The Revolution Next Time

                In the 60’s, it was common to talk about revolution, that was before we turned 30 and became investment bankers and helicopter parents.  In the heat of the moment, revolution sounded like the bold and romantic alternative to a world of uptight hypocrisy and war.  It seemed properly defiant in a world where National Guard troops shot students, cities were in flames, and the war was in your living room every night.  So much of what was wrong could be reduced to one word, Nixon.  Now, the same animosity and revulsion is associated with Trump.  Just as in the 60’s, the idea that it might take a revolution to change the course of democracy is gaining popularity and credence.  I think it’s important to compare these moments of revolutionary rhetoric, because as naïve and inconsequential as the revolutionary calls in the 60’s turned out to be, what we face now is entirely different.

                Nixon was impeached in a world that was violent and corrupt, but it still had both a cultural and economic coherence that is missing in today’s political theater.  Although they were famously slow to react, it was Republicans who forced Nixon from office.  Viet Nam had strained American political solidarity, but it was still a force.  Even though it was coming to an end, the economic expansion following WWII meant that the culture wasn’t fragmented so much that a majority of folks thought they had nothing left to lose.  In Trump’s America, the forces that eventually held sway in Nixon’s impeachment have all been hollowed out and the center is too weak to hold.  The revolution this time will be the real deal and not a youthful fantasy of cultural liberation.

                Nixon and Lee Atwater launched the ‘southern strategy’ in ’68 that set the modern Republican party on the path to embracing minority rule.  Even though there are other elements of the coalition Atwater assembled, such as Evangelicals, abortion, and conservative ideology, the core of that coalition was and is racism.  It created a block of committed and active voters who, even though they have always been a minority of the population, have dominated the politics of the nation for the last 50 years.  They have become more violent and vitriolic while becoming less and less tethered to reality.  They have their own news and their own ‘alternative facts’ that make it impossible to engage them in civil discourse or democratic compromise.  Nixon and Atwater started undermining the institutions of American democracy, and the weight of Trump’s lawless and venial presidency has brought it to the point of collapse. 

                What Trump and the Republicans make obvious every day is that the ‘nation of laws’ that we have always thought we lived in no longer exists.  Trump’s impending impeachment is about to make that painfully clear.  There will be no statesmanship or patriotism that saves the day this time.  This time the battle will be fought and resolved on entirely different grounds.  In some ways that is both healthy and predictable.  American democracy has gone through several resets along the way.  We moved from a confederacy to a republic.  Civil rights and labor rights both reconstructed democracy to include more voices and level the playing field.  But the biggest reset was obviously the Civil War, when there was no way to reconcile the competing visions of what the country should be.  Without being unduly alarming about it, that’s where we are now.

                Clinton’s impeachment was a charade, but it was a political charade of no constitutional consequence.  Trump’s impeachment is going to make our whole system of government and its dependence on law and procedure into a charade.  I don’t think there is any way to avoid this.  We have been traveling down this path for 50 years; we can’t turn back now.  Finally electing not just a corrupt but a thoroughly incompetent president has broken the institutional framework of what we called a democracy.  There will be a lot of talk about how to restore those institutions.  It can’t be done.  More to the point, it shouldn’t be done.  We have tried to legally and institutionally construct a democracy based on diversity and we have failed.  We have to win this fight – never underestimate the depths of depravity to come – but when we win it, we have to start building something new, something different.  Jefferson thought a little revolution every now and then was a good thing.  After 230 years or so, a little revolution probably isn’t enough.

How Fantasy Baseball Ruined America

                Back in the day, when they were still referred to as Rotisserie Leagues, I was in a fantasy baseball league.  We were a loose collection of friends who also played poker, golf, softball and basketball together.  We met at someone’s house once a month and drank beer and tried to scam each other in outrageous trades.  We lied and blustered and had a great time.  Bill James had only recently started writing about ‘sabermetrics,’ an idea that would lead to “money ball” and analytics.  Today, fantasy leagues are everywhere, often an online collection of people who don’t know each other and have nothing in common but the destruction of civilization.  The innocent evolution of fantasy baseball is a small part of an obsession with an abstraction of experience that destroys what it is meant to describe.

