Camouflaged In A Conformist World

Title: Convenience Store Woman

Rating: 5 Stars

I must be on some kind of Japan kick. I’m in the midst of reading a Japanese WWII history. It’s a two volume work, so between the two volumes I decided to read this quick little book.

The title character is Keiko Furukara. From childhood, Keiko knows that she is different from everyone else. When she was a young child, she saw a dead bird. Instead of grieving over it like a young child normally would, she brings it over to her mother and asks her to cook it so that they can eat it. Two boys were fighting at school. People were screaming that someone should stop the fight. Keiko picks up a shovel and hits one on the head. Problem solved. Scenes like this leave her parents and other adults horrified. 

Keiko doesn’t understand why her actions are wrong. She does understand that she gets into trouble when she does things that don’t conform with people’s expectations. Therefore, with the help of her sister, she begins to at least put up the appearance of fitting in.

When she was eighteen, she got a part time job at a convenience store. There, she was given very explicit direction regarding her expected behavior while at work. Grateful for the structure, she quickly adapted and became a model employee.

Now, she follows precisely all company directives. She always loudly and cheerfully greets all customers. She carefully reads each customer’s face to predict their every whim. She even makes use of her co-workers. She closely watches how her co-workers dress and talk. By mimicking their clothes, expressions, facial expressions, and gestures, she can successfully conceal her oddness from everyone else. This allows her to live her quiet life without cultural opprobrium.

Eighteen years later, she is now in her mid thirties and is still working part time at the convenience store. The people that she went to university with are married with children or have careers. Her sister is now married and has a child. They all now look at her with some combination of concern or disgust. How can she be happy unmarried working at a dead end job? She realizes that her carefully constructed persona as a normal person is no longer holding up. Without a doubt it is a constructed persona. At one point her sister is complaining about her crying child. Keiko wordlessly looks over at a sharp knife and realizes that there’s an easy solution to the child’s crying. Instead she just smiles at her sister.

Enter Shihara. A recent hire at the convenience store, he is a lazy slacker with a poor attitude. Quickly fired, Keiko later bumps into Shihara. Talking with him, she learns that he hates the way that society is structured. Women are supposed to get married and breed children. Men are supposed to grind away at work. He hates all of that. He just wants to stay home and do nothing. Keiko realizes that, although different, he’s as much of a cultural outcast as she is.

Keiko proposes a solution to him. He can move in with her. They will pretend to be romantic. Out of her meager earnings, she will provide him food. He can stay home and do nothing. She can pretend to have a romantic partner. 

Will that give them happiness? Will society finally leave them alone and allow them to live their lives without judgment?

This is a slight little book. It’s about the length of a novella. Within its short length, it explores interesting ideas. Japan has a reputation as an extremely conformist society. There are rigid expectations levied upon all. As men and women age, it is expected that they all transition through the same phases of life. Those that don’t are collectively judged, condemned, and ostracized. 

Corporations are also known for their strict rules and processes. The convenience store takes all of this to an extreme degree. There are morning chants. There is a uniform. There are very specific ways to interact with customers. There are times when food must be cooked and displays must be set up. Sales targets must be hit.

Keiko has found a way to exist within this structure. It’s not clear how long she’ll be able to keep up the artifice. Like her idle thought that she could solve her sister’s problem by killing her child, will she always be able to repress her murderous impulses? Shihara has no chance. He doesn’t have Keiko’s coping capability, so he will always be an outcast. His future will be homelessness and misery.

Not everyone can exist with these defined parameters. What should be done with them? Must we force them to adopt a mask that gives us peace that they are like the rest of us?

Is there even a rest of us? Ultimately, aren’t we all outside the system? Aren’t we all, in one form or another, putting on external masks just like Keiko?

War Is Merely The Continuation Of Stupidity By Other Means.

I decided to title this post by slightly changing the famous von Clauswitz quote. I was inspired by listening to the Dan Carlin Hardcore History podcast. If you haven’t listened to him before, I highly recommend it. A word of warning though, when he tackles a subject it will take about five podcasts, each between four to six hours, spanning over a period of year and a half or so. If this is in anyway attractive to you, you will be well rewarded. I particularly recommend the Japan focused series (just concluded) and the earlier World War I series. Having listened to the former series, I’m now reading John Toland’s history of Japan, The Rising Sun.

This immersion leads me to wonder how wars even start. When I did my deep dive into World War I a number of years ago, a similar question came to mind. Logically, you’d think that the assassination of the crown prince of Austria-Hungary by a Serbian nationalist would result in serious sanctions, an apology, possibly an indemnity, or at worse some kind of local conflict. How did that action lead to a war involving some thirty nations with some twenty million casualties that led to the collapse of four empires (Russian, German, Austrian-Hungarian, Ottoman) and served to essentially usher in the twentieth century? Even after all of the reading that I’ve done, it still seems bizarre.

Similar thoughts come to mind when I read about Japan. It’s a country one tenth the size of the United States. It has very little in the way of natural resources. It hadn’t even been 100 years since Admiral Perry ‘opened’ Japan to Western ideas. How did Japan think that a sneak attack killing thousands of Americans would lead to their success in creating their own Eastern Asia hegemon?

