The Law of Inertia rears its ugly head

Just look what the holidays and the political zeitgeist and the new semester and... well, everything can do to our best intentions: it's been two months since my last post on this blog. 

I could make excuses, including trying not to continually moan and groan about the latest outrage from the Orange One and his minions, but they remain excuses, and they are not that great. More responsible for my not posting is simple inertia. A body at rest tend to remain at rest. as Newton would say in his First Law. 

Still not a great excuse.

So, time to restart.

The first weeks of the Trump administration have been a blur of executive orders, bizarre public pronouncements, outright lying, half-truths, and ongoing outrage from the pundit class. In other words, business as usual in the world of Trump. 

I was not surprised to learn that there is a term for his strategy of  "flooding the zone," so to speak: distributed amplification.

Apparently, the phrase came into academic usage during the pandemic, when the deluge of opinions and information and disinformation, mostly online, left most of us puzzled, possibly afraid, and certainly a bit unsure of the truth about Covid and its effects. The term originated with electrical engineering, describing a method that expands the capacity of circuits to reach wider bandwidths (whatever that means).

A less academic-sounding concept that plagues us all right now is "telling the same lie over and over until an audience suspects there must be some truth in there." Interestingly, the bigger the lie or the more brazen the scheme, the more an overwhelmed public will believe.

I was thinking today about the tragic collision of a helicopter and an airliner over the Potomac and how it is inevitable that social media will quickly create conspiracies and bizarre interpretations of the event.

There were Russians on the plane! (There were: ice skaters and coaches.) The military helicopter was engaged in some clandestine mission! (Maybe, but more likely this was a routine flight from across the river.) Joe Biden orchestrated the crash as a way to embarrass the new administration! (Really?) The price of eggs will soar even more! (Can we stop with the egg prices?)

All this is to introduce what I hope will be a more regular examination in this blog of what most Americans want or share or believe, all from the point of view of this 74-year-old white male. 

Well, that's the hope. 

And I will try not to surrender to Newton's First Law again.

Are we really a sad, weak country?

I was somewhat surprised to see emails from both universities I teach for about meetings, seminars, counseling options, and suggested classroom strategies to support our damaged students post-election.

"Damaged" is the word I chose, just to be clear. There must be plenty of exceptions, based on exit polls, as to college students being shocked and despondent after Trump eked out a win a couple weeks ago. Some of that might be attributed to our silos ("I don't know anyone who voted for him!"), but the media's quick take on the results on the day after might have something to do with it.

We can expect a practiced liar like Trump to proclaim that his election was a mandate and "landslide," but the reality is that he received just under 50 percent of the votes cast. Statistically, this was one of the nation's closes elections. Reality never stops an egomaniac or a cult that revels in exaggeration and "trolling the libs," of course.

But now we are setting up program to support young people who appear (are?) fragile and naive. Oh, the poor things!

The many Muslim leaders and voters who chose to ignore all logic and experience and throw their support to the Orange One seem to be experiencing buyer's remorse. They are shocked that Trump nominated Mike Huckabee for Ambassador to Israel. He has said there is no Palestine, to start. 

"But he promised he would help us."

I mean... it's bad in Gaza. Worse than bad. Something needs to be done and most of the world is frustrated by the slaughter and stubbornness... and not just in Lebanon and Gaza but in Ukraine and Sudan. It's fair to ask why the most powerful nation on earth isn't putting a stop to it. But the world is way more complex than this simple cause and effect: U.S. says no, so we don't. 

It's tempting to think that those desperate and outraged Arab-Americans will learn their lesson once they see Trump throw all U.S. support to Israel. And, honestly, I guess that complete destruction is one way to end the war... just not the method most Arab-Americans would like. 

I remember reading that when the Romans finally conquered the Carthaginians, they not only slaughtered or enslaved everyone in the city, but they knocked down the walls and buildings and then salted the earth so nothing would grow. 

Man, those Romans knew how to end a conflict.

Teaching online gives me some separation from the raw emotions of my students, and that is a mixed blessing. I only know them from their writing. I don't spend much time contemplating "trigger warnings," though I try to avoid the most controversial and upsetting topics for writing assignments. 

I worry that some percentage of Americans become so easily upset by whatever latest outrage the world presents them. And the outrages are endless. And in our instant communications age, those outrages pour into our news feeds and our TV news. 

I'm part of the last generation to really live in an "ignorance is bliss" world, I suppose. Horrible things were happening during the 1950s but like the tree falling in the forest with noone to observe... was there any sound? 

I am not in favor of ignorance, but I am in favor of everyone having a bit more grit. Life rarely offers massive victories, but the next four years are a chance to pile up some occasional and even substantial wins that can lead to a less damaged world. 

