Money

Some critics like to write about songs, and what is in them. Some of the songs Greil Marcus writes about I know and love too. Others I don’t. One of the songs he writes about in The History of Rock And Roll in Ten Songs is Money, written by Berry Gordy, sung by Barrett Strong, and Motown’s first hit. I first heard it when the Beatles did it five years later, and have loved it ever since, though I’m a bit ambivalent about the message.

For those unfamiliar, it begins, The best things in life are free/But you can keep them for the birds and bees. That’s a very American kind of line, a line that, if people in other countries didn’t agree, we’d impose it on them. Money is the most important thing? What else is new?

It’s funny, though, because money is also mysterious. Does any other species on earth use it? It seems real, especially the effects of not having enough of it, but it also seems somehow imaginary. How does inflation happen, for instance? Why has making coins lighter made money worth less? How does money work when it’s not based on a precious metal like gold? It always seems to be losing value, but still works more or less the same.

One thing we do know is that money is addictive. When you don’t have enough, you’ll know it, just like with any other addiction. And like any other addiction, it cushions everything–or seems to. It insulates, it takes the pain away. Or at least it’s easy to believe it does, or will. That’s why the Europeans who settled the Americas were desperate for money, whether it was money they could directly steal, or money they could make through taking advantage of others, wrenching money out of the landscape, out of slaves, or anyone else they could dominate.

Gold was the first thing many colonists looked for, especially the Spanish. Slaves were the second thing. Religious freedom was a lot less important to most. And religious freedom was only for the colonists (if them), not the natives or the slaves. Religious freedom was a fairly new concept by the time the Americas were discovered, and a lot of people didn’t believe in it (some still don’t).

Money don’t get everything, it’s true/But what it don’t get, I can’t use….

It’s interesting that Jesus didn’t seem to think much of money, saying things like, “You cannot serve God and Mammon”, and driving the money-changers (who made it possible for ordinary people to buy animals to sacrifice) out of the Temple.

I doubt he objected to the concept of money, which makes it easy to purchase necessary things, to trade between individuals and countries, and pay for the necessary things citizens share in common, like roads, bridges, schools, police forces, fire forces, and other services everybody uses. It was the addiction, expressed in other religious traditions as attachment, which he called an impediment to entering the kingdom of heaven. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul? directly addresses that problem. But gaining the whole world is no less popular now than it was in Jesus’s time.

Money Changes Everything, by Tom Gray of the Brains, was the polar opposite in effect of Money. It’s the song of someone who believed someone loved him, and is stunned to find out he was wrong. When he confronts her, she says, Yeah well I know, but when we did there was one thing we weren’t thinking of            And that’s money.                                                                         Money changes everything. 

Money is no longer equivalent to freedom, it’s a way of persecuting anyone who doesn’t have it. When Cyndi Lauper took the song over from Tom Gray she turned the pronouns around, so it’s the woman telling the story, and putting the man down as a loser. And that expresses a crucial truth about America: it’s not enough that you win; for you to be satisfied, I have to lose, too. That’s why hardly any powerful people take the “…all men are created equal” phrase in the Declaration of Independence seriously.

Marcus quotes a scene in which Brad Pitt plays a hit man who wants to get paid for some past work, and is talking with a man who wants to stiff him. He calls Thomas Jefferson a hypocrite who was quite willing to let some of his inconveniently dark-skinned children live as slaves so he could go to bed with his black mistress and drink the wine he so enjoyed. America, Pitt concludes, has always been a business. And then demands to get paid.

Money expresses the euphoria of wealth. Or maybe the euphoria of NEW wealth. Are the wealthy who are USED to being wealthy euphoric about it? If they are, why are many of them so driven to acquire more and more wealth?

About sixty years ago there were almost no billionaires. Now there are relatively many, and their wealth taken together is as great as most of the rest of the world. They find it easy to manipulate the political system to amass even more wealth, often at the expense of the lower class people whom they must look at with contempt, as Mitt Romney expressed it during his campaign seven years ago.

The forty-seven per cent of the population he claimed were “takers” were primarily the elderly, the children, and the disabled, as well as people maneuvered into positions in which they couldn’t support themselves. Like the middle-aged middle managers who got fired to be replaced by younger workers the employers wouldn’t have to pay as well, the ones who were then called “overqualified” as an excuse not to hire them even for jobs that would pay less.

That was efficiency of the type that benefits the shareholders and CEOs of big corporations.

A Sears executive of the 1950s said that he had to make the shareholders happy, but couldn’t consider himself successful unless he also satisfied his customers and employees. In the more than sixty years since, Sears apparently converted to pleasing shareholders only. When they recently declared bankruptcy they gave executives large bonuses while shorting ordinary workers on their severance pay. Another example of this being a two-track society in which nobody has to consider the situation of anyone at the bottom of the social ladder.

The two songs are examples of how great songs have the potential for reinterpretation that makes them great art. The Beatles, in the opinion of Marcus, took Money beyond the interpretation Barrett Strong gave it: Lauper took Money Changes Everything and entirely changed the context, greatly enlarging the meaning.

That’s only one of the ten songs of the book’s title. In the chapter All I Could Do Was Cry, after a song by Etta James, the author depicts a scene in a movie about Leonard Chess, who founded Chess Records, and recorded many great artists, including James. (Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, Little Walter, Buddy Guy, Chuck Berry, and others).

In the film there’s a scene about James, played by Beyoncé, in which the actor playing Leonard Chess taunts her into delivering a better singing performance than she may have thought she could. James’ comment on that song was that she thought she was play-acting, but would soon live through the scenario of seeing another woman take her man away from her. Marcus notes that she was 22 at the time, but sounded as if she could be sixty.

James started young in the music business with great talent as both singer and songwriter. She had a hit young, then went through about five years of performing oblivion, getting introduced to drugs on the way. Eventually she had more success, but also struggled for years with drug habits. I got to see her in a small club about twenty years after she’d begun her career, but didn’t know who I was watching (also true when I saw Muddy Waters perform).

The taunting was an accurate reconstruction of how George Goldner treated Arlene Smith, lead singer of the Chantels, who was only seventeen, and sometimes, Goldner said, it worked, as Marcus tells us it worked on Beyoncé in the movie.

And it was Beyoncé who got to sing At Last at Barack Obama’s inauguration instead of Etta James, who had had a hit with the song long before Beyoncé was born. Another example of the pioneer being forgotten in favor of the younger star, as when Jackie Robinson became the first black player to begin the desegregation of Major League Baseball instead of Satchel Paige, who was much older and possibly the most famous player of the Negro Leagues. Paige did get some share of fame the next season in helping the Cleveland Indians win the pennant, though. Etta James missed out on the biggest stage.

There are other songs and artists portrayed in the book. Buddy Holly, who left such a large number of written and recorded songs in only about two and a half years. An account of Robert Johnson, and what might have happened if he hadn’t been poisoned in 1938, and possibly survived to have become a record producer. That account ends with him being asked to perform at Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration, and refusing because artists are expected to perform for free. A reminder that, while musical artists (especially black artists, but by no means only them) have often been robbed by powerful people in the music business. Leonard Chess was allegedly one of the robbers, though he seems also to have been concerned about the artists he recorded. A tremendous amount of great music has entered public consciousness through that business, and survived. As badly as black artists were treated by record companies, publishing companies, and agents, at least they were given opportunities, and many of them both succeeded and greatly influenced their contemporaries and later generations.

Much of the message of the book seems to be that rock & roll produced music that may have seemed to be superficial, but often wasn’t. Who would have expected Buddy Holly, who died at age 22, to still be remembered, and with reverence, today? Because he influenced the young Beatles (who took their name after his band, the Crickets) and others.

Not so many remember the Flaming Groovies, whose song, Shake Some Action, Marcus writes about as an inspiration. Nor Joy Division (named after Nazi prostitute organizations), but Marcus writes about them too. He’s a rock and roll partisan.

Of course other forms of music can be passionate too, but rock and roll, which dominated the record industry from the 1950s at least into the 80s, was often denounced as a genre, not just as individual pieces, because it was perceived as dangerous music by a lot of people. And it was!

It specifically rebelled against many of the white societal norms of the 1950s, especially in the 1960s when the civil rights movement and Vietnam had given people a lot of specific things TO rebel against.

Of course the lifestyle was dangerous too, and the attempted transition from the sometimes stifling conformity of the 50s to a kind of anarchic version of freedom popularized in the 60s often didn’t go too well, besides arousing resentment from the “good” boys and girls who did what their parents told them, and didn’t get to experience the liberties taken by so many of their generation. Those are the people who use liberty as a watchword now, and mean by that an excuse to mistreat anyone they happen to dislike. At least some of the customs they like to follow have to do with excluding the people they don’t like from power. A too tightly organized society is no better than one not organized enough.

The music business has been a microcosm of American society in its idolization of money and its enabling of cheating the artists to the benefit of the agents, managers, and record companies. In spite of that, what a wonderful century of music the twentieth century was!

Not only did jazz, blues, and country music emerge as technology allowed music to be recorded and sold, but so did rock and roll, gospel, soul, rap, and all their collisions and permutations. Even classical music, though fewer people listened to it or participated in it.

The song Money could have been depressing, but wasn’t. It was the joy of music in spite of robbery and fraud. The lyrics may have been simplistic, but they were susceptible to redefinition in unexpected ways, as is and was true of many great songs. The spirit coming through in spite of everything.

