He’s still around doing his thing.  But alongside Him are new Gods” Progress.  Science.  Technology.  Blinding us from reality, all of them.

Voting not voting 2016!

I find myself inexorably drawn to politics – while at the same time saying that politics is futile.  Just mainstream politics?  No, all of it: even the radical fringe that provides a more incisive view is still part of the big game, the big machine.  So with election season in full swing I’d like to consider avenues for real change.  What are some other ways to “vote”, i.e. alternative lifestyle choices, good philanthropic institutes to support, etc.

1. Nothing.  This ultimate option immediately comes to mind.  No, there are no avenues for real change.  And I’m not just saying this to set up a straw man to tear down.  Not doing anything is the same as doing something.  Actually, if participating in a calcified/corrupt/hypnotizing official political system is pointless, then we are all doing nothing anyway.  Maybe it feels good to vote: sure, that is easy to see.  You get the pat on the back and the “I voted” sticker.  You sacrificed for a change and took the extra time to rub shoulders your fellow proles in (meaningless) social pageantry.  Whatever, since: voting = not voting.

Proper placement of the "I voted" sticker - photo from T.r. Lang's post in Jill Stein's Dank Meme Stash

2.  Get radical.  Like environmental shit that Deep Green Resistance does.  (This might be the only/right answer).  As Derrek Jensen states, it is always good to have some activist project going.  And not just a protest revolving around the election – get out make your community better.

3.  Just wait.  The historical tides of demographics, the ratio between perceived-

disenfranchisement/actual-disenfranchisement, etc. will eventually have their say.  Change occurs because people try hard to create change.  But change takes time to build up.  Do people trying to cause change actually cause change?  Sure, they help.  But the change they try to affect could not happen without the dull weight of time.  Example gratia: is Hillary a war-criminal?  Yes.  Do popular conceptions allow the average American to see her as such?  No.  Not yet, despite the efforts of people getting radical.  If you are against war then of course you would not vote for Hill (vote for Jill!).

4.  Have fun!  Host an alternative election in your living room with your collection of weird dolls – or – wheelchair yourself to voting place then rise out of your chair and walk out proclaiming that “Voting works!  We do live in a democracy!” – or – stay at home chain-smoking while reading The Stranger.  Whatever you do this election cycle, be creative!

Of elections and alternate realities

The party's over: Bernie being led out of the DNC

So confession time about election time: a sense of unreality has taken over me during this presidential election cycle.  A month or so ago – before either party had officially declared their candidate – is when I first really felt this uncanny feeling.  And it wasn’t with Trump.  With the Republicans I could care less: remember the cast of characters Trump was running against?  No, it was when Hillary finally got the delegate counts that the little voice said, “This is really happening”.

Perhaps age makes this feeling possible and not the candidates themselves.  I’m older, seen more shit.  Maybe people felt this weirded-out when, say, Reagan became president in ‘81.  Part of it too is my interest in the Sanders’ campaign.  He was an unreal alternative with a very real network of support.  When Hillary got her unsurpassable lead down the stretch it became clear that The Machine had spoken.  Inertia would rule.  That is when the feeling kicked in: when the Democratic Party demonstrated that ultimately they had a lid on things.  The Party had decided on Clinton and the Party was, in end, getting its way.

That is what made the Sanders’ campaign so exciting.  He was an independent who switched to Democrat for the election, i.e. he was an outsider going against the status quo.  Again, maybe others felt this feeling of unreality.  Maybe Ron Paul supporters felt this when their candidate was finally eliminated from contention in ’08 and ’12.  Just like Paul was running in a Party that had an ideological foot in libertarianism, Sanders was operating within the recently sympathetic to progressivism.  Different dreams, same result.

It turns out that, to me, Sanders was last chance for doing something.  And that chance disappeared and the sense of unreality unfolded.

Now we are operating in the wholly symbolic.  Choice has been reduced to political acts that align with a political point of view – purchasing certain products, shopping at certain stores, listening to particular types of music.  All surrogates for real choice.

Unreal reality has been restored.  The illusion that voting is your voice may continue.  

A growing Boise meets the Limits of Growth series: Intro and a welcome to Californians

A new day, a new building popping up in downtown Boise

Boise’s growth has always required the movement of people from outside the state.  My first brush with, umm, I guess the tension this can bring dates back to the ‘80s.  Driving with my uncle down Emerald St., about where it turns into Americana, a car zipped past us.  Without losing a beat my uncle leaned out the driver side window and yelled, “Fucking Californian!”  And on we went.

