Category Archives: Psychological Musings

The Honda Insight, Al-Qaeda, ad hominem thinking, projection, and blogging

Americana, Psychological Musings

Honda Insight-

As I was driving down to Menlo Park the other day, I waited at a stoplight behind an old Honda Insight. This was the 2000 Insight that looked a little goofy – in the best way – got great gas mileage, and didn’t sell very well. This Insight had a bumper sticker that said Al-Qaeda hates this car and I thought, That’s wrong, Al-Qaeda loves that car. The bumper sticker was strangely annoying.

At first, it struck me that our different reactions were based on how we see Al-Qaeda sees us. That the bumper sticker indicated that Honda Harry thinks Al-Qaeda hates us because of who we are and I think that Al-Qaeda hates us because of what we do. I think that, if we all drove cars that got great mileage, if we didn’t need middle eastern oil, if we didn’t have troops stationed in Saudi Arabia, Al-Qaeda would be happier.

I understand that Al-Qaeda hates us and if we pulled our troops out of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan, Bahrain, Yeman, Egypt, Libya, and – especially – Saudi Arabia, they would still hate us. We have poisoned that well. I understand that if we didn’t reflexively back Israel, they would still hate us. Still, I don’t think that they hate us for who we are, I think that they hate us for what we have done – stationing troops in Islamic countries, their countries, among other things – and that has informed what they think of us.

I also think that we all make ad hominem arguments where we argue that the person is wrong because of who they are, not what they have said that might be wrong. I get five emails a day telling me about some stupid thing a Conservative has said like Obama being wrong about Libya because he is a Muslim. Aside from the fact that Obama isn’t a Muslim, why can’t a Muslim be right about Libya? But of those five emails, usually in one or two of them, it seems to me that what the Conservative is saying, maybe inexpertly saying, is sensible. The assumption of the email is that what is being said must be wrong because the guy saying it is a Conservative.

The ad hominem argument that the bumper sticker tries to make – the guy who put it on, really – is that  My Insight is good because Al-Qaeda doesn’t like it. Of course, everything that Al-Qaeda doesn’t like is not necessarily good. A-Qaeda doesn’t like killing male babies, that doesn’t make killing male babies good. Saying Al-Qaeda hates this car is not really an  argument and looking at it angered me.

We all see ourselves in others. Sometimes we see what we know about ourselves, sometimes we see what we didn’t notice or have forgotten, often we see what we find hard to see in ourselves. I am a big believer that projection is a way to look back at the projector. Why I was angry over  Al-Qaeda hates this is, eventually, more interesting, enlightening, and – surprise – more disturbing than if the bumper sticker is accurate or why the Honda guy put the bumper sticker on in the first place.

In this case, what bothered me is the assumptive superiority of the Honda guy. The assumption that what he had to say about Al-Qaeda and his car is of interest, or, even, importance. It was much easier to see that assumptive superiority on the bumper of the Insight than in myself and turning that thought back on myself gives me the shivers. The self-reproach of that assumptive superiority makes it hard to accept it in myself and easy to be irate with the Honda guy. That is the yin.

The yang is, if I didn’t have that assumptive superiority, I wouldn’t have a blog and I probably wouldn’t even pick up a camera. That yin and yang are the struggle when doing this blog and showing my pictures. I think it is a struggle we all have.

Even with all of that, I don’t think that Al-Qaeda hates the Honda Insight, and yeah, they probably do hate the guy driving it.

The horrific things we do to each other

Americana, Evolution, Obama, Politics, Psychological Musings

Boston-0405

I brought a biography of Clarence  Darrow – Attorney for the Damned – with me for the flight to Boston. I am not so sure that it was a great idea: I was still in Dayton, Tennessee – at the Monkey Trial – when the plane landed in Boston. And still in Tennessee on the bus ride to New Hampshire.

Darrow was in my family’s pantheon of civil heroes – or, at least, my dad’s pantheon, and by extension, mine – and I was enjoying reading about him in more detail than the stories that had been pretty much fixed in my DNA as a child. Darrow was a free-love-bohemian and I was a little taken back by how much free love and bohemianism there was back in the 1890s. He defended so many people that nobody else would touch, like Loeb and Leopold, the Western Federation of Miners who were in an industrial war with the Mine Owner’s Association in Idaho, or a black family that moved into a white neighborhood in Detroit.

The Mine Owner’s Association had the politicians backing them, and the police, and the Pinkerton’s who beat strikers to death under the banner of law and order. The miners struck back, bombing mines and buildings. The black family had everybody against them also, with the police protecting a crowd of whites who were trying to force the family out. It was a time of brutality and it was a time that resonates today, both financially and racially, although in a milder form.

A couple of years later, William Jennings Bryan ran for president as a populist hero against the powerful, the police that protected them, the Pinkertons, and even President Cleveland, of his own party, who sent Federal troops in to back the rich. Much of what Bryan said then is still germane now: There are two great theories of government. One claimed that if you would only legislate to make the well to do prosperous, their prosperity would leak through to those below. But the Democratic idea is if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity would find its way up through every class that rests upon them.