Well, much like Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of Franz-Ferdinand was only the spark that set off WWI, many things were happening that preceded the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

First of all, the fact is that Japan had experienced success fighting nations much larger than themselves. They kicked Russia’s ass in the Russo-Japanese war in 1904-05. In 1932, Japan invaded China and took over a significant chunk of Manchuria, creating a puppet state called Manchukuo. Japan invaded China again in 1937, starting the Second Sino-Japanese War. The war was still going strong when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Somewhere between 10 to 25 million Chinese died in this war. The Japanese had experience fighting countries that appeared much stronger and much larger than themselves.

After the start of the war with China, the US led an embargo effort. Most critically, oil was embargoed. Japan’s navy, like virtually other navy at the time, ran on oil and had huge requirements. Being resource poor, all of Japan’s oil was imported. The Japanese military considered the cutting off of oil to be nearly an existential threat. They figured that they might have only a couple of months of reserve left. Japan feared that the US could quite literally starve the fleet dry, leaving them helpless.

Japan felt surrounded by the so-called ABCD countries. These countries were America, Britain, China, and the Dutch (big in the East Indies). By encircling Japan with their territories, they were preventing Japan from taking her place as a first-rate nation.

OK, so those are some theoretical reasons. Let’s talk about some nuts and bolts reasons.

Let’s start with the emperor. A quiet man, he was taught to reign but not rule. His role was that of figurehead. The government represented the will of the people. He felt that he should rubber stamp whatever they passed. Once, in the 1920s, he did speak up harshly at someone that he felt was taking Japan in a bad direction. His mentor sharply reprimanded him, teaching him that he should not try to exert his will. Even though it appears that he did not want war, the fact is that he could have stopped it by just speaking up firmly. His passivity led to Japan’s tragic end.

Even though the head of the government, the Prime Minister, is a civilian position, the way that the government was actually structured was that the military held the true power. The army was enthusiastic about starting a war. The navy, knowing that it would bear a significant amount of responsibility for fighting the US, was much less so. However, to save face, the Navy admirals in the cabinet would never speak up. They would privately talk to the Prime Minister and urge him to stop the march to war, but wouldn’t say so publicly. This left the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister in a poor position to fight for peace. 

There was all kinds of miscommunication between the US and Japan. There was bad translations on both sides. One side would offer a reasonable statement but the translation would make it seem bellicose. There were simple misunderstandings. One condition that US held firm on was to get Japan out of China. The US just meant China proper. However, the Japanese interpreted that condition as a requirement for them to also get out of Manchukuo. This was an absolute deal breaker for Japan. A simple clarification of that condition itself might have led to a peaceful settlement.

Let’s not forget about simple racism. The US didn’t treat Japan as a first class nation. They didn’t treat the Japan military seriously. Several US diplomats treated the Japanese diplomats somewhat contemptuously. On the other side, the Japanese didn’t really understand Americans either. They underestimated Americans will to fight. This was a clash of two cultures that truly did not understand each other.

Finally, in 1941, it looked like the Axis powers were the winning team. France was knocked out of the war. The UK was barely hanging on. The Soviet Union was getting crushed. If Japan didn’t act now, maybe they were going to miss out on the opportunity to share the spoils of victory with Germany. There were dreams of Germany taking over India and linking up with the growing South-East Asia empire of Japan. The two of them would truly lead the world. 

So, after all of that, I guess that Japan decided it was now or never. They felt that they had a date with destiny and that their destiny was to become a major world power. If they waited even six more months, they would lose that opportunity, possibly forever. As one general said, at some point you just have to close your eyes and jump off the cliff.

At the bottom of that cliff was a complete destruction of their society and some three million Japanese dead.

Just Because We’ve Always Done It This Way Doesn’t Mean It’s Not Stupid

Title: Moneyball

Rating: 5 Stars

Before I starting talking about the book, let me just say how lucky Michael Lewis is when it comes to film adaptations. Lewis is a talented writer. When you read him, you are always entertained. At least to me, he does not seemingly tell cinematic stories. After all, Moneyball is a story about statistics and how most baseball teams misuse them. The Big Short is about several certifiably odd people that found an anomaly in the financial market and used it to get very rich. They were both interesting stories but really, is there a film there? It just shows how wrong I am because not only are there films there, but, having watched both (Moneyball quite recently), they were both great fun to watch and both received Best Picture Academy award nominations. Not only that, but another Lewis work, The Blind Side, was adapted and received yet a third Best Picture nomination (and won Sandra Bullock a Best Actress Academy award). Having neither read that work nor seen the picture, I can’t comment on them, but still, quite impressive Michael Lewis!

On to Moneyball. Written about the 2002 season, it describes baseball as having several serious problems. One is that baseball is run by largely baseball people. These men, using their own experiences, are confident that they understand the game. They have no need for statistics. They have no need for analytics. They can eyeball a player and determine how good he’s going to be. They can look at a player’s face and determine his character. Any player that doesn’t match their platonic ideal of a baseball player is rejected out of hand, regardless of their actual productivity on the field.

A second problem is that the statistics that they do use (and after all, baseball is ostensibly awash in numbers) are not useful indicators of productivity. A hitter’s batting percentage is misleading since it ignores walks. After all, a walk is quite literally as good as a single. A fielder’s fielding percentage is misleading because it only counts overt mistakes. For example, if a player is slow and has limited range, he won’t have as many errors as a player that could actually get at least close to a hit ball. Finally, a pitchers earned run average is misleading because, other than strike outs, home runs, and walks, a pitcher has effectively no control once a ball is hit into play.

