Tag: election 16

Mourning In America

Detail from William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Pietà, 1876, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. Mary is so sad. She lost her son.

Women with loss. Loss of a child. A boy, a man, a son, a girl, a woman, a daughter.  A Gold Star mother saying these words, “I became a Gold Star mother,” into a microphone. To millions of people. And tucked deep inside her story of bravery at the unspeakable, she thinks, “Keep your star.” It’s an exclusive club. Nobody wants to join.

Wailing women. Weeping. Pounding their chests. Grabbing their heads. Pulling out clumps of hair. Faces wrenched. Clenching jaws and grinding teeth, trying desperately to hold back the bellows of grief. Of their worst moment. Of falling to the ground with horror. Of being unable to breathe. Of minds going blank, no thoughts, no feelings, nothing, because the alternative is that this is real.

Women of grace. Standing there. Alone. Together. Some with anger. Many with anger. Some struggling to find meaning. Others taking the mantle of meaning. Sharing their heartache, despair, agony and anguish. Pleading with us to see them. To acknowledge their children. To imagine their pain. To warn us. All searching for peace.

There are no words. But I am so sorry for your loss.

 

Posted on by docthink 0

Democracy Happens

Jigglypuff helping VP candidate Tim Kaine deliver his speech.

Tonite’s post-dinner dialog went like this.

The Spouse: Who’s speaking tonight?
Me: Uncle Joe is up. So maybe POTUS tomorrow?
Big Guy: (walking in the hallway toward the TV) It’s not on now. I just checked.
Me: PBS. It’s on PBS. My girl Gwen is on it. Other channels are in and out.
The Spouse: Yeah. I heard their coverage is great.
Me: Channel 20.

The Big Guy turned on the TV just as Tim Kaine was entering from stage left with his hands grasped over his head like a local prizefighter.

Big Guy: He’s walking in like this. (Clasped hands rocking over his head to the left and to the right.)

The Big Guy stood in line with me when I voted for city council, mayors, and presidents. He punched my ballot for me at least once. He’s put my ballot in the box. The poll workers were invariably older women. They always gave him an I Voted sticker, and he’d wear it to school the next day. One of the times he came voting with me, he pulled out his driver’s license, filled out the form and cast his first ballot. He’s done it more than once. Not the registering but the voting.

The Spouse brought him a peppermint tea. The Big Guy is illin’. This is his rare night off. And he got out of bed to watch our nation’s democracy do its thing.

The Big Guy, like many Millennials, cares.

Posted on by docthink 0

You Can Live Through Anything if Magic Made It

A stylized corner-scape of the construction entrance for the new DC Trump Hotel at 12th and Penn NW with a riff on a no-parking sign that reads "No Trump Anytime."

Enough with the outrage. This is not a scandal. In the big picture, it’s a minor error.

Let me start by saying that while I’m not indifferent to the pickle that Ms. Trump has gotten herself into, I don’t actually feel sorry for her. She’s doing okay for herself.

I mean, first, she can walk in those shoes. I would totally misstep and feel the heel slip out from underneath me to find my ankle bent at the wrong spot, immediately followed by bouncing my own not-so-tight buttocks to the ground.

Second, her dress was quite nice, with those frilly poofs at the end of her 3/4 length sleeves. It was an angelic white. I could imagine myself in the green room and either spilling a coffee, or, very likely, depositing a ring of makeup around the neckline. She looked pretty flawless.

She’s along for a crazy ride as a politician’s wife. Not just any politician, but a major-party presidential candidate. There’s a ton of spotlight trained on her, but she spent the early part of her career under lights, strutting along the catwalk. I think she’s got this. She might not like it, but she’s got it.

Okay, back to the outrage. The outrage about Melania Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention. The outrage over the speech she delivered to “humanize” her brash spouse. The speech that was cribbed liberally from the speech Michelle Obama gave eight years ago to humanize her own presidential candidate husband.

Michelle Obama’s was a good speech to copy. It probably marked the beginning of America’s love affair with the future first lady. It made people see the Obamas as another couple with struggles “just like us.” It was designed, in part, to de-other them.

Ms. Trump delivered her version professionally, if a bit stiffly. I mean it was originally written to introduce a “South Side [of Chicago] Girl.” That doesn’t fit Trump so much.

But this is not a scandal. It is a staffer using cut and paste and then attempting to make the words Melania’s own by whitewashing the personal out. Yes, the two speeches eight years apart had almost 50% in common. But the concepts of hard work and loyalty and hope for children is pretty universal–whether you grew up in eastern Europe or south Chicago.

More importantly, this is the candidate’s wife we are talking about, not a future Attorney General (although it would be a little funny if Gov. Christie got passed over, again. But I’m not laughing since schadenfreude may be bad karma).

