Better Racism Through Science

Title: The Guarded Gate

Rating: 4 Stars

With Southern governors now sending off immigrants to semi-random areas up North in some kind of attempt to own the libs, immigration is once again in the forefront of our news. I say once again because immigration concerns are nothing new here. A good history of our xenophobia is America for Americans, by Erika Lee (I wrote about it here). The Guarded Gate is about a specific point in American history.

Before I start discussing that time, it’s always good to start with the fact that, for the longest time, there was no American concept of illegal immigration. You got on a boat, you went across the ocean, you disembarked at Ellis Island, and you were in. It was as simple as that.

So, when people today talk about how their ancestors got in the right way, that they ‘followed the rules’, if their ancestors came more than 100 years ago (as mine did), remember that there were no rules, so it’s a bit disingenuous to claim some kind of moral high ground.

Another thing to keep in mind is that racism changes over time. One of the big surprises, if you didn’t already know that, is how the definition of who is white changes over time. If you’re interested in that subject, I’d recommend The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter (and I wrote about that here).

During the time of this book (1890s through 1920s), people were most concerned with immigrants coming from Southern and Eastern Europe. Nationalities such as Italians, Greeks, Serbs, and Poles were considered dirty and mentally unequipped to become ‘real’ Americans. In fact, they were considered to be a completely different race. At the top of the race heap were the Nordics (renamed from Teutonic due to the unfortunate fact of World War I suddenly making enemies of the German people). Below the Nordic race was the Alpine race, followed much lower by the Mediterranean.

Italians were considered only good for jobs such as food peddler. Even worse, they had a reputation for reproducing so much faster than the ‘good’ race. Many felt that by allowing so many Italians to immigrate, in combination with their increased levels of reproduction, would lead to the destruction of the ‘American’ race. This was called race suicide.

And when I say that many held that opinion, I’m not just talking about low educated, ignorant, overt racists. Teddy Roosevelt believed in and used the term race suicide.

In fact, many of the leaders during this time proposing restricted immigration based upon the ‘science’ of eugenics were prominent in the Progressive movement. Many of them were trained scientists. Those that weren’t scientists came from what passes for American blue blood royalty. These were people whose families could be traced back to the Mayflower or from the most elite, old money, Boston families. They received multiple degrees from Ivy League institutions and lived lives of great luxury.

We have Madison Grant, a leading figure in the eugenic movement. He also founded the Bronx Zoo. Another leading figure was Fairfield Osborn. A paleontologist, he was the person that named the Tyrannosaurus Rex. He was the president of the famed American Museum of Natural History in New York City for 25 years. He also cofounded the American Eugenics Society and firmly believed in the superiority of the Nordic race. John Rockefeller Jr, a great funder of liberal causes, also secretly funded eugenics organizations.

Some names might surprise you. Margaret Sanger is best known today for advocating birth control. She communicated with leaders in eugenics and thought that there was synthesis in the ideas of birth control and eugenics. She worried about the unfit reproducing. One of the slogans of her organization was “To breed a race of thoroughbreds”.

In a way, it makes sense that the Progressives were seduced by eugenics because it certainly had the veneer of science. Field agents went out, interviewed, collected, and collated the information on some half of a million people. Studies were performed that seemingly conclusively proved that the mental health hospitals were predominately populated by recent ethnic immigrants. A massive study was done of the US army that proved that some forty percent of the soldiers had a ‘moron’ IQ (this was during the time when moron, idiot, and imbecile had ‘scientific’ definitions). Reports generated were full of dense columns of numbers and charts.

Nowhere in all this data was there explicit racism. The conclusions that followed from all of this data collection was based upon rigorous calculations. After all, numbers don’t lie, do they? If there is scientific evidence that immigrants from some countries are indeed defective, isn’t in our country’s best interest to keep them out?

Well, it turns out, numbers do lie if they are derived from nonsense. The people conducting the field interviews were little trained and made incredible subjective judgments. When evaluating those in mental institutions, only public institutions were investigated. Private institutions (where upper class patients would reside) were ignored.

The intelligence tests were worst of all. Here are some sample questions (and no, I’m not making this up):

• The Wyandotte is a kind of: horse, fowl, cattle, or granite.
• Bud Fisher is famous as an: actor, author, baseball player, or comic artist
• Velvet Joe appears in advertisements of: tooth powder, dry goods, tobacco, or soup

Guess what? Apparently I’m an imbecile! Clearly, this is not an IQ test. At best, it’s a test of cultural knowledge. Imagine giving this test to a recent immigrant from Italy and then being shocked that they register as mentally impaired. Even so, these tests did yield some darkly amusing results. It goes without saying that, in the race hierarchy, that the Black race was considered the lowest rung. Imagine the surprise when Black people in the North scored higher than white people in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Kentucky.

Regardless, this seemingly scientific approach was enough to lead to the passage of laws that severely restricted immigration. Wanting to be racist without seeming to be racist, the law set an immigration quota for each nation. This quota was based upon the relative percentage of each nation already in the US. Seemingly fair until you learn that the law was passed in the 1924. The 1920 census data was available and ready to be used. Instead the law was based upon the 1890 census. You will not be shocked to learn that 1890 was before the bulk of the Southern and Eastern Europeans began to immigrate.

Therefore, the immigration quota of these nations were dramatically restricted without the messy racism of having to call them out by name. Immigration from these nations immediately dropped by ninety percent or more. Quotas were based on monthly values. The entire continent of Africa was allotted 122 per month (oh yes, Black Americans, descendants of slaves from Africa, were intentionally excluded when calculating the quotas). One person from Luxembourg was denied because that country’s monthly allotment of seven had been reached.

