Category Archives: Politics

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It is widely accepted now that there are two kinds of news in circulation in the world: relatively accurate news, and fake news. A number of cable channels and Internet sites have chosen sides, and put out either all real or all fake news. The “real” news outlets — The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN etc. — and their adherents congratulate themselves constantly for their objectivity and neutrality.

But there is a third category of information driving all of this, on both sides of the real-vs-fake debate, and that is what I call the narrative. This is not the content of their broadcasts or articles, but the assumptions that underlie their decisions on what to cover and what emphasis to give it. Contrary to what many people outside the news business believe — that these decisions are handed down by corporate executives for the working stiffs to execute — the reality is more subtle than that. Continue reading →

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What we want our parents to have been and our presidents to be — the father/mother who knows best and takes care of everything.

Most of us who grew up in homes with a mother and father in residence remember our childhoods as times of absolute safety. If the slightest thing went awry, Mom or Dad would fix it immediately. In our adult lives, facing existential threats (whether real or imagined, still threats) on a daily basis, we often wax nostalgic about that Golden Age when Mom and Dad, all powerful, provided for our every want and vanquished every threat to our well-being. 

Every once in a while, reality intruded into our cocoons and someone suffered an accident or a sudden illness or a crime, sometimes someone died, and we all reeled in shock at this thing that could not happen. But in time we either returned to our cheery confidence or gave ourselves over to permanent nostalgia for the old days, when everybody was safe.

We weren’t safe, of course. We were ignorant. We believed in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and omnipotent parents. Meanwhile our parents were just as scared, insecure, uncertain and self-doubting as we are now. Thinking differently — believing in that Golden Age — warps our thinking about ourselves, for one thing makes us fault ourselves for not being as stalwart as we suppose they were.

But there’s more to it than that. Believing our parents were god-like and our childhoods were inviolate is childlike, perhaps, but it does scant harm, and that only to ourselves. But when you expand that mistaken belief into an entire worldview, the increase in harm is exponential.  Continue reading →

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We don’t organize large rallies to protest hurricanes. No one advocates, and no government funds, attempts to eradicate hurricanes, despite their destructive and deadly nature. (Occasionally some idiot will propose dropping a nuclear bomb on one, but no one that dumb could ever get elected president. Oh, wait…) No one reviles hurricanes, or denies that they exist. No one blames the president for the hurricanes that occur during his term of office. At least not yet. No one campaigns on behalf of hurricanes, trying to persuade us to understand them better, except weather forecasters when one is approaching and they all run out to stand in the rain and the blowing debris to tell us not to do that.

In general, we’re quite sensible about hurricanes, accepting them as a part of the world we inhabit without investing them with any particular political, moral or religious values. (A few exceptions, I know.)  Continue reading →

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As we approach Herd Mentality, as Trump called it, we seem to be lowering our standards for political candidates.

Our relentless drive for Herd Stupidity — the state in which so many of us are so stupid that there’s nothing more we can manage to do together than run off a cliff —  is being assisted and accelerated by the homogenization of politics. Every election contest in America right now seems to be about only one thing — are you with Trump, or not. 

If they held an election today for City Cat Herder in Omaha, Nebraska, there would be a Trumpist candidate and a progressive socialist Democrat candidate and they would spend the whole campaign arguing over who is really president.

This is a big, unbelievably complicated country, whose governments at every level face daunting, unbelievably complicated problems. Ideology does not fix potholes. Cults do not build sewer systems. Conspiracy theories do not help keep the lights on, or help anyone after the lights have gone out. Loyalty to Trump does not deflect hurricanes. Continue reading →

A dismaying proportion of the news coming at us from the mainstream media firehose is based on polls. It’s dismaying to me because in my past lives in business and politics, I have been a consumer of the polls themselves, not just the news based on them, and thus have first hand knowledge of how good they are. Which is not very. And they are getting worse fast.

Some days it seems as if every other story is about a poll: what politician is ahead, and who is behind; what foreign or fiscal or immigration or trade policy does the public like, or not; who supports a cause, or opposes it. And it’s usually presented as just a poll, as in “A new poll out today says that fewer than half of West Virginians believe the 2020 presidential election was legitimate.” Few broadcast stories and not all printed stories tell us anything about how the poll was conducted or by whom. Continue reading →

In all the babble over the “reforms” to Medicare now being debated in Congress, I have heard not one talking head refer to the reason the reforms are necessary: perhaps the single most contemptible piece of legislation ever disgorged by the Congress. It was part of the 2003 law establishing Medicare Part D, which for the first time would pay for medications. It was called the “noninterference provision,” and it prohibited any effort by Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Medicare, with its enormous buying power, was and is required by law to pay whatever the pharmaceutical companies ask for their compounds, period.

One cannot imagine a piece of legislation  more harmful to more people, or more nakedly designed to ease the lives and fatten the purses of Big Pharma and its executives. Continue reading →

Kamikaze tactics, it turns out, are just as unproductive in politics as they were in WWII.

In the late stages of World War II, the Japanese military adopted a new tactic for use against Allied warships — the kamikaze attack. Instead of trying to shoot at or bomb enemy ships, the kamikaze pilots conducted suicide attacks, flyng their bomb-laden planes directly into the ships. The idea was to achieve greater accuracy and efficiency in destroying enemy vessels. 

This began in October of 1944. By the end of the war 11 months later 3,800 kamikaze pilots had died. There were a few spectacular successes, but on average, each suicide attack killed two enemy sailors. It was a terrible tactic, not only because it didn’t work, but because each attack reduced the number of aircraft and pilots remaining to conduct the war. It was, in fact, a tactic that could have been embraced only by a country that knew it was losing the war, and had decided to fight to the death while doing so. Continue reading →

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Really? You want to do this again? Well, history tells us: be careful what you wish for, and don’t presume you know how it will turn out.

When I visited Costa Rica in 1988, on assignment for a national wildlife magazine, it happened to be the 40th anniversary of the country’s civil war, so there were commemorations and recollections everywhere, all the time. Otherwise I would not have learned the story that provided one of the major political and historical epiphanies of my life.  I did not know that any country had done what Costa Rica had done, indeed it had never occurred to me that any country could do what Costa Rica did. 

Then when I revisited the story this year in connection with something I was writing, details I had not especially noticed before ignited like fireworks and illuminated in an entirely new way the presidency of Donald Trump and the events of January 6, 2021, in Washington D.C. Continue reading →