The third problem is the cloistered nature of baseball. As a group, baseball people form a pretty small club. The front office people are afraid of looking foolish in front of their peers, so they continue to operate in a manner that is obviously counterproductive. As a group, they epitomize the definition of insanity as doing the same thing and expecting different results.

In 2002, each of these problems are going to be solved by one club, the Oakland Athletics. 

The statistical work was done earlier by Bill James. Before that, most of the statistical work was done in the 19th century by a man named Henry Chadwick. He developed the box score as we know it. Considering that his background was actually cricket, his translation to baseball was somewhat lacking. For instance, the idea of the walk has no place in cricket so he essentially ignored it.

Starting in the 1970s while working as a security guard on the night shift, Bill James got angry enough about the state of baseball statistics that he decided to do something about it. He started publishing a baseball abstract that took a deeper, more analytical look at baseball statistics. The first abstracts were mimeographed sheets of paper that were sent out to at most a couple of hundred users. Other oddball people latched onto James’ ideas and advanced their own statistics. Daniel Okrent (a pretty famous author that among other things wrote Last Call, a history about Prohibition, of all things) invented rotisserie baseball (named after the restaurant where it started). It was a fantasy baseball league that allowed people to pretend to be baseball GMs. This was a primary reason for the explosion of popularity of sophisticated baseball statistics.

One of the more radical ideas is that batting percentage is much less important than on base percentage. The main thing a batter needs to avoid is making an out. The on base percentage measures that. Another idea was that pitcher’s statistics should be based just on strikes, walks, and home runs. All else was left to luck.

Still, baseball ignored all of this. Enter Billy Beane, the GM for the Oakland A’s. 

When he was young, he was considered a lock to become a major league star and maybe even a future Hall of Famer. Everyone in baseball from scouts to coaches to management told him that he was a sure thing. He had all of the tools. He made it all look easy.

That might have been the problem. It was too easy. Once he reached a level where it wasn’t easy, he couldn’t deal with it. He let himself get wrapped up in his own head. Despite all of his natural skills, he never could figure out how to hit off of professional pitchers. After several years of futility and ferocious anger, he gave up, walked away, and asked for a front office job with the A’s.

There he found a home and ultimately became their General Manager. One thing that came out of his own experience is that he had no trouble calling out scouts on their bull shit. He saw himself as exhibit one in their ability to predict talent. He was therefore open to new ideas.

Given that the A’s consistently had the lowest team salary in Major League Baseball, this openness turned out to have significant benefits. Knowing that he couldn’t afford top talent even if he wanted it, he started to look for overlooked gems. He started making use of the more sophisticated statistics to identify these gems.

There was the catcher with the bad arm that was an incredibly patient hitter. Fine, let’s put him at first base. Struggling in the beginning, eventually the catcher’s raw physical talent turned him into an above average first baseman.

There was the pitcher that had a goofy delivery. He pitched in a submarine style that was so low that his knuckles occasionally grazed the ground. Such an unorthodox delivery made him too embarrassing for other teams to  consistently use. Beane had no such embarrassment. Beane used him and he became an effective middle reliever.

In the film, Brad Pitt played Billy Beane (and got an Academy award nomination, I believe). He exactly captured Beane’s charm. One person compared Beane talking to other GM’s to the Big Bad Wolf talking to Little Red Riding Hood. One thing that Pitt did not adequately capture was Beane’s intensity and anger. Beane is fiercely competitive, not above throwing chairs when he is raging.

I’m not sure if I’m doing a good job describing how much I liked this book. I’m not even a baseball guy. I’ve been to maybe one game in the last ten years. In telling what could be a dry story about the evolution of baseball statistics, Lewis does an outstanding job bringing all of the characters to life, from Bill James to Billy Beane to A’s players like Scott Hatteburg and Chad Bradford.

Lewis manages to, as he consistently does in other books, combine numbers and statistics with personalities in a very engaging and entertaining way. Moneyball is one of Lewis’ best efforts.

The Only Thing That The US Has To Fear Is The US Itself

Title: Unrivaled

Rating: 5 Stars

I’m not sure if this is common across all countries, but it’s certainly true that the US spends a lot of time looking over its shoulder.

When I was growing up, the big threat was the Soviet Union. We were constantly being told how much better or stronger the Soviet Union was. They had smarter, better educated engineers. Their massive army was poised to sweep through Western Europe with little that we could do to stop them. They had significantly more and better nuclear weapons (the so-called missile gap that pretty much every aspiring Presidential candidate from Kennedy to Reagan swore to). Their planned economy could effectively direct resources so much better than our anarchic system. They were the dark force that the democratic nations were standing unsteadily against.

Of course we now know none of that was true. Their economy was a shambles. Their military equipment was insufficient and poorly maintained. Their soldiers were poorly trained. There never was a missile gap. They were barely able to manage the resources that they had, let alone indulge in dreams of world domination.

The Soviet Union wasn’t our only bugbear. In the 1970s, during the oil crisis, we quaked at the power of OPEC. We thought that Saudi Arabia would get fat on our imported oil addiction. With their big piles of money, they would just be able to buy and sell us.