Ships from some countries would sit outside ports and then, when the new month starts, would race each other to be first. For example, Greece was allocated a couple of hundred people a month. One ship beat another by two minutes. The second ship was turned away.

This is madness. And yet, the madness persisted for forty years. It wasn’t until the Immigration Act of 1965 that national quotas strongly preferencing Western Europe were removed. As a science, eugenics in the US wasn’t discredited until the rise of Hitler and Nazism.

And here we are again. There’s now another ‘throng’ of immigrants trying to reach our country. There are so many of them (apparently traveling in ‘caravans’). They speak a different language than us. They’re bringing their own unique culture. They congregate together in communities. They don’t appear to be assimilating.

Some people that consider themselves Real Americans are worried that these immigrants are threats to our culture. People are worried that they’re going to take over. People are worried that our way of life (whatever that means) is somehow at risk. After all, these are people coming from ‘shithole’ countries. That can’t be good, right?

It’ll be interesting to see what historians thirty years from now will write about us. I’m guessing that it won’t be kind.

A Political Astrology

Title: Last Best Hope

Rating: 3 Stars

I’m concerned about the state of the US. I still haven’t processed how tens of millions of Americans can think that our last presidential election was a fraud. I don’t understand how receiving a potential life saving vaccination is a political act. I’m aghast that women are being stripped of rights that were earned decades ago.

As a literary geek, this concern is manifesting by reading. From my last post you know that I’ve just re-read American Nations. I’ve just now finished George Packer’s Last Best Hope. Both books try to reconcile my concerns by theorizing that we’re not just one America but several very different Americas. Over time, one or more of these Americas wrest the reigns of power and attempt to force their will upon the others.

While I found Woodard’s American Nations to be informative, I was not so impressed with Packer’s.

While Woodard has twelve nations with their behaviors mostly set in place by their early founders, Packer has four nations. They seem to be much more, I don’t know, philosophically clustered than geographically clustered, although with the political self segregation that is an increasing feature of American life, there is a significant amount of segregation amongst the four.

Packer was inspired by the twin upheavals of the year 2020. First, there was the pandemic. After an initial burst of civic togetherness, it rapidly degenerated into deep schisms of vaccinations, masks, and school policies. The second crisis was the aftermath of the presidential election. Citing fraud with no credible evidence, Trump came scarily close to succeeding in staying in power. A relative few Republicans in state positions put country before party and thwarted attempts to have state legislatures override their voters’ preferences or to send in alternate slates of delegates. When that failed, January 6th happened. For the first and only (hopefully) time in my life, I saw my Capitol assaulted. Much to my dismay, the assaulters were people that looked just like me. 

The first America is named Free America. This group held power for decades. It’s what people of my age think of when we hear the word conservative. They believe that the government should be out of the regulatory business. Capitalism, not government programs, is the answer to our problems. If you’re not rich and successful, it’s your fault and the government is not going to bail you out.  Although they are anti-regulation, they are also in league with Christian fundamentalists, although the desires of the latter often take a back seat to business priorities. 

The next America is Smart America. This nation believes in meritocracy. They believe in higher education. They are at peace with modernity. They think that globalization has been a force for good. They have sympathy for the poor and disenfranchised and are supportive of government programs that could help them. This is true as long as these programs don’t impact their 401K and as long as those unfortunate souls don’t try to live in their neighborhood. Since higher education requires money and influence, it’s actually quite difficult for someone without money or influence to get into a top rated higher education program. Therefore, the meritocracy is really an aristocracy in camouflage. 

Next up is Real America. As Packer cleverly states, for this nation, Sarah Palin was the John the Baptist for the ascendant Donald Trump. Classically, this is thought of as small town America. Their values have not changed over time while the rest of the country apparently has, much to their disgust. They hold know-it-all intellectuals in disgust. It is essentially a whites only club, seeing all non-white immigration as an invasion. In the class structure, it looks up and sees a parasitic elite and it looks down and it sees a shiftless underclass.  The manufacturing that has disappeared and has destroyed entire communities as a result of globalization has been devastating to this nation.

The final nation is Just America. These are the Gen-Z and millennials that see the systemic racism, sexism, and classism that is at the core of our country from its founding. The American myth of the city on the hill or that we’re on some inexorable positive path of progress is meaningless to them. They see a near constant video stream of police brutality. They know the statistics of mass incarceration. They take to the streets in protest and use their cultural power to silence those that disagree (the so-called cancel culture).

There’s a couple of things here. First of all, this set of nations does not seem complete or orthogonal to me. It would seem to me that many Americans would look at this list and not see themselves reflected in it. Given where I lived, the profession that I chose, and my academic background, most people would probably place me in Smart America, and for the most part I would agree. Even so, there are many parts of Just America that ring true to me as well. Reading the different nations left me feeling that I was reading the political equivalent of a horoscope. Once you put yourself in one of the nations, confirmation bias quickly leads you into agreeing with the attributes of it.

A second problem is that it seemed to be light. The book had some half dozen essays. They were at best loosely connected. The four nations essay read like a long form article in The Atlantic. That’s not a random observation. In fact, the first time that I encountered the four nations was in a long form article in yes, The Atlantic. It seemed to me that the other essays were added for the primary purpose of getting to a book length.

A final problem is that there really wasn’t a ‘where do we go from here’. There was some pablum about strengthening our local press, extending the New Deal, strong unions, and such, but these are all horses that have long left the barn.

We have to strive to create a new America, an Equal America. OK, I’ll get right on that. 

These Disunited States Of America

Title: American Nations

Rating: 5 Stars

Like the Battle Cry of Freedom, this is one of those nonfiction books that I feel compelled to read every couple of years. This is, I believe, the third or fourth time that I’ve read it. Even now, I’m not sure if I believe its main thesis. I do appreciate authors who take big swings at an interesting question and proposes bold and unique explanations.

