Eastern Promises from a President Elect

Welp, here it goes. The world is waiting on pins and needles to see what exactly is going to happen over the coming days and weeks as Donald Trump is inaugurated and his administration begins to take shape. This week represents a dramatic shift in US and World politics, unlike anything we’ve seen since, say, the 16th century. Although to catch a glimpse of what an unchecked Trump Presidency might look like, there is one other modern country that embraces his leadership style.

There is one country that always seems to overplay its hand. One country that has thrown caution to the wind and completely adopted a bull-in-the-china-shop approach to diplomacy. One country that is consistently viewed from afar as irrational, insane, and stupid, but keeps on keeping on day after day. There is one country that is continually dismissed and underestimated, but which has bluffed its way to a seat at the adults table. One country which, in the face of more or less global opposition, has staged three nuclear weapons tests in the last decade.

Donald Trump’s campaign has much more in common with North Korean leadership than terrible hair. It’s not a stretch to think that he’ll use a similar strategy as leader of the free world.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump acknowledges the crowd as he walks onstage for a rally at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, Saturday, Jan. 9, 2016. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
(AP Photo/Patrick Semansky) – photoshop work uncredited

This warrants a look at North Korean policy with the premise that the Kims are not fundamentally insane, but that the Madman (Petulant Child?) With A Bomb visage is carefully curated. North Korean leadership is, at the end of the day, acting in their own best interest by keeping the Pacific Rim in a perpetual risk of nuclear war.

Korea’s nuclear gambit pays off in both foreign and domestic policy, and we’ve already seen Trump borrow a play or two.

  • Domestic Policy – A state of impending war has, for centuries, bought any national leadership a bit of leeway with their constituency1. It whips up nationalist fervor, hardens The People to outside propaganda and information wars, and breeds a kind of stoicism to national shortages of things like food and energy.
  • Foreign Policy – By projecting an image of nuclear equipped insanity, North Korea has insulated itself from invasion. In 2003 President Bush identified North Korea, Iran, and Iraq as the “Axis of Evil.” We saw how that played out. American policy has, for a few decades at least, been to undermine or topple foreign governments2 that are both a) unfriendly to American interests, and b) unable to do anything about it. North Korea’s commitment to nuclear development and putative willingness to deploy those weapons has dramatically reduced the risk of Normandy East.

Now, does capitalizing on nationalist fury and my-way-or-the-highway negotiating to win power sound familiar? Donald Trump was never going to win an election based on his policy chops or command of the issues, but his willingness to kick over the checkers board resonated with an electorate that has grown cynical about neo-Liberal policies.

Importantly, the weekly gaffes and Twitter tirades that have typified the past year are not the random ravings of a madman, but a clearly effective strategy for overplaying his hand.

Looking forward to a Trump administration, it’s hard to imagine a change in tactics.

Part of North Korea’s success relies on a robust propaganda machine and controlled messaging. We see this at home in Trump’s efforts to fundamentally dismantle the concept of truth through fabricated news and a prolonged assault on the news media. His efforts to expand libel laws and weaken the First Amendment indicate a real move toward weakening legitimate journalism and strengthening his own propaganda apparatus.

Bluster like a Mexican border wall and weakening NATO works in two ways. It appeals to latent racism (white nationalism) that has been ignored by mainstream politics for a long time (but is clearly still central to the American Identity), and erodes global confidence that the world’s largest economy and military will act in a predictable way.

And the thing is, it’ll probably work. In the same way that Trump actually (sort of) won the Presidency and that North Korea still hasn’t been invaded by some Coalition of Willing partners, this approach to government really may benefit the US in the short term.

If we’re willing to drill for oil in National Parks, we’ll see an uptick in jobs. If we’re willing to upend a century of diplomacy, we’ll probably see concessions from our allies. If we’re willing to ignore the idea that some things are true and other things are not, then we’ll certainly be able to believe that our own Dear Leader has our best interest in mind, and that we really are great again.