 

Islam and the West

It’s part of American conservative orthodoxy right now to consider Muslims as irredeemably evil. They’re trying to destroy our country as well as Europe. Even if they aren’t directly attacking Europeans (and they have mounted some horrifying attacks) they’re trying to take over by out-reproducing whites, at least in Great Britain. When they’ve attained a majority they’ll be able to impose Sharia law on Britain, which they plan to do in the USA too.

Is this view true? It’s true that some Muslims are extremists who carry out terror attacks, but not that they’re the only group that does so. According to Wikipedia, the first Muslim immigrants to this country began coming in the 1840s (other than slaves, many of whom were Muslim, but were prevented from practicing their religion by their owners, and were often forcibly converted to Christianity), and that 292 Muslims fought in our Civil War. Large numbers of Muslims immigrated to this country between the 1870s and 1920s, As far as I can tell, Muslims committed no terrorist acts in this country until the 1990s.

Why did they do so then? Many Muslims resented European colonial powers who, in their view, mistreated Muslim countries in seeking oil, which had revolutionized power generation in the West. European countries began seeking concessions to drill for oil in the Middle East about the beginning of the 20th century, and the Middle Eastern oil fields quickly became so important that Great Britain occupied portions of the Ottoman Empire to safeguard their supply of oil. European influence had a great deal to do with the breakup of that Empire into artificial countries: Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Iraq in particular was home to a variety of peoples who had little loyalty to each other: Sunni Muslims (the majority of Muslims worldwide), Shia Muslims (the majority in Iraq), and Kurds, who wanted their own territory, but have yet to secure a recognized nation. The American invasion of Iraq destabilized the country, along with much of the rest of the Middle East. Saddam Hussein had certainly not been a nice leader, but I suspect few Iraqis would have opted to go through the violence and chaos they’ve experienced in the past fifteen years.

In Iran after the First World War British diplomats supported the takeover of the country by an army officer named Reza Pahlavi, who became the Shah. After World War II he was forced out of power and his son became Shah. In the early 1950s the Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh nationalized the oil companies in the country, greatly displeasing the Western powers. The CIA funded a military coup that displaced Mossadegh, and brought back the Shah (who had fled the country). The Shah wanted to modernize and secularize the country (the latter was disliked by the religious authorities), and used a notorious secret police force to force people to comply.

Perhaps the main issue that made Muslims unhappy, especially those in the Middle East, was Western support for making Palestine the homeland of the Jews. Zionists had been urging Jews to immigrate to Palestine since the mid-19th century, and many had. The trickle began to become a flood with the rise of Hitler, and Palestinian Arabs became alarmed and fought against the Jewish immigrants. Terrorism was committed by both sides. I think it’s possible to support Israel as homeland for Jews without agreeing with all its policies or excusing its expropriation of the property of the Palestinians or killing them. The existence of Israel enraged the Arabs of the region, and they tried to defeat it and allow Palestinians to get their property back. But the Israelis had a stronger economy and higher military technology, and successfully resisted attempts at invasion. They also had the support of many Western countries, including the United States. That was another thing Muslims of the region resented.

In the late 1970s Iran began rebelling against the Shah at about the same time he became ill and traveled to the USA for treatment. The Ayatollah Khomeini became the political leader of the country at about the same time that Iranians took a lot of Americans hostage. Not all approved of the Ayatollah’s version of an Islamic government, but many approved of Iran going its own way whether the United States liked it or not.

In 1980 the USSR invaded Afghanistan, and Arabs in various countries organized Mujahideen to help resist them. One of these was Osama bin Laden, who fought in Afghanistan and, after the Russians were driven out, returned to Saudi Arabia a hero. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, he offered (fearing Iraq would invade Saudi Arabia next) Mujahideen to repel the Iraqis. Some believe he was outraged by Saudi acceptance of American help to defeat the Iraqis and especially their allowing the United States to build a military base in the country. Other accounts say he believed the US was harming Muslims in the Middle East (Wikipedia quotes Michael Scheuer, who led the hunt for bin Laden as saying, “They hate us for what we do, not who we are.”) under the influence of the Israelis, and called upon them to cease fornication, homosexuality, gambling, and usury. He belonged to a particular school of theology that believed violent acts against innocent civilians were justified by jihad. 

Not everyone agreed with this interpretation. According to Wikipedia, “Jihad is classified into inner (‘greater’) Jihad, which involves a struggle against one’s own base impulses, and external (‘lesser’) jihad, which is further divided into jihad of the pen/tongue (debate or persuasion) and jihad of the sword. Most Western writers consider external jihad to have primacy over internal jihad in the Islamic tradition, while much of contemporary Muslim opinion favors the opposite point of view.” Wikipedia adds that in classical Islam there were elaborate rules against harming innocent noncombatants in jihad, and that modern Islamic scholars emphasize armed jihad as primarily defensive, a stance bin Laden obviously disagreed with.

Extremists of all kinds are liable to be violent. To condemn all Muslims for the actions of a relative few is to be unjust to more than a billion people. One guess is that we have between four and seven million Muslims in this country. If all of them were extremists, we would be in bad trouble. Despite our intelligence organizations, it would be nearly impossible to keep that many people from committing terrorist actions if they really wanted to. Did they come to this country to do that, or did they come for similar reasons to our own ancestors: because they wanted to make better lives for themselves? It’s interesting that Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson both advocated tolerance of Islam as well as any other religions, though of course they had little if any contact with any Muslims.

I suggest that Muslim terrorism is part of a larger problem: alienation. Alienation isn’t a necessary part of Islam, any more than of Christianity or any other belief. But so-called Christians have committed terrorist acts too, such as bombing abortion facilities, synagogues, and churches. I believe alienation makes people more vulnerable to drug and other addictions as well. Are Muslims in Great Britain trying to take the country over? Why would they want to? Have the British been mistreating them? If they’re accepted as citizens like any other, won’t they behave like most citizens?

At the same time, while Americans were justifiably enraged at the atrocity of 9/11, a lot of sympathy was lost for America after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq killed at least hundreds of thousands. Was that not also terrorism?

The reason many Muslims are trying to leave their countries of origin is because they’ve become almost impossible to live in. Sometimes the reasons are drought or famine. Other times they’re political, like civil war. The French famously dislike the Algerians. Could it be because Algeria was once a French colony and the Algerians forced the French out? Could it be the English don’t like the “Pakis” because India (of which Pakistan used to be a part) was once part of the British empire? Europeans subjugated much of the rest of the world during the colonial period. Is it the turn of the Western powers to be subjugated by people from their former colonies? Or is it possible we’ll learn our lesson and treat those people decently, so they won’t WANT to subjugate us? Or are we assuming that Muslims (as well as other refugees) will behave the way some of our ancestors did, doing anything they could think of to take the land from its indigenous peoples?

What is written above is a very over-simplified history of Middle Eastern interactions with Europe and America. It says nothing about the early history of Islam when its civilization was much higher than Europe of the same time. When the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem they massacred everyone inside, Muslims, Jews, and Christians alike. When the Muslims retook Jerusalem they managed to arrange an orderly departure for the Crusaders without any massacres.

Muslim poets and philosophers also influenced Christian thinkers during the Middle Ages, often from Spain, where Muslims, Christians, and Jews managed to get along harmoniously for several hundred years until a new wave of more fundamentalist Muslim invaders came in, followed by a Christian terror of the Jews which led to the Spanish Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain.

How different that is from the way the way the Sultan of Egypt reacted to a European invasion in the early 13th century by feeding the soldiers after having defeated them. Will it be possible for our civilization to respond as generously as did the medieval Egyptians, or are we too frightened to behave in a Christian way?

World War II: The Eastern Front

I recently read a novel which claimed that the Russians took 250,000 prisoners at Stalingrad in World War II. When I tried to corroborate that I found it was an exaggeration, but it wasn’t clear if it was a huge one. At one point in the Wikipedia account it said 105,000 prisoners had been taken. At another, 91,000. I thought these might have been two different times, which would mean nearly 200,000 prisoners taken.

But earlier in the war, Germans (according to a video about the German invasion of Russia) the Germans took 600,000 prisoners on capturing Kiev, and another 800,000 with the capture of Kharkov. The eastern war was immense. I had marveled at the ability of the English to withstand the horrors of the Battle of Britain. The invasion of Russia dwarfed that.

Russia hadn’t been ready. Not because they didn’t suspect (or even EXpect) it would happen. One reason was the great purge engineered by Stalin in the middle of the 1930s, which lasted almost until the war began. It solidified his power in the country but, among other things, also decimated the Soviet military, so it wasn’t really ready for a war.

The other mistake was that Josef Stalin wasn’t expecting the invasion, at least not when it happened. Whether he thought it was because he and Hitler were friends (possible but unlikely), thought Hitler would invade and subdue Great Britain first (somewhat more plausible), or because he expected Hitler to buy cold weather gear and equipment for his soldiers (Hitler didn’t). One historian thinks Stalin didn’t expect Hitler to open a second front in the war, since Germany had lost World War I by fighting a two front war, The historian points out that Hitler believed the United States would enter the war allied to Britain, making it very difficult to conquer Britain if an invasion was mounted. But Hitler, and most of his military advisers thought they could beat Russia quickly, considering Stalin’s purge of the military. They almost did.

In the first few days of the invasion large amounts of military supplies were lost, with huge casualties. Minsk fell; so did Kiev and Kharkov. Leningrad and Moscow were put under siege, Moscow being saved at the last minute by troops brought from the Far East. Some have suggested that if the so-called Axis powers had coordinated the Japanese could have attacked the USSR in the east and prevented them from being withdrawn. That in itself could have changed the war.