In this case, the big question is, despite this deep rooted image of us Americans being one people that united together to defeat the British, that temporarily split over the issue of slavery, but since then have thought of ourselves as one people, why do we hate each so much? Why does one state highly prioritize education while another state used to have a ban on all public education in its state constitution? Why does one state work hard to get as many people as possible to vote while another state actively puts hurdles to prevent its people from voting? Why does one state try to implement governmental programs while another state thinks that governments should be drowned in bathtubs?

In Colin Woodard’s book, he proposes that in fact we are not one people. He proposes that the United States is actually comprised of eleven separate nations, all founded at different times by different people that had different priorities. Events like the Revolutionary War or the Civil War came about when various subsets of these nations united to fight an external power or to fight each other.

What are these nations?

Yankeedom: Founded by the Pilgrims / Puritans, its primary purpose was to create a state that reflected their religious beliefs (they were definitely not interested in religious freedom). Part of their belief system involved having a more personal relationship with God. Since this implied that a citizen should be able to read the bible, public education was prioritized. This also resulted in the expectation that citizens would play a significant role in government (eg town halls). John Adams is a citizen of this nation.

Deep South: The bitter enemies of Yankeedom, it was founded by descendants of Barbados slave owners. Barbados was notorious even during that time for being the cruelest of the slave nations. Being an island, the owners rapidly ran out of land. Seeing opportunity in the deep Southern states, children of these slave owners came over and recreated their culture there. It sought to recreate the old Roman culture where the few could live a life of idle luxury while their enslaved did all of the work. Accordingly, they believed in a oligarchical government with the great mass of people kept in uneducated ignorance. John Calhoun is a good example of a citizen of this nation.

New Netherland: Essentially New York City, it was founded by the Dutch and chartered by the Dutch West India Company. Established purely for commercial reasons, it valued trading and generally just making money. Given this commercial focus, it was quite diverse and accepting of most cultures.

Tidewater: Cut off from territorial expansion, its importance died off but was key in the early days of the country (Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe all came out of Tidewater). Founded by younger sons of English aristocracy, it tried to recreate that type of government here.

Midlands: Founded by Quakers, this nation is marked by religious freedom and relative passivity. This is one of the key ‘swing’ nations that other nations try to recruit to join whatever cause they’re espousing.

Greater Appalachia: Populated by people coming from places like the Scottish Irish border lands, they are used to hard scrabble existences and having to fight for everything they want. Violent, quick to anger, and full of pride, they have eagerly fought in every battle in our country’s history (think Andrew Jackson).

Other nations include the oldest nation, the Spanish influenced El Norte, the Yankeedom influenced Left Coast, the corporate run / government subsidized Far West, and two nations whose prominence is most felt in Canada, First Nation and New France.

When you look at our history through the prism of these nations, some things begin to make sense. It explains why New York City was pro-English during the Revolutionary War. It explains why Yankeedom and Deep South went toe to toe during the Civil War (and in so doing, brought in allies from the other nations). It explains the paradox of how some Western states both hate the government and also are deeply subsidized by it.

It seems odd that the motives and philosophies of founders can still resonate now, several centuries later. Woodard cites sources that demonstrates that even a low number of founders can have a disproportionate impact for generations.

Although illuminating, it is also kind of depressing for me. Even though I no longer live there, I spent so much time there that I am definitely a Left Coaster. I believe in education, rationality, equality, and using technology to improve our lives. I want to believe that ultimately we’re on a path of progress that will eventually lead us to a point in our future where such common sense ideas (at least to me) will have universal appeal. Reading this book convinces me that this will not happen. There are parts of our country that are utterly inimical to such ideas and no amount of persuasion will change their minds.

These nations aren’t set by artificial boundaries like state lines. Woodard used extensive voting information by county to construct a detailed true boundary of each of these nations (shown on the cover of the book). It’s not even clear how these nations could be rationally split apart. It would appear that the entire US history to come will be a continuing struggle as various combinations of these nations try to attain supremacy.

As I said at the top, I don’t know if I’m completely sold on this. Could the behavior of a nation with a population of 330 million be explained by a small number of settlers from 400 years ago? It seems shady, but Woodard does provide some pretty compelling evidence and commentary. Over the course of my life, it does seem to explain behavior that otherwise seems inexplicable.

Seriously, It Was About Slavery

Title: Battle Cry Of Freedom

Rating: 5 Stars

Let’s get the easy part out of the way first. This is generally considered the best one volume history of the American Civil War. It’s one of the finest histories that I’ve read of any period. I believe that this is the fourth time that I’ve read it. Sure, it’s a bit long (clocking in at around 870 pages), but it covers not just the war but the decade or so leading up to it. It covers, among many other things, the Wilmot Proviso, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Compromise of 1850, the Lincoln Douglas debates, Bleeding Kansas, and John Brown. Not only is it complete, but the narrative form in which it is written makes for propulsive reading. Even though it’s based upon historical events that took place over 150 years ago, I found myself on the edge of my seat rooting on the boys in blue. I really can’t recommend this book enough.

Without exhaustively going into all of the ways that the book is wonderful, let me just concentrate on just a few of the interesting things that I read.

In writing about another book about this period of time, I entitled the post It’s The Slavery, Stupid (click here to read it). In the many decades since these events have taken place, many people have tried to muddy the waters of the roots of the war. In some cases this was even done for understandable reasons. After a horrendous war, somehow the country had to be stitched back together. If it took one side talking about states’ rights or bravely standing up to the tyranny of the North or things like that, so be it.

Well, it’s been long enough that we don’t have to do that anymore. A simple look at the speeches of the time put the lie to any high flown theoretical arguments. It was about slaves. Since the founding of the country, Southern politicians had dominated the federal government. After all, of the first dozen presidents, the only ones that did not own slaves had the last name of Adams.

