Unprepared!

“Be prepared.” — The Boy Scout Motto

Some 31 years ago, an American political philosopher named Francis Fukuyama published a book about the “end of history.” The Soviet Union had just collapsed of its own dead weight, and he predicted the dominance of democracy. He saw our entire human species as sailing into a golden sunset of global peace, cooperation and progress in science and the arts.

Unfortunately, things didn’t work out that way. Today, our species’ condition and prognosis exemplify the biblical injunction: “Time and chance happeneth to them all.”

Today we face a new era of global conflict. We see an unfolding Russian imperialism like that of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But this time we face a stronger tyrant with nuclear weapons.

If the truth be told, even that menace is not the worst we face. The consequences of runaway global warming and a really deadly pandemic could be a lot worse. Indeed, mass displacement, migration and decimation caused by a climate change or a new pandemic could trigger the final Armageddon among Matthew Arnold’s “ignorant armies clash[ing] by night.”

How can we rank our existential threats? It’s not easy. Any one could maim or decimate us. And by “us” I mean our entire human species, not just us Americans.

Only a general nuclear exchange could totally extinguish us. That’s more probable now than at any time since October 1962. The threat of artificial intelligence controlling weapons makes even science-fiction’s doomsday scenarios possible. But we can hope that that’s the least probable menace, if only because it’s totally within our control. The others are not.

So let’s not presume to rank our existential threats. Let’s just list them.

I would put runaway global warming at the very top. It’s not merely probable: it’s happening right now and appears to be accelerating. We don’t know how it might end, but an Earth made habitable only poleward of the Arctic and Antarctic Circles is entirely possible. Imagine the horrors of migration, famine, disease, and wars required to reach “equilibrium” as that awful outcome unfolds, not to mention the vastly increased risk of nuclear war along the way.

Second is a new pandemic, perhaps a variant of the H5N1 avian flu now killing tens of millions of birds around the world. Imagine an airborne virus, capable of infecting humans, with an 80% mortality rate, transmitted around the world by aircraft in days or weeks. With mRNA technology, we have the means to create genetically “programmed” vaccines in record time, perhaps even months. But we have done nothing at all (so far as I’m aware) to create a plan to prevent our air travel from becoming the fastest and most effective viral vector ever to maim any species on our planet.

Third is the new imperialism. With all the progress in democratic theory, we humans have yet to give up our evolutionary bent toward alpha male rule. And so, just ninety years after the rise of Adolf Hitler and his Nazis, we have a Russian leader whose unprovoked aggressions and military atrocities are indistinguishable from Hitler’s. Even his justifications are much the same, although (in a case of pure projection) he accuses his victims—led by a Jew!—of being Nazis.

One especially vile aspect of this Russian bestiality has gotten little notice. Russia’s most effective fighting force is a band of tens of thousands of mercenary soldiers (The exact number is unknown.) led by a Russian oligarch named Yevgeny Prigozhin. His mercenaries come in part from prisons, penal colonies, and marginalized Russian minorities. They are in the thick of the brutal crimes against civilians and civil infrastructure in Ukraine. And Prigozhin himself reportedly claims to be responsible for the relentless Russian cyber-assaults that helped our Demagogue gain our presidency, and nearly to keep it despite losing the election.

Prigozhin is nothing less than Russia’s sole and most powerful warlord. Apparently, he’s a power unto himself. He operates independently of whatever “law,” apart from tsarist decrees, still exists in Russia. He seems to act outside the normal chain of command. What happens if he turns on Putin himself, or if he “takes charge” after Putin falls ill or dies? Might we have a lawless, half-demented, brutal warlord in charge of the world’s biggest arsenal of nuclear weapons?

Next to this, it’s hard to see anything in Xi Jinping’s China as posing a greater menace, notwithstanding China being far richer, smarter and more populous. The Chinese are a practical people, whose unique system of writing (I believe) does not lend itself to wild, let alone crazily brutal, abstractions. While dealing harshly with internal minorities, China has not staged a major invasion of a recognized foreign power since the “divine wind” (Japan’s words) of tropical cyclones sunk Mongol fleets intent on invading Japan in the thirteenth century.