                I’m not arguing that numbers are all evil.  If you’re down to the final out and you have to choose between a pinch hitter who has whiffed every time he’s faced this pitcher or someone who has lit him up every time he’s had a chance, those would be good numbers to have.  It is invaluable to know when our perceptions correspond to reality and when they don’t, but relying on statistics instead of experience and emotion can lead to an empty and soulless life.  Fantasy baseball and analytics have turned baseball into an empty game.  Fantasy owners care less about the game than they are the statistics the game generates.  Their ‘teams’ exist in a twilight zone of numbers that are never real or realized.  There is no joy or surprise in the game that analytics has created.  Several years ago when Cabrera became the first player since Yaz in ’67 to win the triple crown, the sabermetrics folks thought Mike Trout should have been the MVP.  This was based on a completely fabricated analytic called WAR, or wins above replacement.  There is no such thing as WAR, it is not part of the game.  It is an idealized bit of statistical fluff that has never swung a bat.  It was created by people who’s lives would be at risk trying to field a routine fly ball.  But in fantasy league world it has replaced the greatest single offense season in this century. 

                If it was just baseball, which is doing a good job of killing itself off, maybe it wouldn’t be a big deal.  But this statistical infection can be seen everywhere.  We evaluate children using invalid and improperly proctored tests to determine how ‘smart’ they are.  We use numbers instead of observations to diagnose patients.  We have replaced experience with a parallel statistical reality that is neither all that accurate or exciting.  We want to know who wins instead of enjoying the game.  Sure, it sucks to lose, but games are games and humans who play get something out of it that people who measure but never set foot on a field cannot understand.

                Democracy is a relational and not a statistical endeavor.  The people I interact with every day are not the composite of their income, IQ or credit score.  In the college I used to teach at, they would occasionally put together a statistical analysis of the ‘typical’ student, based on age, background, test scores and income.  That student never existed.  That analytic never once helped me engage the actual students that were in my classes.  They were all in some way an outlier, an anomaly in their own right.  Knowing them and teaching them meant I had to abandon whatever preconceptions I had and meet them where they were.  Democracies can and should do the math on who gets what, but they can never let the numbers replace the actual people.  We still have to go out there every day and make the connections and do the work it takes to understand each other.  A statistical parallel constructed by and for an elite class of managers is not the same thing.

                The team I drafted in my rotisserie league had seven eventual Hall of Famers on it, but it never shared a warm evening at the ballpark.  It never delighted or inspired a kid to play the game or practice for hours on the off chance they could play one day in the show.  It never did anything but pile up statistics.  It’s a poor substitute to watching a game with a friend or filling your grandsons up with all that crap your parents wouldn’t let you eat.  It can never recreate the magic I still remember the first time I trudged up the beer stained concourse at old Tiger Stadium and saw that amazing green field for the first time.

The Zebra Storyteller

                Back in the day, when I taught literature classes using anthologies (I apologize), the Norton Anthology included a little story from Africa called the Zebra Storyteller.  In the story, a zebra storyteller was walking down the trail thinking about a recent spate of zebra killings by some unknown animal.  The storyteller imagined what it would be like if an ordinary cat had learned how to speak Zebra and used that skill to surprise its victims and kill them.  Just then, a house cat stepped out of the bushes and said hello in Zebra.  The storyteller, instead of being shocked and victimized, kicked the cat in the head and killed it.  The editors of the anthology said that the story was proof that literature and imagination were critical to living a good life.  I am writing this as your zebra storyteller.

