Diatribes of Jay: Thanksgiving Message 2018

[The end of the midterm elections seems like a good time to purge this up-front reprise of most recent posts and provide only the reverse-chronological listing of recent posts at the bottom. I’ll have something more specific to say about the midterms when all the results are in. I’ll also have something encouraging to say soon about driving on the Sun’s energy, rather than on fossil fuels. In the meantime, here’s this year’s Thanksgiving message:]

Thanksgiving messages are traditional on this blog, for Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Unlike most holidays, it doesn’t celebrate a religious figure and so avoids magical thinking. Nor does it tout a tribal victory or loss in some collective act of violence and mayhem.

Instead, Thanksgiving celebrates a simple and beautiful act of humanity. Two radically different cultures joined in celebrating a successful harvest: European religious refugees in a strange and cold new land, and the native people who had helped them survive there. The genocide came later, much later.

Merely to recite these facts is to recognize the yin and yang of human nature. There is always something in our lives to lift our spirits and make us proud. And there is always something to make us worry whether we will survive long term and whether we deserve to.

The trick is to keep the optimism and pessimism balanced and realistic. This year we Americans just delivered the first serious rebuke and electoral restraint to the worst supreme leader in our short national history. So we ought to emphasize the positive. We ought recall who we are, what we’ve done, where we came from, and how our strong political culture continues to shield us from the Dark Side.

In that spirit, I offer a dozen reasons to be thankful this November and beyond:

1. The dike of our democracy has so far held back the floodwaters of tyranny. We have kept the most inexperienced, uneducated, ignorant, willful and undisciplined president in our history from ruling us by whim, ruining us financially, or getting us into another needless war.

2. Despite all the structural defects in our democracy, and despite all our gerrymandering and vote suppression, our voters have done what they always do in midterm elections: make a course correction and apply the brakes to unchecked executive power. In this case, the course correction and braking are even stronger than usual. After two millennia, it seems, human culture has learned how to manage a Nero or Caligula without civil war.

3. Our separation of powers has restrained the worst impulses of executive power. While Congress hasn’t done much but fail to act, our judges have curtailed several unjust and irrational executive acts. They include: (a) barring immigrants based on their religion, (b) ripping refugee children from their parents, and (c) suppressing citizens’ votes, as least in some of the most egregious cases.

4. Our press has held firm in reporting the truth and has held back the tide of delusion. Among its feats are reporting, from time to time, all the lies of our supreme leader, prominently and in detail. [The latest such report is here.] In the case of Jim Acosta, our courts have validated the press in its vital role of holding power to account.

5. Youth, minorities and especially women have risen from passivity and apathy not just to vote, but to serve, to run and to win. Not all have won, of course, but many have. Over time, these new faces in Congress, the courts and our state legislatures will direct our national course back toward the straight path. At least they can orient us toward the future, not the past.

6. The light is beginning to dawn in the halls of business. What profit a man (or woman) if he lose his (or her) country and culture? Our people see manipulated rises in stock prices and foreign disinformation and begin to ask at what cost.

7. The light is also dawning on the Internet. It’s neither a miracle nor a money tree, but a human institution, with considerable benefits but serious risks. The first significant regulation (of privacy) has begun in Europe, and more is on the way. Can restraints on societal subversion, fake news, cybertheft, cybersabotage, cyberwarfare and even rampant distraction from school and real work be far behind?

8. Our Second Gilded Age is producing much the same reaction as the first: revulsion at excess, undemocratic power, and gross inequality. Slowly but steadily, our people and our representatives are recognizing that monopolies on money and free expression are incompatible with a free society, regardless of motive. Facebook, the worst bad actor, is heading for a long overdue comeuppance.

9. After wasting money on a tax cut for the rich and corporations that busted the budget, and after using debt as an excuse to skimp on the people’s health care and retirement, our Congress has nothing much left to spend money on than our dilapidated infrastructure. Sooner or later, we’ll get to it. As Winston Churchill once said, we tend to do the right thing after exhausting all the alternatives.

10. As a nation, we are getting serious again. We have to. After the “end of history” with the Cold War, after spending money on the biggest, wildest party our government has ever thrown, there’s not much else to do but get serious. Soon we’re likely to see some experienced, educated and smart people return to the top levels of government again, if only because we’ve tried everyone else.

11. Science is disrespected and on the ropes, but it’s not yet down and out. The mildness of its predictions of global warming will soon revive it, as an unstable climate leads to yet more extreme storms, winter cold snaps, hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts and fires. And just as we lamented the “missile gap” early in the Cold War, we’ll start to fear the gap in personalized medicine, nanotechnology, quantum computers and quantum communication. Trust me, science is on the cusp of a revival, just as soon as we start getting serious again.

12. Amid all the craziness of our politics and rival ideologies, there is one bad thing we haven’t yet done. We haven’t started a single new, uncessessary war. We’ve limited ourselves to childish threats (in North Korea) and proxy wars against helpless people (as in Yemen and Gaza). Doing so won’t inflate our false sense of moral superiority much, but it also won’t destroy us or our species.

We Americans are enduring a time much like the First Gilded Age a century ago. It’s a time of excess, at time of change, a time of transition. We have the knowledge, experience and intelligence to avoid what happened later during the last century: a world-changing global economic depression followed by humanity’s then-most-terrible war.

To avoid similar catastrophes in this century, all we have to do to is to apply the lessons of the past and avoid magical thinking. Our predecessors in the late twentieth century showed us the way. Our recent two-year venture into executive madness, with our brakes just applied hard, gives us every reason to expect we’ll get serious again soon enough and apply those lessons before it’s too late.

So give thanks for the promise and the hope of change, and continue to work for it. Happy Thanksgiving!

Endnote: Pelosi and the Old Guard

On second thought, let’s make it a Baker’s dozen of things to be thankful for. Let’s include House Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi, House Majority Leader-to-be Steny Hoyer and House Whip-to-be Jim Clyburn—the “Old Guard” of the Democratic House.

Why them? Why now?

They have the thing most missing in our national government since Obama left office: experience. With only six years of elective office before he became president, Dubya had been our least experienced president ever, if you count our general-presidents’ military commands as experience. Yet Trump beat Dubya soundly in that regard, with zero experience in politics and public office ever.

Think the world’s toughest jobs might actually require some knowledge and savvy? Well, the jobs for which Pelosi, Hoyer and Clyburn are headed aren’t too much different from the presidency. There are innumerable rules, customs, traditions and procedures to know, and 434 personal relationships to master. You don’t just jump into these jobs on a college degree and some enthusiasm.

No one is happier than I about the new Muslim, African-American, Hispanic and female reps who just got elected. But don’t they have to find out where the bathrooms are first, before they start running things?

And while we’re on the subject of gratitude, how about pre-existing conditions? If you or a loved one had them insured recently, you owe your/their health and perhaps survival to two pols: Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi. They fought the good fight to bring you that real insurance. And they didn’t just fight; they won! They won after a century of struggle, beginning (so help me God!) with Grover Cleveland.

So don’t let yourself be conned by the GOP Cracker Brigade that figuratively sat on the split-rail fence jeering the “gal” and the “black” while Pelosi and Obama were bringing you the best thing for regular people since Lyndon Johnson. The Young Turks will have their day, once they find out where the bathrooms are and how the House really works. Meanwhile, let’s all give thanks for Pelosi, Hoyer and Clyburn, who can hit the ground running.

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Diatribes of Jay

21 November 2018

Thanksgiving Message 2018

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