Category Archives: Psychological Musings

Western State Lines and Handicap Parking

Americana, Politics, Psychological Musings

My theory is that the further the people making the law – or rule – are from the people having to obay the law, the more arbitrary the law and the more likely it will not relate to what is actually happening on the ground. The borders of almost all states west of the Mississippi are an example.

Most of these state borders are straight lines following a compass heading totally ignoring any relationship to the topography. Because the people drawing the lines way back in Washington had no idea of any topographic detail. They didn’t know where the streams or mountains were so they couldn’t care. California where our northeastern border runs from some arbitrary point in the Great Basin near Goose Lake, due south to Lake Tahoe, is typical. That corner of California, about the size of New Jersey, is on the Nevada side of the mountains from the rest of California and would have been in Nevada if the people dawing the lines had lived anywhere near the lines being drawn.

A couple of days ago, Michele and I went on a short walk in the Thornwood Open Space Preserve. When we got to the parking lot, I noticed that the Handicap Space was little used and it re-booted my gripe about bureaucratic rules. Having Handicap Parking at the trailhead for a walk that handicapped people can not make is stupid. That is not to say that the people who made sure the handicap space was there are stupid but that the law – made from afar – is stupid.

I do not think that this applies only to government it applies equally, maybe even more so because there is less chance for recourse, to big business. Just think of trying to get something changed through a big bank or insurance company. The rules override reasonableness. I suspect it is even more frustrating to the person charged with enforcing the law that they know does not fit the situation.

Ironically, these arbitrary rules hurt more than they help.

First, they make the enforcer stupider and more likely to make a mistake. When I first started my own building company, our lender was Wells Fargo Bank and our lending officer was a local guy. (His brother was a real estate broker, so the real estate biz was in their blood.) When we wanted a loan for a project, we had to convince him. Wells trusted him to make the right decision and he was responsible to know the project and know that it would work.

Now there are twenty five times as many rules, the decision gets kicked up to a committee and – if the project meets all the requirements – it gets passed with none of the decision makers having to actually visit the site. Nobody really has a vested interest in the project working. That is part of the problem that lead to the bank failures.

If the lending officer – who now is really only a data collector at a large bank – follows the rules and the project doesn’t work, nobody is to blame, they all followed the rules, after all. The rules are made to make the lending environment safer but they really make it more dangerous. Everybody knew there were stupid loans being made, but nobody cared.

Second, this arbitrariness pisses people off and builds disrespect for the government or company. People are more willing to cheat; to design a project to fit the rules rather than be successful. In schools, it becomes teaching to the test rather than educating students.

 

 

We are all heroes

Americana, Psychological Musings, War, What's a man?

in our own minds, except that we are not. When I was about 31 or 32, I read The Winds of War by Herman Wouk. It is one of those book with lots of characters and shows the wind- up to WWII from different view points and if you haven’t read it, I would recommend it – although I may be wrong, as I did read it almost forty years ago and our collective sensibilities may have changed – if you like historical fiction. Anyway, a couple of the characters are Aaron Jastrow and his niece, Natalie. They are Jewish – duh! – and in Europe. From almost the beginning of their part of the story, it became obvious – from my view point of looking back on the war – that they were going to end up at one of the German Death Camps.

When I would get to the Aaron and Natalie sections, I would just skip ahead. I couldn’t read all the bad choices they were making; choices I knew that I would not have made. In my mind – at 31 or 32 – I would have, heroically, made much better choices. Now – forty years later – I know that I would not have made those heroic choices of my fantasies. Now I know that I couldn’t read many of those sections because I saw myself in Jastrow’s mistakes.
These remembrances came up when I read a  blog post by Ta-Nehisi Coates today. In it, he writes about how easy it is to think we would do something different than what the slave owners and slaves actually did do, if we had lived in the slave society of the pre-Civil War south. It is a constant theme of Coates and was brought up by an article by some fool white guy saying what he would do if he were a black kid being raised in poverty. Read it, really! It goes directly to the question that people who are raised in poverty tend to stay in poverty and should society try to change that or just say, It’s their fault, with all the ramifications that brings.
By the way, the prison camp photo above is one of the camps we – we being the United Sates of America – built, in one of our racist fits, to intern our Japanese citizens during WWII. I want to say that I would have been against these camps if I had been my parent’s age when they were built, but I doubt it.