That had been in 1941. In early 1942 Stalin had insisted on a general counter-offensive, which was unsuccessful. The Germans were still strong, and had the advantage in technology if not manpower. With the threat to Moscow not only did civilians leave the city, but factories were disassembled and moved east of the Ural mountains so they wouldn’t fall into German hands. A colossal effort difficult to imagine. In early 1942 Hitler aimed his forces south to capture the oil fields of the Caucasus. In the 20th century success in war had become dependent on oil.

Here were two other decisions which, if they’d been different, could potentially have won the war for Hitler. One was his treatment of the Russians and other ethnic groups his soldiers encountered. It wasn’t just Jews his ideology considered subhuman, but Slavs as well. At least some Ukranians were willing to collaborate with the Germans: they had suffered horribly in the civil war and the forced collectivization which followed about ten years later. There was famine in both periods, largely artificial, in which millions died, and cannibalism took place. But other Slavs, seeing how Germans treated them (and the brutal response of the Russian authorities) were determined not to give in, though one would think the chaos and cruelty of both sides would have been intensely discouraging.

The other decision that might have won the war for Germany was if they had bypassed Stalingrad and driven deep into the Caucasus, which might have been possible, since Stalin and his military hadn’t expected their thrust south. Had they managed to take control of the oil fields of the south they would have had oil to power their war machine, and been able to deny it to the Russians. But their supply lines became too long, and lack of quick success at Stalingrad prevented them from concentrating more troops there.

Also, Hitler wanted to take the city named after Stalin, and Stalin was just as determined to defend it. He refused to evacuate civilians from it, and reportedly executed soldiers for cowardice or treason. One estimate cited by Wikipedia said as many as 13,000. An estimate from a different site said fewer than 300. But both sites agreed that executing soldiers was not a good way to raise the morale of the troops. In Russia the war is known as the Great Patriotic War, and I think that’s a much better explanation. Asking Russians to fight for Communism so soon after the Great Terror would have been a hard sell.

As it was, women fought the Germans as well as men. They fired anti-aircraft guns and artillery aimed at soldiers on the ground. The Germans were quite surprised, especially since the women’s contribution had been quite effective. They also flew combat missions.

Hitler, meanwhile, had insisted that Stalingrad be captured street by street, if necessary. There had been a population of some 400,000 in Stalingrad before the attack. A great many lives must have been lost just in the initial bombing, greater than the bombing of Great Britain, according to Wikipedia. Some 40,000 were sent to Germany as slave labor, while many soldiers lives were lost taking, losing, and retaking sites like the train station, a grain elevator, and several factories. Germans called this Rattenkrieg (rat war), and joked that they were taking over the kitchen while still trying to take the living room. Whenever the Russians lost ground they tried to retake it as quickly as possible with fresh troops. One group of Soviet soldiers fortified a four story building overlooking the Volga river and held it for 2 months without being relieved or significantly reinforced, Wikipedia says.

The Germans were eventually able to take most of the city with their Sixth Army, but in so doing set themselves up for defeat: Russian troops concentrated to the north and south of the city began Operation Uranus on November 19th, which succeeded in surrounding the German troops in the city on November 23rd. There were some 265,000 Germans, Italians, Romanians, Croatians, and troops recruited from occupied areas of the Soviet Union. Wikipedia comments that these were often reliable, since the penalty for having joined the Germans was summary execution. A pretty powerful motivation.

Field Marshal Erich von Manstein told Hitler that he could break through Russian lines to release the trapped army, and advised that the Sixth Army not attempt to break out. Wikipedia quotes American historians Williamson Murray and Alan Millet as saying this was what made the German defeat inevitable: they tried to supply their army by air, but could only transport a small percentage of the food and military supplies needed for lack of sufficient airports and Soviet destruction of fields from which the planes took off. Eventually the Germans decided they couldn’t rescue the Sixth Army, nor supply it well enough for it to break out of its encirclement. It continued to fight, which tied down Russian troops, preventing them from attacking the army trying to invade the Caucasus.

General Paulus, commander of the Sixth Army implored Hitler to let him surrender, but Hitler expected the soldiers to die in the line of duty. Shortly after this, on January 31st, 1943, Soviet units surprised Paulus at his command headquarters, and a surrender was negotiated (though Paulus stated later that it was someone else who had surrendered, and not him). Two days later the last group of Germans surrendered. When the German troops had been encircled about 105,000 had surrendered. When the Russians recaptured the city another 91,000 did. Fewer than 250,000 (at least according to Wikipedia), but not that many fewer. Resistance continued sporadically into March, with more than 2,400 German troops killed and almost 8,500 taken prisoner. According to Wikipedia, only about 5,000 of the 91,000 taken prisoner returned.

German forces, including Hungarians, Italians, Romanians, and volunteers from occupied parts of Russia lost almost 870,000 troops killed, wounded, or captured. The Russians lost over a million, but had changed the momentum of the war. The battle of Kursk reinforced that.

It took place between July 5th 1943, and August 23rd. Hitler hoped to regain the advantage in the war with an offensive in the Kursk Oblast, a region east of Kiev and north of Kharkov. The Russians had anticipated this, and had “built a defense in depth designed to wear down the German armoured spearhead…The defensive preparations included minefields, fortifications, artillery fire zones, and anti-tank strongpoints which extended about 190 miles in depth…The Battle of Kursk was the first time in the Second World War that a German strategic offensive was halted before it could break through enemy defenses and penetrate to its strategic depths.” (Wikipedia) It was also the first success Soviet troops had had in the summer. From that point on the Russians had the initiative.

Casualties for the Germans were about 165,000 men, compared to about 685,000 for the Russians. But the Russians had a higher population and more industrial potential, and the Allies had opened a front in Italy which the Germans had to defend. The invasion of Normandy wouldn’t take place until the following year, and despite the fierce German defense, that pretty much signaled the end of the war.

The Russians had managed to do the most to defeat the Nazis without help in fighting. Great Britain’s army had come close to being destroyed at Dunkirk, and the American army had to be built up and trained. Churchill was reluctant to invade France until he was more confident in his army, and he also had the Suez canal to protect.  If the Nazis controlled it, they could use it to invade India and prevent the British from being in contact with their empire. That’s why he decided to invade North Africa, and persuaded the Americans to join the British there.

The Allies DID supply the Russians not only with war materiel (almost 700 tanks and thousands of airplanes), but with also with many trucks, much phone wire, chemicals, and other supplies that helped keep the Russian economy going until they could produce what they needed themselves. The Russians wanted the Allies to open a front in continental Europe earlier than they did, but once they did it had an effect on the war. Germany was unable to send as many troops as desired to Russia once Britain and the USA opened the front in Italy. The Normandy invasion was the beginning of the end.

There were lots of ironies. One was that Germany had enabled the Bolshevik regime to come to power by sending Vladimir Lenin from Switzerland back to Russia. Lenin obliged them by taking power in November of 1917 (considered to be October by the calendar in use in Russia at the time) and immediately initiating peace talks. The Russian army stopped fighting, which was advantageous to the Germans, but an advantage that didn’t win them the war. More than twenty years later Russia did a great deal (certainly the most fighting on the largest front of the European war) to defeat Germany.

The other, and more tragic irony from my point of view, is that Stalin managed to modernize his army through forced collectivization of the country’s peasants, a move that was otherwise disastrous: some 10 million killed, much of the country’s livestock slaughtered, and another famine like the one during the civil war. But without that modernization (plus a lot of later supplies from the allies) Russia couldn’t have won the war. That in particular seems unfair.

Earlier this year after I watched the Ken Burns documentary on the Vietnam war, a friend sent me a link to an article criticizing inaccuracies in the series. Interesting as it was, what interested me more were the comments on the page at the end of the article. Several were by veterans, and one talked about how General Patton’s idea of invading Russia to wipe out Communism would never have worked, even if he could have found people to go with him–the Allies were ready for mopping up, not renewing warfare, no matter how much they disagreed ideologically with the Communists.

But the other reason was that Russia had learned how to win on a much more extensive front than the other Allies had fought on. Any attempt at invasion would have gone nowhere.

Some Americans and Europeans would have preferred to either be allied to the Germans or to allow Germany and Russia to fight it out without intervention. Communism was certainly not preferable to Nazism in its attitude toward human rights: Stalin was responsible for a lot more deaths than Hitler. I personally find Hitler’s racist ideology slightly more toxic than the Communist version, but that’s just my personal feeling.

Probably one thing that prevented an alliance with Germany and promoted one with Stalin was Roosevelt’s view that business could be done with Stalin. While Stalin was arguably just as fanatical as Hitler in some respects, he was certainly more practical. He had done business with the Nazis when other western powers wouldn’t ally with him before the war, and he was willing to do business with the Allies to protect his position (and incidentally his country), and he had learned to trust his generals instead of issuing unrealistic orders as Hitler increasingly did as the war progressed.

Why did Hitler want his army to fight street by street to capture Stalingrad? They would have incurred a lot fewer casualties by simply encircling the city, not allowing the Russian soldiers out, and preventing reinforcements from getting in. He might have been able to send reinforcements to the Caucasus to take over the oil wells there, which would probably have won the war for him. Insisting the city be captured street by street allowed the Russians to encircle it and trap the army there. Perhaps the Germans could have broken out, if they’d tried immediately, but the longer they put the decision off the less capable they were of doing it.

World War II is the largest war in history. The scale of it was immense, and so was the struggle on every side to prevail. Many people agreed with Hitler’s estimate that he could quickly win a war against Russia, and were surprised that Russia was able not only to hold out, but to take the initiative away from the Germans, drive them out of Russia and back to Germany, and occupy Germany and most of eastern Europe too. The Allies didn’t have an easy war to fight in western Europe, but the Russians had it harder, and achieved more in the east. We hear a lot less about them.

