"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.

Harambe's death and man's ultimate freedom

The earth is a farm.  We are someone else’s property. – Charles Fort

Goya's The Colossus on the cover

 So, we all want to have control over our lives, right?  To be able to control our destinies.  To have agency.  Each day is a sort of triage where we evaluate the things that we can change – and those we can’t.  The things we can control and can’t control (more about the uncontrollable below).  Like rivers carved into the earth, the paths of change become channeled.  The streams flow fast in these confines; choices become limited.

This idea came to mind recently with the outrage over the death of Harambe, the Cincinnati Zoo gorilla.  The outrage over the killing – to protect a child that had fallen into Harambe’s enclosure – quickly spread.  People were really mad, so much so that a “Justice for Harambe” change.org petition has nearly 500,000 supporters.  Not to get into the aspects of this incident – the mom and the zoo have been roundly criticized.  What interests me is the virulence of the criticism.

This is a perfect issue to provoke a quick response.  It falls into the category of things that people can take action on – the outrage occurring on an individual level but among many people.  What about this got people all fired up?  It is kind of wildcard – a gorilla getting shot in a zoo to (purportedly, some would say) save a child.  Outrage felt – and acted upon.  Petitions signed.

So is this what it takes to get interested in something?  Why aren’t people protesting the very existence of zoos, the existence of which allowed for Harambe’s demise in the first place?  Why do people not rally against factory farming?  Why aren’t people more actively critical of domestic and foreign policies?

What is right and just and moral comes down to the individual in many cases.  But, more importantly and interestingly, those carved-out river canyons come into play.  Some things are so, well, entrenched in our society they don’t get constantly criticized.  They become part of the background noise.  Object to Harambe’s death: sure.  Object to the farm sector that is worth tens of billions of dollars: not so easy.

A detail from Goya's painting: the reaction of crowds

The poet Robert Bly has written A Little Book on the Human Shadow, which “concisely describes the most powerful human decision making engine, which our culture refuses to acknowledge, the shadow”.  In it he portrays the shadow as a bag into which we place all those suppressed needs/desires/drives.  We keep this shadow-bag with us though we pretend we don’t.  Yet it affects all of our decisions.  It controls how we expect people to behave.  Think of Freud’s id or even Jung’s collective unconscious.  All the spoken and unspoken things that take place in human encounters.

All those uncontrollable things – those desires we have to change the course of our life but are unable to scale the canyon walls – need to be acted upon in some way.  You see where I’m going with this?  We feel bad that we don’t actively try and subvert the system so we act out on things that we feel we can have some control over.  Pressure release valves for those crushed and hidden shadows.

The image of a gorilla in a zoo pulling around a child is so ripe for this type of interpretation. The gorilla represents the animal world which we have brought into our protective custody, the zoo.  We want to control the animal world which, in its animal, non-language way, represents the shadows that we all lug around.  In a controlled setting. 

We have outrage when our ward is harmed or killed.  That ward is us, the zoo is our world.  Our world is a prison and we take action on the things we can.  We change the shades of color that the prison walls are painted.  We cry out for better treatment when outrageous incidents occur.  But we shy away from trying to change the prison itself or even ask fundamental questions about it.  (Steps down from soapbox.)