Dr. Christine Blasey Ford opened the door with her heroic testimony on Friday and then these two women forced Senator Flake to listen. This is telling truth to power.
Category Archives: Americana
Left Wing of the Possible
I’m a radical, but I tell my students at Queens, I try not to soapbox. I want to be on the left wing of the possible. Michael Harrington, a founder of the Democratic Socialists of America.
The Left Wing of the Possible is also the title of an interesting and very complimentary article on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Socialist phenom from the Bronx, in the New Yorker (interestingly, the same article is entitled Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Historic Win and the Future of the Democratic Party in the online edition). The article is by David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker since 1998, who wrote a very favorable article on Barrack Obama in 2007, painting him as a centrist, that was instrumental in my getting on the Obama bandwagon. As with most New Yorker articles, it is about 75% context, so, if you are at all interested in politics, I suggest you give it a read.
Ocasio-Ortega is running on a platform that, the article points out, is not that radical. She is running on a platform that includes single-payer health insurance, a minimum wage of $15, equal rights for women and minorities, and free college, but, to quote Bernie: “not the government taking over industry”. As the article title suggests, she wants what she thinks is possible. I think it is possible, too and, I don’t understand why I often read the opposite from the Democratic establishment. Taking a hypothetical Trump voter – who voted for Trump because they don’t like income inequality or are afraid that their middle-class life will not be there for their kids, not a Trump voter who voted for him because they think he is a racist – I think they are more likely to vote for somebody who is pushing free college rather than somebody who is pushing we will significantly cut interest rates for future undergraduates because we believe that making college more affordable is…important.
I don’t think that the Democratic voter base, including many Trump voters – many of whom also voted for Obama – are against free college and single-payer health care, for that matter, I think the Democratic corporate base is. I think that, if the Democrats want to win back Congress, they are going to have to start listening to the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezes, not just their rich financial contributors.
As an aside, after WWII, education at state colleges was virtually free and remained so at the University of California until 1970 when a $150 “education” fee was added. Now the tuition fee is $14,460. As an aside to the aside, I don’t think it is a coincidence that, as the number of minorities has gone up at Cal, so has the tuition. I think the governmental and educational infrastructure, consciously or unconsciously, just doesn’t think educating people of color is as important as it was when most of the students were white. End aside.
Distracted by shiny objects
Republicans have blown this deficit up to places one couldn’t even imagine it could go: a statement by Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) who still voted for the 2019 military budget of approximately 716 billion dollars.
While the press – and, correspondingly, the people who rely on the press for information, that’s us – have been watching the Trump Administration put children in cages, a bi-partisan Congress has voted for a new military budget. A military budget that includes a boost in defense spending of approximately 82 billion dollars for next year. To put that in perspective, the increase just voted on is bigger than the entire Russian military budget which was 69.2 billion dollars last year (according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute).
Think about that for a second, the increase of the United States’ military budget, next year over this year, is bigger than Russia’s entire military budget. Lest you think that this is all the nasty Republicans’ fault, the 2019 military budget was a bi-partisan effort with only ten Senators voting against it and two of the Ney voters were Republicans (Mike Lee and Paul Rand). I am glad to say that both of California’s Senators, as well as Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand, voted Nay. I wasn’t surprised that Bernie voted Nay, but I am surprised Cory Booker voted Yea for the increase, seeing as how he is rumored to be running for President.
It is interesting to note that the Department of Education estimates that free college – belittled by much of the political establishment, on both sides of the aisle, as being unaffordable – would cost about 62.6 billion dollars, about 20 billion dollars less than the one year increase for our already bloated military. In my opinion, this is a good measure of our National Values and it is hard for me not to get enraged.
Trumpism and Jung/evolution
Stories about anti-heroes are powerful not because they confuse us, but because they deeply satisfy our unconscious understanding of who we are. The victory of Donald Trump was another story about who we actually are. From an article, Jung and the Trumpian Shadow by Alexander Blum, in a Web magazine called Guillette.
A day or so ago, Patricia Karnowski posted an article, referenced above, with the comment: OK friends. I found it. This explains what is going on… or at least it helps. And it does…or, at least, it clears up many of the very muddy ideas I’ve had swirling around in my heart and head. I want to yell “Read This Article!!” – I actually considered making it the title of my post – not so much because it is so insightful or that it tells the truth – although it is and it mostly does – but that it looks at the election from a new-to-me, detached, Jungian-pattern, overview. So much discussion of why Trump won the election is lost in yelled accusations or, just, sheer rage.
One of my strongest memories of the disastrous – in my opinion, at least – 2016 election was the first Republican Debate. Trump on the far end of the stage, in no man’s land, and, in the center Jeb Bush, the man who had raised $120 million, more money than everybody else put together. He was resplendent, waiting for his anointment, and Trump destroyed him. In almost every argument about how stupid Trump might be, I have told my arguer how masterful I thought Trump played his position but I couldn’t really define what happened or how Trump did it. Blum analyzes it from a pattern level.
In an essay titled “Feminism and the problem of supertoxic masculinity,” political scientist Justin Murphy makes an unconventional argument. In encouraging men to be passive, polite, and non-offensive through social pressure, most men will conform to that feminist standard out of a genuine unwillingness to be abrasive or do harm. But a small number of men who cannot be shamed, in a world filled with men who refuse to check them, will begin to dominate….Jeb Bush was far closer to the feminist male ideal than Donald Trump ever was. Bush was tepid, meek, and asked for polite apologies. Trump refused to apologize, bullied him, and bulldozed him. Jeb was too used to the polite society of elite socialization to deal with a man who was, by comparison, an uncouth barbarian. Everyone across the political spectrum, from socialists to Trump’s supporters, thoroughly enjoyed watching Jeb, the civilized man who was promised everything, be devastated by a shameless and cruel competitor. People, regardless of their political views, enjoyed watching a man perceived as weak be totally dismissed by a morally darker but more interesting man.
I don’t agree with every word of the above, or, more accurately, I don’t want to agree with it, but I have to admit that both Michele and I enjoyed Bush getting trashed. My default, however, is not to moralize over what Blum calls the shadow; I prefer to think selfish, unthinking behavior like racism, as being rooted in our territorial animal past and is a deep and powerful force.
As quoted by Blum, Jung says:
Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
And Blum points out that
American progressives believed that through a respectable politics, the psychology of hatred could be repressed through a combination of censorship and social pressure. They imagined that the march of progress was so inevitable that by shaming and denying the power of our worst impulses, we could create a paradise.
It is turning out that we can’t and I found this article very helpful in my trying to find out how we got here. Jung and the Trumpian Shadow, check it out.
Did I miss something?
I think I must have missed something. Even Trump couldn’t have gone from taking kids from their parents at the border because it is the law and we can’t stop it – it’s the Democrat’s fault, anyway – to signing an executive order banning it without taking a breath.