Today, we celebrate the downfall of a cretin like Gaetz, but that is fleeting and unsatisfactory. 

Time to look for some ways to make positive change.

Let's all pretend that we are living in normal times

If there's one thing that is now clear about our national political system, at least to me, it is that the executive branch, specifically the president, has far too much power.

The latest trolling from the president-elect has him promising to declare a national "state of emergency" and to activate the National Guard and who know what other units to round up undocumented people. He also fairly shouts with glee: "And then to get them the hell out of the country." 

Leaving aside the somewhat unclear issue of whether x number of undocumented immigrants might be dangerous, this idea of using the military to enforce laws within our borders is a challenge to all. When autocratic rulers manipulate the military to do their bidding, it often leads to not just power imbalances but to outright dictatorships. 

Trump and his cult are claiming several things after his victory, starting with terming the results a "mandate." As of today, the popular vote totals are Trump - 76,536,315, and Harris - 73,916,618. The current percentages are Trump 49.96% and Harris 48.25%. A difference of 1.7% is only a mandate if we decide to claim it as such. The news media, apparently, has decided to let this latest lie or "stretcher" stand. Two other things that most Republicans suddenly are very enthusiastic about are the economy and the reliability of our voting systems. 

Winners get to gloat. Hypocrites who win never have to explain.

For Democrats, the results sting, of course, but check this out: while Trump gained 2.3 million votes over 2020, Harris received nearly 7.4 million fewer votes. 

The top vote-getter was "I don't care," with that group of eligible voters deciding to sit the whole thing out. I assume those "can't be bothered" folks will be fine however things go, and also assume that at least some of them will take a look around in two years and "surprise" pollsters by ending the Republican majorities in the next midterm. 

Trump of course, will still be there, firmly in lame duck status, over 80 at that point and doddering, and hankering for some rallies to attend, some cult members to excite, and more cash to extract.

I have read that many people around the world are wondering about the American psyche and the nation's ability to do all it can to disrupt its own success and to (apparently) abandon the rest of the world. It's embarrassing to be an American sometimes, though I am certain many of our neighbors are humming "Happy days are here again" as they celebrate the return of the Orange One. 

On Saturday, while driving home near a major intersection in Highlands Ranch, I was confronted with a couple dozen of our fellow citizens waving "Women for Trump" banners and hollering at passing vehicles as they went by. I guess they just wanted to bask in their glory for a few more days. 

In sports, we would call that bad sportsmanship. Athletes are properly taught to NOT rub it in unnecessarily, to not get too full of themselves. The worm always turns. The boastful always are brought down. 

But maybe Trump and his cult will manage to upset even that eternal truth of athletics. At this point, it's tough to root for an America that seems to have lost its way. 

Or maybe those potential voters who just couldn't choose (in Colorado, one of the highest voting states, each of the eight congressional districts totaled over 100,000 non-voters) are a looming sign that the American Experiment, as it is often called, is coming to an end. 

'But things were pretty good for me back then...'

I assume that a vast number of Americans are unconcerned about the results of the election. In fact, many people seem to assume that all the blustering and overt racism and sexism... all the vulgarity and obvious greed that the winner exhibited for months and months... was just an act. 

Maybe it was. More likely is that the most egregious plans he put forth just won't fly in a nation that has moved from racial splits and gender splits to reveal what it really has been for its entire history: a nation dominated by the wealthy. It's not that money can simply buy elections -- after all, the Democrats raised and spent far more than the Republicans -- but the wealthy will always come out fine.

The puzzle for me has always been that the wealthy continue to find ways to get the poor, the struggling, and the frustrated to vote for them. Most of America is like Charlie Brown, always hoping that the football will not be yanked back at the last second by Lucy, sending us crashing to the ground, defeated. 

I'm not sure what to make of people who choose to pay exorbitant prices for bacon or eggs or whatever foods they just can't live without. Another choice would be to simply NOT purchase the items with inflated prices, or buy less. At some point, change happens. It's the essence of capitalism.

Financially distressed people could forego that trip to Disney or whatever splurge their credit limit can handle. I hate to be that guy, but when I was young and had little money (but enough to cover housing and food), it never occurred to us that our happiness might be raised by spending beyond our means. In fact, we never really felt frightening financial pressure. We just kept working.

I read the other day that the average income in Mississippi was more than the average income in Germany and England. Imagine that! I know averages can be deceiving, since they mask the extremes, but at least one reading of that fact is that Americans are doing quite well. Most of the world certainly thinks so.

Americans don't.

My immediate take on the results of the election is that the country had a little fit... people decided that this was a chance to express their anger and frustration with the way the world has treated them. So, we threw the bastards out. We will throw out the new bastards quite soon, of course... maybe in two years or four, but they are going.