What underlines that for me is that the Russians had been enduring catastrophe for decades. They were unable to stop the Germans in World War I so that much of the last part of that war was fought on Russian soil. The Russian civil war followed the end of Russia’s participation in the World War, and was a calamity: millions of people dead. Compare that with America’s civil war (quite catastrophic enough) with about 620,000 deaths of soldiers, and an overall loss of over a million. Russia, already a poorer country than the USA, endured tremendous damage in those two wars.

And afterwards came forced collectivization and the Great Purge. How did they manage not only to avoid defeat in the early stages of the German invasion, but to stop it entirely? There were giants in the earth in those days.

James M. Buchanan, Revolutionary Stealth Strategist

James M. Buchanan was an economist whose name isn’t well known, but whose influence is being widely felt throughout the country because of political initiatives that allegedly suppress voting rights for various people, and attack working conditions, public services, and consumer rights.

Though he, according to Wikipedia, identified as a socialist in his youth, he eventually attended the University of Chicago (after World War II, in which he had served) and became influenced by his economics professor there. By the 1950s, when teaching at the University of Virginia, he had become an extreme advocate of capitalism. Historian Nancy MacLean characterizes his view as “stark”, and has written a book,  Democracy in Chains, about it, and how he managed to spread his influence.

She compares him to Milton Friedman, whose views may have been somewhat similar (they both belonged to the Mont Pelerin society, a group for economists), but who had a much more attractive personality, and made an optimistic case for free market capitalism. MacLean is quoted as saying (ineteconomics.org), “Buchanan was the dark side of this: he thought, ok, fine, they can make a case for free markets, but everybody knows free markets have externalities and other problems. So he wanted to keep people from believing that government could be the alternative to these problems.” (externalities are the costs or benefits that affect people who didn’t choose to incur the costs or benefits–pollution is one such cost).

That view fits very well with modern conservative beliefs: “Government is the problem, not the solution.” And that fits together with Buchanan’s view (which many wealthy people were quite willing to endorse) that “The people who needed protection were property owners, and their rights could only be secured through constitutional limits to prevent the majority of voters from encroaching on them….”(https://www,inet.org/perspectives/blog.meet-the-economist–behind–the-one-percent’s-stealth-takeover-of-america ). This is because of Buchanan’s bleak view that nobody worked for anything that wasn’t of direct benefit to themselves, including legislators, government employees, teachers, doctors, and civil rights advocates. The inet.org article about him says, “They wanted to control others, and wrest away their resources,” and quotes him as saying, “‘Each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves.'” The “makers and takers” narrative popular in conservative circles.

That’s not entirely untrue, since many of us at least have self-centered and self-seeking aspects, but restraining democracy to protect property owners ONLY seems an extreme solution. MacLean believes that “Buchanan wanted a private governing elite of corporate power that was wholly released from public accountability.” Charles and David Koch thought this a goal worth striving for, and spent a lot of money spreading this view, funding institutions and politicians that would promulgate it, and begin crafting and passing legislation to implement it. Other groups and individuals funded the process too, including companies like: Shell Oil, Exxon, Chase Manhattan Bank, Ford, IBM, and General Motors. That kind of support bought a lot of almost subliminal publicity and almost unnoticed activism. “The economist saw that his vision would never come to fruition by focusing on who rules. It was much better to focus on the rules themselves, and that required a “constitutional revolution.”

“Suppressing voting, changing legislative processes so a normal majority could no longer prevail, sowing public distrust of government institutions–all these were tactics toward the goal. But the Holy Grail was the Constitution: alter it, and you could increase and secure the power of the wealthy in a way that no politician could ever challenge.” (ineteconomics.org)

At an event of the like-minded, “MacLean recounts that Buchanan…focused on such affronts to capitalism as environmentalism and public health and welfare, expressing eagerness to dismantle Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare as well as kill public education because it tended to foster community values. Feminism had to go too: the scholars considered it a socialist project.” (ineteconomics.org).

The ineteconomics.org article sees his work as paralleling that of John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, a senator and seventh vice president of the United States, who sought to protect the institution of slavery, saw the southern planters as “victims of the majority”, and “sought to create ‘constitutional gadgets’ to constrict the operations of government.” In other words, slave owners were claiming to be victims–practicing “identity politics”–long before Progressives were.

Where did Buchanan’s ideas come from? He grew up in Tennessee during the Depression. His grandfather had been an unpopular governor in the 1890s, and according to the Atlantic he “grew up in an atmosphere of half-remembered glory and bitterness, without either money or useful connections.” MacLean says Buchanan was involved in the pushback against the Brown vs Board of Education decision which attempted to force desegregation of schools. Conservatives had been opposing extension of government power since the 1930s, but ordinary people liked Social Security, and weren’t too attracted–until the possibility of desegregation. According to Wikipedia, both libertarian and nonlibertarian writers question MacLean’s contention of Buchanan’s racism, saying that he played a role in inviting an anti-apartheid activist to the University of Virginia in 1965, and condemned Jim Crow laws at that time. She says he was careful to couch his objections in economic rather than racist terms.

But the extremity of his views suggests that he shared the resentment of many ordinary Southerners, whether his was about race, or not. Such resentment is common in a number of circles now, and has historically caused acts of violence. Segregation was an issue that focused Southern bitterness about their defeat in the Civil War, just as the loss of the First World War paved the way for Hitler’s ascendancy. His views are popular now in some circles, and are remarkably dualistic. The idea that wealthy property owners are good, and everyone else bad–only parasites and thieves–speaks of a great fear and simplistic mindset.

The trauma of the Civil War, still remembered by many Southerners, justifies their conservatism to themselves. They felt attacked before the war, and WERE attacked during it, with catastrophic effect. What many prefer not to remember is that they had, for nearly two hundred years, been attacking and kidnapping black Africans whom they then forced to work for them. Maybe the idea of karma wasn’t current before the war, but Southerners felt even then that they had to justify their treatment of blacks. That’s where the racism became attached to slavery. Race had never particularly been an issue with regard to slavery in the Old World, where ANYBODY could be a slave.

Was race the issue, or one of them, that drove Buchanan’s work and point of view? MacLean thinks it at least played a part, and says he trained students how to disagree with the Brown decision the implementation of which, in Virginia (where he was then employed by the University of Virginia) was delayed five years during which white families were able to send children to private schools (and were reimbursed by tax deductions), while black children simply weren’t able to go to school, something those who objected to desegregation may have been quite happy about. Teaching blacks to read had been a crime during the time of slavery. If they were able to read they would be able to find ways to resist the ways in which they were mistreated–as they did about the time schools began to be desegregated in Virginia, and (according to Doug Stafford, chief strategist for Rand Paul, as quoted in Time Magazine), when the public schools reopened, few white students returned to them.

MacLean remarks in an interview with Slate magazine that Buchanan’s view wasn’t primarily racist, but more driven by the knowledge that black voters have a different experience from whites, and will never vote for the kinds of laws he wanted to establish. Nor would most women, or other groups. “We make a mistake when we think these are just reactionary prejudices, and we need to see them as shrewd calculations to keep people who would oppose this vision away from the polls.”

But Buchanan’s viewpoint seems to have been more about class divides (racism can be considered closely akin to class, since blacks and other minorities have been more often poor in this country than not). Why did he believe property owners had to be especially protected, when their wealth enabled them to better protect themselves than could the poor and vulnerable? Just because the United States is called a democracy (inaccurately–it’s really a republic) doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of people who really don’t want ordinary people to be politically represented.

One might think giving ordinary workers more of an economic stake in the country would make the states more united; conservatives don’t seem to see it that way. Does this sort of paranoia suggest a guilty conscience? Conservatives are always interested in discrediting Marxism, and of course the manifestation of Communism has been horrible in most cases. But that doesn’t mean Marx didn’t have any valid insights. On some level the ultra-rich may be aware of how badly they’ve mistreated their fellow citizens, and that when they accuse the poor of practicing, or wanting to practice class warfare, it’s the wealthy that have been conducting it all along, and usually much more successfully than the poor.

Consider that Democrats are accused of wanting people (especially immigrants) to vote illegally, while Republicans are accused of suppressing the votes of people who have a perfect right to vote. Whether either of these accusations is true isn’t the point: that each is seen the way they are means that Democrats are more inclusive, with Republicans more exclusive.

Of course there are always problems with democracy, as with any other governing system. But if Buchanan is to demand “fairness” for property owners (the wealthy) shouldn’t he demand it for others too? The wealthy can defend themselves in comprehensive ways others can’t. Demonizing anyone who isn’t wealthy brings civil war closer. No one can deny the existence of crime, but there’s no question that it’s not the exclusive property of one class. White collar crime is crime indulged in by people in high positions, and is often difficult to detect, much less punish. Because people with high positions can behave criminally, they can also cause far more damage than street criminals. There are at least two tracks in the justice system, and if you’re on the lower track you’re probably out of luck. On the upper track you’ll probably get away with bad behavior.

Why exactly did Buchanan want so badly to protect the wealthy? He didn’t start out wealthy himself, but since his grandfather had been a governor of Tennessee (and unpopular) his family probably had been wealthy. How did they lose their wealth? Was it bad choices on their part, or was it taken in some questionable fashion? That might explain the depth of his bitterness, and willingness to advocate really radical measures to protect wealthy people. Or was it just abstract belief not reinforced by personal experience? I can’t find enough detail about his family to say.