The question, then, is what we’re willing to give permanently in order to believe that we’re doing better now.

 

1Of course this has also been a cornerstone of US foreign policy since at least the 1950s, although we’ve selected wars on ideologies (like Communism, Drug Culture, and Terrorism) rather than anything actually defeatable to prolong the uncertainty.
2 Iran, Syria, Guatemala, El Salvador, Lebanon, Cuba, Congo, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Brazil, Chile, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria again, etc. – Any I forgot? Leave ’em in the comments!

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Benny Up

img_20150807_231409
the unassailable, irreplacable

The last week has been rough. Like, I think, a lot of the people who knew Ben Parsons I’ve spent the past few days shuffling through the grieving process and hoping to land on something like gratitude. Parsons was a rare beast; we were lucky to catch a glimpse.

Ben lived a beautiful kind of paradox. He managed to possess all at once those traits that endear us to each other, but that tend to be mutually exclusive. He was simultaneously gregarious and humble, hilarious and kind.

On Sunday hundreds of people walked together to the top of Big Mountain to share a moment of silence. Hundreds more sent thoughts and prayers from around the world and made it clear that Ben touched countless lives.

But what truly set Ben apart was that those hundreds of people also touched him. Over the last few days we’ve heard stories and shared memories. The common chorus is a reflection on how important family, friends, community were to Ben. Each person hurting now knows not only that he was important to us, but that we meant every bit as much to him.

Ben was willing, like no one else I’ve known, to let the world in. To actually care for everyone around him. To let each of us touch and change him the way he challenged us and improved every one of our lives. Ben’s rareness, his uniqueness, was in his unmatched capacity to love.

This is as much at the center of our loss as it is to his legacy and lasting influence. We can all strive to live and love a bit more like Ben.

 

 

 

How’s the weather out there?

buttecold

Lyric artist Temp? but really though?
And the weather is sizzling hot
Mister, pants for romance is not’Cause it’s too, too, too darn hot
 Ella Fitzgerald  100+  There is no hope.
 Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head  The Lovin’ Spoonful  95  Good god it’s hot. Like, have a mojito hot. Buy a plane ticket hot. Lock the doors and sleep in the basement until October hot.
 It’s so hot in here it’s running down the walls
And it’s dripping in my eyes from my hair
It’s hot it’s so hot
 The March Violets  82  Burn your pants, burn your sweaters. You’ll never be comfortable again.
  Lukeworm and hating it. Filthy and tepid. Filthy and tepid.   See The Light  68   Puddles are getting kind of scummy. It’s probably raining. And not, like, “Sweater Weather” rain. Crappy rain.
Inside this place is warm
Outside it starts to pour
The Neighbourhood  55 Ho man. Sweater Weather. Pumpkin Spice Lattes. This is the best.
Baby, it’s cold outside. Frank Loesser  40  It’s not that cold. Not even icy. Get yourself home.
“It’s cold as ice.” Foreigner 32  It’s literally freezing out there. Get some gloves, and keep your ears covered. You’ll catch your death of cold.
 It’s cold here.
Sunshine falls like a snowstorm.
It’s only cold for me.
If I touch anything, it freezes so I’m afraid to hold your hand.
 Epik High 12   This here is your classic “Christmas Story” blizzard. If it’s too cold to hold someone’s hand, definitely refrain from licking lightposts, ski poles, ice skates, and anything else you might get stuck to. It’s super embarrassing.
 It’s colder than a well digger’s ass.  Tom Waits  0  Where you’ve actually been working pretty hard and even though it’s legit cold out you’re working up a little bit of a sweat (especially in the buttcrack region) and then your union break comes up so you crack your thermos with the Bailey’s coffee in it and have a seat and just, like, enjoy the damn stars for a minute but then you go to hop back up, to get back to it, and your swass is frozen to the permafrost. You know what I mean. The pitts. Really.
 Colder than a polar bear soaked in liquid nitrogen
Something like a tray of ice cubes
 The Palmer Squares  -23  Like, Butte cold.
 It’s colder than a gut-shot bitch wolf dog with nine sucking pups pulling a number-four trap up a hill in the dead of winter in the middle of a snowstorm with a mouth full of porcupine quills.  Tom Waits  ?????  This is real.

