Category Archives: Americana

Believing Is Being

Americana

In Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals, Robert Pirsig writes about bringing a boat into a strange marina, in a strange river town, in the dark. He has the wrong marina or the wrong town, I don’t remember which, but the harbor lights didn’t match the charts and he kept moving the real lights around in his mind to make them fit his imagined reality. He was in the wrong place, but it seemed like the right place because he was mentally moving the data around. In other words,  Believing is seeing, not the other way around. I wrote that four years ago, I believe it, even more, today except that I want to add: Seeing is being, we are what we believe we are. 

A couple of weeks ago, Burt Kuhlman and I went to the  California State Railroad Museum. Driving to Burt’s house, I was listening to the Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testimony on the car radio and, when he got in the car, Burt said he had been watching it on TV. So, as we drove up to Sacramento, we continued to listen to the testimony of  Dr. Ford. When we got there, we both agreed the hearing was more interesting than the museum, so we skipped the museum, turned around, and drove home, listening to the start of Brett Kavanaugh’s testimony. After listening to Dr. Ford testify – and then watching and relistening on TV at home – I find it hard to see how anybody thinks she is lying. But I already believed her and her testimony just gave me a framework on which to hang that belief. I know that, but she was so vulnerable, so honest, and so strong that I thought that even some Republicans Senators would believe her. That doesn’t seem to be the case.    

I want to preach something, but first I want to tell a story. A somewhat embarrassing story. In 1966, I started a development/construction company, bas Homes, with my friend and mentor, Sam Berland. Sam was about 30 years older than me and, in many ways, he was a father figure, he certainly was one of the most influential people in my life. He had been my boss at Shapell Homes and we agreed that going in, we would continue that relationship. He would be President of  bas and, after five years of his tutelage, I would step up to President and he would stay on as an advisor. When the five years were up, I asked to become president and he agreed by saying I could be President and he would be promoted to CEO (and still boss). After a couple of months, I started whining and Sam finally agreed to an impartial referee to settle our disagreement. 

The ref moved in and watched us for a week or two and interviewed almost everybody in the company. When he got to me, he asked me if I really wanted to be President and I said: “of course”. He asked me that, he said, because in his experience, men – sorry but that’s the way it was in those days – who really wanted to be a company President, went after it “like a dog after red meat” and I wasn’t doing that. As the Ref pointed out, I was asking Sam to make me President while I was still bringing questions and problems to him, for his decisions as if he were the President. He said that if I really wanted to be President, I would make the decision and then present that decision to Sam as a  fait accompli. My priority was not taking over but having Sam like love me. I wanted to be President but not at the expense of our relationship. Sam wanted me to love him, but he was the boss and if that hurt the relationship, he was sorry. Looking back, I realize that Sam thought of himself as President; I thought of myself as his assistant. Sam was not going to give me his power, I had to take it and before I could take it, I had to own it. 

I think our country, the world really, needs women to take over and run it. And the operative word here is”take”, men are not going to give their control up. Men, especially we white men, think that the world needs us even though we are the ones who are ruining the world. Women already have more power than they are using, they control much, if not the majority, of the private money in the country – just look at the number of ads that are selling wealth management targeted towards women – and it is time to start using that leverage.  

Left Wing of the Possible

Americana, Politics

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

Americana, Politics

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

Americana, Politics, Psychological Musings

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.