From an artistic point of view, it could be that Melania Trump is just digging deep into her OG self. Like Weezy says after incorporating Kanye’s lyrics in his song:

And that was called recycling
Or re-reciting
Something ’cause you just like it
So you say it just like it.
Some say its biting
But I say its enlightening
Besides Dr. Kanye West is one of the brightest.

So maybe she was paying homage to a great first lady. Maybe she was modeling herself after another supportive wife. Maybe she was feeling the same feels and didn’t have a more clever way to express them.

Maybe she was just sampling a familiar hit. So sue her.

Anyway, her nonpartisan words about what it’s like to be an American were not the scandalous words that I heard last night. No, they were not. Let’s not waste any more time on the frivolous speech of the wife. There’s bigger fish to fry.

Posted on by docthink 0

Framing or Taming Fears

A frightening site. A post coitus demon sitting in a blown out building overlooking the East Side. For those of you who don't know, this is from Ghostbusters.

Why did she do it? Why did she step outside her frilly cravat and black robes for poli-talk. Inappropriate for a sitting Supreme Court Justice. Inappropriate.

First, I know that plenty disagree with me on that last word. But for those of you of the leftward lean, imagine if Justice Scalia had said the same about candidate Obama. There were calls for Justice Alito’s head when he publicly reacted to the President’s State of the Union by reflexively shaking his head no and mouthing, “Not true.” That’s nothing like calling a major party candidate a faker and saying he’ll bring America to ruin. Let’s be intellectually honest here and call the game fairly.

Back to the why. Why did she step so far out? She hasn’t crossed the line this directly into politics before.

Some say it’s because in her eighth decade, she will just say whatever she likes. Others wonder if she is feeling her moniker as The Notorious R.G.B. and was lost in her own importance. Was she careless? It’s hard to think that her remarks were casual, especially because she repeated them before she walked them back and apologized.

I think she was deliberate in her statements. She was in a sit down with the New York Times. It’s as if she sought an opportunity to be on the record. I think it’s because she is afraid. She as much as said so.

I imagine a scenario where she’s feeling that this cycle is very different. That established rules of behavior and decorum of the presidential election process are being flaunted. That even as personal and ugly as elections have become, that there is a new level of debasement. And it is frightening.

I have a hunch that she thinks this is the worst, and most dangerous, election in modern American history. That our democracy, that America, is seriously at risk. I imagine that she felt compelled to do something. She felt remaining silent was an abdication of her oath “to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.” That, if she could, she must use her influence.

I bet she didn’t map out about the true political ramifications of her comments. She played directly into the narrative that scares her. She immediately became the lighting rod for judicial overreach, for confusing the roles in our Constitution, for the out of touch establishment and as the worst of liberals trying to protect their liberalness. By taking the unprecedented steps of directly commenting on an active election, she likely expected to have an impact. But she wasn’t going to have much impact on her own choir, and she riled up the other team.

Justice Ginsburg is a brave person both on the bench and personally. But she blew this because she played outside of her strength. It’s recklessness borne of a growing alarm.

Writing a note to self: Do not act out of fear. Act from the strength of convictions. Yours, not someone else’s.

Posted on by docthink 0

Wisdom Doesn’t Help

Help us Athena, you're our only hope. More details The Athena Giustiniani, a Roman copy of a Greek statue of Pallas Athena (Vatican Museums)

You can have the milk that has just soured or the milk that’s curdled.

You can choose between the phone with the broken screen and a slow network or the new phone with a data plan you can’t afford.

You can walk in the torrential rain without an umbrella or wait under shelter and abandon your child at daycare.

You can live in a community that disallows any deviation from a very narrow set of norms or you can live where it is unsafe.

You can select either the partner who ignores you or the partner who beats you.

You can opt for an uncertain future in a zombie apocalypse or the certain and immediate death of an asteroid hitting the earth.

Being poisoned or shot in the head?

You can choose someone who thinks that the ends–like protecting the least among us–justifies the means–lying and hiding and evading–or you can chose a bullying, racist demagogue.

What good is the wisdom of Solomon? There isn’t a good choice. But someone is going to win.

Posted on by docthink 0

Type A or Type B

That 70s Show. Kitty is easy. Red is not.

What kind of parent are you? Here is a little quiz.

  1. Which one is more important for a child to have:
    a. independence or
    b. respect for elders?
  2. Which one is more important for a child to have:
    a. obedience or
    b. self-reliance?
  3. Which one is more important, for a child to be
    a. considerate or
    b. well-behaved?
  4. Which one you think is more important for a child to have:
    a. curiosity or
    b. good manners?

How many A’s did you have? How many B’s?