                The news is full of more and more stories about the decline of Trump.  His behavior is more erratic (as if that’s even possible) and his poll numbers are sinking fast.  The pundit class is trying to figure out what possible strategy he can use to regain the presidency.  The narrow Electoral College victory he pulled off in 2016 (with the help of the Russians and voter suppression) looks less and less likely today.  Like the zebras killed by the house cat, they are making the mistake of thinking their adversary is going to use tactics they are already familiar with, like getting more votes in an election or at least more votes in the Electoral College.  But as I was walking down the trail the other day, it occurred to me that winning the election isn’t really what they are trying to do.

                I don’t think their goal is to win the election.  I think they already know they can’t (whether or not Trump knows it is debatable).  They will collect money, and spend it on themselves, and they will have campaign events and buy ads, but that is just for show.  They know they can’t win the election, but they have no intent of giving up their power.  They plan to either steal or invalidate the election.  Either is possible (note Moscow Mitch’s unwillingness to protect the election process), but the latter is easier.  It might be too much even for the most long gone Trumper to change votes or vote tallies.  It’s too bold and too easily detected.  All that has to happen is for enough doubt to be created so that his supporters  believe he was robbed.  Remember, these are people who already believe that millions of people were bussed into New Hampshire in the last election (where would they even stand?), and that cost Trump the popular vote.  In the midst of this confusion, Trump and Barr would suspend the constitution and claim power.

                If you think this is unlikely, ask yourself how many things you thought could never happened here have already happened.  We have a president who is owned and manipulated by Russian oligarchs that aided in his election.  We have a leader of the Senate who refused to fill an open seat on the Supreme Court or allow any legislation to protect our elections to come to the floor.  He has gutted the elections commission so it cannot intervene in next presidential election.  And our sister democracy in England is now run by its own Trumpian lout who is closing down Parliament to jam through an economically disastrous ‘hard Brexit.’  How much more has to happen before the cat that speaks Zebra starts its reign of terror?

                These are not normal times.  The mostly romanticized belief in American democracy we have been touting is in ruins.  Trump has already won that battle.  The alliances that protected us the last 70 years are now filled with nations that see us as an unstable partner.  The courts are packed with judges that are little more than political hacks intent on defending a partisan agenda.  The federal government is now in the hands of the most corrupt and inept (it’s hard to figure out which one of those should go first) group of appointees ever.  We are burning down the Amazon rainforest to sell soybeans to China.  Is invalidating an election really that much of a reach?

                Like all storytellers, I will leave you to your own thoughts, but don’t be surprised to run into a cat that speaks Zebra, and please don’t be afraid to kick it in the head and kill it.

               

A Democratic Ethics

                We have mostly thought about ethics as a rational enterprise.  Often ethics classes use scenarios or cases to deliberate and debate which action is more ethical.  Now those scenarios play out in automobile companies where programmers try to decide who dies in the crash, or they a resolved using algorithms to decide who gets medical treatment and who doesn’t.  But democracy isn’t a simulation, a game played in endless iterations seeking the best outcome.  Our interactions with people are often dominated by our feelings and senses more than they are by a rational calculation.  What modernity left out of democracy were the aesthetics of ethical choice.  A radical democracy is more about experience than objectification.

                When Dewey called art an experience, he was arguing for an aesthetic dimension to what he called “felt intelligence,” the mastery of feeling and technique developed over a lifetime of action and reflection.  That means we have to do more than rationalize our behavior, we have to experience the totality of its impact.  Dewey thought art was one way of developing the other experiential aspects of thought and action.  In that sense, perhaps it makes more sense to think of ethics as an art, developed over time, than it does to think of it as game playing in a poorly attended philosophy class.  I would argue that we know unethical behavior as much by how it feels as how rationally justifiable it might be.  In fact, we live in an administration that rationalizes the horrific and insane in the most mundane terms. Separating children from their parents is a matter of ‘immigration policy’ and degrading the environment is an ‘economic policy.’ 

