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Looking at the American people, I wonder whether it is apt to say that there are two great camps: those who follow their hearts  and those who follow their heads.  The former cling to the old idea that American labor deserves a living wage.  The latter say, "the world has changed, and we must accept the fact."  The former are poor, uneducated, and unskilled.  The latter are affluent, educated, and skilled.  The former have nothing to gain from listening to their heads, and the latter have nothing to gain from listening to their hearts.  The former cling to the fantasy of realizing the American Dream.  The latter, having realized this dream, eschew emotional attachments. 

The two camps gaze at each other across a gulf.  Or rather, the heart-led folk gaze across at the heartless, and the heartless are gazing into the future.  In the future, there is no longer such a thing as race or nationality.  In the future, automation will be capable of performing tasks that today can only be performed by human beings.  Cars will drive their passengers.  Our every movement will be electronically monitored so that we may be better served.  In the future, the institution of marriage will be nothing but a fading memory.  Heart will no longer find a home.

Commemorating 9/11/2001: 2017 Edition

The news of late has focused on the succession of hurricanes that have battered our brothers and sisters in Florida and Texas.  We see once again the ability of Americans to rally together in times of crisis, revealing the depths of their compassion. 

But there is another crisis we face as a nation, and it is the most insidious sort of crisis because it moves among us without anyone being aware of it.  How shall I describe it?  At the risk of disturbing an atheistic or agnostic reader, I will call it a spiritual crisis.  And by "spiritual", I mean everything that is left over once we've discovered the limits of rationality.  Hence, "spiritual" takes in ethics.  I've tried, but remain unconvinced that rationality is enough to produce a meaningful ethical point of view.  Ethics is not built on rational argumentation.  It belongs to our emotional lives.  It is not a question of rationality to decide, with firmness and courage, to commit oneself to being an ardent patriot simply because of where we happened to be born.  It is not a matter of rationality to accept, with open eyes, the nature of the world in which we live.  The rational mind could just as easily settle on the conclusion, "there is nothing I, as an individual, can do" or "the world that the mainstream media shows us is accurate," or "I will set my fix my hopes and dreams on the next major consumer purchase on my list."  It is not rational, but it is ethical, to fight even when there is no chance of winning.  It is not rational, but it is ethical, to refuse the life that we have been offered in favor of a life that may remain beyond our reach. 

The events of 9/11 were a coordinated assault on the United States -- on our homeland, which had previously been far removed from experiencing the immediacy of war, as it was felt in Great Britain, France, and throughout Europe during World War II, or as it was felt in Vietnam or Iraq.  Our leaders cynically used 9/11 as a pretext for a more aggressive campaign of Oil Imperialism in the Middle East, and the ongoing civilian drone-strikes and bombings may slip from our awareness because they have become a routine, but I must remind you that whenever death is rained down on civilians, that too is terrorism.

From an ethical standpoint, we cannot -- as many have urged -- close our borders to Syrian and Iraqi refugees because we created the conflicts from which they are fleeing.  We have waged an economic war on Mexico ever since NAFTA, and must accept the consequences of that as well.  From an ethical standpoint, it is not enough to say "I did not vote for Mr. Trump."

In contemplating the ethical standpoint, I've thought about the opposite of an ethical standpoint, and a metaphor that comes to mind is addiction.  The alcoholic is surrounded by signs that her addiction is straining and destroying friendships, causing poor health, and undermining her economic self-sufficiency.  But it is possible for an alcoholic through the enormous power of addiction and denial to refuse to see these things.  What the alcoholic must learn, if she is to survive and perhaps prosper again some day, is this, "God grant me the serenity / to accept the things I cannot change; / courage to change the things I can; / and wisdom to know the difference."

Ethics requires courage and wisdom.  Courage and wisdom require us to boldly accept uncomfortable truths.  America did not deserve the horrors of 9/11.  But our leaders at the time were inattentive to the warning signs that intelligence agencies had been regularly relaying to the White House, and before that, inattentive to the predictable consequences of providing support to the Taliban (the ethical person knows that it is in the nature of a scorpion to sting).  Our leaders are a reflection of who we are as a people.  We have not learned to become better at choosing our leaders and as a result, what the future holds is more of the same: an avoidable loss of innocent American lives. 

What we have learned from the 2016 election is this: (1) the two-party system is a choice between two saloons, each of which only promises to aggravate our addiction to an unethical way of life, (2) campaign contributions are the false friends who buy us drinks, and (3) to choose to do nothing is to choose disaster.  In remembering 9/11, let us remember simply this: the needless loss of innocent American lives is something that we do not and cannot tolerate.  Serene in this knowledge, let us think carefully about how to avoid its repetition.  Let us make ethical choices.  

Orwell Commemorative Essay 2017

Welcome to this year’s installment of my annual appreciation of George Orwell.  It is occasioned by his birthday.  This year’s festschrift will feature his book Down and Out in London and Paris. 

Of course, this is the Orwell who is known for the book 1984.  Sales of that novel spiked briefly following Donald Trump’s election to the presidency.  But that was merely a vainglorious gesture by the well-read crowd, a response to Trump’s penchant for peddling “alternative truths.”  A more meaningful gesture and a more effective dissent to the Trump presidency requires a good deal more than this.  It would require a thoroughgoing examination of the roots and fruition of a political form known as OLIGARCHY.  And that word seems to have disappeared from popular discourse after its brief vogue during Bernie Sanders’ moment, and that other moment when the brilliant economist Thomas Piketty brought attention to it.   