As our nation expanded westward, it became clear that most of this additional territory was not conducive to using enslaved labor. At the same time, the population of the Northern states was greatly outstripping that of the South. Those two facts led Southern politicians to the inescapable conclusion that they would inevitably lose power in the House and in the Senate.

They addressed this by attempting to expand our country Southward where slave labor could still be used. There were fairly serious talks with Spain to acquire Cuba. There was talk of taking over Mexico and some people even attempted to take over governments in Central America.

None of it came to pass. When Lincoln was elected President, even though he specifically said that he did not plan to limit slavery where it was already in place (in fact, he believed that he could not due to constitutional issues), the fact that he was not willing to extend slavery was just too much for the Southern leadership to bear.

In the years leading up to the Civil War, everything that inflamed the Southern leadership was based on slavery. Alexander Stephen’s famous Cornerstone speech specifically called out slavery. The Confederate constitution was a near copy of the US constitution except for provisions preventing slavery from ever being curtailed.

Another interesting fact is how deluded the South was. They legitimately thought that one Confederate soldier could beat ten Union soldiers. They thought that England would immediately recognize them once the Confederacy withheld their precious cotton from their looms. They overlooked the massive population, manufacturing, and transportation advantages of the North. Even in the later years when it was clear that the Confederate army and economy would be destroyed, they were still thinking that they could somehow make some magic happen. As I read the book, I was continually being reminded of the Black Knight, the Monty Python character that still wanted to continue to fight even after his arms and legs were cut off.

As much as Robert E Lee is lionized in the South, it seems to me that he was the exact wrong general to lead the Confederacy. He was a military genius, but his personality was that of a gambler, always willing to bet it all on the next throw.

The Confederacy was such a large area that occupying it would have been insanely expensive if not impossible for the Northern states. Therefore, what was important to the Confederacy wasn’t to win some impressive military victory over the North but not to lose. For example, you can’t point to any victories of the Taliban over the United States, but after a 20 year war, guess who’s running Afghanistan?

However, Lee (and to be fair, most of the leaders of the South), playing not to lose was not in his personality. Both of his invasions of the North ended in Southern tragedy. His failed battle at Antietam resulted in Lincoln issuing the Emancipation Proclamation and his failed battle at Gettysburg took away any future initiatives. In my opinion, James Longstreet, with his defensive mindset, would have made a more effective strategist for the Confederacy.

Finally, it’s amazing how much the Southern leaders gambled and lost. In 1861, Lincoln had no plans to stop slavery in their states. By the end of the war, all of their slaves had been freed, their railroads destroyed, their land burned, and, if I recollect, some twenty-five percent of their fighting age male population was dead. Even their cotton was no longer king. During the four year period of the war when the South’s cotton exports dropped so propitiously, the English found other cotton sources in India and Egypt.

Before the war, the Southern states were some of the wealthiest states. Now, when I look at the latest list of the poorest states in the US, in the bottom fifteen I see (in order of largest poverty rate): Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina. Nine of the fifteen poorest states all were part of the Confederacy. The only two Confederacy states that were not in the bottom fifteen were Virginia and Florida. Since the Civil War was 160 years ago, that strikes me as an amazing result.

Read Battle Cry of Freedom. Who knows but you might find yourself turning into a Civil War geek.

Let’s Go Dark Brandon!

I am not a fan of Joe Biden. I didn’t support any of his previous runs for the presidency and I certainly didn’t support him running in 2020 when he was 77 years old. There was such a wide array of younger, smarter, and more charismatic candidates to choose from. Just a bit off topic, but it kind of drives me crazy that it was the South Carolina primary that brought his candidacy back from the dead. There was no way that the Democratic party was going to carry the state of South Carolina in the general election. It seems incomprehensible to me that a political party would allow a state that it had no chance of winning to play such a huge role in their nominating process. But I digress.

Once Biden received the nomination, I really had no choice. There was no possibility that I was going to vote for Donald Trump. So, when thankfully, Biden won the election, I was relieved but was not expecting a significant presidency. If Biden had done nothing more than restore some presidential norms that had been destroyed during the Trump presidency, then I would have counted it as a success.

Given my very low expectations, what has Biden accomplished?

The number one crisis that our country faces is the coronavirus. During Biden’s presidency, 600 million vaccinations have been administered. Sure, there have definitely been ebbs and flows of infections and even now, some 500 or so Americans die daily from coronavirus. If you’d asked me in 2019, I would have been shocked that so many Americans are choosing to die of what is now largely a preventable/treatable disease. There’s probably still some exceptions, but everyone who wants one can get a no cost vaccine. 600 million vaccinations is an impressive achievement.

Even after so short a period of time has passed, people have forgotten how bad our economy was doing during the peak of COVID. The 1.9 trillion dollar American Rescue Plan, passed barely two months after he was inaugurated, was designed to address that. In addition to expanding COVID vaccinations and testing, it prevented evictions and provided support to small businesses. An argument can be made that it was inflationary. Even if it wasn’t perfect, it was a needed shot to keep America afloat during a troubled time. Looking at other countries that are in deep recessions or experiencing even more inflation, it’s clear to me that it was much needed.

In recovering from COVID, during Biden’s term at least nine million jobs have been created. The unemployment rate is now around 3.5%. That’s the lowest level in fifty years.

Every President talks about infrastructure. The US infrastructure is showing its age. Politicians usually like such projects because it brings pork to their district or state. Even though passing an infrastructure bill has been a top priority for past Presidents, there has not been much to show for it. During the Trump presidency, infrastructure week became a running joke. Well, a 1.2 trillion dollar deal was signed by Biden. Not only does it target traditional infrastructure needs like roads, bridges, and railroads, it also seeks improvements in such things as internet speed and availability.