These simple questions were developed by this guy Feldman from Stonybrook and have been used by social scientists since the 1990’s to help quantify folks’ tendency to very high, high, medium and low levels of authoritarianism. The questions are effective because they aren’t loaded as good and bad options. Both options are fine. They simply identify a preference.

A couple of other guys, Hetherington and Weiler, wrote a book in 2009 that pretty much predicted this year’s inconceivable presidential campaign. No seriously. You don’t have to read the book, it’s in the article. But they talk about how people with high authoritarianism have been sorting themselves to the GOP.

These simple questions identify people’s leanings toward authority. Bottom line, the more A’s, the more you

…prioritize social order and hierarchies, which bring a sense of control to a chaotic world. Challenges to that order — diversity, influx of outsiders, breakdown of the old order — are experienced as personally threatening because they risk upending the status quo order they equate with basic security.– More from VOX.

It’s more than the preference for authoriy that’s driving people now. It’s authoritarianism combined with a concern for their (and their families’) safety.

People do not support extreme policies and strongman leaders just out of an affirmative desire for authoritarianism, but rather as a response to experiencing certain kinds of threats.

So you have the perfect storm. Uncertainty and social changes trigger the desire for the safety of clear and familiar rules and norms + a fear of physical threats especially from outsiders like 911 terrorists or ISIS.

When they face physical threats or threats to the status quo, [some people] support policies that seem to offer protection against those fears. They favor forceful, decisive action against things they perceive as threats. And they flock to political leaders who they believe will bring this action.

But the people being driven to the law and order and social conservatism in the GOP are not necessarily aligned with the party.

The responses to our policy questions showed that authoritarians have their own set of policy preferences, distinct from GOP orthodoxy. And those preferences mean that, in real and important ways, authoritarians are their own distinct constituency: effectively a new political party within the GOP.

This is what I said before. Not like I’m saying “I told you so,” or anything.

It’s just that we can’t understand what’s happening without trying to understand what’s happening. And this can mean uncomfortably confronting assumptions and learning about new models that fly in the face of these assumptions.

Don’t be afraid. They can smell your fear.

I totally recommend reading the full article on Vox. It’s long, but it’s worth it. And likely better than my tl;dr above. The Rise of American Authoritarianism, by Amanda Taub; published March 1, 2016.

Posted on by docthink 0

Moving Day?

Oh Canada!

I’m hearing people on both sides of the political spectrum threatening to leave the U.S., if their nemesis candidate wins. Thought I’d give you some facts to prepare you for your move.

  1. Canadians have The Queen on their money. Americans like The Queen. And her corgis. And whatnot.James Bond and the Queen's corgis.
  2. Their Super Cute Prime Minister welcomes refugees from all over the world. He might even help you on with your jacket. It’s probably a good idea, though if you bring your own.
    Canadian Prime MInister Justin Trudeau helps a young refugee adjust to the cold Canadian climate.
  3. You can call them on their cell phone, but don’t ask them to teach you to dance. This is NOT a good look. Not even in Canada.
    Drake. Dancing poorly. Hotline Bling
  4.  The U.S./Canadian border is the longest border in the world. And the Canadians don’t even protect it. It’d probably be very easy for you to cross. The Mounties are more for show. They do look good, though, don’t they?
    RCMP, CHARGE!
  5. Even the sexiest man alive displays the modesty of his homeland. Those Canadians are just so darned nice, dagnabit.
    Ryan Gosling being Canadian-polite.
  6. Canada has no weapons of mass destruction. Well, that is if you don’t count Deadpool.
    Deadpool pulling out some weapons. (Played by Canadian Ryan Reynolds)
  7. Canadians are very cultured. Even hockey players can break into a broadway tune!

Hope this helps you through your angst. As an alternative, you can just figure out how to make your own country into the one you want. Like VOTE!

Vote in local and state elections. Vote for school board. Vote for city council. Vote for your state representatives, state senators, elected judges and attorneys general, and governor.

Vote for your federal officials. It counts.

A special note for Millennials. You now outnumber the old Baby Boomers. They are in charge, though, because they vote and you don’t. So VOTE!

You don’t want to have to learn the words to a new national anthem–in FRENCH! Think about it. And poutine is weird.

Posted on by docthink 0

Inconceivable! [or not]

One of the famous and favorite moments in The Princess Bride is when Inigo Montoya tells Vizzini:

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Watching the Yelling Shows this morning, I kept replaying Inigo’s line in my head.

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

I guess Inigo was wondering: Is it a misuse of language? A misunderstanding of what’s actually happening? Or, simply, wishful thinking? But ultimately the why doesn’t matter. If you don’t recognize the reality, you’re in trouble.