Xi’s “zero Covid” policy was oppressive, inept and ultimately ineffective. But he reversed it when his people began to rebel. Unless senility sets in (as it did with Mao), it’s hard to see him destroying Taiwan and its world-leading chip factories in order to “save” them, as Putin is self-evidently doing with Ukraine. Unlike Putin, Xi considers cause and effect and does not appear to consider wanton destruction and murder as sound means to an end.

Nevertheless, China’s rising might and increasingly erratic one-man rule presents an existential risk of its own. How might Xi react if global warming extends last summer’s crop failures in Southern China? What will he do about massive migration from warmer countries as they become less habitable? Will Chinese “discipline” produce more effective, let alone more “humane,” solutions to coming disasters than those in the West, let alone Russia?

The final existential threat is a wild card. Will the Internet’s lies, misinformation and disinformation destroy our species by first making us mad, à la Euripides? In the US alone, unrestrained social-media firms have given us: (1) the Demagogue’s presidency; (2) his Big Lie; (3) some one-third of our population who follow him blindly and believe his Big Lie; and (4) a majority of our electorate who fight—like ignorant armies clashing by night—for and against “wokeness,” while ignoring or minimizing all the existential threats listed above.

Our Supreme Court just heard oral arguments in a case that could cut social media’s carte blanche to spread lies. We won’t know its ruling until June. Meanwhile, Congress seems split along party lines on requiring social media to bear any responsibility for spreading the lies that are busy drowning American democracy in a sea of false charges, paranoid fantasies, and “fake news.”

In closing, let’s narrow our focus from our entire species to our own United States of America and its government. What’s our “report card,” so far, as the “leader of the free world” in facing our whole species’ four existential threats?

In facing runaway global warming, we just passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which contains $369 billion for clean energy projects. But that’s against a background of consistent denial and doubt-sowing about the very fact and cause of global warming, for over half a century. A late start is better than none. So I would give us a C+, assuming all the IRA money gets properly spent, and not wasted or defrauded away.

In facing the growing threat of yet more deadly pandemics, we have done nothing even to consider, let alone prepare, a plan for protecting air traffic, or even shutting it down temporarily. Along with Germany, we developed the mRNA vaccines, which have the unique ability to be “programmed” for new viruses at “warp speed.” But we’ve done little to wrench vitally needed vaccine development free of commercial motivation, let alone to aid robust vaccine production among the 95% of global population that doesn’t live in the US.

So as our President declares the Covid-19 “emergency” ready to end in May, we’ve done virtually nothing to prepare for the next pandemic. This is so even as bird flu has infected the same order of magnitude of organisms that, in humans, caused nearly a dozen variants of Covid to emerge in a mere three years. So I’d give us a C-, at best, for being prepared for the next pandemic.

In facing the threat of revived bestial imperialism, coming mostly but not exclusively from Russia, we’ve done pretty well. We’ve devoted a significant part of our military budget, and we’re planning for more, to stop Russia’s Nazis in or at Ukraine.

We need to send more weapons and ammunition, including better and longer-range ones, in much greater quantities. But we’re doing a lot already, and we’ve goaded and encouraged our allies to do more. President Biden’s recent impromptu, secret visit to Kyiv was an extraordinary propaganda coup, not to mention a huge morale boost for Ukraine’s defenders. It also put to rest, for the moment, fears of Biden’s senility, as did his adroit ad-libbing defense of Social Security and Medicare during his State of the Union Address. Here we earn a B+, I would think, although we still need to do more and to stay the course.

In facing the threat of the Internet and social media making us crazy, the jury is still out. No nation, even ours, can succeed in difficult times by letting large segments of its population believe dark fantasies concocted for partisan gain and spread for profit.

So far, Congress, in Section 230, has given Internet media carte blanche to lie, cheat and propagandize without consequence. And so far, our Supreme Court has given our oligarchs carte blanche to use their money, in the name of “speech,” to drive the propaganda. We can hope for better decisions in the future. But so far our government institutions rate a grade of F in ensuring close popular contract with reality, without which no organism or nation can survive.