The book was about the Darrow I had been taught, the defender of the powerless, but there was a Darrow I didn’t know. A Darrow who also defended people because he wanted money, people like a white bigot who brutally killed a Hawaiian and who Darrow knew was guilty. My dad was a defense lawyer for a while and he constantly pitched that a person is innocent until proven guilty. In the same manner as Darrow, my dad defended people like a bartender who killed his wife. Daddy knew he was guilty – even I knew he was guilty hearing the stories over the dinner table – but that didn’t seem to matter to Darrow or my dad. But sitting on the airplane,above it all, it mattered to me and left me in a melancholy funk.

I had brought a New Yorker book review of a couple of books about the partition of Pakistan into two countries, Pakistan and Bangladesh. I put down my Darrow book and read the book review to improve my mood. That was even worse. Nixon was a prick and while he and Kissinger congratulated themselves on their masculinity and pragmatism, the Pakistani generals, our allies, slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Bengalis who were – as Nixon said – just a bunch of brown goddamn Moslems.

I thought of Obama and our drones and how our government seems to find killing people OK as long as it suits our political needs and my melancholy grew. I went back to Darrow, and, fortunately, I was able to cheer myself up with the Monkey Trail, The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, in Dayton, Tennessee, where the Courthouse had a banner that said Read your Bible.

Today, it is easy to laugh at Dayton and the trial but it was no laughing matter then and it still isn’t. Like the  Capital vs.Labor  fight, Ignorance vs. Science is a conflict that is still with us.

On the bus to New Hampshire, in Dayton, it was Darrow against Bryan and Darrow was at his best. You can close your eyes, Darrow said, But your life and my life and the life of every American citizen depends, after all, on tolerance and forbearance….If men are not tolerant, if men can not respect each other’s opinions, if men can not live and let live, then no man’s life is safe. If today you can take a thing, like evolution, and make it a crime to teach it in public schools….At the next session you can ban books and newspapers.

Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant, and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one, you can do another. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding…After awhile, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man,  and creed against creed until – with flying banners and beating drums – we are marching backwards to the glorious age of the 16th century, where bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.

Getting off the bus in New Hampshire, the sun was out and people were taking family pictures.

Boston-9556

 

 

Mixed feeling on the Roma Blond Angel

Current Affairs, Psychological Musings

greek-roma-coupleIn case you missed it, a couple of days ago the police in Greece, while raiding a Roma neighborhood of  Farsala, found a blond girl they say didn’t fit. On one hand, it seems the police just swept up Maria because she didn’t look like her parents, on the other hand, the state asserts that Maria’s parents claim they have 14 children, six who are less than ten months apart which would make them suspicious. Of something, somehow. When I first saw the story, my immediate reaction was that it was just another case of prejudice against the Roma.  Historically, next to Jews, the Roma are Europe’s favorite scapegoats. They are the classic outsiders, after all.

From the newspaper reports, it seems the police were in the area looking for drugs and weapons when they spotted the girl who looked different, and confiscated her. I have a problem with the police going to minority communities looking for drugs anyway, and an even bigger problem with the authorities confiscating kids without real cause. Sure, they will probably find drugs in the community just like they would probably find them with a random drug bust anywhere.

As I type that, a little inside voice is screaming Yea, but there is a better chance of finding drugs in a Roma neighborhood. Then I remembered a story an acquaintance told me. She loves plants and lives in Atherton so she thought she would try growing pot. She figured she would be able to get a better grade for less money, less risk, and more fun. It turned out that it wasn’t as easy as she thought. Cannabis is a dioecious plant, meaning that male and female flowers are on different plants and the idea is to keep the males away from the females so then females continue to grow flowers rather than seeds. In Atherton, so many people are growing pot that the male pollen is everywhere and it was very difficult to keep the females isolated. According to Forbes, Atherton is the most expensive place to live in the United States and you can be sure that nobody is making random drug searches there.

Meanwhile, back in Greece, they had no real cause, they just took Maria away from her parents and decided to find a cause later. In a turn around, they say they have a kidnapped child but nobody from whom she kidnapped but they still charged the parents with abduction. Now. the parents, it seems, will have to prove that she wasn’t kidnapped. She doesn’t look like her parents but they don’t claim that they are the biological parents, they claim that a woman from Bulgaria asked them to take Maria because that mother couldn’t take care of her. Now they are trying to prove that they didn’t commit a crime that may not have even been committed (on the bright side, a Roma kid who was taken from her parents, has been reunited after DNA tests showed they were related).

Here is the thing, though, when I read that Maria’ parents are illiterate, and had registered their family in several towns, collecting about $3,420 a month in child welfare subsidies; when I read that they have 14 children, six who are less than ten months apart: I started to think, Well, yeah, they are gypsies after all, and gypsies are known for abducting children and trafficking in them. I started to buy into the whole gypsy abductor scenario. It scares me how easily I can slip into the same stereotyping that I blame the police for.

And it scares me almost as much how easily I can stereotype the police for doing the wrong thing.

