An Imagined Order

                Languaging, Maturana said, is a way of bringing a world into being that we share with others and not a way of describing the world as it already exists.  In his book, Sapiens, Harari calls these new creations “imagined orders.”  We find ourselves in one of those moments where the imagined order has broken down and a new one has not yet emerged to take its place.  Times like these are always fraught with anxiety and uncertainty.  We tend to think of the Renaissance as this glorious flowering of art and invention, but for the people who lived it, it was hell.  In the rear-view mirror, imagined orders look stable, even inevitable, but in the moment of their creation they seem anything but.

                We stand at moment of great wealth and power – the greatest the world has ever known.  Mad men and idiots have the power to destroy the planet.  Fossil fuel robber barons are threating our survival trying to extract the last drop of oil the way a junkie frantically craves the last drop of their fix.  The greatest power of the last century is caught in a Dadaist travesty of noise and decay.  But amidst the chaos and cacophony a new story is starting to take shape.  It is currently being told in small tribal pieces, but a quilt of meaning is starting to slowly take shape.  Its successful creation is anything but certain.  We may not make it.  Much is stacked against it.

                It will be a difficult story to tell.  It won’t have something like the Edict of Milan to mark a clear distinction between past and future.  It won’t be the product of elites leading the masses.  It likely won’t produce constitutions and legal codes.  It won’t revolve around a central power.  It won’t be run by men.  The languaging of this new order will be localized and fragile until it becomes as strong as the root system of the grasslands.  It is a story that embraces contradiction and paradox over certainty and uniformity.  It will not be written by AI bots.  If it is to be written at all, it has to allow new voices and new ways of being to gradually build the resilience and strength to be heard.

                Some are already calling it a failure.  They say we need truth and order, forgetting that the truth and order they refer to was written in the blood of those oppressed by the old order.  We will have to be tolerant.  We will have to learn how to be still.  We have to learn to respect chaos – the thing the Egyptians and Greeks feared the most.  We have to learn how to recognize when we are wrong, and we have to learn to recognize each other.  It will have to start small and stay flexible and contingent.  We can all play a part – we can all be a witness.

                I hear the imperfect cords of this new harmony in Black Lives Matter and in #MeToo.  They have in common the demand that the silenced be heard, that the invisible be seen.  They challenge the old order’s habit of assigning moral clarity to a privileged few.  They broaden the scope and add to the range of the narrative.  They are a long way from being perfect.  The key will be if all of these new singers can recognize the choir.  Their stories need each other.  Right now, that isn’t happening, and it would be foolish to expect it to so soon in the process.  There is a long way to go.

                Can we learn how to equal without being alike?  The language and concepts of the old order will not help.  If we don’t escape the language of the old order it will pull us back in to the same contradictions and limitations it took so long to finally see and resist.  Can we embrace both science and poetry as essential and not fall into the desert of another false Enlightenment?  We are, as Beckett once said, “between a death and a difficult birth.”  This is going to require another leap in consciousness that involves more than a priesthood or professorate.  In the process we may even rediscover and redefine what it means to be ‘human.’  Like anybody getting ready for a life-changing move, it’s time to sort through the attic and decide what to throw away.

                This is all going to seem very frustrating and illusory until it suddenly seems inevitable and natural – until we can’t remember ever not thinking this way.  I don’t expect to be there when that happens.  This is a long road.  But I can lend whatever energy I have left to telling and listening to the stories we have to tell, to put the children to sleep and keep watch in the night.

First, They Came for the Schools

                In 1983, the Carnegie Commission issued a report entitled, A Nation at Risk.  That report accelerated an all- out war on public education.  It turned schools into outlets of the textbook and testing industry and helped kick-start a war on teachers.  The report used data from tests that have since been challenged as unreliable and invalid.  It compiled test scores without reference to age, income, race or gender and concluded that schools were failing, although there was little objective evidence to support that conclusion.  Three and a half decades later, America’s schools have been reduced to detention centers, drug providers and failed technical training centers.  In the bargain, we’ve lost faith in education and see it as merely a means to employment.

                After more than 70 years of mass education through high school, economic inequality is either as bad as it’s ever been or the worst it’s ever been.  Democracy in America has been hijacked by political parties addicted to dark money and less than half of the people eligible to vote do so.  Whatever lofty goals the nation had for our schools coming out of WWII, it’s time to admit that we haven’t been able to reach them.  In fact, it’s time to admit that things are worse.  If there is going to be another chapter of American Democracy, that narrative is going to have include in it an alternative and radically reconfigured idea of school.