This series of blogs won’t solely be about these minor tensions.  Instead I would like to see how Boise’s history and how its contemporary state intersect with larger trends.  I would like to hold the example of Boise, Idaho up to the critical light of various thinkers such as James Howard Kunstler, Derrick Jensen, etc.  This town needs to pay its pound of flesh when it comes to explaining its existence.  When does the conversation about acceptable levels of growth begin?  Is Boise immune from any concern over global warming/climate change?  As Boise exists in a liminal space – where the desert meets the mountains – the city also exist in a nexus where the local meets world events and trends.

So what of that Californian-in-migration flash point?  Let’s clear the air.  There does seem to be a perpetually nascent “Idaho native” movement.  In the constant low-level conversation that takes place via bumper stickers, I noticed maybe less “Idaho Native” stickers over the last 20 years.  You still see this sentiment represented on hats and in conversations, however the “Fucking Californian” sentiment has been replaced with a passive, non-critical acceptance.  Plus, if you lived in Boise for a spell, you probably know some California transplants and perhaps realize their non-insidious nature.  And I would say this is due at some level to people basically realizing what side their bread is buttered on: while Californians (specifically) bring some perceived negative qualities, they also bring a lot of money. 

Yes, money.  As a measure of influx, in 2014, 2,806 Californians exchanged their Cali drivers licenses for Idaho ones.  The year before it was 2,629.  These are tax payers whose existence in Boise means more money in the tax bucket.  Idaho state does not have a property tax but Boise sure does.  House prices have increased 10.5% within the past year with expectations of 4.9% increase in the following year.  Where a place like Flint, MI cannot provide drinking water for its citizens, Boise debates about which gentrified neighborhood will get a new sidewalk.

This first post in what is hopefully a series is just laying the basic framework: Boise currently and in the last few decades has relied on growth for its prosperity.  At some level all these posts will take to heart the dictum, “It’s the economy, stupid”.  And if, in some fanciful manner, in-migration was blocked, the shiny city amongst the trees would begin to stagnate.

The Lion of Idaho series: That time when Idaho quit drinking

An interesting chapter in Idaho’s history came 1915 when statewide Prohibition put into law.  As this article states, Idaho was never entirely dry during the Prohibition era.  Speakeasies and illegal stills sprung up immediately.  Liquor was verboten in name only.  Of Shoshone County in northern Idaho it was said that alcohol could be bought anywhere “but the post office and the Methodist Church”.  Cities relied on taxes from liquor licenses and the businesses catered to people’s need to go out and have a good time.  Eventually Prohibition failed.  From Syd Albright’s article:

One report said, “The criminal justice system was swamped although police forces and courts had expanded in recent years.  Prisons were jam-packed and court dockets were behind in trying to deal with the rapid surge in crimes.  Organized crime expanded to deal with the lucrative business, and there was widespread corruption among those charged with enforcing unpopular laws.”

Borah was pro-prohibition.  Idaho actually went dry four years before the nation did, the United States passing the 18^th Amendment in 1919.  Senator Borah willfully engaged in machinations to achieve this end, urging fellow Prohibitionist to wait for an amendment to the state constitution instead of simply having the legislature enact a law:

The change which comes from statewide Prohibition will in the very first instance almost exclusively prove unpopular.  The readjustment which has to take place and the rehabilitation of society, as it were, leads to criticism and objections and for a time almost invariably as a history of Prohibition shows weakens the Prohibition cause.  If you have statewide legislative Prohibition and undertake to secure an adoption of a constitutional amendment two years thereafter, you will weaken the Prohibition forces in your fight.

According to Johnson’s biography, Borah never touched a dropped of alcohol:

Although Borah has always hated liquor, he has not always advocated Prohibition.  His original position on liquor was purely personal.  He would have nothing to do with in himself, but if his friends and neighbors wanted to muddle their heads with it, that was no particular concern of his.

Once the zeitgeist dictated, Borah could follow personal guidelines that matched up with those of his constituents.  The Anti-Saloon League was putting politicians under its influence, so to speak, and was active in Idaho.  As already mentioned, the League would see Idaho become dry before the nation.  Those that sought Prohibition perhaps had their hearts in the right place.  But, as Albright discusses in his article, Prohibition was economically damaging and served to create a bureaucratic entity – the Bureau of Prohibition – which exists to this day as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.

Could we, today, same them back then?

Are we Rome?  Not exactly.  But we are cut from the same cloth . . .

A struggle for objectivity, a God’s-eye view.  We look at the past and think of ways to intervene, if given the chance.  To go back to ancient Rome and tell a leader here or there at different times in the republic or empire’s span ways to save the empire – yes, perhaps point out ways to remain a republic.  What exactly would we say and to who?