I was thinking about this as the guest on the show, in an ominously warning voice, said that people need to understand that Donald Trump is not a Republican, and he does not represent what the Party stands for (he said lots of other stuff, too, but that’s not germane here).

I think that this is the wrong argument.

What if people don’t care that he’s not a Republican? What if THEY are not Republicans, too? [There is a parallel argument on the Democratic side that Senator Sanders is NOT a Democrat, and my thinkings here apply to both parties.]

Earlier this week, Clay Shirky who, by the way, is a much better thinker than DocThink, wrote a tweetstorm outlining a theory of the redundancy of political parties in a networked world. He offers that parties used to be required to access media, to access donors and to access voters through organizing. He traces the arc of a scythe cutting down this syndicate starting with Ross Perot through Howard Dean and Obama for America. He posits that both parties are seeing an internal insurgency where “the people,” or at least a passionate sector of “the people,” are hijacking the party regulars.

I’m not sure that’s exactly right.* I think that we are seeing the hijacking of the parties’ infrastructure for people who may or may not be party members. It could be that the outsiders are not growing the party as much as using the party. They are disruptors.

Conventional wisdom sided against any 3rd or 4th party in the U.S. because of the infrastructure requirements to gain public office. It’s the party apparatus in each state that organizes and hosts primaries. The parties own the statewide infrastructure, the hosting of caucuses and elections, the rules, the timelines and the costs. They own donor lists and vendors who do polling and pipe and drape.

Smart outsider candidates are able to use this structure to launch their own campaigns with enough hat-tipping to the “party,” as long as they have followers. They can build their own followers

  • by addressing them DIRECTLY on social media and use this to pressure and gain earned media,
  • by raising money from them DIRECTLY online, and
  • by getting their names and emails and Facebook likes and Twitter follows to call on them DIRECTLY as well as ask them to call on each other when it’s time to GOTV.

We might be seeing a disruption on the scale of Amazon for commerce, Uber for transportation, Airbnb for lodging or Facebook for communications.

It makes me think, too, about another Clay. Clay Christensen wrote the Innovator’s Dilemma. I’m still working my brain through this but I think I’ll throw it out to see if it’s a useful model to apply. Christensen says*

  • Companies innovate faster than their customers’ needs evolve and eventually produce products that are actually too sophisticated, too expensive, and too complicated for many customers.
  • Companies pursue these “sustaining innovations” at the higher tiers of their markets because that’s what made them successful– charging the highest prices to their most demanding and sophisticated customers at the top of the market.
  • This leaves a gap at the bottom of the market for competitors to emerge and go after smaller markets with simpler products that might not be attractive to the “establishment” organization.
  • See a full and smarter version here.

So the people who were in the market, but couldn’t afford the goods are happy with a cheaper, less feature-rich version that they can have. Or maybe they don’t see themselves as customers of the Party as it is, and are open to an offering that better meets their beliefs.

But what about the Brand value of the Parties. Parties still offer a shorthand to understand where a candidate stands. I did voter studies in the 80’s. I know about party affiliation. But I also know about brands. So I’ll offer one thought. How does that brand–of establishment political parties–make people who are angry and left out feel?

The first Clay put out a stat that floored me. There are 150 million registered voters in the U.S. That would be considered a MEDIUM-sized group on Facebook. Shirky said, “All voters’ used to be a big number. Now it’s less than 10 percent of Facebook’s audience.”

Whoa.

in·con·ceiv·a·bleˌ inkənˈsēvəb(ə)l/adjective
     1. not capable of being imagined or grasped mentally; unbelievable.

* Apologies for my reductionist parsing of both Clays’ arguments. I’m just trying this out, Loyal Reader. I suggest you read them both and help me hone my Thinkings.

Posted on by docthink 3

What Are the Limits?

It’s been said that this is a different presidential cycle. In addition to the way the politics are playing out, there’s a shift in what candidates talk about–and what is off limits. For example:

On Limits

  • The color orange of a candidate’s face, usually regarding fake tannng.
  • The hair-do of a candidate. This could include comb-overs, fright wig looks or hairbands.
  • The apparent sleepiness of a candidate.
  • The amount of “energy” a candidate emits.
  • How much a candidate spends on stuff for themselves and their families.
  • How often a candidate goes to church and how they worship their gods.
  • The weight of a candidate.
  • The wrinkles a candidate has.
  • What a candidate wears, especially if it’s a pantsuit.
  • How long a candidate takes to pee.
  • What a candidate remembers about something they did in high school.
  • A candidate’s “talent” as a politician.
  • The sexcapades of a candidate’s spouse.

Off Limits

What seems to be off-limits? Sadly, we seem to be avoiding substantive coverage in the media of policy differences.

I mean, really. C’mon.

Posted on by docthink 0