Starting in the 1980s, we started fearing the rising sun of Japan. After we built them up from the ashes of WWII, they enthusiastically embraced US business practices. Within a couple of decades, they were better than us in business processes and in manufacturing. Their system of interlocking corporations (Keiretsu) seemed to be a Japanese cultural specific innovation that could render our businesses obsolete.

In the 1990s came the European Union. It appeared that WWI and WWII had cured the separate European nations of their dreams of continental conquest. They began to look for opportunities for integration. They created a common market. They eliminated border restrictions. They (at least most of them) even agreed upon a common currency. Now there was a 400 million strong union of highly educated Westerners with sophisticated economies that could knock the US off of its preeminent perch.

Guess what? None of that happened either. Have we learned our lesson? Has the boy cried wolf one too many times? Are we going to calmly perform a rational analysis of our future threats?

Um, no. One word. CHINA!!!!!!!! This time it’s real! The 21st century is going to the Chinese century! We’re doomed!

This is why I loved Unrivaled. It’s actually a slim book (around 150 pages). It doesn’t go in for histrionics. It’s a rational discussion of what actually makes a hegemon, a comparison of the relative power between the US (the current hegemon) and the latest contender China, and some comments regarding the future.

His thesis is that the US is in a position of nearly overwhelming power in comparison to the other prominent powers and will continue to be so (unless it does some pretty stupid things) for decades to come.

First of all, let’s discuss the term hegemon. A hegemon is a country that is unchallenged within its geographic region. In the last several hundred years, the only hegemons were the UK during Pax Brittanica, Japan during the years before being destroyed in WWII, and the United States since 1890. 

Let’s look at the current state of the US. Canada and Mexico are the only two countries that border it. Both are friendly and are comparatively weak militarily. Every other competing country has adversaries either on its border or within geographic proximity.

The US has extensive coast lines with both the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean. The US has more deep water ports than the rest of the world combined. This gives the US a unique position in global trade. The US has more navigable rivers than the rest of the world combined. This serves as a relatively cheap transportation infrastructure. Other countries have to build expensive roads and ship on expensive trucks to get the same network.

The US has extensive energy resources. It currently is the largest producer of both oil and natural gas. China is the largest coal producer. Even so, the US has more than twice the reserves of coal than China but has no need to maximize that production.

So, before you even start with a military comparison, it simply is a fact that the US has natural advantages that no other nation in the world can compare to.

So, what about China? China will inevitably surpass the US in GDP. Beckley’s thesis is that net GDP is the more important metric. In a typical GDP measurement, any economic activity, positive or negative, counts as a positive number. However, if you spend 80% of that GDP just feeding your people, then that does not leave much room for other productivity gains. As another example, China has taken out massive state loans to build ghost cities that will never be lived in. That is a waste of resources even though it counts under normal GDP calculations.

Military expenditures should also be considered similarly. China has a large military and a large budget. However, much of that budget and manpower is spent suppressing internal dissent. China has over fifteen countries that it shares borders with, including nations that it has recently fought wars with in fairly recent memory (eg India and Vietnam). Although it claims seas off its coast as its own, their claims are fiercely fought by such countries as Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, Philippines, and Malaysia. No matter what direction it looks, its hemmed in. On the other hand, the US military has no such limitations. It does not operate within US borders. It has hundreds of bases all around the world. It can move with impunity in the seas and in the sky.

China is also in a bad place demographically. Thanks to its now obviously misguided one child policy, it’s looking at a future where 1/3 of its population will be over 65 by 2050. Given that its economy is already slowing down, this is a recipe for disaster.

There are so many other dimensions to look at. Whether you look at education, health, productivity, pollution, patents, or any other number of indices, the numbers tell the same story. The US is simply in a dominant position relative to any other country in the world, but especially in comparison to China. 

So, here’s the thing. We need to chill. I’m not saying, don’t be vigilant. I am saying that if the US is going to go down, it’ll be our fault. Internal things can bring down a hegemon.

We can overextend our resources by say, I don’t know, spending twenty years fighting wars in Afghanistan and/or Iraq with no exit strategy. We need to stop thinking of every external problem as being a nail and the military is the hammer. We need to beef up the State Department and use diplomacy. 

We can, with no external threats, turn upon ourselves. We could end up in a state of permanent political gridlock (filibuster, anyone?). Our trust in our democratic institutions can be threatened (thank you Donald Trump). Over the last forty years (as I’ve written about in other blog reviews) our non-discretionary government expenditures (things like education, infrastructure, transportation, housing, energy, R&D) have plummeted as a percentage of the total budget. This makes our government look less capable to people that need these services and does not prepare us for future challenges.

Instead of just always looking outside at the scary ‘other’, we need to look within our country and deal with the challenges that truly threaten us.

At Swim-Two-Birds Meets Star Trek

Title: Redshirts

Rating: 4 Stars

Here let me start with my usual caveat that science fiction isn’t really my genre but every now and then a book enters my consciousness and I decide to give it a shot. I think that re-watching Galaxy Quest was the spur that encouraged me to give Redshirts a shot. According to my Goodreads book list, I’ve apparently read this before. This must be a mistake because I don’t remember a thing about it and it’s not really that old that I might have forgotten about it. Even so, I kind of knew what it was about. I remember enjoying Galaxy Quest in the theater when it came out but for some reason it just didn’t do as much for me this time. I was hoping for better luck with Redshirts.