                If we ground ethics in experience, we are grounding ethics in our bodies.  We are grounding our ethical choices not in abstractions but in the world.  Modernity has stripped the world of its cosmic significance, its connection to something we might consider sacred.  We’ve created a world full of things that are no more important or significant than any other random thing in the universe.  We don’t feel and do not act as if we were connected to the biosphere that sustains us or the social context that defines us.  We think of wealth as an arbitrary collection of abstract value that has nothing to do with the value of life.  In all these ways, we have constructed such a limited idea of ethics that it is hardly worth promoting it.  An ethics of experience resituates us in a world that is also alive.  It redefines us as part of a social nexus that values people and their existence.

                An ethical practice requires humility, the ability to see ourselves not as individual and independent actors but as interdependent beings who rely on other people and other living things for our being.  Diversity in modernity is mostly about advertising and marketing, about the desire and reproduction of difference.  Diversity in a radical democracy is a felt sense of entanglement grounded in the realization of our interdependence.  An ethical political and economic system wouldn’t burn the rain forests or lock children in cages.  The notion that a country or a religion can insulate us from the injustice supported by that country or religion is myopic.  Nothing that disconnects us from the larger context of life, some would call it a ‘deep ecology,’ can be considered ethical, no matter how many philosophers or corrupt Attorney Generals argue otherwise. 

                We will never value diversity among people if we cannot see the diversity in the biosphere.  We will never protect civil rights if we are not also protecting the environment.  Consciousness is not a distinctly human quality.  Our consciousness is shared by everything around us. The computerized out- sourcing of ethical decisions is a step away from a radical democracy and not an improvement.  The point of being ethical is not to be ‘right,’ the point of being ethical is to be in harmony with what sustains life.  Some of that life will confound and insult me, but it deserves its place as much as I deserve mine.  We cannot tolerate violence and greed.  If we want to live democratically, we have to accept the limitations of rational thought and embrace an ethics grounded in aesthetic experience.

The Road to the Right

                In the aftermath of WWII there was rift in American culture.  While the majority of Americans immersed themselves in the boom years following the war, a small cultural and literary movement mounted a protest to the suburbanized swirl of hula hoops, sit-coms, and mass marketing.  They eventually were called ‘The Beats,’ after author Jack Kerouac’s play on the word beat.  They became the cultural icons of the era, laying the groundwork for the iterations of the ‘counter-culture’ that followed.  They stood for a rebellious and idealized search for individual truth.  In On The Road, the main characters, Sal and Dean, go roaring across the country looking for “it.”   Rules were made to be broken, and the promise of a better world was only over the horizon.  Looking back on that period from the perspective of a President Trump and Proud Boys terrorizing Portland under police protection, the road looks a lot different than it did when Neal Cassady was driving a Cadillac a hundred miles an hour through the fields of Kansas.

                Road Lit was always a white male fantasy world.  There are so few examples written by women that each of them stands as the exception that proves the rule.  Only one road work, and it’s stretch to even call it a road work, was written by an African American.  It popularized the notion that it was the birth-right of every white male to take to the road, to somehow think of themselves as special.  The women, drugs and lack of responsibility were all part of the show.  Everything and everyone was fodder for the trip, but the trip never delivered the promised vision.  America never became the sacred land the Beats thought it could be.  Their original impulses to resist capitalism and crass culture of post-war America put their politics firmly on the left, but the privilege of their narratives drives us in a different direction today.

                Today, the ‘road’ is closed, but the internet is wide open.  America sustained a couple hundred years of narratives of limitless escape.  From the frontier to the wilderness, Americans, particularly white male Americans, could just leave.  There was always another adventure, another wife and job that would finally make everything okay and confirm just how individual and special the traveler was.  Sal ends up on a lonely pier in New Jersey romanticizing the America he failed to grasp but he felt was still out there to be found.  Today that trip takes place on the internet by people who never leave home.  Sal’s America was a fantasy, and their America is a digital fiction of air brushed porn and social media promising what no one can ever have.  Sal’s road led from the old culture of the East Coast to the opening of the West.  Today, geography doesn’t matter.  Those of us who followed in the footsteps of the Beats wanted to believe the gospel.  We wanted to believe we were resisting the establishment, even though the Beats sold their work and Kerouac ends up drunk on a bus to his mother’s house in Florida belittling the Beatniks, and presumably the Hippies, that followed.  In the end, it wasn’t the trip, it was the privilege that mattered.