Every pundit can suddenly see that Democrats made x mistakes... and everything is so clear in hindsight. The pollsters will create some elaborate rationalizations for their latest inaccurate predictions (I know, they will say they don't predict... but come on). The devout will rationalize their abandonment of ethics and morality as important in our leaders (though they will also see their churches grow emptier as even most ignorant can only take so much hypocrisy). 

I am glad to see the curtain pulled back, so to speak, so we can all see that it was class all along. All the leaders of Trump's cult have advanced degrees and obscene amounts of money. All the leaders of the Democratic Party enjoy the same. 

I teach college classes as a sort of retirement hobby and one thing I can say for sure: getting a college degree is not beyond most people, if they want it. Many do not, but they still lust for the money and power a degree usually brings. We hate to be talked down to. We all want to be the ones doing the "talking down."

One thing is certain: our economy depends upon a large percentage of the population working semi-crappy jobs, focused mostly on how to pay their next bill. No time to analyze, well, anything.

It's understandable that every few years those people throw a fit using one of the few bits of power they possess: their vote. 

Then they can go back to being manipulated by the rich and educated. 

End of bitter rant.

Down to four days... and down to rock bottom

At this point, the firehose of arguments and craziness and news events and assorted bizarre pronouncements blurted by various geriatrics (I include Biden here for his fumbling remark responding to some unknown comedian insulting an entire island and then Trump refusing to take any responsibility or even acknowledge knowing any details) has reached peak nuttiness.

I just heard a women someone at CBS discovered who claimed to not want to vote for BIDEN but not liking Trump... so she's not going to vote. Well, that seems like her best choice. We don't need morons to mark their ballots. 

Or maybe the poor soul is just frazzled and has lost any semblance of rational thought. Covering our ears and eyes until, say, December might be the most rational choice we could make. 

I am going out on a limb and saying Harris will win, in the end. I have no logical support for that other than preferring to cling to the idea that most of our neighbors are, well, OK. I often quote Seinfeld's famous statement: "People. They're the worst." But the nihilistic appeal of that claim ultimately doesn't quite work for me. 

I'm not sure America is broken but I am quite certain that American politics is broken. We are entering unknown territory, where half of voters will feel aggrieved whatever happens next week and an additional 80 million Americans who could have voted will not do so. Well, that's how many did not vote in 2020 and that election featured record turnout.

That means that we have about a third of Americans of voting age not being able to muster the energy to participate in the looming "most important election of their lifetime." And then a third will vote for Trump and a third for Harris... and a small number of white women in Pennsylvania will determine the Electoral College winner. 

The only consolation I have right now is that Trump will be gone in four years, even if America's broken system permits his appalling return. I happen to think that he is a cult leader and unique. There will be no successor who can captivate the genuflecting masses. 

If I am right that Harris ekes out a win, Trump and minions will wail and protest and sue, well, everyone. But he will eventually run out of gas and retreat to his grotesque palace. He won't disappear but his increasingly bizarre and obscene ravings just won't matter.

I often note that big changes don't come until we hit rock bottom. We are almost there. My hope is that there may be opportunity for a large and complex nation to focus on the future, even as we shake our heads thinking about how a decrepit man has led us down.

Next time I blog, perhaps we will know a bit more about what sort of society we want to be. 

The last national polls have been taken... and we have voted

Kathleen and I continued our tradition of sitting at a literal kitchen table to study our ballots, with the help of the "blue book" -- the state ballot information booklet. 

A few questions on the ballot were truly "kitchen table" issues, as the political cliche goes. But most of the items on the very extensive ballot seemed distant from our daily lives. That doesn't make them unimportant, necessarily, but we agreed that we mostly had not paid much attention to them.

It was very easy to choose the Democrat in the national and state races, but the judicial retention choices, and there were many, pushed us to the "judicial performance evaluations" in the booklet. I know almost nothing about how the evaluation panel works, but it appears it consists of six non-attorneys and five attorneys, appointed by the governor along with senate and house leaders (including from the minority). According to the report, everyone on the ballot is satisfactory. 

I suppose a person could register a general sense of frustration with, well, everything, by choosing NO for each judge, but we went with YES, perhaps reflecting a general sense of things being OK in Colorado and wanting to support an institution that we rarely come into contact with. 

The real test was running through the seven state constitutional amendments and the seven propositions. Each of these citizen or legislative-generated items was described in the blue book, and the booklet is a model of solid professional writing, I have to say. It is texty, but how could it not be? It does pull summaries of "what a yes vote means," and "what a no vote means." There are also clearly written pro and con arguments. 

We favored extending a property tax exemption for disabled veterans, even if their disability was not due to service injuries. Seems like the least we can do. 