By now, everyone must understand the joke behind Scalzi’s title (or maybe the joke is now so old that it’s faded away into trivia). In the original Star Trek series, whenever Kirk, Spock, McCoy, or Scotty went on a mission to explore some distant and probably dangerous world, they took along a security detail identifiable by their red shirts. Since these were nondescript bit players, they were always the first ones killed off.

In Redshirts, the protagonist is Andrew Dahl, a recent crew member of the flagship Intrepid. It is exploring the universe in the 25th century. Like a certain series that it’s taking the piss out of, there are a couple key senior officers with names of Abernathy, Q’eeng, West, Kerensky, and Hartnell. Regularly, one of these senior officers has to investigate a foreign planet on an away mission. When they do so, they bring junior members along on the mission (like Dahl). Inevitably, one to many of the junior members are killed in often spectacular, bizarre, and often illogical ways. None of the senior officers are ever killed, although Kerensky is often horribly injured but is quickly healed.

The crew, aware of this tendency, takes great lengths to avoid these senior officers to stay away from the away missions. There’s other unexplained events on the ship. There’s a mysterious box that can solve any problem in any dramatically short period of time. Whenever damage occurs on a ship (and it often happens since they’re regularly under attack) only a certain set of decks are ever affected. No matter where an attack takes place on Intrepid, the bridge is always slightly damaged.

All of this is quite mysterious. Dahl meets up with Jenkins, a crew member that has now gone rogue, now wearing great dreadlocks and living in the ship’s tunnels. It is Jenkins’ belief that they live in a time line that was somehow first initiated by a mediocre sci-fi show started in the 21st century. The weird deaths and universe non sequiturs that the crew experiences is the result of slipshod writing done for the show.

Dahl and a couple of his equally low status friends hatch a desperate plan to time travel to the 21st century to try to get the show to stop killing off so many people. They succeed in the time travel and must meet with the writers, producer, and stars of the show. As might be expected, things get very meta.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Some of this might because it does take the piss out of a genre that I’m not a huge fan of, but clearly Scalzi does so out of love. He highlights the ridiculous animals that attack the crew (an ice shark? Is that a shark that lives in ice or a shark made out of ice?), the silly rules of physics that they must abide by in their world (you can time travel, but only for six days after which point your atoms will melt away), and the heavy melodrama that the senior crew often demonstrates.

The meta is quite clever. I have no idea if it holds up under any system of logic, but that’s kind of besides the point. It was enjoyable. In fact, not to get too high brow, but as I read it, it reminded me a bit of that classic meta novel At Swim-Two-Birds, which is a too bizarre to explain novel about characters in novels that are writing novels in which their characters rise up against them. It’s written under the Irish pen name of Flann O’Brien. Among other things it includes Irish folklore characters like Finn Mac Cool. One of the characters in Redshirts is called Finn. I really would like to believe that Scalzi threw that in as a tip of the cap to one of the all time great meta novels.

It was oh so close to five stars. Only two somewhat minor things marred it slightly. One is the three codas. They each briefly describe the aftermath of the visit from the 25th century characters upon the 21st century characters. They were well written and actually quite touching. However, they just had a bit too much of a television film closure feeling to them. I didn’t really need to have all of that spelled out for me.

Secondly is that I wish that it’d been just a tad more ambitious on the meta front. It was on the verge of something at the end. The timeline has been saved and it appears that there will be no more unnecessary deaths going forward. However, Dahl comes to a realization. In the story that he’s just lived, it’s been him, not the senior officers, that has been the protagonist. In this specific timeline, he was the main character while they were the bit players. He wonders, is it possible that he himself is the focus of another narrative from another time and is he just living it?

I know that it would have hopelessly complicated things, but I think it would have been awesome if at this point somehow Scalzi himself introduced himself as a character within the work. That would have brought the meta narrative all of the way to the God figure himself, the author.

A Second Bill Of Rights

In 1944, Franklin D Roosevelt announced a second bill of rights. It basically went nowhere. In 2019, Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey introduced the Green New Deal. It never advanced in the Senate.

I’ve written several reviews of books that have discussed, whether it’s through hugely successive socially conservative campaigns or through corporations overwhelming politics with campaign contributions or the shenanigans of the Senate filibuster, that in many ways our legislative process is broken.

The current state of the Republican party is seemingly content with the situation. Other than tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations and appointing conservative judges, they don’t really seem to have any political beliefs beyond that of grievance. In fact, if you remember, the national Republican party platform in 2020 quite literally said that it is whatever Donald Trump thinks it is. No matter what you think of Donald Trump, even his most passionate defenders would not accuse him of being a political theoretician.

So it’s up to the Democratic party to have the ideas. To their credit, they have scads, everything from infrastructure projects to family leave to police reform. The flaw is that they are trying to solve this via conventional national legislation, which currently is broken, and unless both Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema change their minds, it will continue to be broken.

So, what can we do? The bad news is that there is no easy path forward. If we want the country to eventually get out of its rut, we have to have a national movement. The Green New Deal is one path forward, but it’s got so many things that it’s trying to accomplish that it’s easy to knock down as either gross federal overreach or some far off impossible Candy Mountain dream.