I think this passing away of interest in oligarchy owes to something more significant than America’s short attention span.  There are many reasons that apply to many classes of person for not wanting to gaze too long at the fact of oligarchy.  Too many Americans will recognize themselves in it.  Those loathsome purveyors of Identity Politics, who cast the African American as a sort of Noble Savage in naïve ignorance of the racist undertones of it, they are oligarchs.  They graduate from Harvard and use the word “privilege” as a cudgel against intellectually inferior ideological opponents who reject the idea that our country’s political misfortunes can all be laid at the feet of white working-class men.

Harvard is its own sort of Ministry of Truth.  It broadcasts a critique of privilege even as it denies a living wage to its service staff.  The ideology of Identity Politics focuses attention on those evils catalogued by Secretary Clinton – as embodied by “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic” deplorables who ignorantly fail to respond to her message.  And conspicuously left out of that list of offenses is the systematic creation and exacerbation of poverty by a handful of politically powerful individuals who happen to be her campaign donors.  

All this brings me back that book, Down and Out in London and Paris, in which Orwell avoids the grand themes that distinguish his better-known works.  Instead, his attention is turned to the most prosaic of topics: the brute fact of poverty.  

Orwell had long struggled to earn a living.  But in March of 1929 he fell gravely ill.  After, his money had been stolen from him not by the culprit identified in the book but by a young demimonde that he’d invited back to his room and which he’d kept silent about until years later.  He had recourse – he could have borrowed money to restore himself to bare respectability – but he chose to join the ranks of the homeless, to learn firsthand how they lived.  

He was obliged to sell or pawn his clothes and wear the clothes that one can afford to allow to become dirty.  And donning the durable and inexpensive clothes that poor people wear, Orwell immediately observed a change in how others perceived him.  His experience was reminiscent of that outlined by seminal Identitarian tracts such as Black Like Me (John Howard Griffins’ account of impersonating a black man) and Gentleman’s Agreement (Laura Hobson’s fictional imagining of a man impersonating a Jew).  

 Assuming the identity of a poor person, he found that the community of the poor began calling him “mate” for the first time and readily accepting him as one of their own. 
  

And women treated him differently.  “For the first time I noticed,” Orwell said, “how the attitude of women varies with a man’s clothes. When a badly dressed man passes them they shudder away from him with a quite frank movement of disgust, as though he were a dead cat.”  

In our present Identitarian age we are told a great deal about how men as a group conspire against the legitimate ambitions of women to become full participants in society.  But we hear little about how Harvard graduates conspire against the legitimate ambitions of the poor to become full participants in society. 

Orwell also learned that devotees of organized religion conspire against the poor, seeing poverty as a vulnerability that can be exploited.  There is no free biscuit and cup of tea without first listening to a lengthy proselytizing sermon.  Just as today, the poor are expected to believe certain things before their needs will even be acknowledged.  The white poor are expected to believe that the needs of poor blacks take precedence over their own needs.  They are expected to believe that their poverty can be alleviated if they themselves attend the right vocational training classes, or relocate without a moment’s hesitation when work leaves their hometown.  Yes, that is what our opinion leaders tell us.  The Rust Belt breadwinners would be better off if they became itinerant laborers.  It’s a lie, and not even a carefully concocted lie.  But one needn’t bother to come up with convincing lies to tell the poor since so few poor people are willing to believe that they are poor and those who do are desperate enough to believe anything they are told.

Orwell also spoke about homosexuality in this book.  He recounted a time when he was staying at a “spike” – a sort of homeless shelter for casual (itinerant) laborers.  He was placed in a room without beds with a stranger.  That other man, at about midnight “began making homosexual attempts upon me—a nasty experience in a locked, pitch-dark cell.  He was a feeble creature and I could manage him easily, but of course it was impossible to go to sleep again.”

But Orwell wasn’t as homophobic as one might expect of a man of the 1930s.  Instead, he listened respectfully.  “For the rest of the night we stayed awake, smoking and talking.  The man told me the story of his life—he was a fitter, out of work for three years.  He said that his wife had promptly deserted him when he lost his job, and he had been so long away from women that he had almost forgotten what they were like.  Homosexuality is general among tramps of long standing, he said.” 

Today, adventitious homosexuality is found among prison inmates and young women who can’t endure the demeaning conditions of heterosexist white male supremacy.   

No, I am not advocating the view that homosexuality is a “lifestyle choice” or an immoral behavior.  Homosexuality is a reflection of a natural human hunger.  It is like the hunger for food.  No one has the right to tell a starving person what to eat or what to refrain from eating.  But one must wonder at signs that this starvation exists even among the affluent daughters of privilege.  Where am I going with this?  Oh, perhaps I am wondering whether too many men these days are wearing the wrong clothes and are beneath a woman’s consideration.  Or maybe I am tired of being told what to believe and what not to believe.  I am trying to place myself in the position of those deplorables that Secretary Clinton decided weren’t worth the trouble of courting as Democratic voters. 

As Quixote tilted at windmills, I will tilt at shibboleths.  You're apt to be offended and read no further.  But as millions of poor of diverse race and gender were dying of alcohol poisoning, suicide, and opioid overdose, our nation was preoccupied with the question of where transgendered persons ought to be allowed to urinate.  And I remain angry.