Another catastrophe looming in our future is climate change. Even if you don’t believe it’s human caused (despite pretty much all scientific evidence to the contrary), there is no disputing that the Southwest is running out of water or that California is burning. With one party denying climate change and with a few Democratic senators in the pocket of fossil fuels, any progress would seem unlikely. Lo and behold, Biden signed into law the 770 billion dollar Inflation Reduction Act. To be fair, it supposedly does reduce the government deficit, but it was named that probably just to appease Joe Manchin. Even so, over 350 billion dollars of it is targeted towards climate change. This is by far the largest such investment that the US has ever made.

There’s other things in that bill as well. First the first time in over a decade, Medicare will now be able to negotiate drug prices. That’s a huge win if you’re interested in controlling medical inflation. It also forces corporations to pay a minimum tax. You can argue what an effective tax rate for a multi-billion dollar corporate should be, but it probably should not be zero and it should definitely not be negative. Assuming that you’re not a tax cheat, you should also cheer on increased IRS enforcement. The IRS is currently severely underpowered in comparison to wealthy corporations and elites. Let’s hope that this levels the playing field a bit.

Maybe you care about international competitiveness. You complain that the US doesn’t build anything anymore. You think that we should bring some of our manufacturing back on shore. Well, there’s the CHIPS and Science Act. Among other things, it will invest 52 billion dollars into semiconductor research and manufacturing. Given how computers are so integrated into everything, including but not limited to defense weapons, this seems to be a prudent investment.

Maybe you worry about our overseas wars. Well, after twenty years, forces were withdrawn from Afghanistan. Clearly, this was not a pretty process. Biden deserves criticism for saying that it wouldn’t be another Saigon when clearly it was precisely going to be another Saigon. Things like Saigon happen when you lose wars. We went to war in Afghanistan to drive the Taliban out. Within a month of our departure, the Taliban were back. That, by any standard, was a defeat. However, after 2,500 US soldiers’ lives lost and some 2.3 trillion dollars spent, the defeat was inevitable. What were we going to do? Spend another twenty years there? For what? So that the Afghan government would last two months? The withdrawal was ugly but necessary.

As messy as Afghanistan was, the US approach in Ukraine has been stellar. If Putin had occupied Ukraine, NATO countries like Latvia would have been seriously at risk. If we had committed armed forces to Ukraine, it could have easily become a world war. By supplying a very willing and able Ukraine military with weapons primarily of self defense, the cost to Putin has been significant. Even more importantly, it dramatically strengthened the Western European alliance. Putin, far from weakening NATO, has strengthened it with the pending membership of Sweden and Finland. This has been a masterful example of international strategy.

If you’re more of a red meat kind of person who has not forgotten 9/11, how about the death by drone of Ayman al-Zawahiri? He was bin Laden’s second in command and took over al-Qaeda after bin Laden’s death.

Conservatives like to brag about all of the justices that were appointed during the Trump administration. Well, the Biden administration has appointed more judges at this point in its term than any other since the Reagan administration.

There have been a couple of long standing priorities in the progressive movement. One of them was college debt forgiveness. The Biden administration published a plan that will forgive up to 20,000 dollars of debt. This will affect over forty million Americans. Gun control is also high on the progressive priority list.  The Biden administration signed into law the first significant gun control law in thirty years. Personally, I’m not that impressed by it. Serious gun control would require so much more than what was passed in this bill. Even so, passing the first gun control bill in thirty years is significant.

That’s a lot! Keep in mind that all of this was done while the Biden administration had a slim majority in the House and a Senate that is 50/50.

I totally get that some of these achievements might be politically toxic to some. Even so, the sheer scale of accomplishments is impressive, irrespective of your politic beliefs. Notice that in nearly all of these cases, no one really got all they wanted. Progressives did not get all they wanted. Environmentalists did not get all they wanted. Gun control advocates did not get all they wanted. Seemingly forgotten, compromise is the essence of politics. The Biden administration accomplishments are the fruit of political compromise.

The Fox narrative that Biden is senile and incompetent seems laughable. Don’t get me wrong. Biden has lost a step. He’s not charismatic. I’m certainly not saying that he’s personally responsible for all of these accomplishments, but he has created an environment in which highly competent professionals focused on top priority items can get stuff done.

This is so much better than a President that seemed more focused on shit posting on Twitter.

Meta Pseudo Semi Post Modern Reality

Title: The Rehearsal

Rating: 5 Stars

Reality shows, from their inception (whether you want to count An American Family or MTV’s Real World) have always been weird. On the one hand, the people on the show are real people. They are using their real names, are thrown together, and are told to act natural. On the other hand, there is the heavy hand of the producers and the editors. The characters (people?) are thrown into situations designed to provoke a response. The participants’ responses are then heavily edited so that each can appear to be of a certain archetype that most of us can now recognize (the slutty, drunken woman, the angry person of color, the sensitive non-binary, and so on). Not only that but the people in the show already know all of this and thus color their own reality to match the show’s expectations. It’s a wilderness of mirrors of what is or is not reality. If he was still alive, I’d be interested in what Marshall McLulan and his “medium is the message” philosophy would make of all of this.

Well if the typical reality show is a wilderness of mirrors, Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal is a multi-dimensional, interstellar, cascading chaos of mirrors.

It starts off innocuously. The central concept is that Nathan believes that any situation can be successfully managed with enough preparation. It’s crucial that every possible contingency be planned and rehearsed. By doing so, when the actual event occurs, the person will be so prepared that it is guaranteed to be successful.