In any case, his views on democracy were different from those of many, as Michael Chwe explained in the Washington Post. He says that Buchanan’s ideal society was noncoercive. That, to him, meant that it should be almost impossible to pass laws, unless they were unanimously approved, because penalties for breaking laws are coercive. Thus, employers should be allowed to refuse to hire or serve people on any basis whatsoever, which provided a rationale for people to send their children to private schools so they wouldn’t have to associate with minorities.

He also disapproved of public demonstrations against perceived injustices (something many people consider firmly in the realm of democracy). “,..Buchanan…embraced ‘order’ and insisted something must be done about students who have not done anything illegal but merely disregard ‘ordinary rules of conduct’ and ‘obstruct others’, which are of course part of peaceful civil disobedience. He also called them ‘child-men’, ‘animals’, and ‘parasites’. Why was he so afraid of protesters he had to call them dehumanizing names? Does a person who truly believes in democracy call his opponents names, or does that indicate a belief in something else? To me it signifies a rigid personality. Though he must have been able to tolerate disagreement, since many of his colleagues saw things differently, he seems not to have felt it was legitimate to disagree with him.

Chwe goes on to say that he believes in the field of economics, public choice, which Buchanan was instrumental in founding and defending. He gave talks at George Mason University, where many of Buchanan’s supporters work, and that they treated him well. He adds that it’s possible to find intellectual inspiration in Buchanan’s work without agreeing on all his ideas.

The ideal of noncoercion certainly isn’t entirely wrong, but isn’t entirely practical either. Quakers believe in noncoercion, and take a lot of time in consideration and discussion before making unanimous decisions. I doubt this would be possible on a national level.

And the refusal to make new laws, especially laws to correct faults with the status quo would perpetuate injustice. Of course it could also create some, but it seems clear (at least to me) that such profound conservatism wants almost NOTHING to change, including unjust social practices. The majority can certainly tyrannize; more often it has been the minority, in human history.

Buchanan had the chance to put his ideas to the test with the military coup in Chile in 1973, when Salvador Allende (who had won the election) was deposed and Augusto Pinochet installed as leader. Pinochet liked Buchanan’s ideas, used a number of them, took advice from Buchanan–and Chile’s economy went down the tubes. MacLean says Buchanan didn’t seem to be too upset about the human rights violations Pinochet’s regime committed, though the regime was far from being a democracy. He also took the precaution of not advertising his involvement there. MacLean says he’s unlike Milton Friedman in this way, since Friedman liked being center of attention, and had a “sunny” personality (more pleasant?).

She adds that his first major work in his field of public choice economics, The Calculus of Consent, “…he seemed to believe that people of good will could come close to something like unanimity on the basic rules for how to govern our society on things like taxation and government spending and so forth. And by the mid-1970s he concluded that that was impossible…that there was no way people who were not wealthy, were not large property owners, would agree to the kind of rules he was proposing.” In his book, Limits of Liberty, “He actually said in that book the only hope might be despotism.”

And we’re seeing the beginnings of despotism. Suppressing voting is despotism. So is exporting jobs, and then blaming workers for not being able to earn a living. Withholding medical care from anyone who can’t afford insurance or to pay for it outright is too. And then blaming people who protest against policies that injure them.

The details are different, but anyone who disagreed with the Communists in Russia, China, and other countries had no right to protest. The repression in this country isn’t enforced by military power–yet. But proponents of limited government think a strong military is one of the few legitimate functions of a federal government, and having one means it can be used repressively, if anyone wants to. It has been in the past, and rarely for the benefit of poor people. If Buchanan’s vision is implemented, it would probably have to be. That vision would essentially constitute a one-party government in which only a minority would be represented.

That’s what Communism was and is. It hardly matters that the economic vision is different; like Communism, the world designed by Buchanan and the Koch brothers would be one in which anyone who disagreed would be punished. No debate. No representation. The owners of the country, as John Jay put it, would be the ones running it. All the laws would be on their side. There would be no checks or balances. Just a foot forever kicking anyone in the face who didn’t love Big Brother.

 

Propaganda

Probably just about everyone bends the truth a little, but some people feel justified in just making things up if it will, in their opinion, advance their cause. Some of this is hard to detect, but some is absurdly easy, with a little thought.

One example is that of George Soros. That’s not his real name, as he freely admits. He was born György Schwartz, in Budapest in 1930. No doubt he changed his name for a sinister reason? Yes, he changed it because he was Jewish. What was happening to Jews in Europe in the 1940s?

Some claim he joined the Hitler Youth (and greatly enjoyed it), that he collaborated with Nazis, that he was a protege of Hitler. He was 14 at the end of World War II, barely old enough to join, and he DID pose as Christian with a Hungarian official who himself had a Jewish wife in hiding. You or I might have done the same had we been Jewish in that time and place. This sort of “passing” had previously caused great paranoia in Spain hundreds of years earlier when Jewish families had ostensibly converted to Christianity and married into the nobility, while continuing to practice the Jewish religion in their homes. That became a matter for the Spanish Inquisition. One might have thought people would have been somewhat less paranoid in the 20th century. Soros said later that he enjoyed 1944, when the Nazis took over Hungary, because he got to see his father’s heroism in saving a lot of Jewish people from the Holocaust.

Did he collaborate with Nazis? He accompanied the Hungarian official (something someone else would probably have done if he hadn’t), posing as his godson, as the official inventoried a Jewish property Nazis had taken over. He also took summonses to Jewish people, and warned that if they answered them they would be deported.

After the war he moved to England and attended the London School of Economics. After graduating, he moved to America and managed hedge funds, which made him very rich. Does this make him a Communist, as several have accused him of being? If he were, would he have contributed to setting up democratic institutions in eastern European countries after the fall of Communism?

But being Jewish, surely that means he’s a Zionist. Except that he has contributed to Palestinian causes and criticized the Israeli government, much to its irritation.

The Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court was based on the idea that contribution of money counts as free speech, something conservatives applaud–as long as it’s CONSERVATIVE speech. It’s perfectly okay for billionaires to spend huge amounts on CONSERVATIVE causes. Apparently it’s heresy when they contribute to liberal causes. That’s Soros’s sin–that and (arguably) being Jewish.

Another example is the anxiety over Sharia law. This is customary law associated with Islam, and many people are anxious about Islam, especially since 9/11. Yes, there was a terrorist attack that killed 3,000 or so people then, and there have been a few other attacks in the USA that have been fairly horrible, but not on the same scale. Considering the amount of anxiety, it’s a bit surprising there have been so few. Especially when you consider that American retaliatory wars on Afghanistan and Iraq have killed at least hundreds of thousands and destabilized the whole Middle East. Muslims, especially of that region, have some reason to believe their countries have been targeted because (at least in part) of their religion, and have little reason to sympathize with our anxiety about them.

The anxiety has gone to the extent of state legislatures in this country outlawing Sharia law. Why would this be necessary? One commentator pointed out that Sharia law is already practiced in the USA–among Muslims. Nobody else is subjected to it. We have our own legal tradition, whatever its faults, and for Sharia to be applied to everyone, it would have to be imposed. Three to five million Muslim American citizens aren’t in a position to do that, even if they wanted to–and I suspect many of them don’t. Many probably came here for economic opportunities or to escape Middle Eastern violence. As long as they’re allowed to follow their own customs, I doubt they want to impose anything on anybody. The idea that Sharia would destroy the United States seems obviously false.

Even more recent has been the response of some conservatives to the aftermath of the Parkland, Florida shootings in the high school: that the students criticizing politicians for not passing legislation that might have kept them safe are actors, and that the shootings never happened. The same thing has been said about the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut; the difference in Florida is that the students in Parkland are old and articulate enough to speak for themselves. The students in Connecticut were too young. Conservatives see any attempt to take guns from the hands of the irresponsible as a threat to their own right to weapons.

This is another instance of paranoia. Taking guns away from anyone is worse than taking lives, even the lives of children. The position guns rights people are taking is that guns are necessary for self-defense. In some cases this is true–mainly in the case of soldiers and police–but even in these categories questionable shootings happen.

And gun rights seem to apply only to certain segments of society. When the Black Panther party asserted their rights to carry guns and defend their neighborhoods some fifty years ago their actions instigated a gun control initiative by then- governor Ronald Reagan. While black criminals use guns (Chicago is frequently cited in this connection), there really aren’t many mass shootings by blacks. I can only remember one in Texas a few years ago. Mass shootings are almost exclusively committed by white males. Very few have been committed by Muslims, blacks, or Hispanics. And I just read today that most such shooters have been home schooled by religiously conservative parents. If true, that’s quite interesting. Why would that population be so angry?

Is all the paranoia on the rightwing side? Or all the propaganda? No, propaganda is practiced by anyone involved in politics on any level, and propaganda is designed to make people FEEL paranoid. That’s a very old trick. Divide and conquer doesn’t apply to just one political group. A bumper sticker on a nearby street proclaims that the car’s owner doesn’t believe the liberal media. Fair enough. I don’t believe the conservative media. But I DO believe in the First Amendment, which means I have to tolerate what conservatives (or others) have to say, whether I agree or not (and I often don’t). And they have to tolerate what I say.

But that’s one of the primary things that makes this country worth living in: we’re allowed to say what we believe. When we express our beliefs we may discover that some of them are stupid. I think that applies to everyone, not just conservatives or liberals. In the eyes of God most of us are probably not too bright.

And one of the things that makes us not too bright is taking our own beliefs without any grains of salt. Like most people, I like being confirmed in my own opinion. That doesn’t mean my opinion is right, so I have to be watchful that I’m not making stupid assumptions. It’s an easy thing to do, and I can be caught saying and thinking foolish things as easily as anyone else.