                Today it is that privilege, the ingrained entitlement of white men to have a freedom and uniqueness just because they are white men, that is the political legacy of the road.  Escape is never an answer.  The rise of white supremacy in American culture and the grievance agenda of the Trump presidency is, I’m afraid, a logical extension of Sal and Dean.  The men driving and creating the hateful politics of the right believe they are entitled.  They should have the right to their own trip and their own vision, even if it’s nothing more than the pornographic fantasies of an Incel chat room.  They are no more willing than Kerouac’s characters to put in the work it takes to be real.  The fantasy that looks so appealing in On The Road, is pretty tawdry and worn in the age of internet.  White male privilege is a byproduct of the post WWII culture.  The Beats were never like the generation before them who never were allowed to think of themselves as all that special.  How dare women and people of color take that uniqueness away from them.  How dare anyone ask that they do what the Beats never did and take responsibility for what the do.  It’s no surprise then, that they follow the most relentlessly empty and vacuous politician in our history.  It’s no surprise that they see in him a model for political action.  Trump, who is nothing that he claims to be, is a perfect bookend to literary movement that never delivered what it promised.

Art, Education and Democracy

                John Dewey thought that the best way to think about art was to think of it as experience.  Like all experience, art creates knowledge and insight, so that the aesthetic was always already part of the cognitive and social dimensions of life.  If we think of art that way, it’s easy to make a case for the role it plays in educating people for participation in a radical democracy.  We encounter each other and learn to understand each other not through the contrived categories of social science data but through our direct experience.  Part of that encounter is aesthetic.  We react to the way people dress, what they listen to, how they talk and what they smell like before we even have a chance to think about the more abstract and intellectual markers we sometimes apply to others.  These senses are developed and fine tuned by the same experiential judgements we apply to art.

                I taught what was basically an ‘art history’ class for almost forty years.  I understand that the way we teach art now is exclusionary and colonizing.  The whole process of making canons of art and passing ‘universal’ judgements about high and low art is completely undemocratic.  Limiting art to the story and perspective of any one culture, religion, race, class or gender has less to do about art than it does an oppressive cultural narrative of dominance and exclusion.  But it doesn’t have to be taught that way.  It doesn’t have to be judged and ranked and limited so only a few tastes and perspectives, only a few experiences, are represented and explored.  Art in education is not meant, as Eliot’s reforms at Harvard in the 1870’s would have it, to train a few lower-class individuals to mingle with and work for the owner class.  We don’t need to study art to be ‘better’ or more sophisticated.  We need art to make us whole and to help us engage each other.

                Radical democracy is a contact sport.  It is more relational than it is rational.  We have tried building a democracy around rational and institutional practices.  It hasn’t really worked very well.  We are an extremely segregated society, in which we increasingly limit our contacts to people who are mostly like us.  The fear – and sometimes loathing – of ‘others’ makes it impossible to see a common good or a communal way forward.  Our democracy has become, primarily because of a broken economic system, a zero-sum game of groups waging political war over the few scraps left behind.  Education, particularly the vocationally oriented education we provide, merely reinforces the estrangement.  We still promote an ‘ideal’ culture, which means a white, patriarchal, protestant, heterosexual, European culture that excludes any other way of organizing the world.  We do not structure education as what Pratt calls a ‘contact zone.’  Mostly we teach folks that they don’t belong, unless they buy the right stuff, of course.

                None of us are the synthesized data-points we are thought to be.  The stuff that makes me interesting (Okay, cut me a little slack here) and human is not collected in an algorithm.  Our experience of the world and each other is primarily and initially an aesthetic one.  I’ve lost count of the number of times that music, dance, food, painting, tapestry or poetry helped me understand and value something that my abstract rational intellect just couldn’t comprehend.  The best things, the richest things, about a democracy are created in the intersections of our contacts with each other.  We create a world together and fill it with music and food and laughter and love.  We share pain and disappointment the same way.  Institutional democracy has lost the people that live in it.  We’ve stopped thinking about education as a fully human and life-long journey and settled for a hollowed-out and deracinated shell of ourselves.