Do you work for a living? Or are you in the outdoor industry?

Somewhere in New York a ball is waiting to drop. In a couple of days, they’ll hoist that gaudy thing to the top of 1 Times Square before they let it back down again and we’ll all sing Auld Lang Syne and strangers will kiss in the street and then they’ll pack the whole thing up in styrofoam peanuts and wait for the next year to do it all again. It’s a tradition.

New Year’s is a holiday fraught with tradition, after all, with the songs, and the hats, and the terrible champagne, and the resolutions, and the ruminating on just what happened over the last twelve months. It’s pageantry for the sake of pageantry, mostly, and I would never suggest that you make a New Year’s Resolution.  But in the long nights and bloated post-Christmas stupor one can’t help but reflect, for a moment, on the highs and lows of the year before.

To me, 2016 felt old. It was a relic. Somehow we are standing on the cusp of a robot revolution and using the vocabulary of the Civil War. We each carry an inconceivably powerful computer in our pocket and we’ve cured the most devastating diseases in history. Yet the national dialogue seems inclined to fire up the Cold War for old time’s sake and cast aside the lessons from the 20th Century so we can do it all again. Even Siri and Alexa sound a bit like HAL, if you think about it.

Take, for instance, the jobs conversation (you remember the election, yes?). As far as I can tell, our new administration’s plan for economic prosperity evokes the tenor of Reconstruction, and rests on coal mining, assembly line labor, and condemning immigrants.

When we talk about the economy we still use the parlance of the Industrial Revolution, when factory output and factory jobs correlated one to one and energy was free. We ignore the fact that 85% of manufacturing jobs were lost to automation and improvements in technology, not lowly paid currency manipulators.

I mean, good god people – we live in the age of self-driving cars, but the national dialogue on job creation is still built on Henry Ford’s assembly line. A manufacturing-based economy is lost, not to trade and immigrants, but to the unflinching wheel of progress. The south fought a war to preserve a slave-based economy only to see it rendered moot by the mechanization of the cotton harvest. Our current president-elect has promised a trade war over jobs that began fading to obsolescence in the 80s.

(NB: If we’re actually interested in putting people to work, it’s hard to imagine a more labor and investment intensive project that redesigning the entire power grid for renewables. Hell, Exxon and Phillips can have the contracts for all I care.)

But the tendency to look to assembly lines and strip mines for jobs ignores a quiet industry giant. Starting in 2017, the impacts of outdoor recreation (you know it as “playing”) will be included in the US GDP calculations.  A 2012 Economic Impact Study of the sector reports that the number will be somewhere around $650 billion in the US alone. (That’s bigger than the pharmaceutical industry, btw.)

And so when we talk about jobs, it’s time to start talking about real jobs. Not imaginary jobs that your grandfather had after he came home from killing Nazis but that haven’t existed since I Love Lucy got cancelled.

workingforfree
PC: @bbrunsvold, working for free

We’re talking about real careers that support real families and buy real houses. It’s hunting guides and trailbuilders and bike mechanics and ski lodge operators. It’s the guy at the Patagonia store, or who shows you where the big fish are.

This is a segment of the economy that relies on government assistance, but not in a traditional way. The outdoor industry doesn’t rely on subsidies and tax breaks. It doesn’t shelter profits in Ireland. It doesn’t ask regulators to look the other way during an oil spill to keep people at work. The outdoor industry only asks that open and wild spaces are protected (we’ve got, like, five year budget forecasts and stuff and it’ll really do us a solid if we can count on us not, like, damming the Grand Canyon or something).