                First, we have to face the fact that schools cannot function equally or effectively when the country fails to address the social and economic disparity in our society.  It is ludicrous and beyond cynical to send children who are homeless, malnourished, without parents who live in violent settings to school and expect an underpaid and under supported teacher to perform a magic trick.  Schools are not the corrective to our cultural problems, they are a reflection of them.  If we want, and I don’t think we really do, an equal and fair quality education for all of our children, then we have to address the conditions those children live in away from school.  What we have done instead is to create a text book and testing industry that sucks resources out of our schools and funnels them to companies that produce tests and curricula that replicate the economic and social divides in our country.  If you want your child to do well on the standardized tests their being force fed, you better make enough money to move to a nice neighborhood and nice school.

                Second, we have to stop blaming teachers for everything that’s wrong with schools.  Education might be the only example where ‘capitalists’ have decided that paying less and reducing benefits is the best way to improve performance.  Teaching should be an attractive profession that is able to keep motivated teachers from leaving.  The opposite is true.  In too many cases, we have taken away the ability to teach and replaced it with test monitoring.  Tests mean nothing if the things being tested lack value in the real world.  Teachers are only part of the education puzzle.  They have to be supported and allowed to use their intelligence and creativity.  If you don’t think they possess those characteristics, they shouldn’t be teaching.

                Most importantly, we need to rethink what we think an education is.  Is it just the mastery of some random, socially contextualized facts?  Is it only about memory and recall?  A dogmatic education only works in a culture where change is minimal.  Ours is not that kind of culture.  Children are going to need the ability to imagine and connect with other people.  They are going to have to create or at least recreate a world that is livable and sustainable.  Sure, they need skills and knowledge, but they also need to participate in making that knowledge.  They need teachers able to lead and support them and communities that protect and nourish them.

                The easiest way to dismantle a democracy is to attack the way its children are educated.  In the last 35 years we’ve done just that.  There are smart and well-intentioned people in education, but it’s impossible to ignore what a mess they’ve created.  The influence of politicians and dark money has only added to the problem.  Thinking of schools as these nice little factory buildings where we house kids during the day is not a model for going forward.  We need to radically rethink what it means to learn around an ethic of participation and not one of passive transmission.  We have no idea what our kids are going to need to know to rebuild what we’ve destroyed.  The least we could do is to stop acting like we have the answers and get the hell out of the way.

They Hang Traitors, Don’t They?

                In the aftermath of the plundering of the American economy by the GOP and their rich donors, it can be hard to understand what really has happened in the eleven months of Trump’s reign.  So much that we had just assumed was part of the bedrock of our politics and our culture has been eroded or destroyed.  This week they finally found a way to kill off the ACA and start the process that will strip health insurance from millions – which is a wonky way of saying they just decided to kill thousands of people they were elected to represent.  It feels like watching a group of thugs in suits trash the neighbor girl’s lemonade stand, kick her in the teeth, and then, realizing they might have left a dime on the sidewalk, going back to take the dime and kick her again.   The spectacle of rich, old, white senators writing tax breaks for each other while kicking two million kids off health care makes the Grinch look like an amateur.

                As disgusting as this display was, the even more damaging news was that the Right has decided to defend Trump’s ties to Russia by attacking the special counsel.  What worries me is not the issue of collusion – which is pretty clear by now – or even the failure of congress to do one thing to stop Russian intrusion into our elections: what worries me is treason.  Trump has taken actions against NATO, the UN and climate change that have damaged American interests around the world.  Moving our embassy to Jerusalem just gave Russia the upper hand in any future political activity in the Middle East.  This is not just a matter of being incompetent – although he surely is that – it is a direct action that weakens American interests while aiding the interests of a hostile power.  Isn’t that treason?  Trump owes Putin and the Russian oligarchs (otherwise known as the Russian mob) billions for propping up his failing real estate empire.  Now he is paving the way for Russia to dominate world politics by dismantling the American government.

                He has destroyed the State Department, politicized and attacked the FBI, CIA and EPA.  He has nominated people for federal judgeships that have never tried a case.  His pathological lying has opened the door on a politics of deception that threatens the very notion of democracy.  He is still in violation of the constitution every day he doesn’t put his business interests in a blind trust.  I think we’ve just grown numb to the onslaught.  Every day is a new low.  Every news cycle brings an even more disastrous and unbelievable transgression.  We need something to focus our intention in a way that cuts through the noise and the chaos.  TREASON should do it.  Let’s stop talking about the normal political process or anybody’s legislative agenda.  This is basic.  You have to be an American or a traitor.  No more phony umbrage over NFL protests or hollow praising of the troops.  This is a moment to save your country or be part of the mob that aids and abets a traitor.