Cue Newt Gringrich (I bet you didn’t see that one coming, amirite?). In 1994, he and his fellow Republicans came up with the Contract With America. It was a simple set of laws that he promised to introduce, if he was elected Speaker of the House, on his first day in session. Although they hid legal complexity, the goal of the laws could fit on an index card. They were very understandable. I’m not saying that the Contract was the reason that the Republicans won the House majority for the first time in 40 years, but it didn’t hurt.

Especially with one party bereft of ideas and seemingly ideologically exhausted, now is the chance for the Democrats. However, I’m not proposing some simple legislation. I’m proposing, ala FDR, an entire new set of constitutional amendments.

I know that this is not a small thing. Especially in our broken political system, no meaningful amendment has been passed in fifty years. I think that this would need to be accomplished from the bottom up. The probability of getting 2/3 of both houses of Congress to propose a set of amendments is probably not happening. The alternative of getting 2/3 of the state legislatures to ask Congress call a constitutional convention seems even more daunting.

However, we are at a pivotal moment in our history. After the past 40 years of propaganda of how ineffective government is, how inefficient it is, how private enterprise always has the best answers, the past year of pandemic has shown that the federal government still has a role. If some form of Biden’s America Recovery Plan, America Jobs Plan, and American Family Plan passes and people see the positive role that government can play, then maybe there might an opportunity.

It would take years, probably over a decade. It would take grassroots efforts nationwide. It would take Democrats leaving their comfort zones of the cities to have serious conversations in people wearing MAGA hats.

Who knows? If the Democrats started having committed and focused conversations on real issues, then maybe the Republicans will respond with their own ideas. Crazier things have happened.

So what would a second bill of rights look like? Here’s my attempt. It’s an amalgam of FDR’s amendments, the Green New Deal, and reversing some bad court decisions that have been made over the last couple of decades. Notice that there’s not even ten of them!

Healthcare is available for all. Personal health decisions are personal decisions.

It’s pretty simple. If you get sick, you should be able to get help. It shouldn’t bankrupt you. Obviously, there’s a lot of complexity to this, but we’ve managed to figure out how to do it for people 65 and over, so you’d think that we could figure it out. Virtually every other developed nation has figured it out for all. The second issue is obviously about abortion. Look, I get it, it’s hard. I’m not comfortable with it. In fact, I guarantee you that if I ever get pregnant, that I would carry it to term. Also, I’m a 58 year old man. That’s kind of the point. I (and no one else) have no right to interject myself into a young woman’s decision.

Education is available to all.

I’m not saying that everyone goes to Harvard. It’s just that, especially in the 21st century, that human intellectual capital will be paramount in the race of nations. If the next Bill Gates is living in a trailer in rural Georgia, I want our country to do everything it can to allow them to maximize their opportunity. Again, many other nations have figured out funding higher education. It would seem that we can too.

Housing is available to all.

Having lived in downtown Seattle where homelessness was rampant, I saw first hand how critical this issue is. Living in the richest country in history, having people living in tents and cars because they have no other option is unconscionable.

All adults are entitled to a Universal Basic Income / Negative Income Tax.

Yes, this seems to go against the grain of American values. After all, we’re all just Horatio Algers struggling to life ourselves by our bootstraps, right? If you follow your dream, the money will follow, right?

In fact, it’s a myth and it was a myth when the stories were being written. Right now, there are people working more than full time, multiple jobs, and still have to decide between paying rent, utilities, or medicine. That is not right.

Will there be abusers? Of course there will. In a nation of 330 million people, there are always going to be a few people that will just sit back and get something for nothing. However, they are relatively few in number. The American work ethic is pretty effectively indoctrinated into nearly everyone. Nearly everyone prefers to earn their way. Let’s give them a chance to make a living wage.

Money is not free speech.

This is one of those Supreme Court decisions that makes sense in the abstract but is absolute garbage in execution. I put this case in the same category as Plessy v Ferguson separate but equal decision. By equating money with speech, you are guaranteeing that only the richest people will have the megaphone.

Corporations are not people.

No, they are not.  We should not be giving corporations religious freedom. They should not be able spend unlimited sums of money for their political causes (see above). We need to stop this nonsense.

No voting restrictions and easy availability to vote to all Americans 18 or over.

The eviscerating of the Voting Rights Act is another bad decision by the Roberts court. Again, great in theory, but the fact that as soon as it was implemented Southern states immediately began passing voting restrictions  belies the nature of the argument.

If we want to have a truly participatory democracy (granted that right now, there is one party that decidedly does not want that), then everyone must be able to participate. Just because you’re a prisoner or you’re on parole or you don’t have a driver’s license or you don’t have transportation or you live in a nursing home does not mean that you shouldn’t have a voice in our democracy. I think everyone should vote and I think that it should be as easy and secure as possible.

Abolish the Electoral College.

This one bums me out a little. Yes, it’s archaic. Yes, Mr Constitution, James Madison, was himself adamantly opposed to it. Still, it’s one of those weird little compromises that the founding fathers came to. For a long time, it basically worked. It seemed to be a nice expression of the relationship between state and federal.

