Miscellaneous Outrage

Call Me Chicken Little

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

Here we go, I guess. We’re just four days in, and it appears that all those nutty, childish, reactionary things that you’ve spent the last two months terrified of but that your racist uncle assured you were “just campaign trail antics” really are the cornerstone of our 45th President’s administration. Maybe I’m just being paranoid, but the past 72 hours have been nothing short of surreal. The sky is falling, call me Chicken Little if you must.

Since his inauguration a few days ago we’ve see President Trump throw a fit over parade size and actually acknowledge that his press secretary peddled “alternate facts,” which, wtf? We’ve seen him repeat the lie that his unprecedented loss of the popular vote was a result of unprecedented voter fraud. We’ve seen him straighten his tie with Scotch Tape.

While some Republican leaders fear that he is blowing his only chance to build consensus with the benefit of the doubt that comes with a nascent administration, he has found time to effect disastrous policy change (if stopping short of governing).

In the past 72 hours the current administration has hamstrug government efficacy (excepting, of course, the Military-Industrial Complex) through a blanket hiring freeze. It has apparently deemed the man who less than a year ago described President Obama as “The Antichrist” now, after testifying that climate change is a real thing, too moderate for a cabinet position. It has killed the EPA’s contracts grant program, which includes not only research and monitoring but environmental cleanup and redevelopment.

At the same time, an overwhelming majority of appointments (let alone confirmations) are vacant. A significant population of Obama staffers are still on board to make sure that someone flips the OPEN/CLOSED sign twice a day, which, by the way, includes James Comey, which can be any combination of:

a) An inability of the administration to come up with anyone different

b) A tacit approval of his mishandling of various investigations over the course of the last year

c) A move to retain some kind of leverage over the several pending investigations on connections between our government and foreign adversaries

Which, I mean, take your pick, I guess.

It’s not that the Trump administration hasn’t been busy, it just hasn’t been busy doing its job.

What we’re seeing is the good stuff. The easy stuff. The “let-me-stick-my-thumb-in-your-eye-you-haters-stuff.” We’re seeing quick, satisfying serotonin dumps in lieu of anything like strategy. We’re seeing a spoiled kid have dessert before broccoli. Between Kim Jong Un and Joffrey Baratheon you’d think we’d seen enough of the whole Boy King thing.

We’re seeing the same approach to governance that we saw during the campaign. The candidate Trump  consistently eschewed preparation in favor of freewheeling showmanship. He never built a ground game or any kind of organizational infrastructure.

Now I know what you’re thinking: “He won, after all.” And you’re right. He did win*. He was elected by the country whose individuals carry an average of $16,000 in credit card debt and nearly $30,000 in auto loans. A country ravaged by obesity. A nation of people who consistently demonstrate that they cannot invest in the long term at the expense of the short.

This is where we are. We live with a barely functioning government of white supremacists that is actively divesting from our quality of life. So I’m proud to see that protests dwarfed the inauguration. I’m proud that the Women’s March was one of the largest (the largest?) demonstration in US history. I’m proud of that guy who punched Richard Spencer in the face.

God that's good.
God that’s good.

My instinct is to stockpile guns and MREs and wait for Red Dawn to play out, because this feels about as close to the end of the world as I can remember. But that’s only because I can’t remember when there were a bunch of nuclear warheads in Cuba pointed right at our faces. This country has seen some shit, and it’s still more or less in one piece. So stay mad and eat your broccoli, it’s just two years to midterms.

 

*kind of.

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Eastern Promises from a President Elect

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 4 Comments

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

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 1 Comment

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

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

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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The Real Winner of the Election

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

You have probably heard by now that we recently had an election. The lady who was supposed to win did not, and the shittiest job in the world just went to the guy who seems to be realizing now that he never really wanted it in the first place.

In the waning hours of Tuesday the 8th, a bit more than half the country began mourning its loss. It was the second time in three presidencies that a Democratic candidate won the popular vote and lost the election at the hands of an electoral system that is unanimously regarded as obsolete.

The rest of the country, after a few hours of jubilation and hate crimes, started to lose a day or so later as our President Elect began to backpedal on pillars of his campaign stump one at a time.

It started with the wall, which by Thursday had turned into a fence, and by this week seems to look more like a policy of mass incarceration. Promises of getting money out of politics went by the wayside as he stacked his transition team with lobbyists. A week after swearing up and down that the Affordable Care Act would be repealed and replaced, he reneged to say that much of it was good, and it just needed some work (which, btw, is essentially verbatim to Clinton’s position).

He cried out to #DrainTheSwamp. To rid Washington of the establishment goons that have ruined America and replace them with fresh thinkers. Then he appointed Reince Priebus, literally the single most establishment Republican there is, as his Chief of Staff.

This year we watched everyday political attack ads devolve into the manufactured drama usually reserved for reality shows. We watched an incidentally uninformed electorate grow into a deliberately misinformed electorate. And we saw backpedaling from campaign promises reach cartoon status.

The American political system, in 2016, has become a caricature of itself.

There are, apparently, no winners in this election. No winners except for cynicism.

trump
art. by Illma Gore

You’ve heard it. Clinton won the vote but lost the election. It was always rigged against Bernie. Trump won’t fulfill a single promise, but has stacked his cabinet with a chilling combination of neo-Nazi ideologues, anti-science scientists, and brutally efficient policy men.

Trump rode a wave of populist anger to our highest office, but it feels now more than ever like the will of the voters is unheard in Washington. This election dashed the hopes and dreams of half the nation that we would triumph over a divisive campaign and elect a female president. The first week of Donald Trump’s presidential transition may set the stage to dash the hopes of the people who put him in that office.

We’re facing, now, a 2020 election in a nation of cynics. Where the feeling of hopelessness transcends political affiliation and We The People disengage from the political process because it doesn’t make a difference anyway.

That will be a mistake.

In the same way that we need to continue to hold Obama accountable for campaign promises like closing Guantanamo, we need to hold President Trump accountable for his promise to fix national healthcare. His promise to return prosperity to the American Middle Class. His promise to get money out of politics. His promise to erase corruption from Washington. His promise to quash international terrorism.

The Candidate Trump made a lot of promises that we can all get behind, and he will take office on January 21 with a Republican controlled legislature. Trump has all of the momentum here, and if he can’t fulfill his promises to improve the quality of life of Americans, then it’s our job to find someone who can.

We do that by holding our elected officials accountable to the promises they made to get our vote, and by participating in every election (not just the ones with half billion dollar ad campaigns).

Mid-term elections are two years out. And whether you’re disillusioned by the results of 2016 or the flacid promises of a blustering showman, that’s the time to make your presence felt.

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