This is demonstrated in the first episode. By supposedly recruiting from CraigsList, Nathan finds a viable candidate. It’s a man who for years has posed as having an advanced degree to members of his trivia group. The guilt of lying eats at him. He wants to confess to one of his trivia friends but is concerned that he’s lied about it for so long that she will consider it a betrayal. Since his trivia group is so important to him, being ostracized from it would be personally disastrous.

Nathan steps in. He builds an exact replica in a warehouse of the bar where the man will confess. He hires actors to populate the bar. One actor, under a ruse, manages to interview the woman that he will confess to so that she can understand her personality and mannerisms when rehearsing with the man.

The man and the actor pretending to be his friend endlessly rehearse. Every possible scenario is practiced. Standing nearby is Nathan, with a laptop, continually updating an increasingly complex diagram describing all of the possibilities.

At the same time that this is unfolding, we discover some other truths. Nathan is himself afraid of failing and is himself rehearsing. He builds a replica of the man’s apartment and practices meeting him. Also, Nathan is worried that, while he’s confessing, a poor trivia score will throw off the man’s attention. Therefore, he covertly learns the trivia questions that will be asked during the evening and then secretly gives the man answers in a seemingly free flowing conversation.

Do you see how byzantine this can quickly get? And here’s the thing, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

In subsequent episodes, they center upon a woman named Angela. She is a woman that wants to know if she’d like raising a child. Nathan sets her up in a house. Since it’s a time limited experiment, Nathan decides that something like every three weeks will age the child three years.

It starts with an infant. Due to work labor laws, the infants can only work so many hours. The infants are therefore periodically exchanged through a bedroom window. At night, a mechanical baby programmed to cry like a real baby is placed in the bed.

The woman does not plan to raise the child alone. Nathan first tries to match her up with a man. When that doesn’t work out, Nathan steps in and acts the role of the father.

At one point, Nathan thinks that the actors that he’s using are not equipped to perform the all inclusive roles that he’s defined for them. He proceeds to set up an acting school for the purpose of teaching actors how to insert themselves into another person’s life and to then take on their personality and mannerisms. He notices that one actor does not seem to be picking up his techniques. He’s worried that he’s not an effective teacher.

Yep, you guessed it, Nathan sets up a fake Fielder acting school. He acts as the problem student with a fake Nathan Fielder trying to teach him the technique. I won’t go into any more details, but the snake eats its own tail even more later in the episode.

At a certain point, it all falls apart. Angela leaves. Nathan, after a conversation with his parents, is wondering if he’s even capable of being a father. In Angela’s absence, Nathan, now just himself, continues the rehearsal.

When the rehearsal finally stops, one of the boys, himself fatherless, is having trouble detaching himself from Nathan, continuing to call him daddy. This concerns Nathan. He tries to solve it by, yep, more rehearsals. He rehearses with a different 8 year old child, a teenager acting like an 8 year old child, and a life size child’s doll. To try to help the child, he rehearses by playing the part of the child’s mom (yes, the child’s mom) to yet another fake Nathan Fielder.

What the actual fuck is going on here?

The answer is, no one knows. Not only that, but no one is supposed to know. We know that Angela is a real person. Also, Angela has some acting experience. Does Angela actually really think that Halloween is run by Satanists and, for that matter, as is Google? No one knows.

Are those Fielder’s actual parents? No one knows. It is true that Fielder recently went through a divorce. Is all of this some sublimation of his fears of basic unsuitability as a husband, father, or man? No one knows!

Is the little boy acting when he calls Nathan daddy? You’d think that there’s no way a child could fake that. Well, when Nathan does his rehearsal with a knowing child actor consciously acting the lines, the child actor seems just as believable.

In all of this, Nathan has the emotional range of Buster Keaton. He appears to be trying to make emotional connections but his blankness leaves all of his interactions cold. Is this stiffness and emotional unavailability real or is Nathan acting? No one knows!

That’s the brilliance of it. This is reality television through the mind of MC Escher. The show’s logic twist and turns upon itself until you’re left bewildered.

The Glamorous Life Of A Road Comic

Title: Running The Light

Rating: 4 Stars

Many years ago, sometimes back in the late 1980s, I remember going to a comedy club (Swannies Comedy Underground in Seattle). The headliner was a comedian named John Fox. I’d never heard of him.

When his time came, he walked to the stage and grabbed the mike. There was no ‘Hello Seattle, how ya doing’ or compliments on what a great crowd it was. The first words out of his mouth were, “Two firemen were in a smoke filled room butt fucking”.

And it went on from there. There was no observational humor. There were no personal anecdotes. There was no arc. It was all jokes. No joke was longer than probably fifteen seconds. It was machine gun comedy.

And he killed. He owned that room like Jeff Bezos. In hindsight, his jokes weren’t even all that funny. None of them were particularly memorable. He just took over the stage and willed us to laugh. And we did. We were gasping for breath by the time that he was done.

Years later, I think it might have been the mid 1990s, I decided to see comedy. I checked, and much to my surprise, John Fox was once again headlining at the Underground. I remember how much I enjoyed it, so I decided to watch him again. I go the show. Fox is introduced. He comes out on the stage, looking a little bit worse for the wear. The first words out of his mouth were, “Two firemen were in a smoke filled room buttfucking.”

Five or six years later, ninety percent of his act was, word for word, identical. And to be clear, once again he killed. John Fox was one of the classic road comedians.

John Fox died of cancer back in 2012. If you ever listen to Marc Maron’s WTF podcast when he’s interviewing an older comedian, there’s a chance that they might have a John Fox anecdote. When his name is mentioned, you can almost hear Maron sigh and think, here we go. Fox’s antics were so famous that someone made a song about it called The Legend of John Fox (click here to listen).