Many people are unaware of the history of religious wars in Europe. The Thirty Years War in the 17th century is considered to be the most destructive in history until the World Wars of the 20th century, and that’s one reason why our Founding Fathers decided religion had to be separate from government. Different denominations had used government to punish people they felt believed the wrong things. This had obviously caused resentment, and persecuted denominations took opportunities  for revenge. The obvious way to avoid such conflicts was to not allow ANY religious group to dominate any governmental institutions. Let them have their churches, mosques, synagogues, and private schools. Let them all be equal in the eyes of the law.

But there are always groups who want to tell others what to do. It’s popular now to chant the mindless motto, “Government is the problem.” The idea that human society can survive any time at all without being governed has been disproven over and over again. A society without regulation may create a powerful economy, but some of the activity instigated will be criminal, and some will be powerful people rushing in to fill a power vacuum. Criminals don’t want laws, and when people propose deregulation I think we should take a close look at how they plan to benefit. Allowing wealthy people to control political discourse means the wealthy will get what they want, often at the expense of the less powerful and wealthy, No wonder there’s a narrative that poor people are to blame for their poverty, and that they’re takers rather than makers. Believing that’s always true gives wealthy people the excuse to arrange things the way they want them, and mistreat poor people. There’s plenty of history to confirm that opinion: we can begin with the reasons for our Revolutionary War.

I think the most dangerous thing about propaganda is that it promotes the idea that people we agree with are good and those we disagree with are evil. That’s way too simple, and it’s an idea that can be manipulated way too easily. Propaganda is designed to make us frightened and angry and to persuade us of things that are against our interests. It’s easy to dismiss all conservatives or all liberals as propagandists; it’s much harder to listen to different voices dispassionately, and decide things on the merits of each case, rather than on the basis of our emotions. Conservatives often say liberals want to feel good. Of course that’s true. I just think it applies to conservatives too.

Religion vs Humility

Modern times have been characterized by a collision between religion and science. Not because what science said (at least at first) was necessarily so controversial, but because it was contradicting the official doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. That the planets revolved around the sun instead of the other way around was less a strange thing to say than a challenge to orthodoxy (literally “right belief”), a challenge that continues to reverberate more than four hundred years later. That’s because the Church was in the business of defining reality, and derived a lot of its power that way. When other voices were allowed to be heard, religious power was diminished.

A lot of people have believed this was terrible, especially after the concept of evolution became known, as if humans could define the tools God (or His representatives) were allowed to use. What it really represents, though, was the overreach of religious authority, which claimed to know things it didn’t. That’s the reason for so many scientists having become atheists, I think: they’re repulsed at the power grab–which doesn’t stop some of them from trying to grab power themselves.

That’s at least part of what’s behind climate change denial, for instance: a backlash against science, partly by religious people who believe they ought to have more power and influence, and partly by the wealthy who derive THEIR power from the coal and oil industries, and are threatened by the possibility of green energy.

At about the same time that the Church was having its issue with Galileo, the Thirty Years War was demonstrating just how destructive religions could be when going to war, an example the American founders took seriously when separating church and state. The American Revolution was occurring about the same time Fundamentalism became important in both Protestantism and Catholicism as a reaction against new perspectives and as a sign of great insecurity. If one’s faith can move mountains, why should it be bothered with the idea of evolution?

Scientific analysis didn’t end with astronomical observations. It was applied to study of the Bible too, and the analysts discovered that the supposed Word of God was extremely inconsistent. Bart Ehrman, who has made a career of studying the history of the Bible, and who personally went from being a conservative evangelical to being an agnostic, points out that (for one thing) the book of Genesis has two different creation stories that disagree with each other, and the New Testament is possibly even less consistent. In one Gospel Herod murders all boys in his kingdom beneath the age of two, forcing Jesus’s parents to take him to Egypt. No other Gospel mentions this, as if they either hadn’t noticed, or had forgotten. And there’s no historic record of any such thing. That’s only one inconsistency. There are many more. Ehrman’s point is that writers of the New Testament weren’t concerned with historical accuracy (history as a discipline had only barely begun, and probably no more than ten per cent of the Roman Empire was literate), but with making a theological point. What a lot of that point was becomes clear with the Gospel of John, in which Jesus declares, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and no man comes to the Father except through me.” Only Christians are henceforth going to be allowed power.

Which is why a lot of Fundamentalists feel so injured: their power has been taken away by defining their perspective as nonsensical. They naturally dislike this.

But wasn’t humility supposed to be a large part of the Christian message? No, humility wasn’t a virtue many religious leaders aspired to when Christianity became the state religion of ancient Rome, nor do many of the most vocal aspire to it now. Political and religious leaders often share a trait: they like to tell other people how to behave and what they’re allowed to believe. Denial of the human part in climate change (for instance) becomes part of religion, just as do religious prohibitions of homosexuality (I think it’s worth noting that Jesus never commented on this) and other things religious people don’t like. Scientists at least aspire to be impartial, though they don’t always achieve it; a lot of religious leaders don’t even aspire to it.

The lesson I derive from this is that humans tend to be power-hungry. Even Christianity, supposed from the beginning to be a religion of love, also became very early a religion that believed no one else had the truth. They may have possessed a truth that few or none other had, but their declaration of this had an ugly side: anti-Semitism has already begun by the time the New Testament is complete.

And anti-Semitism and related bigotries continue today. Those are things extremists like, and we happen to have an extremist president who stirs up and reflects a lot of our country’s baser passions. There are people on both ends of the political and religious spectrum who would gladly start another Inquisition if it would enhance their power. The president represents part of this tendency, as can be seen when he denounces “fake news” or anthropogenic climate change. He’s using the same weapon science has used against religion: discrediting the point of view of anyone you disagree with, though I suspect that initially there was less malice on the part of science. That sort of behavior should have nothing to do with either religion or science, and does only because of the shadow side of human nature. We don’t like being humble.

There’s a saying that science doesn’t care what you believe. That’s science as it ought to be, but isn’t always. Nature, on the other hand, REALLY doesn’t care what you believe. If we are believing the wrong things, especially about our duty to the natural world, nature is very likely to let us know. If the climate scientists are right, there is likely to be a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth at that time.

 

A Very Strange Dilemma

Author James Baldwin asked, “Why does white America need niggers?”

The first obvious reason has always been cheap labor. Black labor played a large part in the development of America, especially in the South (for which they received few benefits). But it seems as if there’s always been more to it than that.

The slave trade in North America really took off in the 18th century, if not the 17th. Was it really necessary? Weren’t there enough white people to provide labor in the colonies? In retrospect it doesn’t seem to have been very efficient to go all the way to Africa to get slaves and have many of them die on the return voyage. But the slave trade continued right up to the beginning of the Civil War.

And that’s in spite of the fear and resentment whites felt towards blacks. Part of the fear was because slave owners used their slaves sexually (probably not all owners), as can readily be seen by the range of skin colors in the black community even today. Southern whites in particular were afraid of black men doing the same to white women, and lynched a number of those they even suspected of the desire.

Another part of the fear was because on large plantations especially whites were badly outnumbered by blacks. They used brutality to intimidate blacks, and consequently feared what blacks might do in return.

One result of slavery in the Unites States was identification of it with black skin and further resentment of blacks after the Civil War supposedly fought to free them. In the Old World slaves could be of any nationality or skin color, and could fairly readily become free, even powerful. Identification of slavery with black skin necessitated the rationalization that blacks were inferior, and that having been brought to this country was somehow in their interest. But how could it be beneficial to have their own cultures erased and to be made to feel inferior because of their skin color, the different texture of their hair, their culture, etc?

The oddity of the relationship between white and black is underscored by the fashion for minstrels in about the 1850s, in which white musicians used makeup to look black when performing. What was THAT about? Was it done just to make fun of blacks, or was there something about the culture whites wanted to emulate? If so, what might it have been?

Could it have been an emotional and/or sexual freedom blacks possessed and whites usually didn’t? Knowing little about the era, I can only guess, and not with much confidence. Whites were later more willing to make use of black influence, if not to credit them or reward them financially. Jazz became the first purely American musical art form, but it was white musicians who more readily profited from it.

Whites came to resent blacks for their presence in the country they never should have been brought to. Perhaps the rational thing would have been to apologize and start over again, but whites were generally unwilling to admit their mistake, didn’t want integration, and sending blacks back to Africa, however desirable, wasn’t practical. Nor did all blacks want to go.

But a look at history reveals that blacks in general are perfectly capable of succeeding in America–when they’re allowed to. In each generation there were a few who became doctors, lawyers, or teachers in spite of the odds against them. In the 20th century particularly blacks were successful in music (though often taken advantage of by record companies and having their music copied by whites) and athletics. In the second half of the century they became successful in politics too. If not for segregation in most parts of the country, a form of white affirmative action which prevented competition no matter the rationalized reason, they would most likely have been successful in a wide variety of other fields too.

As it is, the resentment continues. James Baldwin’s question could be extended: why did Europeans need Jews? A recent article in The Atlantic focuses on the late 1930s when Nazi persecution of the Jews reached a higher gear, but before the Holocaust began, when Jewish professionals were forced to clean streets with toothbrushes. The article points out that they were treated this way not because they were subhuman, but because they were obviously human, to humiliate them. But for most of 2,000 years they had been Europe’s favorite group to persecute. Why was that? And why did blacks get awarded that position in the New World?