So how well are we prepared, in sum, to face the existential threats that we know to be here, perhaps with more to come? On average, we’re below a C grade, i.e., below rank average. For the so-called “leader of the free world,” that’s not good enough. In my next essay, I’m going to analyze what kind of leadership we Americans need, at the national level, to improve this dismal picture.


For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

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Reviving Labor Unions Despite Lazy Reporting

Today I read one of the most heartening news stories of the last five years. It said that nearly half a trillion dollars of federal spending, which our formerly Democratic Congress had already approved, includes subsidies and tax incentives to revive labor unions in America. The benefits do not go to unions directly; instead, the law provides tax credits and other incentives for private companies to hire union labor, have or allow union apprenticeships, pay “prevailing” (usually union) wages, and “buy American.”

That money will increase union membership, propel union apprenticeships for on-the-job training, and push for union-level wages. It will also encourage the use of American-made steel, iron and components in everything from infrastructure projects to chip-production machines and electric cars. In other words, the new laws pushed and passed by Democrats, which President Biden touted in his State of the Union address, will give American labor unions and American labor a half-trillion-dollar indirect boost.

Why is this story so important? The last generation’s decline in America’s military and economic power, social justice, economic equality, and “domestic tranquility” is largely a result of the disemployment and marginalization of our skilled workers.

To get lower labor costs and make more profit, our oligarchs moved some 60,000 American factories abroad. This left their domestic workers high and dry, factory towns emptying, and wages, skilled jobs and self-respect plummeting. The result was declining real (inflation adjusted) salaries for skilled workers, the emptying of the “rust belt,” a second pandemic of “deaths of despair,” the rise of the Demagogue as a false friend of labor, and the near-loss of our Republic on January 6, 2021.

All this won’t change overnight. But the revival of labor unions promises to reverse virtually all of the trends that drive our current discontents. First, it promises good, well-paying, dignified jobs for the two-thirds of American workers who lack college degrees. Second, by boosting their pay, it will boost our economy by increasing the demand for goods and services that most of us use. (Unlike many college-educated workers, most non-college-educated workers spend most of what they earn currently. They don’t “invest” in luxury goods or speculate in stocks or crypto. They don’t tend to buy good homes just to “flip” them.)

Third, instead of most of us going to Walmart to buy cheap foreign-made stuff, most of us will have the money to buy better products made by Americans in American factories to American standards of quality and safety. In this way, we Americans will pick ourselves up by our economic bootstraps. When you go to buy a manufactured product, you may pay a little more. But, in so doing, you will support your fellow Americans and help them have a better life. Then they can afford to buy more, boosting the economy, and to pay more in taxes, helping to make our infrastructure and defense more secure. A rising tide of better income and more economic security will raise all boats.

Fourth, America will return to making enough of its own manufactures so that it needn’t depend on its rivals and enemies for the things that make a modern economy run and grow, let alone things we must have to fight and survive a war. Finally, a majority of American workers will slowly come to realize that the Democrats are their true friends, and have been since the early twentieth century. They will come to reject the false promises of “free trade,” “globalization,” and “libertarianism,” which only let their factories and jobs be sold abroad and the oligarchs wax rich from cheap foreign labor and effective tax rates far lower than their own.

A must-read Vox article shows, in seven key graphs, how the decline of union membership has mirrored the decline of economic justice for workers in the OECD. (Everyone who works for someone else should carry a card with this short article in his or her wallet or purse.) The most important graph is the third one, which plots the share of union membership against the share of income accruing to the top ten percent of earners, i.e., oligarchs, bosses and the “elite.” Union membership peaked at about 33% during World War II and had declined to about 12% by 2008 (fifteen years ago). During the same period, the share of total income grabbed by the top 10% increased from 33% to 47%, or nearly by half.

Labor unions are the surest means by which workers can achieve fair wages and fair and safe working conditions. They can’t achieve them alone because their bosses can always find more desperate workers to replace a few who demand better treatment. That’s especially so in an economy with eleven million undocumented migrants effectively reduced to serfdom because they can be deported at any time with a single phone call. (The solution to this problem is to give them some sort of legal status, even if far from citizenship, so that they can organize and object to abuse without being instantly deported.)