 

“A date which will live in infamy.”

Americana, Psychological Musings, War

About fifteen years ago, when the Serbs were trying their best to be the alphadogs of the region, before we were worried about global jihad and the GWOT, the Serbs  justified attacking Kosovo because it was of major historical importance to them. Major historical importance because of the Battle of Kosovo in which Serbia got their ass kicked in 1389.

In the build up to the Clinton”11week air campaign that forced Yugoslavia to accept a Western peace plan for Kosovo” – to quote someone – we were pretty much anti-Serb and, among other things, their 1389 Battle of Kosovo fetish was used as as a reason they couldn’t be trusted. I remember reading a newspaper article – or maybe it was a magazine article – that said something like In The Balkans, the past is never dead, they still remember this loss like it was yesterday. The article was very critical of the Serbian personality that would remember a loss and not a win.

But we are all like that. Certainly we Americans are. We remember the Alamo, and remember Pearl Harbor. Here, in California we even have a special license plate for Pearl Harbor. We don’t have a special license plate for VJ Day or VE Day, or our smashing the Japanese at Iwo Jima or at Guadalcanal which may have been the roughest fight the US has ever been in.

I’m not going anywhere with this except that I find it interesting and I suspect it is pretty much a human trait.

 

 

A thought on moral cowardice and Joe Paterno

Psychological Musings

In his memoir, General Ulysses S Grant talks about being a moral coward on two occasions that I can remember. The first was while riding through the wilderness of Texas at the time:

After the second night at Goliad, Benjamin and I started to make the remainder of the journey alone….On the evening of the first day out from Goliad we heard the most unearthly howling of wolves, directly in our front. The prairie grass was tall and we could not see the beasts, but the sound indicated that they were near. To my ear it appeared that there must have been enough of them to devour our party, horses and all, at a single meal. The part of Ohio that I hailed from was not thickly settled, but wolves had been driven out long before I left. Benjamin was from Indiana, still less populated, where the wolf yet roamed over the prairies. He understood the nature of the animal and the capacity of a few to make believe there was an unlimited number of them. He kept on towards the noise, unmoved. I followed in his trail, lacking moral courage to turn back and join our sick companion. I have no doubt that if Benjamin had proposed returning to Goliad, I would not only have “seconded the motion” but have suggested that it was very hard-hearted in us to leave Augur sick there in the first place….

The second was the first time he lead troops into battle:

While preparations for the move were going on I felt quite comfortable; but when we got on the road and found every house deserted I was anything but easy….As we approached the brow of the hill from which it was expected we could see Harris’ camp, and possibly find his men ready formed to meet us, my heart kept getting higher and higher until it felt to me as though it was in my throat. I would have given anything then to have been back in Illinois, but I had not the moral courage to halt and consider what to do; I kept right on.

In Grant’s case, he takes what we would consider the more heroic path but he points out that he only did it because he is afraid of what other people will think of him.

Looking at it – from here in my nice warm home – it seems impossible that Joe Paterno could have shown such a moral cowardice as to let a subordinate – or his boss for that matter – rape a 10 year boy and not call the police. But like most of us, even Joe Paterno, the most powerful man in town, was afraid of what other people would think of him if he became a trouble maker.

 

The Free Press

Americana, Current Affairs, Politics, Psychological Musings

Check out the two pictures above. According to Sociological Images, what really happened is that the police complained to the New York Times and they changed the article. I am not much of a conspiracy kind of guy but I do think that the press does have a point of view and is susceptible to influence. Even the New York Times. We liberals think that Fox is a right wing propaganda machine and the rest of the press is neutral. That is not true.

Almost all the press is owned by the establishment  and tends to back the establishment and protect the establishment and listen to the establishment. We, on the other hand, are pretty much trained to passively and uncritically absorb whatever is in front of us. So when the New York Times says that In a tense showdown over the East River, police arrested hundreds of Occupy Wall Street demonstrators after they marched onto the bridge’s Brooklyn-bound roadway we believe it. Except that that isn’t what really happened.

 

 

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