It seems to me the institution of slavery need not have taken the direction it did in the Americas. It would probably have been a corrupt institution anyway as power imbalances usually are, but it didn’t have to become identified with dark skin, nor did it have to be so cruel.

Why DID we need niggers? What does that say about us?

“I Am Not Your Negro”

Author James Baldwin undertook a project in 1979, to tell about the lives of three of his friends who had been assassinated in the 1960s: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. He had only written thirty pages of notes by the time he died eight years later of stomach cancer.

Raoul Peck, Haitian film-maker put together the movie I Am Not Your Negro using Baldwin’s own words (sometimes from TV talk shows, sometimes read by Samuel L. Jackson) to express what he felt about race in America. The result is powerful.

Early in the movie there is footage shot in the South in the early sixties of hate-filled white people carrying signs. One says, Miscegnation is Communism. Another says it is the Antichrist. It’s dolefully ironic that miscegnation (sexual relations between black and white) was initiated by white slaveowners who then blamed black men for wanting to rape white women, thus turning the dynamic inside-out. Black men are still blamed for their sexuality, though, just as women are blamed for tempting Adam to eat the apple. A good myth is hard to give up.

Also early in the film is a black girl walking alone to go to a white high school surrounded by whites carrying signs saying they don’t want to go to school with blacks. They’re jeering and spiting at her too. Baldwin speaks, saying that he saw this footage in France, where he was then living, and besides being enraged was filled with shame, adding, “One of us should have been there with her. ”

It’s hardly surprising he died of cancer. Cancer and heart disease are in part caused by stress, and he had the stress of being both black and gay. A recent article says it’s a shame the movie didn’t address his being gay too, because Baldwin did in his writing. The three of his novels I remember best spoke of homosexuality as well as race. Actually, I don’t think Giovanni’s Room talked about race. So sexuality was very important to Baldwin too. He comments in this movie that black men aren’t allowed to show their sexuality (that may be less true now), and that movie star John Wayne, who spent most of his time on screen admonishing Indians, had permission, because of his whiteness, not to grow up. It was okay for him to kill Indians. He didn’t have to learn to negotiate with them as equals.

Baldwin met Medgar Evers early in the 1960s and traveled with him as Evers attempted to gather evidence about voting suppression. The sixties weren’t far advanced when he was murdered himself. Baldwin says he was extremely frightened traveling through Mississippi, but also felt he needed to do that as a witness, and that he needed to travel widely as a witness. Eventually he also traveled to Georgia and Alabama where some of the famous Civil Rights protests had been. More footage of police beating defenseless men and women.

Baldwin says he watched Malcolm X and Martin Luther King come from very different positions to eventually drift into almost exactly the same position. Footage is shown of Malcolm X criticizing King for not wanting blacks to fight back when abused by whites. However understandable his feeling, it’s also obvious that taking on whites in a race war in which they would be vastly outnumbered and outgunned would be a self-defeating strategy. King replies to Malcolm X by saying that he sees love as being a powerful force rather than a cowardly surrender. Did Malcolm X come to appreciate that position before he died? Baldwin says he was in London with a friend taking a day off when he learned of Malcolm X’s assassination.

Baldwin came home from France in the later sixties. He said he missed very little about America, but missed his brother, sister, their children, and his mother. He was visiting them in 1968 when his sister was called away from the table. When she returned she said nothing, but he felt something was wrong. Then she said, “Martin Luther King was just killed. Reporters are coming to get your reaction.”

He attended the funeral, and said he tried not to cry, felt that many others were trying not to cry too, and for the same reason: they didn’t know if they could stop.

He felt he had to visit the widows and children of those leaders, also not easy. Perhaps especially because none of the three lived to be as old as forty.

I was vaguely aware of the strife of the sixties, but didn’t really feel it. I had problems of my own taking up my attention. But the sixties shaped my political views. In the 1950s we had had a comic book portraying Rosa Parks taking a white person’s seat in the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and refusing to get up. That’s where I first heard of Dr. King.

In 1963 I was with my grandmother while she watched coverage of the March on Washington, and got to see in real time Dr. King’s I Have a Dream speech. Hairs stood up on the back of my neck. What the Civil Rights movement was protesting was so obviously unfair that I didn’t see any alternative to being a liberal. It seemed that all conservatives were racists, a term that has since been used too lightly for too many frivolous reasons. No one in the Civil Rights movement has had the kind of gravitas Dr, King had, which is a shame. He and the other two were murdered because they held up a mirror to show us all what we were, causing panic fear. People comfortable with segregation felt their world was coming apart, and had no answer but violence. After King was killed, many others felt THEIR world was coming apart too. If my heart was in the right place in feeling sympathy for the movement (which is debatable), I did nothing about it, to my shame.

Baldwin didn’t only report his feelings about the movement and the death of his friends (as well as many other more anonymous people), but looked at the larger picture of America, its racism and other forms of injustice. He saw white America being as entangled and imprisoned by racism as black America, and striking out in violent resentment of it. Black Americans never wanted to come here, but neither did whites, he says. Using blacks as slaves made them prisoners too.

The fact is that the American way of life hasn’t made many people happy. Satiated, in some cases, but not happy. That many of us have secure lives that most people in the world can’t even imagine, and yet are fearful of people unlike ourselves is ironic, if not paradoxical. Look at some of the things we lead the world in: numbers of prisoners, people killed by police, consumption of illegal (and legal) drugs. Those things don’t indicate a happy culture. More people have a higher standard of living than any time previous in the world, but they aren’t happy, and their standard of living comes at the price of devastation of other peoples and the waste of natural resources. They, who are WE, prefer fantasy to reality, because experiencing the reality of what WE are complicit in would mean we must experience overpowering guilt and responsibility. Nobody wants that. So we’ll have to pay in another way.

The climactic scene of the movie is footage from the Dick Cavett show. A new guest enters and says he disagrees with what he’s heard Baldwin say, and asks if there isn’t any other way for him to connect than through race? Surely he must feel more connection with a white author than with an illiterate black.

Baldwin answers that the man is invoking an idealistic vision that he has seen no evidence of. Is he to trust not only himself, but his relatives and children to an idea which he’s never seen manifest in real life? The other seems to have nothing to say–or maybe it’s just that I can’t imagine him saying anything to refute Baldwin.

The idea that racism was once a problem, but is no longer, is popular in some circles. When people complain about it, or even try to talk about it, they’re said to be “race-baiting”. I don’t suppose people with this view are even insincere–that they’re aware of. One such person friended me on Facebook during the past year or so, complimenting me on the posts I’d written on this blog, and trying to persuade me of his views. He was nice to me, never being rude when I stated my own views (which he probably saw as liberal cliches), and even defending me from some of his friends. But I couldn’t agree that racism was no longer a problem, nor could I support his candidate for president. I’m not sure if this movie would mean much to him. I’d like to think it could open his eyes, but that might be too much to expect. There are quite a few people who seem pretty sincere in their disagreement with what I believe. And I certainly am not always right.

The movie Raoul Peck has made isn’t perfect. As one writer complained in a recent article, he didn’t address Baldwin’s homosexuality, even though Baldwin wasn’t shy about that. If he had, the movie would probably have been longer, and even more powerful. As the writer pointed out, Baldwin was criminalized in two ways: not only as a black man, but as a gay man. He was doubly an outsider in ways most whites don’t experience, unless they really want to. Most of us want to be accepted, so don’t confront the injustices we see. That’s what is known as white privilege, a term some people are impatient with. They don’t see themselves as privileged. They also don’t think to ask how a black person might see them.

The movie quickly surveys several movies with themes of black vs white. One is the movie in which Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier are handcuffed together after escaping from prison. At the end of the movie they’ve managed to get rid of the cuffs and are running to catch a train and ride in the box car. Poitier climbs onto the train, Curtis clutches at his hand, but can’t hold on, and falls down the hill. Poitier jumps back off the train. This, Baldwin says, is to reassure a white audience that black people still love them, in spite of the way whites have abused blacks. But, says Baldwin, the black audience had a completely different reaction: they said, “Fool, get back on the train!”

Do we want to know how the people we live with, who had a major role in building this country, but got very little out of it, actually feel, or do we prefer a fantasy? The answer to that question may go a long way to determining our future, as Baldwin says.

An Interesting Time

We live in a fractured nation, and some of us hardly even know it because we’ve imposed a de facto segregation  on ourselves, and often hear few opinions we disagree with, except on TV.

But there is disagreement, and it’s virulent. Conservatives think conservatism is the natural way to be, and think liberals are hypocritical and malicious. Liberals feel the same way about conservatives. Neither lives up to their best ideals; both feel the other wants to impose their views on a whole range of issues. Not just abortion, but in religion, schools, etc. Part of the problem is economic: an expanding economy and good pay makes up for a multitude of sins, but a lot has to do with cherished beliefs too. A Dominionist Christian is quoted as saying other denominations should have their religious liberties taken away. This is extreme, but isn’t different from past Christian attitudes. It’s contrary to the vision our Founding Fathers had, though.

The Founding Fathers weren’t, in many cases, conventionally religious. They amended the Constitution to include religious liberty because of the still remembered (by some) religious wars of the 17th century. One way to avoid these was to allow every religion to practice, but none to impose its views on any other. The monotheistic religions tend to produce fanatics, and fanatics like to impose their own beliefs. Perhaps we periodically need to be reminded how well that works.

Daryl Davis attended Howard University intending to become a spy or a diplomat. He became a musician instead. He also acquired an unusual hobby: he began talking to members of the Ku Klux Klan.