Slowly but surely, workers in low-paid jobs are beginning to understand these facts of life. That’s why Amazon’s warehouse workers, Starbucks’ baristas, private delivery drivers and similar gig workers are already organizing unions. They’re doing so despite (in some cases) relatively benign working conditions and (in too many cases) full-court presses by their employers to convince them not to, sometimes in violation of labor laws.

Why are labor unions so important? For all who work for someone else, but particularly those without college degrees (whose work options are more limited), democracy is not complete without a labor union. Your political vote won’t matter much if you don’t have a job, or if the job you have won’t support a family without working two shifts, or without constant struggle, worry, and angst. And if you can be deported with a phone call, you have no rights beyond those your boss is willing to concede voluntarily, at least to the extent of not making that phone call.

If you’re white, male and straight, you may think that getting a “leg up” against the Black, Hispanic, Asian, foreign-born or LGBTQ worker next to you might help, but it won’t. “Divide and conquer” has been the means by which bosses have prevailed over workers since bosses broke the back of the progressive movement around the turn of the twentieth century. The only sure way for workers to move ahead is together, united without regard to race, religion, national origin, gender or sexual proclivities. That’s one reason all workers should know that any demagogue who tries to make them hate and fear their own co-workers, on the basis of mere identify or beliefs, is their enemy, not their friend.

Modern industry has made it possible, and sometimes necessary, to treat human beings as interchangeable cogs in big machines. In the early twentieth century, it was ladies behind endless rows of identical sewing machines, and men behind endless rows of identical lathes. Today, it’s workers in call centers, social-media workers trying to stamp out misinformation and hate, programmers cranking out code under impossible deadlines at their home computers, gig-delivery workers and warehouse workers tasked by algorithms, and even some health-care workers directed by machines as well as superiors.

If you work at one of these jobs, how much do you think your mere vote as a citizen is going to change your salary, working conditions or on-the-job safety, i.e., the important conditions under which you work from day to day? Only by organizing with all or most of your co-workers can you force your boss to see you, hear you, negotiate with you, and make things better. In this sense, a labor union is as essential to your being treated humanely as your vote as a citizen in a democracy.

So when I read the article about President Biden’s big push to revive labor unions, I stood up at my breakfast table and cheered.

But then had a second I thought. I saw the article about union boosting on February 11. President Biden had signed into law the CHIPS and Science Act on August 9 of last year, the Inflation Reduction Act on August 16, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (aka the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill) on November 15 of 2021.

Why, in all the nearly seven months since the signing of the last two acts, and all the fifteen months since the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill was signed, had I never heard about the union-boosting provisions of these laws? Why had this successful push by the Democrats, which goes right to the heart of the current discontents of our workers, our economic ills and our democracy, not been a matter of general public knowledge?

Maybe I missed it. But I think not. I think our so-called “meanstream media” (that’s a typo, but I like it!) dropped the ball, big time. Amidst avid reporting of useless pols brandishing weapons, amidst endless speculation about what pols would say or do next, amidst careful reporting of endless lies and misinformation, amidst even more endless reporting on degenerate celebrities, our media missed one of the most important stories since January 6, 2020. And a positive, encouraging story at that!

It’s also a story that any junior reporter could have broken just by reading the laws that Congress had passed. Maybe it’s too much to ask a billion-dollar media corporation to assign someone to read Congress’ admittedly boring thousand-page productions from cover to cover. But that might have broken this story early enough to have had some effect on the recent midterm elections.

You might be disposed to blame the silence on the Dems. If they don’t toot their own horn, who will? Even now, the President of the United States has undertaken a temporary near-full-time job going around the country talking about what he’s done for the working stiff.

But what about the media? If they had done their jobs back in August, September and October, let alone for all of 2022 before the elections, our midterms might well have have come out differently. Maybe we would have a new, fully Democratic Congress and be well on our way to resurrecting our democracy, not to mention economic and racial justice, as well as our economy.