 

Kicking the can

Americana, Politics, Psychological Musings


10386804tidi

The government is back up and running – using the running, very loosely – and nothing seems to have changed. In some ways, it seems like Congress has just kicked the can down the road. Maybe the road will look different next January when it will be closer to elections, maybe it will look different because the assessment of the players – on both sides – will be different going in, and maybe it won’t.

I started to write about an incident with a woman in a supermarket to make my point and then remembered that I told the same story in 2011 – it obviously made a big impression on me – so here it is Something like twenty-five years ago – I remember it like it was only five years ago – I was waiting in the ten items or less line, when I realized the person two or three people in front of me had an over-full cart being pushed by a crazy looking teenager. Just then, her mother came running over very embarrassed saying something like Oh! no, dear; it is not nice to put a full cart in this line. The crazy teenager just looked at us like somebody yelling in the street and said “They don’t care”. She probably wasn’t drooling but I do remember her looking slightly dangerous in a ready to go berserk way.  We all looked at our feet, including the checker, and she went ahead.1

It was a vivid demonstration of  how much power the craziest person in the room has and it has, obviously, stuck with me. I am going to define crazy person – here – as someone being willing to let the government collapse if they don’t get their way. Leading up to the shutdown, the right fringe of the Republican Party – who I am calling  the Tea Party, for brevity – gave every indication that they would be the only crazy person in the room. They constantly made statements indicating that they were willing to take the country down to get their way (and that the government was so bad, or so big, or so ineffectual, or so something, that taking it down wouldn’t matter or might, even, be good). The Tea Party power, however, rested on the belief that they were the only people crazy enough to actually take this government down.

Obama has a long history – as long as you can have in four and a half years of  being president – of compromising (sometimes it even seemed as if he was compromising before the settlement talks started).  This time however, Obama said he would not compromise, We’re not going to pay a ransom for America to pay its bills ….we can’t make extortion routine as part of our democracy. Like the Tea Party, his beliefs were strong enough, he was crazy enough, to let the government shutdown. Additionally, he seemed willing to not compromise to raise the debt ceiling, no matter how much damage it would do.

Obama bet that he could justify his motives for his crazy behavior better than the Tea Party could and the polls proved him right. He bet that, what Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker calls the Republican “survival caucus”, would vote for a compromise if there were two crazy people in the room. He was right. In the end,  just eighty-seven out of two hundred and thirty-two Republicans in the House of Representatives, changed their collective minds, but that was enough, along with the Democratic members who compromised on the timeline.

I am not sure that the Democrats had much of a choice in this except to compromise on the timeline. They had to compromise on something to make a deal and, with Obama refusing to give on Obamacare, all that was left was the time line (the did agree to means test reimbursable payments for low-income people buying insurance but that was, apparently, already in the bill). In the end, everybody agreed to kick the can down the road.

1. https://srstern.com/2011/in-defense-of-obama-or-the-advantage-of-being-crazy/

 

Shutdown, honor, and doing what ever we want

Americana, Psychological Musings, Uncategorized

Government Shutdown

My complaint with organized religion – my fear of, really – is not in any particular belief structure. I listen to Pope Francis say If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge? – and I think , Now there is a holy man, there is a man connected to something greater than himself. My grievance, my fear of, is with that faction – that all religions seem to have – that justifies what they want by the certainty of using God. Hey! don’t blame me about my belief that homosexuality is bad, God told me to believe that way.

When I listen to the doctrinaire faction of the Republican Party, the No Compromise faction, what scares me is that they have that certainty. They seem to believe what they are saying. While what they are saying – and doing – seems cynical and hypocritical to me, I am fearful that they are doing it out of the religion of greater National Need. I am alarmed that this government shutdown isn’t a beef between the Republicans and Democrats. I am alarmed that the Republicans are shutting down the government just to shut the government down. What distresses me is that the shutdown is the goal.

Sure, not all the Republicans feel this way, maybe not even a majority feel this way, but a hardline core does and they are wagging the dog right now. That minority is looking at themselves as being honorable (much more honorable than that Kenyan President). They are what Eric Hoffer called True Believers.

To – not quite – pick an example at random, going to Michelle Bachmann’s website gives the impression that she is very happy with the government shutdown. She is so certain in her beliefs that she doesn’t even see the irony in voting – and campaigning  – to shut down the Government and then working to get the WWII Memorial open, saying, on her website, Another wonderful day of greeting brave WWII veterans from across the country at their memorial. Of course part of it is that Bachmann only wants to shutdown the bits she doesn’t like, but it alarms me that she believes the parts she likes are the only legitimate parts.

While I don’t understand John Boehner’s strategy – he talks like he knows the shutdown is doing damage and then continues to keep the government from functioning – or his justification, I am sure he has one. Maybe he thinks that he is the only rational player on the right and he justifies his actions as the only way to keep the barbarians from taking over.

Everybody has a justification – a reason if you prefer – for what they do. Just saying I am doing it because I want to is not enough. Especially when what we want to do is horrible or illegal. Then the reason is often about a truth that is bigger than the immediate issue. Often that bigger truth it is a truth that other observers can’t see.