We favored repealing somewhat archaic definition of marriage language lingering the in the state constitution and voted "yes" to including an explicit right to abortion in the state law. We did briefly discuss the futility of this should the nut cases take over and impose a national abortion ban despite polls saying that over 70 percent of Americans favor choice.

Speaking of choice, we voted NO on a proposed amendment to include an explicit right to school choice. This is clearly a subtle inroad into adding more money for non-public schools and Colorado already offers all sorts of options regarding school choice. 

Among the propositions, we favored increasing taxes on bullets and guns and increasing state support for local law enforcement. 

After seeing the chaos from urban voters choosing to reintroduce wolves to the state (over the objections of rural voters), we rejected a proposition to add more protections for bobcats and lynx... both of which are already protected by law. We said NO to allowing more non-veterinarians to act like, well, veterinarians. We decided that the lack of clear standards and educational programs for these "para-professionals" meant that this proposal is premature. Plus, we were losing focus at this point.

We voted no on a proposition to establish all-candidate primaries and ranked choice voting for some elections. The mechanics are quite complex and we would become a living experiment. We noted that Alaska is voting this time to retract their own ranked choice law. No one is quite certain how it would work, but the fact is that seven multi-millionaires are funding the campaign for this proposition. 

One thing I know for certain: when the stupidly rich get exercised about a law or regulation, I grab my wallet and begin from the position of "no way." The last thing I would ever want to do is be controversial (ha!) but it is becoming more and more clear that class now dominates our societal dysfunction. Race and gender are powerful, of course, but the more powerful motivators will always be money and power.

I dropped off our sealed ballots on Wednesday night and we both received our ballot trax notifications that our ballots have been counted. Kathleen kept time and we invested 48 minutes, plus all those hours of commercials that we couldn't always avoid, in the process. 

I guess it's acceptable to expect a Coloradan to invest a bit less than an hour as part of being a citizen, plus driving to the drop off box about four miles to the west. 

Later we watched the unmasking of a transvestite on "The Masked Singer," and that show took the same time as completing our ballots. We did not get a chance to vote for our favorite but we were fine with that. We do resent not being able to vote online for our favorite "stars" in Dancing With the Stars. Only those in the Eastern and Central time zones get that privilege because of, well, time zones. 

Results from those TV shows are instantaneous (and unregulated, I assumed). The Nov. 5 election may take days for results to be finalized, and then will come the inevitable legal challenges, no matter who "wins." Americans will whine. Patience is not a virtue these days.

But at least we were asked to weigh in on some important electoral issues.

All is not well among Florida student writers

Humans have an often-useful ability to quickly move on from disaster and pain and disappointment. We are a hopeful species.

But there are some times when our short attention span and indifference to history can keep us from engaging with the effects of those past disasters, pains, and disappointment. We don't want to wallow in that, of course.

This past week I was reminded of a somewhat unfocused theory that the pandemic has had a wide range of negative effects on current high school and college students. Those two years or so of fear and confusion and isolation -- and that includes the entire country -- hit me forcibly as I was reading 102 feature stories from Florida students for a contest.

In short, they were depressingly bad.

They were fine in terms of spelling and grammar. In fact, I could sense plenty of writing skills and a seriousness of purpose. 

What was missing was curiosity, storytelling, focus, sourcing, and any sense of what readers want and need. Well... that's quite a list. I was asked to choose ONE overall winner and each entry received short comments on weaknesses and strengths or suggestions. Each entry could earn up to 50 points within the state association rubric. 

I chose that winner, but not one entry even came close to qualifying for the highest awards, called the All-Florida. I haven't heard back from the organizers of the contest but assume there will be some online conversation about the scores. 

The hurricane and Milton's effects on power and general destruction from the storm likely will delay any reply. I wrote a long email explaining my choices and included my concern that the pandemic has limited student willingness to get away from their screens to observe and talk directly to sources out in "reality." 

I won't get into all the specifics, but instead of what we might call features, which focus on showing people in action and taking readers beyond the basic 5Ws and H facts, I saw internet research, personal commentaries, basic news stories, and, most glaringly, missed opportunities. I typed something like, "Great idea for a coverage topic, but..." dozens of times.

I ended my email to my Florida coordinator by adding that I suspect the pandemic also has affected the teacher advisers. It is hard for me to believe that fully engaged instructors would be OK with most of these contest entries. In fact, they likely would not do well in any classroom. They just didn't have much content and local readers must have found it very easy to skip over these stories.

The common denominator for great student journalism is the adviser and the standards and coaching that are shared with students who are not used to writing for a public.

My theory is that those teachers are so overwhelmed, so damaged, that they are settling for writing that is spelled right and in recognizable English. 

Until the teachers get it back together, what hope is there for young writers? 

On the other hand, it's Florida. Maybe all the time on the front lines of the culture wars has done what we feared: ruined public education in the state.