However, the Republican party is now gaming the system. At this point in their history, they have no reason to even attempt to gain the support of the plurality of US voters. In fact, since 1992, the Republican party has only won the popular vote once (George W in 2004, although it’s interesting to note that even here that if Kerry had won Ohio, he would have been president while losing the popular vote). I’m not even dissing the Republican party here (at least not much). They are behaving rationally. They have figured out a way to win the Presidency without winning the popular vote.

So we need to change the system. If the Republican party had lost seven of the last eight elections, you can count on the fact that they would have adapted. The Presidency is the only nationally elective office. Therefore, it should be decided by American voters, not by some group of appointed electors.

That’s it! Simple, right? Eight steps to fix a broken system.

A Parade Of Misogyny

Title: In A Lonely Place

This is another of a series of book / film comparisons. This time I read the book first. I can’t remember how I stumbled upon it, but in doing a bit of research on it, I discovered that a film was made of it. Not only that, but it’s considered one of the classic film noir and is on some best films list (like the Time Magazine Best Films of all Time). Seeing that it starred Humphrey Bogart sparked my interest even more. Between The Maltese Falcon, Dark Passage, and The Big Sleep, I’ve seen Bogart now in several of his noir classics (not to mention non-noir classics like Casablanca, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and The African Queen).

The first thing that was very surprising is how different the film is from the novel. Yes, they have the same major characters. Bogart stars as Dix Steele, a man with personal demons. His best friend from the war turned police detective, Brub, and his wife Sylvia are also in both. In both cases, Laurel Gray is Steele’s love interest.

In the film, a young woman is murdered that was last seen with Dix. The police immediately suspect Dix. When his history of acts of uncontrollable rage is discovered, he becomes their top suspect. Initially convinced (and indeed, his alibi) of Dix’s innocence, Laurel becomes alarmed when she witnesses one of Dix’s violent rages. The pressure builds on Dix and he begins to lose control. As he is strangling Laurel in a blind rage, the phone rings and it is Brub telling him that he has been cleared. Although now known to be innocent of the murder, the horror of the attack permanently destroys Laurel’s and Dix’s relationship.

In the novel, Dix is a serial rapist and murderer. Brub is working the case. It becomes a cat and mouse game as Dix tries to discover what the police know without tipping his hand regarding how important it is to him to find out. Unlike the film, Laurel Gray is no meek pushover. She is much more from the classic femme fatale mold. Dix and Laurel have an intense relationship of mutual passion and jealousy. Brub’s wife, Sylvia, is nearly nondescript in the film. Here, she plays a critical role. From the first moment that she sees him, Sylvia suspects that something is off with Dix. At the end, it is her actions that trick him to confess.

Although the film and the novel are quite different, the common theme between the two is misogyny. Even though in the film Dix is innocent of murder, his unreasoning rage is a prototypical example of toxic masculinity. One man calls him a name and he nearly beats him to death. He orders Laurel around like she’s his personal servant. Instead of asking to marry her, he essentially orders her to marry him. When he thinks that she’s going to leave him, he would have killed her if not interrupted. Granted that this was filmed in 1950, but even by those standards he demonstrates a contempt if not hatred for women.

In the novel, Dix is even more contemptuous of women, and not only because he rapes and murders them. He has a maid that he treats as sub-human (usually just refers to her as the harridan). He sees Laurel as a possession. He doesn’t like to even let her out of his sight. Somehow he senses that Sylvia can see through him and that makes him hate her. It turns out that he was murdering women even when he was stationed in the UK during the war.

Even though the film is considered to be a film noir classic, I considered the novel to be much richer. Dix in the film is just an irrationally angry man. In the novel, you learn so much more about him.

First of all, unlike the novel, he’s not a successful screenwriter. In fact, he’s mooching off a rich uncle that barely gives him a pittance to live on. He can fool people in LA because he is living in the apartment and wearing the clothes of a very wealthy friend that apparently is out of the country (the book implies but does not say that Dix has murdered him as well). He sees all of the truly rich and successful people and he resents them. 

Although he’s had this resentment for many years, his time in the war really sharpened it (the novel was written in 1947). During the war, he was a hero. He was a fighter pilot that led other pilots. His friend, Brub, looks up to him as a result of that shared time. It’s clear that his time in the military, where he was an important person in an officer’s uniform (and in a service where there were no women to scorn), was the highlight of his life. Coming back to the US, where once again he’s nothing but a poor relation with no prospects under the thumb of a rich miser, it’s a hard adjustment that Dix is unwilling to make.

Reading this novel reminded me of the film The Best Years of Our Lives. Made in 1946, right after the end of WWII, it followed the stories of three men as they try to adjust to civilian life. One of the stories involved a war hero that had to understand that, even after all of his acts of leadership and heroics of the war, that all that civilian life was willing to give him was a job as a shop clerk or a soda jerk. Understandably, this was a harsh adjustment for him to make. Dix is in a similar boat, with the difference being that Dix is a homicidal psychopath. This adjustment of having to switch from a position of leadership responsibilities where your decisions and actions could literally mean the difference between life and death to the prosaic life of peacetime civilian life must have been one that many post WWII men could relate to.

The women in the novel were much stronger (not coincidentally, the novel was written by a woman, Dorothy B Hughes). In the film, both women were unremarkable. In the novel, Sylvia and Laurel are strong characters. Even though they don’t like each from the first, they tag up together to bring Dix down.