How to avoid the weight of history?  Was the empire doomed once it was on a certain track?  Inertia?  What have we learned that can aid us in escaping from the gravity of human nature?  How can greed be parsed out from the overall package of human nature that includes other (vices?) such as the inability to think ahead more than a few years?  We cannot help but compare ourselves with (against) our neighbors.  Someone in the US may be in the lowest financial quintile but globally be in the top quintile – but that doesn’t matter when you compare yourself to the “haves” here.  You can’t help but do it, it is human nature.

Are we Rome?  Cullen Murphy takes on this question.  Of course many factors are different.  But in these different situations we are all human, nonetheless.

The status quo versus human nature: a look at sleep

Bronze head of Hypnos, the god of sleep

There are so many cool things to do these days.  Places to go, things to experience, shows to watch (apparently).  Perhaps not as cool but we have to work to make money to sustain our quest for being entertained.  Just not enough time.  Sleep becomes an impediment: we are losing a third of the day to sack time.  At least with the eight-hours-of-sleep-a-night model.  Scrimping on sleep gains a few hours back each day but doing that can make us irritable and put a damper on those cool things we have to go out and experience.

I don’t like to marginalize sleep, however.  For better or for worse sleep is a component of who we are.  While I also don’t like to go back and valorize our evolution and use it to justify present graces and deficits, I think sleep falls into a benign range.  I’m not justifying war based on evolutionary evidence that war and strife were omnipresent.  But I will look at the evolved need for a certain amount of sleep to serve as an operational baseline for everything.

So, it is easy to consider sleep an impediment to doing stuff while awake.  But what if we look at the awake world as an impediment to sleep?  One recent news article made me consider the latter.  This article sites a (yes) sleep historian:

"The dominant pattern of sleep, arguably since time immemorial, was biphasic," Roger Ekirch, a sleep historian at Virginia Tech University and author of "At Day's Close: Night in Times Past" (Norton 2005), told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience. "Humans slept in two four-hour blocks, which were separated by a period of wakefulness in the middle of the night lasting an hour or more. During this time some might stay in bed, pray, think about their dreams, or talk with their spouses. Others might get up and do tasks or even visit neighbors before going back to sleep."

References to "first sleep" or "deep sleep" and "second sleep" or "morning sleep" abound in legal depositions, literature and other archival documents from pre-Industrial European times. Gradually, though, during the 19th century, "language changed and references to segmented sleep fell away," said Ekirch. "Now people call it insomnia."

I think there is perhaps a reason that this pattern of sleep has developed.  I think there is some utility in accepting it if for no other reason to than to avoid introducing the concept of insomnia.  The same article mentioned that one third of Americans do regularly wake during the night.  How some of us adapted?  Are we seeing evolution at work and the final one third will figure it out or come around or die out?

But the big question is this: How much does society force us to conform even in cases where the demands of society run counter to our deep instincts?  We have our (roughly) eight hours of allotted time for sleep but if you are to still get your eight plus an hour or two of awake time you are looking at nine to ten hour period allotted to rest.

Have we as an industrialized world turned our backs on not only a sleep pattern but a way of life that has suited us historically?

Of course an individual doesn’t have to submit to these societal demands.  One might still be part of the workaday world but just give oneself that 10 hour rest period.  Or one might opt out of society.  But still I like to imagine a world with something like a 3 or 4 day workweek, working maybe six hours a day.  A world where health and relaxation are emphasized. 

Some folks are perhaps smarter and have this now, which makes you have to ask about each individual’s priorities and also make you (unfortunately) ask about how much government should play a part in regulating some modes of life.

Sometimes, “It’s just the way it is” isn’t really the way it is.

"That's just the way it is
Some things will never change
That's just the way it is
Ah, but don't you believe them"

"Old and dirty and evil."

NRA headquarters

Guns and the gun lobby have once again been in the news.  On one hand we’ve had another (deadliest ever) mass shooting – I’ll let you find your own reference for that.  On the other hand Donald Trump has garnered the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) endorsement for president.  Both of these items of course feed into the ongoing debate about guns and gun rights. 

Now I don’t want to pick sides in this post – libertarians have their coherent views as do gun law reformers.  What I do want to look at is a hidden (perhaps in plain sight) aspect of the NRA that doesn’t seem to get mentioned whenever the group pops up in public.  If people knew about this aspect then perhaps people could better understand the world and therefore make better informed decisions when it came time to vote or donate money, etc.