Why am I writing about this anecdote? Well, speaking of Maron’s podcast, some time ago he had Sam Tallent on. Tallent is a career comedian that knows something about road comedy, given that he performs some forty-five weekends a year at clubs. His debut novel is about seven days in the life of a road comic named Billy Ray Shafer.

As a young man, Shafer drifted into a life of crime. He became a transporter of drugs. Ultimately he got caught with drugs and sentenced to serve several years in prison. There he discovered that he could make even convicts laugh. The warden decided to advertise Shafer’s comedy to prove the rehabilitative benefits of prison.

Given Shafer’s talent, this sideways publicity was enough and he became a very successful comedian. He married a woman that adored him and had two sons. He received large sums of money.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Shafter was not able to keep any of it. Alcohol, drugs, and infidelity took away all of it. His wife divorced him. His two children are no longer in contact with him. All of his money is gone. Only people of a certain age have vague memories of him appearing on The Tonight Show. He’s going from gig to gig, hoping to make enough money just to survive. If he has a dream at all, it’s possibly to get a gig on a cruise line, infamously the last stop in the career of a hack comic.

It’s at this point that we meet him. He has one night stands at bars that don’t do comedy. He has a gig at the bachelor party at a masonic lodge. He has a gig cancelled on him due to a kitchen problem. His lowest gig is the one where his opening act is the owner of a duck. A large bingo like card is laid out on the ground and people bid on which square the duck will shit on. Upon talking to the duck owner, it turns out that the duck owner is making significantly more money than Shafer.

To be clear, Shafer is not a good guy. Shafer does copious amounts of drugs, taking whatever he can from whoever willing to offer it to him. He is constantly drinking as much free booze and free food that he can from whatever venue that is hosting him. He has anonymous, promiscuous sex. He beats people up, even if they don’t have it coming to him. He is robbed and beaten. He wrecks a rental car. Every place that he leaves is in a worse state than when he entered it.

But here’s the thing. Even though he’s a horrible person clearly on a downward trajectory towards ruin and probably death, he really does have a gift. Like John Fox, he is a truly professional road comedian that knows precisely what is required to win a crowd over. The hour a night that he spends on stage is a time where his demons seem to be kept at bay.

The other thing about Shafer is that he might not be irremediable. At times, despite his destructive and addictive behavior, he understands that he once had it all, that he lost it, and that it was all completely his fault. By the end of the novel, he is making tiny steps towards reestablishing some kind of relationship with his ex-wife and one of his sons. Although he found it humiliating, his final performance of the week was a deeply personal act from his heart that, of all people, Norm Macdonald, said was brilliant.

Can it be that there might be a chance of redemption for Billy Ray? Is there a path for him? Considering the downward arc that his life goes through just in the course of a week, you might be able to guess the answer to that. The primary reason why I didn’t give it five stars is that the ending was just a little too pat for me. I saw it coming from a mile away, and yep, there it was.

Even so, I’ve been listening to Marc Maron’s WTF for well over ten years. My favorite interviews are always with long time comedians as they talk about life as a comedian. Comedians are, at least from that sample size, broken people bravely fighting their demons publicly and on stage.

Running the Light tells a great story of a week in the life of one of these deeply flawed people.

It’s The Trees’ World; We’re Just Destroying It

Title: The Overstory

Rating: 4 Stars

I make an effort to read as many Pulitzer Prize Fiction winners as I can. Of the past sixty winners, I’ve probably read at least fifty. The Overstory was the 2019 winner.

Unlike most of the previous winners, I honestly don’t know how I feel about it. It’s nearly impossible for me to give it a ranking. There were times as I read it that I would have easily given it five stars. There were other times when I was convinced that I was reading a two star novel.

First of all, there’s the sprawling plot. It focuses on nine different characters. There’s a Vietnam war vet that was part of the Stanford prison experiment. There’s the paralyzed brilliant software developer looking to write software that connects people as he himself lives in isolation. There’s a troubled married couple that share a love of amateur acting. There is a dendrologist specializing in tree communication. There’s a directionless college student that becomes an eco warrior. There’s an Asian engineer with a love of trees inspired by her father. There’s an artist inspired by nature. There’s a psychologist studying people with extremist beliefs.

As you can imagine, setting these stories takes a bit of time. The first third or so of the novel covers the origin stories of each of these nine characters.

Eventually, five of the main characters, concerned about the environmental damage that humans are inflicting upon the planet, come together. Moving from peaceful protests like tree sitting to prevent logging, they ultimately end up committing violent acts. One such act ends in the death of one of the characters. That is the second third of the novel.

The final third is the characters’ lives after the explosion. The four surviving members of the explosion are living quiet if not underground lives, constantly on the fear of arrest.

At the same time, the software developer is getting rich developing an immersive gaming experience. The married couple are estranged and are on the verge of divorce until the man has a stroke that renders him nearly immobile and voiceless. The dendrologist (expert in trees), once derided for her views on the sophisticated behavior of trees, is now redeemed with a best selling book but is desperately concerned about the state of the planet.

From this description, you might understand some of my dilemma. There’s a lot going on, but much of it is at best loosely connected. Some subplots were quite engaging. Others not so much

At its heart, this is an environmental or ecological novel. All characters end up being concerned with the survival of trees, ranging from acts of violence in protest to performing groundbreaking science in the service of trees or even to letting their yard grow wild as an act of rebellion.

At the same time that all of these plots unfold, real facts and data are brought to bear. Since humans have taken over the planet, half of all trees have disappeared. Since trees are so crucial to nature’s lifecycle, the cascading repercussions of this destruction include countless number of species going extinct and unknown life saving medicine being lost. We are the seeds of our own destruction.