                Trump and Putin are the prototypes of a new form of post-nationalist power.  They represent the unfettered and unregulated use of wealth outside the structure of nation states.  They need a world of weakened states to allow their form of kleptocracy to flourish.  Trump, Putin and the GOP are in business of unshackling a new class of global robber barrens intent on destroying the environment and controlling the world’s economy.  To do that they are willing to make America a second- rate power and put the safety and health of its citizens at risk.  The interests of America are the interests of its people and not the interests of a craven class of political and economic opportunists.  The ‘tax’ bill they passed this week without even knowing what was in it, was a big step toward a new world disorder.

                This is the greatest existential threat to democracy since the Civil War.  This makes Benedict Arnold look like a clownish frat boy.  It’s time to tell the MAGA crowd that we’re the real patriots.  We believe in the good things that America can still become.  They are the enemy.  Their leader is guilty of treason.  To support him is to share his guilt.  I don’t just want an impeachment, I want a hanging

It’s Come to This

                The Republican Party is on the verge of doing what seemed impossible only a year ago.  They are about to pass legislation that will officially make this country a kleptocracy like Russia.  The new tax bill isn’t just a bad bill, it is the pretext for a new round of government austerity that will make it inevitable to cut social security, Medicare, Medicaid, education, health care and infrastructure.  It will mark the point at which we stopped being a functional democracy and started evolving into a caste system where there are one set of rights for the elites and quite another set of rights for everyone else.  We’re on our way to the same predicament as the folks in Puerto Rico who live in colony that the elites have abandoned and left for dead.

                All of this is brought to you by a party that will openly run a pedophile for the senate and refuse to question the sanity of a man who is quite obviously mentally unstable.  We have reached the point where 30 -35% of the people will now tell the vast majority of their fellow citizens that alternative or oppositional views no longer matter.  We are in the middle of an occupation that will only end when we end it.  The midterms and the 2020 elections are the last chance to stop this short of revolution.  The time to equivocate over candidates is over.  We have to form a coalition – hopefully it will be as diverse as the slate of candidates elected this year – regardless of the candidates to not just drive the Republicans out of office but to drive them to extinction. 

                It is time to call the Trump administration guilty of treason, of selling out America for their own economic connections to Russia.  It is time to demand that Trump be removed from office and treated as the very sick and dangerous man he is.  It is time to hold him accountable for the sexual assault he bragged about committing and to call out the racist supporters of this administration.  It is time to tell the Christian Right that it is impossible to consider them Christians at all anymore.  What good is the idea of Heaven if when you get there you find Roy Moore and Donald Trump?

                This was legislation written up as it was passed.  No one could even know what was in it or what the possible ramifications of the bill would be.  All they knew was that their ‘donors’ told them to do it.  There were no hearings, no scoring of the bill, no debate and no compromise.  The Republican party is not an American political party.  An American political party realizes that the people who disagree with them still have rights.  Usually we talk about this as protecting the right of the minority, but in this case, it’s the rights of the majority that are being ignored.  Nothing in this bill is supported by the majority of the citizens.  The Republicans continue their use of phony data, their lies about what the bill would really do, and they are depending on a president too stupid to know the difference to sign it into law.

                The framers of the constitution never imagined a political party that cared so little about the republic or the people in it.  The Republicans have become the thing they most wanted to avoid: a class of political hacks who would sell the country for their own economic gain.  It’s time to vote them out or it's time to revolt.  Resistance alone isn’t enough anymore.  This era is over – get out of the way if you can’t lend a hand in making a new order.  

Flaked Out

                Arizona senator, Jeff Flake, became the most recent Republican to publicly break ranks with Trump.  He gave a couple interviews followed by a cliché ridden and overly dramatic speech on the floor of the Senate saying it was time to say enough.  Then he went off and voted to cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans and corporations while raising them on the poor and middle class.  I guess decency has its limits.  The hypocrisy of Flake’s actions captures the fate of the Republican party.  Flake is a reliable vote for the Trump agenda.  He occasionally has a reflective moment that makes him criticize the way Trump and his ilk have abandoned all pretense of being interested in democracy or serving the people, but there is no daylight between them on critical issues.