Although the film was fine, I’m not sure if I’d place it in the list of all time great noir films. The novel, on the other hand, is one of the strongest noir novels that I’ve read in some time.

The Hollowness Of Modern Democracy

Title: Empire Of Democracy

Rating: 5 Stars

This book should come with a warning. It is the densest work that I’ve read in a while. At over 750 pages, it is no easy read. The book discusses the changes that have come over the Western democracies over the past 50 years. It is his argument that this period of time has posed unique challenges to the Western democracies. The way that our democratic institutions have responded to it has led to a hollowing out of democratic capabilities at the national level.

In the thirty year period after World War II, Western style democracies were ascendant. That started changing in the 1970s.

This happened for a couple of reasons. First of all, the rise of the modern welfare state was predicated upon a certain amount of economic growth. Starting in the 1970s, this growth started to fade. There’s a couple of reasons for this. One was the dependence on oil and the rise of the power of OPEC. Another was that the productive gains from earlier periods that had driven productivity had begun to play out. This economic slowdown resulted in higher unemployment and lower rates of productivity. This made the welfare state appear unsustainable. 

At the same time, groups began to organize themselves outside of the traditional government system. Gay rights, women’s rights, and BIPOC rights groups organized themselves. Having for the most part had to exist outside of the conventional welfare state, they insisted upon having the same rights and benefits as everyone else.

As a result, starting in the late 1970s with Jimmy Carter but obviously accelerating under Ronald Reagan (as well as European leaders from that time), the democratic state took a step back from providing the services that historically it understood itself to be on the hook for providing. This was under the guise of being market driven, customer focused, and service oriented. This begat a general belief that the government really isn’t very good or efficient. It needs to step out of the way and let capitalistic free enterprise do its thing.

By stepping away from providing services, first of all it facilitated the tremendous growth of capitalism. Since by its nature, capitalism doesn’t recognize national boundaries, the government lost oversight of these services that it no longer provided. It enabled the dramatic growth of the finance sector. 

By emphasizing the free in free enterprise, the government in effect subordinated equality to freedom. By doing so, over the last several decades, the inevitable, unsurprising result is that economic inequality has now reached levels previously unseen. The resultant inequality makes all on both ends of the spectrum feel less connected to a democratic government.

With the state prioritizing capitalism, there have been other unintended consequences. As mentioned above, capitalism, due to its transnational nature, left to its own devices, will inevitably usher in globalization. Its drive for efficiency will lead to dramatic technological gains. Seemingly good on the surface, these two effects have brought about the death spiral of what was the working class. Relatively uneducated people are left to compete with workers on the other side of the world. The skills that they have developed are being replaced with technological alternatives. All of this was being done at the same time that the Western democracies, especially in the US, were cutting back on conventional welfare benefits. At the very moment in time that large numbers of people need services, these services have been found lacking.

This continued on even after the fall of the Soviet block. During the 90s, when people were thinking that the end of history had been reached and that the West had triumphed, the hollowing out of democracy continued. The Eastern bloc countries, looking for examples of moving forward from a Soviet style socialist economy, encountered democracy at the very moment that it was being hollowed out. We now have nations like Russia, Turkey, Hungary, Romania, Czech Republic, and Poland that have what appear to be democracies but have no political equality or liberal freedoms.

The Democrats, under the leadership of Bill Clinton, decisively moved from their historical liberal antecedents. Clinton’s priorities were a balanced budget, free trade, and deregulation. Looking at it from that point of view, his administration’s priorities were not substantively different than Reagan’s and HW Bush’s. The emphasis of capitalism over democracy and freedom over equality continued unabated.

9/11 and the US response to it hastened this hollowing out even further. Due to laws such as the Patriot act, constitutional safeguards were removed. Centuries old constitutional concepts such as habeus corpus and posse comitatus were disregarded to keep us ‘safe’. US citizens could be investigated without probable cause, wiretapping requests were rubber stamped, and public spaces were closed off. By spending just 1/6th of the Iraq War cost, we could have saved Social Security for fifty years.

Inequality continued to dramatically increase. This resulted in wage repression, capital liberalization, and a national race to the bottom.

This has led to a general disenchantment with democratic ideals. In turn this has fed directly to nationalist leaders who make empty promises about restoring some mythical past of strength. The fact that they can’t deliver doesn’t lessen the potency of their message. This in turn leads to anti-immigration beliefs. With Europe (and to a lesser extent) the US facing looming population shortages, the attacks on immigrants are actively working against the actual needs of these nations.

There’s not a whole lot of sunshine in this book. There are no silver bullets. The only solace that Reid-Henry offers is that democracy has faced challenges in the past. A fine example of that is the fight against fascism during World War II. Democratic structures do have built in flexibility to be able to respond to external events.

The unanswered question is how democracy can respond to internal events that it brought upon itself. An argument can be made that recent mass protest movements are forcing our democracy to focus less on capital markets and more on its citizens. Movements such as these could be what is propelling the historically centrist Joe Biden to move out on his significant spending plans (American Rescue Plan, American Jobs Plan, American Family Plan).

For close to fifty years, our country has been moving in a consistent direction, regardless of the White House occupant. Are we now living in a time in which the direction is changing?