An underlying theme of the novel is that when we endanger nature, we’re not actually endangering nature, we’re endangering ourselves. No matter what we throw at it, nature will adapt. When humans cease to exist, it’s only a matter of time before nature reclaims all of our farm land, carefully manicured lawns, and the cities in which we live. If you can imagine our planet’s life to date taking place in the span of a day, humans only appear four seconds to midnight. At our most destructive, we barely register as a speed bump.

Having so many apparently disparate plots that are, upon deeper reflection, loosely connected, matches with the behavior of trees and forests. Apparently in some cases, what appears to be an entire forest is really only just one unimaginably complex tree. Trees communicate with each other via techniques that we’re just barely beginning to understand. One type of tree will provide another type of tree nutrients that it has somehow signaled that it needs. Since trees can live for centuries, this communication, sometimes at the deep root level, moves at such a slow pace that it is nearly imperceptible to human sensitivities.

The fact that all of this biological philosophy is communicated in a novel while at the same time telling nine distinct stories is astonishing. For Richard Powers, it truly is a tour de force and unquestionably deserving of the Pulitzer Prize.

This is one of those novels that I appreciated and admired both for its message and its brilliant writing but I have to say that I didn’t really enjoy it. For a work of fiction, it took me much longer than normal to finish and there were times that I felt disengaged with it.

Even so, it’s an important novel trying to communicate an urgent message.

Verhoeven Taking The Piss Out Of Heinlein

Title: Starship Troopers

Rating: 4 Stars

After Robocop and Total Recall, Starship Troopers is the last of the three Verhoeven films set in the near future that I planned to watch.

Starship Troopers is a remake of Robert Heinlein’s novel. I read it a couple of years ago. I titled it Sparta in Space and the link is here. To recap, the plot was fast paced and exciting. The politics of the novel is problematic, but considering the time in which it was written (1959, at the height of the Cold War where it seemed to many that we were fighting for our way of life, if not existence), I was able to at least feel some empathy for it.

Apparently, Verhoeven did not. The story is that he read the first several chapters of Heinlein’s novel but could not finish it. He had others summarize it for him. He then proceeded to create a film that makes a mockery of it.

Let’s get right to the plot. Set in the 23rd century, Earth is now under one quasi-fascist government. It has separated its people into citizens and civilians. Citizens are those that have volunteered for military duty and have served their government. They are an exalted people that embody the loyalty and duty that the government requires. Only citizens are allowed to vote and to enter politics and, apparently are more likely to be given permission to bear children.

Civilians are everybody else. They’re not overtly discriminated against, but, to citizens, civilians are leaches that reap the benefits but are unwilling to shoulder the burdens of the state.

Johnny Rico is a handsome young man who’s just a bit feckless. Rico has no great desire to be a citizen. His parents, civilians both, encourage him not to enlist. However, his girlfriend and best friend plan to become citizens, so he pretty much spontaneously decides to enlist. While his much smarter and talented friends land plum careers, his middling test scores and aptitude tests lands him straight into mobile infantry.

Here, we see the brutality of war. The human race is in a deadly fight against an alien force that resemble large insects. Training for the infantry is brutal. The leaders are pitiless. Infantry soldiers are dropped into alien worlds where they are overwhelmed by the insect attackers. Rico gets seriously injured. Friends, lovers, and mentors drop like flies.

Through it all, Rico continues to get promoted. By the end of the film, he’s the acknowledged leader of his unit and he’s a battle hardened, brutally effective clone of the men before him.

He is now worthy of the title citizen.

This film reminds me a bit of Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove. Based upon a thriller novel, apparently Kubrick first tried to make a serious film but the absurdity of nuclear war eventually led him to making a great comedy instead.

Make no doubt about it, Heinlein’s novel is not in any way ironic. He is absolutely earnest in his future world of duty / loyalty and the benefits of those who make the sacrifice to become a citizen.

Verhoeven’s film is quite different. The world government has pretty overt Nazi style elements. The film features state propaganda that appears Stalinist in its subtlety. Dehumanizing the opponent is the first step taken in a total war. Here, it’s explicit because the opponent aren’t human but are grotesque insects. There is propaganda footage encouraging children to stomp cockroaches dead so that even the youngest can feel part of the total war effort.

It’s not clear if it was intentional or not, but the acting, with only a couple of exceptions, is pretty uniformly wooden. Now, you wouldn’t expect a great performance from someone like a Denise Richards, but so many of the other actors appear nearly without affect that it certainly seems possible that it was intentional. In a fascist, propaganda-full world where the individual is nothing more than cannon fodder for the state, having people essentially be vacuous blank slates does not seem unreasonable.

As with the other Verhoeven films I’ve watched, the violence is extreme. Since this is a war film, the violence is even more explicit and graphic. Soldiers are torn apart on screen. In the aftermath of a battle, body pieces are strewn throughout the field. Again, I have no idea if it was intentional, but many of the battle scenes seem reminiscent of actual battles. The military infantry landing on the alien planet looked like D-Day. When the soldiers were trapped at a remote outpost, the insect attack reminded me of legends surrounding the Alamo. Finally, walking the battlefield littered with the dead reminded me of Mathew Brady’s Civil War pictures.

From what I remember when it was released (1997), it was pretty controversial for its nudity and its violence. I remember that people were upset at the glorification of pitiless war. If so, it’s pretty clear to me with the hindsight of some 25 years that those people were really missing the point.

Verhoeven was lampooning the idea of total war by a totalitarian, fascist world government. If you have a stomach for the extreme violence, then there’s a good chance that you’ll find the film caustically amusing. It certainly is no Dr Strangelove, but I did find it entertaining.

Now that I’ve completed my little Verhoeven film festival, where do they rank? Robocop is pretty clearly on top, followed by Starship Troopers, and lagging far back in the rear, Total Recall.