                Flake, and others like him, make two things obvious.  First, they will never rein in, let alone get rid of, Trump.  Trump is the logical extension of a party that wondered off in to Rupert Murdoch’s fantasy camp and never found their way home.  Trump may not behave the way they think he should, but he’s their boy when it comes to driving the country back to the good old days of white supremacy and male dominance.  The reaction to the first indictments to come out of the Special Counsel say it all – silence.  Second, the problem facing the country isn’t just that we have a completely unstable and unqualified president, the problem is that he’s not alone in the way he looks at the world.

                The constitution assumes that if a tyrant ever became president that the congress would do its due diligence and remove him.  It assumes that there would never be a party so enamored with its own brand that it would put party before country.  Bad bet.  Not only have Republicans given up on following the constitution and performing their duty to govern, they have turned a blind eye to what amounts to treason.  It is more important to Paul Ryan to give his rich puppet masters a totally unneeded and undeserved tax break than it is to safeguard the country from an attack by an enemy.  Republicans are so far enmeshed in their own agenda that they have completely abandoned the notion that they have to protect the country, unless, of course, it involves another alleged misdeed by Hillary.  Instead of wanting to get to the bottom of what happened in the last election and prevent it from happening again, they sound like first-graders whining that “he did it, too.”

                Flake lives in the same fantasy world as the rest of the far right.  A world where there is no discrimination – except against white folks, of course – where people still mine and burn coal and the environment is run by God.  They are still believers in ‘supply side’ economics and are still saying that tax cuts will do more than just give the people at the top even more money to hoard.  They live in the conspiratorial echo chamber of Fox News and the more extreme fantasies of Steve Bannon.  They are not sane.  They make up whatever suits their purpose and never take responsibility.  If caught in a lie, they point their finger at someone on the other side and start screaming about what they did.  They are led by a pathological liar and malignant narcissist.  What could go wrong?

                So when Jeff Flake stands before the camera with every hair in place and his tie in a perfect Windsor knot, pardon me if I’m not impressed.  While he tries to summon something he imagines to be courage or decency, but is mere flatulence, the country is dissolving.  Until he and other Republicans join the real world and take real action to help ordinary people, address climate change, fund education or any number of obvious and critical needs, it doesn’t matter.  Maybe he made himself feel a little better.  He did nothing to help the country.  

Random Bits

1.       Trump on Korea:  One of the constant mantras Trump uses to justify his stance in Korea is that our policy there is a failure.  Actually, our policy in Korea has been a huge success.  There hasn’t been a war there for 64 years.  That’s pretty good.  Trump thinks we can stop the North from developing nuclear weapons, but that is unrealistic.  Any country that wants to pay the economic and political price to develop a weapons program can do so.  The technology, by today’s standards, isn’t that hard to come by.  Any claim America has to denying North Korea a nuclear program is undercut by Trump’s own actions.  Who in their right mind would agree to a deal with a guy who changes his mind about agreements already signed on a regular basis?  If there was a viable military option in Korea, it would have been used a long time ago.  There is no reason to talk so tough when the options are so limited.  The number thrown around is a million people would die in the first days of the conflict.  But if the North has the ability to hit not just the South but also Japan with a nuclear weapon, that number could be in the tens of millions.  Just shut up, please.

2.       Jimmy Bakker says it’s bad to make fun of God:  Jim Bakker is tired of people making fun of him and says that what they’re really making fun of is God.  Furthermore, God will punish those who laugh.  Well, if that’s the case, Jimmy better join the witness protection program.  It’s hard to imagine someone who has made more people laugh at God than Jimmy Bakker.  How many lives do these guys have?

3.       Trump on ‘Honoring’ the Military:  Trump likes to say that the people protesting at NFL games are dishonoring the military (and first responders and mom and the flag and ice cream).  First, they’re not protesting the flag, they’re protesting police violence against minorities.  Second, how can you dishonor the flag by taking advantage of the rights it represents?  Third, who is Trump to suddenly be so enamored of the military.  When he had a chance to fight for his country he declined.  Some of those deferments were legitimate, but at least the last one was a blatant bribe by his old man.  I don’t care that Trump didn’t serve, but please stop with hypocritical flag waving.