This may have begun accidentally. He talked to someone after a performance who appreciated how he played piano. That person was a Klan member, and maybe other contacts followed from that one. Davis’s attitude towards him and other Klan members wasn’t accidental, though. He said his question was, How can you hate me when you don’t even know me? It turned out not many could. All many of them wanted was to be listened to. After he listened to them, many began feeling different, and got out of the Klan. Those leaving no longer had any use for their robes, and gave them to him. In the PBS program about him he estimates he has twenty-five or six such robes.

That part is inspiring. He has justified his faith that people can change. What is sad is when he talks to three activists in Baltimore who don’t believe white supremacists CAN change. I couldn’t really blame them: nothing in their experience leads them to believe that, and they feel Davis is a traitor.

They’re not the only people who feel others are traitors, or are angry for other reasons. According to Sidney Blumenthal, our 45th president has always pined for the love of New York City, which has resolutely withheld it from him. This may account for the resentment he displays, and also for his ability to engage the resentment of others, which enabled him to win his campaign. It’s possible we will suffer because New York City didn’t love Donald Trump enough, but many people feel unloved. Christianity told us to love one another, but didn’t teach us how to do that. Consequently, we have done a miserable job of it.

In Mary Renault’s novel about ancient Greece, The Last of the Wine, one character quotes Socrates as saying, “Be what you wish to seem.” This expresses much of the exasperation various groups in America feel about each other: not necessarily their views, but that they don’t behave according to those views. Shaming opponents for believing differently doesn’t change their minds, it causes resentment.

It’s not hard to understand why many people oppose abortion. At least until they know someone who wants to get one because of, for example, rape or incest.

Homosexuality is a similarly hot-button issue. Sexuality is a difficult issue for almost everyone, and the idea of not only having sex outside of marriage but with one’s own gender seems alien to most. Some can be persuaded that it’s not so evil when they know someone who is gay, but not all can. Some parents reject their children when they discover they have AIDS. They seem to believe their children have chosen a life of evil, but aren’t objective enough to ask why they would choose an orientation that so many people detest. When asked that question, they take it very personally, as an attack on their faith, as in some ways it is. Faith in the literal truth of the Bible is a kind of anchor for many who find any analysis of its text to be personally threatening. That’s much of the quarrel of a certain kind of conservative with liberals: liberals make them think unwanted thoughts. That some of these thoughts may embody the sort of compassion Jesus Christ taught doesn’t improve matters. We all prefer the religion that confirms our preexisting beliefs.

When such a resentment is present, it’s not hard to play on it and encourage hatred of others. How did Daryl Davis persuade white supremacists that their views were mistaken? He didn’t judge them. He listened to them and, he says, they persuaded themselves.

Not all will be persuaded, though. The 45th president may or may not emulate Hitler in every way, but there’s a family resemblance in their resentment. Hitler’s father abused him. The president’s father may not have, but the president does seem to feel unloved. Whether it’s New York City he feels rejected by, or whether the rejection comes from elsewhere, it seems likely many of us are going to be punished for it because many others share the feeling. Liberals are an enemy many can agree on, so liberals will be punished. Ordinary people may find that as liberals get punished, so do they, and regret their vote, but by then it will be too late.

Perhaps less justly, Muslims and Hispanics will be punished too. They too seem alien to a lot of people, so are easy to stereotype. It’s not hard for people who don’t know any Muslims to believe they all are terrorists. That few of the Muslims in this country are, that few are likely to get here, and that we have terrorists of our own seems harder to process, especially if one sympathizes in some respects with the white terrorists. Fear of immigrants is easy to take advantage of. The mechanism seems to be that many fear new immigrants will do to us what our ancestors did to Native Americans and imported black slaves. We all know we haven’t treated minorities well, which gives us good reason to fear them. Because of our fears, we mistreat them again, which won’t resolve our difficulties.

Anger can be a potent fuel, but it doesn’t help us harmonize with our neighbors. Unfortunately, the time seems ripe for a holy war. War certainly releases tensions, though it would be nice if we could release them in a more productive fashion. But that’s a matter of individual decision. Perhaps enough individuals will find a better way to behave than they are being encouraged to. This is an interesting time, in the Chinese sense.

Collisions

We’re told that Congress is preparing to repeal the Affordable Care Act as soon as possible, and that substantial changes to Social Security and Medicare are to follow. According to one narrative, the action with regard to the ACA is because it’s a terrible failure. According to another, it’s because it was enacted by President Obama, which is reason enough in itself. The latter rationale fails to recognize that the Act was based on a Republican plan enacted in Massachusetts by then governor Mitt Romney, and that it insured 20-30 MILLION citizens who hadn’t previously been able to afford health insurance. Figures on the possible consequences of the repeal suggest that 43 million or more people will lose their health insurance, and that something like three million jobs in conjunction with the Act are likely to be lost.

Does this make sense?

There is one advantage to the repeal: wealthy tax-payers, who are specifically targeted to fund the ACA would gain substantial amounts of money (seven million per person?) when those taxes are repealed, and this demographic is, of course, one of the main Republican constituencies. They have others, less wealthy, but seem not to be overly concerned about them.

Disadvantages, besides the loss of health insurance for many people, include damage to the economy through loss of jobs. Do Republicans (at one time considered the fiscally responsible party) care about this? Or does the advantage to the wealthy through tax repeal make up for any disadvantage?

Republicans assure us that there will be a replacement for the ACA, but I have yet to hear what that might be. One of my friends told me she had faith there would be no repeal without an adequate replacement. I told her I wasn’t as optimistic. After all, Republicans have been talking about repeal ever since the ACA was enacted. Why haven’t they been able to agree on what ought to replace it?

One hypothesis is that they don’t WANT to replace it. That’s the extreme view, the one which believes that resistance to the ACA wasn’t just partisan, but also racist, and part of the class war which few people want to acknowledge, especially Republicans, who are currently winning it.

Class war suggests that the vast majority of those opposing Republican initiatives (not including elites of the Democratic party, whose views are not so very different from Republican elites) are not wealthy, and therefore deserve to be scorned and mistreated. Is that too radical a view? I suggest that repealing the ACA, to say nothing of defunding Social Security and Medicare, are actions radical in the extreme, and will not be approved by very many of America’s citizens. If Republicans actually intend these actions, I think they either believe their point of view is more popular than it is (dubious, considering their enthusiasm for suppressing votes by those they consider unlikely to vote for them), or they don’t care if it’s popular or not. That suggests they’re willing to use violence to enforce their desires.

If that’s the case, they no longer believe in democracy, nor do they wish to any longer protect the democratic republic that elected them to high office.

If the above is true, Republicans are unlikely to admit it, even if that’s what they consciously believe. And of course there are rationales for not continuing to maintain a truly democratic (small d) system.

One party is largely composed of the poor and middle class, who aren’t as responsible as the wealthy. If they were responsible, they’d be wealthy themselves. It’s the wealthy who really have “skin in the game”, which is what really encourages responsibility. If you don’t have substantial amounts of property, you can’t be considered a serious citizen. The Founding Fathers believed that, and the expansion of the franchise since is a perversion of their vision. The wealthy show their responsibility by demanding bailouts when their ventures fail, which is certainly an interesting manifestation.

The Founding Fathers also made provision for the institution of slavery, which means that slavery, or its equivalent, is quite acceptable. In turn, this means that if you’re unable to avoid the equivalent of slavery, you’re irresponsible and ought not to have a vote on any issue that affects the whole nation.

Another reason is that democracy, and particularly the version practiced in the USA may be considered inefficient. That is, it’s extremely difficult to get anything done. That the Founding Fathers designed the system to function in this way is beside the point, and need not interfere with the sanctification of the American way of legislation. It should be noted, though, that the Founders did this because they didn’t want it to be possible to pass legislation too easily. From that could come tyranny. Unfortunately, we’ve discovered that tyranny of sorts can come from blocking the legislation process too.

A third reason is that the capitalist economic system is often seen as equivalent to democracy, though it differs in some important respects. One such is that it doesn’t prohibit taxation without representation, one of the main reasons for the American revolution. Capitalism is largely manifested through large corporations (now legally defined as persons) which are responsible only to their shareholders, and no one else. Anyone objecting to that particular definition of democracy runs the risk of being considered a socialist, which is possibly the most dangerous form of treason, although socialism in the form of the aforementioned bailouts seems to be quite acceptable.

As things are presently constituted, the logical end of the proposed changes is the death of many unnecessary people. One may be defined as unnecessary if one doesn’t fill some important function which also pays extremely well. Such functions are now less common than they used to be, since many industrial jobs have now been automated, and only require programmers in order to produce.

Such workers are most desirable, since they don’t require wages, and never get tired. A certain amount of maintenance is sufficient. This makes it possible for wealthy Americans to castigate the poorer ones for laziness without providing them jobs with which they can actually support their families. The days of self-sufficiency pretty much ended with the steep decline in family farms, partly assisted by legislation that made illegal some of the ways they survived, as well as the advent of factory farms, with which smaller organizations couldn’t compete.

Now nearly everyone is dependent on what the large economic players do, and they are very willing to take advantage of that dependence.

Wendell Berry, the writer who is also a farmer, compares the migration of farmers to the cities in America, which began in the 19th century and continued into the 20th, to the migrations in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The difference, he says, is that in the USA the compulsion was economic, while in Russia it was naked violence.

Considering the alienation of the political class from ordinary Americans, violence of one sort or another is by no means impossible in the near future. Republicans are very comfortable with fulfilling the wishes of wealthy elites at the expense of their other constituents. Democrats may be less comfortable, but don’t object to that role.

The stage seems to be set for a variety of collisions. Let’s hope they don’t damage the country and its citizens too much.