Founded in 1871, “the group has informed its members about firearm-related bills since 1934, and it has directly lobbied for and against legislation since 1975”.  In 2015, the NRA spent $3.6 million for lobbying.  This is out of a “war chest” of $350 million of overall revenue.  By law, the gun industry cannot donate to the NRA’s political action committee.  This is no problem since the $22 million individual donors give is more than enough to cover the $3.6 million mentioned above.  The reason behind people’s contributions may perhaps be summarized one of the individual donors: “It is a good percentage of my income [5-10%], but I want to do everything I can easily do to preserve my freedoms”.

The above quote from the individual donor comes from a CNN story that highlights the increase in donations from individual donors.  While this is interesting to note we must still understand that the vast majority of donations to the NRA overall come from the gun industry.  As Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center says, “Today’s NRA is a virtual subsidiary of the gun industry.  While the NRA portrays itself as protecting the ‘freedom’ of individual gun owners, it’s actually working to protect the freedom of the gun industry to manufacture and sell virtually any weapon or accessory”. 

So this is the NRA’s hidden aspect.  While the early NRA apparently prided itself on “independence from corporate influence”, today it effectively a PR wing of the industry as a whole:

There are two reasons for the industry support of the NRA.  The first is that the organization develops and maintains a market for their products.  The second, less direct function is to absorb criticism in the event of PR crises for the gun industry.

So what is this analysis worth?  Another dimension is revealed, another useless layer of understanding.  Corporations want to make money, fine.  Initially I wanted to clarify the idea I had that there is a link between our domestic love of guns and the sale of weapons internationally.  This would require finding a link between those US/domestic gun manufacturers and the big, big US companies that sell weapons abroad. 

I want to back engineer the connection between the United States’ international role as the number one weapon supplier and us a country that can’t figure out its mass shooter problem.  The NRA is definitely a link in this chain.  But understanding the dollars and cents of the industry and its ties to government makes the false assumption that the blame for mass shootings can be placed on a single entity like the NRA.

We have a culture of violence.  Perhaps you’ve heard this phrase used in relation to movies and video games, television shows and toys.  Again the idea that the problem can be fixed by further regulating violence portrayed in video games, to get the idea of violence out the heads of those that play them.  Amorphous, a problem of the psyche, solvable with curtailing the prevalence of the media, in whatever form it takes.

More understanding is the solution, a constant questioning.  Solving gun violence should be linked to the need to question making money perhaps instead.  It should be linked to the need for people to think for themselves and decouple from US culture as a whole.  It may need us to question the narrative of progress.  W.W. sums it up nicely:

This question moves us into the frustrating domain of vague cultural explanations. It all has something to do with the violent rebellion of the American founding, with the anarchy of the American frontier, with the threat of hostile natives and the fear of slave revolts. We don't know why the will to gun-up persists so strongly in America, but it does. We don't know why gun-ownership seems more like a precious, basic right to Americans than it does to the citizens of other developed countries, but it does. We don't know why Americans are so obsessed with movies, television and games about the glamour of killing people (and animals and monsters and aliens and robot) en masse with guns, but we are. And we don't know why every year or so a young white American male grabs some guns and slaughters a roomful of completely innocent people, but it just keeps on happening.

As William S. Burroughs wrote, “America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil.  Before the settlers, before the Indians . . . the evil was there . . . waiting”.

Billy Burroughs

A letter to Segobriga

Segobriga, today

The town’s residents were like me.  I can imagine us being traded, swapped-at-birth across an eon . . .  They pause during their day, struck by a strange realization, an odd, final thought – that everything that surrounds them must end.  They’ve heard the tales of incredibly old ruins found by soldiers in Persia.  Untellably old ruins.  Vast structures of a people long gone.

But it is just a thought.  They, he or she, has family, has duties, tasks, jobs, has structure in their life that they must bow and pay homage to.  The machine needs willing participants.  The machine gives us the idea of specialness that crushes the thought of finality.  No, this more powerful thought says, this can go on forever.  This time it is special – you’re special.  Now back to work.

At different times and different places in what we call towns and cities, people have had this questioning thought – why this?  Oh yeah: It’s the way things are, comes the reply.  Back to work.

In this Spanish Roman town – now ruins, of course – I send my thoughts, psychic time travel, to be with a person, a man or a woman of that town.  Beneath our seemingly eternal sun, how long before the surrounding soils pull themselves over the toppled walls and toppled buildings?