4.         Harvey:  The fallout from the Weinstein scandal continues to escalate.  Recriminations about who knew what when and revelations about other people in the industry are bound to continue.  The real story here is the women who came forward and how it might be a pivotal moment in how we see these issues.  A tangential concern for me is how these few powerful men with their abhorrent attitudes about women dominate our cultural production.  If you follow the money, only a few studios and a few powerful men control most of the entertainment industry.  That industry produces almost all our images of love, desire, sex and romance.  If men like Weinstein control those choices, the art they produce replicates their tastes.  In their hands, everything is reduced to a misogynistic and adolescent male fantasy or fetish.  Rather than exploring desire or sex in a diverse and human scale, we have the same images shoved in front of us over and over, creating a simulacrum of human desire.  Removing them not only protects the women who work in the industry, it may lead to a more diverse and fully human treatment of love and desire.

5.       Meanwhile:  We’re still talking about Trump too much and not focusing on what we might do to improve the world.  One of the regrettable by-products of some versions of American Protestantism is that the chosen can do no wrong.  Once you’re a good guy, you’re always a good guy.  The people who still support him will never change their minds.  It leaves the rest of us frustrated and tired.  Winter’s coming – it’s no time to let our guard down or stop the resistance.  Make some soup and gather your friends around the table and tell some stories or sing some songs to make it through the days ahead.

The Bully in the Pulpit 

                It’s common place to talk about presidents using the “Bully Pulpit” to drive their agenda or promote their ideology.  Now we have a president that really doesn’t have an agenda or ideology.  Now we have a president who is a common bully.  Like all bullies, he sucks all of the air out of the room and wants all attention focused on him and what terrible thing he might do next.  If you cross him, he attacks, throwing tantrums and signing more ‘executive orders’ to let us all know that he’s in charge.

                We’ve reached the point in this presidency where any hint of responsible governance is gone.  He’s like a toddler sent to his room for behaving badly who decides to tear the room apart as revenge.  The ACA or DACA, it doesn’t matter.  As long as Obama did it, he wants to destroy it.  It doesn’t matter that he is hurting real Americans with these tantrums, he just wants to lash out in anger.  It doesn’t matter to him that the states he carried and the people that voted for him will be the ones suffering the most because of his actions.  He just wants to show he’s tough.  While the people of Puerto Rico face months of danger from disease and famine, he threatens to cut off aid.  It’s an open question whether or not he even knows they are citizens.  He lies about (you really could put just about anything in this space) his tax plan helping middle class or working families while orchestrating a huge give away to himself.  None of it matters to the bully as long as the cameras roll and the attention continues.

                The cowards and traitors who run what’s left of the Republican party are afraid of the bully, too.  They pander to his whims in the hopes that he might sign some God forsaken piece of legislation they haven’t even read yet, some small trophy they can waive in front of the Koch brothers claiming to have done what daddy wanted.  They don’t care that the bully is edging us toward a conflict on the Korean peninsula that, if it turns nuclear, could kill at least 40 million people.  All they want is one last tax break for the petro- barons and a way to persecute people they don’t like.  They are willing to ignore the damage the bully does to the constitution every day.  They will do nothing to stop the bully.

                No matter how bad any of us thought it would be, it’s worse.  The magnitude of the bully’s depravity is overwhelming and all-encompassing.  Normally, we would proceed a policy or an issue at a time, but the bully doesn’t know anything about policy or issues, all he knows about is power and destruction.  He puts his own staff in the position of denying what he says because it’s so crazy.  He’s only in it for the attention he gets – and, of course, the money.  He has tapped a dark, sick spot of the American psyche and the pain is only just beginning.  He couldn’t have done this by himself, he’s to venial and stupid to have thought it through this far.  This won’t be fixed by voting for Democrats (although I encourage you to do so).  This probably won’t be fixed by politics. 

                I think we’ve come to the point where this can no longer just be patched back together with laws and policy.  I think we’ve come to the point that in order to move forward we have to reconnect with the people around us, even the ones we disagree with, even the ones we don’t like and who probably don’t like us, even the ones who voted for the bully. The bully needs to divide us.  He needs us to hate people who exercise their right of free speech to protest.  But he also benefits when we hate the people who hate the protesters.  Giving in to the anger is helping the bully win.  It is, as Springsteen sang, “gonna be a long walk home.”  We can protest and resist, but we also have to figure out just what it is we stand for.  What is the bigger narrative that makes us brothers and sisters even if we don’t agree about everything.  Purity is the enemy of solidarity.  Maybe, it’s as simple as the old line from a Dylan song, “I’ll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours.”