For generations, conversations about the economy have pitted conservation against prosperity. This was probably about right when “prosperity” meant clear cutting and cyanide leach mining. It doesn’t have to mean that anymore.

In the west we have a tradition of, like Wallace Stegner said, approaching “land, water, grass, timber, mineral resources, and scenery as grave robbers might approach the tomb of a pharaoh.” We have the Berkeley Pits and stump towns to prove it.

But Stegner was also hopeful that a newfound western community would “work out some sort of compromise between what must be done to earn a living and what must be done to restore health to the earth, air and water… to control corporate power and to dampen the excess that has always marked the region, and will arrive at a degree of stability and a reasonably sustainable economy based on resources that they will know how to cherish and renew.”

And we’re on the right track. Wild places are now scarcer than energy and we need to ascribe value appropriately. Not only out of sentimentality and a liberal arts degree, but out of good business sense. It’s time to get our thinking out of the 19th century and into the 21st.

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Familiar Feelings

I read once that people who don’t study history are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, while people who do study history are doomed to sit by helplessly and watch everyone else repeat the mistakes of the past.

Yesterday we saw a headline about a diplomat being assassinated in Turkey. The response from my personal little echo chamber felt more or less consistent: haven’t we seen this movie before? It’s the one where Europe and the US recede into a landscape of bitter nationalism  and an assassination in the Balkans tips the first domino in a series of dominoes that leads to a war of unprecedented scale and technology improves tactics much more quickly than strategy and a lot of people die. It starred that guy who’s not Jake Gyllenhaal but that you always confuse with him.

raskolnikov
Litrony.com

And who knows? Maybe it’s not that big a deal. But this is far from the first time the last few months have made us feel squeamish, nervous, and chillingly familiar. (Remember a few weeks ago when CNN hosted a discussion of whether or not Jews are people?)

This all feels familiar because it is, but we remember history with the benefit of hindsight. When we look now at the underpinnings of WWI, it’s easy to slap our heads and lament that they didn’t see it coming. There isn’t any need to think about nuance, because we know exactly (plus/minus some whitewashing here and there) what happened.

The past several months have felt familiar because they’ve been presented the same clear cut way. The presidential campaign skipped over substantive policy discussions in favor of monosyllabic adjectives: great, sad, smart, best. The very real nuance of policy gave way to concepts that we’re more comfortable with: right and wrong. Good and bad.

If any of this feels familiar, it’s because you have seen this movie before, and that movie was probably written for children. Like, The Lion King, or something. The national conversation, in both echo chambers, has framed our current setting as a battle between good and evil. The candidates in 2016 were not flawed humans doing their best, but caricatures of ideologies, packaged with childproof lids and choking warnings.

Each side saw its candidate is Simba, the other candidate as Scar. Each side sees itself not only as a champion for Good, but, importantly, without faults. (I think we can all, regardless of political affiliation, agree that Tim Kaine is definitely Pumba in this analogy.) In a children’s movie the heroes are perfect and the villains are perfectly villainous. This premise of clarity bleeds from entertainment (whether it’s The Lion King, or 24, or Homeland) into life and poisons the reality that even in history nothing is clear. Remember CNN’s analysis segment that categorized news stories as “good things” and “bad things?”

So, yeah. We’ve seen this movie before. And as the lines between governance, news, and entertainment blur we’ll continue to see complex geopolitical issues distilled into “Good” and “Bad.”

But it’s not enough to just blame the news media. They’re selling what we’re buying. So quit it. Stop sharing whackjob conspiracy theories from Huffington Post and the Blaze. Admit, if only to yourself, that Democracy Now! is a fake thing. Acknowledge that our choices of fiction and entertainment shape the lens through which we see the world. Hell, read some Dostoevsky.

We owe it to each other to come together and agree that not only are things not black and white, there are a hell of a lot more than fifty shades of grey.

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