                Dewey knew that art was an essential and irreplaceable part of an education.  He knew that if democracy was going to evolve beyond the crude forms it had started with and become an ethos and a way of life, then the aesthetic experience of our encounters and endeavors had to be part of it.  Art doesn’t make us ‘well-rounded.’  It doesn’t make us sophisticated, and it doesn’t make us cool.  It represents what every culture we have ever encountered already knew: art is how we understand life.  If that seems too obtuse or precious, ask the folks in El Paso or Dayton how the alternative works.

The Ecology of Democracy

                In the 70’s when environmental issues were starting to take hold, one of the regulations that was passed was that wetlands had to be preserved.  When the federal government planned to run a highway through a wetland in Nebraska, they offered to create a new wetland to replace the one that would be filled in during construction.  Everyone thought that was cool, and the project commenced.  The highway was built, and the new wetland was created.  To everyone’s surprise, the wetland failed.  It didn’t sustain a bird population or keep the food chain intact.  After several attempts, they finally figured out that a small and seemingly unimportant microbe was missing.  Without it, everything else collapsed.  The lesson was that an ecology is a fragile and complex system that needs all its parts to function.  The same is true for a democracy.

                Trump has decided that the way forward in his reelection campaign is to destroy the ecology of American democracy.  Having no accomplishments or policies to run on, he has turned to the old puritan ideals of exclusion.  A democracy is an inherently impure and dynamic creation.  Like a wetland, its structure is complex and multiple.  All of us are worse off when any part of that complex system is removed or compromised.  If we thought of diversity that way instead of as a conflict of interests, maybe we could begin to understand what a radical democracy is all about.  For too long, we have ignored the value of alternative perspectives.  The Republican party of the 21^st century has given up on the idea that this should be an inclusive society or even a democratic one.  The remedy for that is an ecological inspiration.

                Formal democracy seems static.  The buildings look like Greek and Roman artifacts, and the institutions that run a formal democracy are built on laws and regulations that have to be followed.  One of the shocking insights from Trump’s presidency is how vulnerable that kind of democracy is to shameless lawlessness and ineptitude.  When one side quits playing the game, there is nothing the other side can do to enforce the rules.  A radical democracy is based on something more resilient: the relationships of the people.  We are faced with a challenge of how much we value each other and how much we are willing to sacrifice for each other.  The answer to impending tyranny is not rebellion so much as it is love.  We have to care enough about each other to stand up even when we’re not in the direct line of fire, even when our personal interests aren’t involved.

                A public sphere may seem external, but the motivating energy has to be internal.  A radical democracy will not grow out the interactions of a cynical and fragmented people.  It cannot be sustained by a court or a legislature alone.  All of that depends on an internal ethos, a microbe if you will, that knits the communities of people together.  We do not have to be like each other to care about each other.  We need an ecology of democracy that recognizes the expanse and the limits of our connections.  The more diversity and innovation there is, the better off we all are.  Healthy children in other neighborhoods are good neighbors and maybe even potential partners.  An intellectual, cultural and genetic mix is stronger and healthier than any pure strain standing alone.

                We share this crumbling planet.  The children crying at the border are our children.  They are crying to call us to action.  We cannot fix this locked in our isolated communities.  If what Trump and the other autocrats around the world stand for is not defeated, we all die.  Thinking ecologically is thinking democratically.  We are going to have to think through what it means to have ‘wealth.’  The systems we’ve built are too big and powerful to allow them to reproduce unchecked.  The potential is great, but the risks are even greater.  We now have proof that not everyone wants this to work.  It’s time to stand up against those forces and join hands.  A war will only hasten the end.  It can’t be won.  We can rise together and try to create a richer and fairer world.  The only political ecology with any promise at all is a radical democracy.