I’ll say to this person: How odd a thought that one day a person called an archaeologist will pick away at the bricks and artifacts of your town – sewn into the earth as though thoughts could be turned into physical seeds.  These bricks and things served as the backdrop to your life, real stage settings and props.  Your words and breaths are recorded on that fired clay as sure as writing.  These are the same thoughts I might have today, here in the 21^st Century.  I tell you, my past relatives, to think about these difficult thoughts – about your city’s ruin – and then find it too hard to think of myself in the same way.  All cities everywhere covered over and forgotten.  Our modern society, our cities and towns, the dust and loess piled for centuries until we are nice and covered and preserved for future hands to pick at.

Will there even be future hands?  If we go extinct then it will be non-human appendages that pick and wonder.  That there is no one to find buried bones must be as viable a story as the idea that humans will interminably exist.  And in the case of man’s eternal existence, will future man even have the tools and understanding to unearth and comprehend us as their past?  Perhaps a rule: the society that develops the scientific tools to adequately unveil the past has necessarily reached an apex from which they will irrevocably start falling from.

Good night little Spanish Roman town.

The Use of Education

Education looms quite large in today’s social environment.  We are worried about successfully competing in the global economy.  We are concerned about education’s promise to raise the lower class out of poverty.  And so we debate education and make changes.  As education is a large thing – looming so large – these changes are slow.  In a fourteen year span the No Child Left Behind Act was instituted, defamed and made to depart – fourteen years!  Common Core is the new panacea offering reform.  Like NCLB, Common Core’s rise is concomitant with criticism.  Some families have made a radical change themselves in opting for home schooling.

What do we get with simply more educated people?  More, better-educated, burger-flippers according to this recent piece from The Guardian:

The majority of jobs being created today do not require degree-level qualifications. In the US in 2010, 20% of jobs required a bachelor’s degree, 43% required a high-school education, and 26% did not even require that. Meanwhile, 40% of young people study for degrees. This means over half the people gaining degrees today will find themselves working in jobs that don’t require one.

This story cuts both ways: on one side a de-emphasis on education almost seems a rational choice for our society to make.  On the other side a reevaluation of education and society is implicit: how can we make education and societal demands match up?  We don’t want to intentionally dumb down our populace so that the labor pool mirrors industries’ needs, right?

Thomas Frank has looked at how the political rhetoric surrounding education fits into the broader economic framework.  Supposedly education is for the betterment of everyone.  With better education – the reasoning goes – the poor will be able to compete for better jobs and improve their standing in society.  Unfortunately, more educated people doesn’t equal more jobs.  Frank writes:

[I]t doesn’t take an advanced degree to figure out that this education talk is less a strategy for mitigating inequality than it is a way of rationalizing it.  To attribute economic results to school years finished and SAT scores achieved is to remove matters from the realm of, well, economics and to relocate them to the provinces of personal striving and individual intelligence.  From this perspective, wages aren’t what they are because one part (management) has a certain amount of power over the other (workers); wages are like that because the god of the market, being surpassingly fair, rewards those who show talent and gumption. 

That is the all-American, pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps convention and Frank points out that it is wrong.  In his view, when it comes to inequality, education is not the problem.  The relationship between the workers and the management is the problem.

Before the late 1970s, productivity and wage growth had always increased in unison – as workers made more stuff, they earned more money. But by the early 1990s, the two had clearly separated.  Workers made more stuff then ever before, but they no longer prospered from what they made.  Put differently: Workers were working as hard and as well as ever; they simply weren’t reaping the profits from it.  Wall Street was. […] The people who produced were losing their ability to demand a share in what they made.  The people who owned were taking more and more.

This is a difficult thing to talk about – shifting the onus from the behavior of individuals to the behavior of larger, more, shall we say, corporate entities.  But still the cry echoes: “Education!  Why can’t your save the economy!”

Getting back to education itself, separate from other relations and influences, suggestions for improvements do exist.  In Outliers, Malcom Gladwell examines how individual’s educational performance is related to the time of year they are born.  Each grade level has one year of variability in age: the older the student – those born closest to the upper-end age cutoff – are more developed and perform better:

Gladwell . . . note[s] that in countries like the United States, where ability grouping begins in early childhood, students who are among the oldest in their grade will begin the school year more advanced than students who are among the youngest. He claims these older students are then placed in higher-level ability groups, thus beginning a cycle of cumulative advantage and more opportunities for achievement and success. He provides Denmark as a counterexample, where, based on national policy, ability grouping does not begin until age ten, noting that the impact of relative age on success and achievement in school is nearly unheard of there.

Does that seem like too difficult of a change to try out on the slow, lumbering - looming - beast that is the educational system in America?  Even if there are not enough jobs out there for people, a better-educated populace still seems like something to strive for.