It’s all enough to make me think that our private media—virtually all run or controlled by oligarchs (Jeff Bezos owns the WaPo, and need I mention the Murdochs and Fox?)— are engaged in a conspiracy of silence. But I’m not that paranoid, not yet. I just think our media have all become so entranced with social media and so fundamentally lazy that their reporters would rather walk over hot coals than read a thousand-page statute from cover to cover, or even pick up the phone and talk at length with a lawyer or analyst whose job is to do just that.

As for the future, it’s clear as day that the Democrats need their own media outlet. It shouldn’t compete directly with the big monopolies in retail news, for revenue and clicks. Rather, it should be something like Reuters or AP: a progressive-focused, authoritative and trusted original source of real news, based in part on real analysis of long and boring but crucially important documents like the statutes passed during President Biden’s first two years.

Today, we’re emerging (we hope!) from the Covid pandemic. At the same time, we’re dealing with spy balloons from China, a Demagogue still waiting in the wings (also a defendant in multiple trials), a smarter one waiting to pounce from Florida, a once-a-century disaster in Turkey and Syria, and the winds of war with both China and Russia. With all this going on, isn’t it a bit of a waste sending an overworked, eighty-year-old President around the country doing what fair, “balanced” and competent media ought to have been doing as a matter of basic good reporting?


For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

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Our Sick SOTU

O, tempora! O, mores! — (Latin: “Oh, the times! Oh, the customs!”)

Before I get to the sick stuff, let’s give President Biden his due. His words came not trippingly off the tongue, but in spurts that seemed propelled by steroids. Only with my streaming service’s instant replay could I understand them all.

But he did what he had to do, and he did it well.

Biden laid out the long list of his accomplishments before losing the House. They included: (1) the first big infrastructure bill in a generation; (2) regulated (and much lower) insulin prices for our millions of diabetics; (3) medical help for vets maimed by breathing burn-pit gas; (4) saving Ukraine, for now, from Putin the Terrible; and (5) the first big bite out of climate change ever. And this is just a partial list.

More important, through an impromptu and clever rhetorical trick, Biden got his so-called “conservative” opposition to “agree” not to cut Social Security or Medicare. He did this although every sentient being knows that so-called “conservatives” have been gunning for these social programs ever since FDR and LBJ, respectively, created them.

Biden even played the role of statesman. He congratulated Kevin McCarthy on his Speakership, causing him to visibly soak it up like a errant kid praised on a playground. Several times, Biden invited his opposition to work together for the good of the country. In reciting his own many legislative accomplishments, he gave credit to those that were bipartisan. As surprising as that may have been to some, there were many.

But the “optics.” Oh, the optics! As I watched the action in the huge House chamber—the interplay among the worthies who are supposed to govern us—I imagined myself watching the Roman Senate in the time of Nero, Caligula, or Commodus.

The first thing that struck me was the age gap. There was Joe Biden, the oldest person ever to become president, doing a creditable job of reporting his administration’s many successes—the more remarkable for his age and the nation’s grave division. There was Democrat Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader (with a real majority, of one, this time!), stooped with age and smiling benevolently like a kindly grandpa. There was ex-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, rightly congratulated for having been the most effective Speaker ever, looking for all the world like a cross between a kindly grandma and an Egyptian mummy.

And then there were the kids, whom we’ll get to in a moment. But few stood out in between.

When the President finally turned to congratulate Hakeem Jeffries, our new House Minority Leader, I literally got up off my couch. I clapped and cheered in a room with only me and my wife it it! Finally, I could see a Democrat old enough (52) to have some sense and clout, young enough to have a worthy future, and with enough experience in Congress (ten years) to know where the bathrooms are and how to get things done. As far as I could tell, Jeffries’ likes are few enough: he’s a rarity sandwiched between the fading geezers and the strutting, clueless ingenues.

Literally glowing among the latter was Senator (Senator!) Kyrsten Sinema. She wore an iridescent day-glo yellow dress, with day-glo horn-rimmed glasses. Her glowing dress had extended epaulet-like shoulders of the same material, making her look like a character in The Game of Thrones. Just to make sure no one missed her, she placed her yellow irradiance in the center of the room.

If there had been an award for dressing wildly inappropriately for the occasion and the institution, Sinema would have won it by acclamation. She seemed the very model of today’s young “look at me!” pols.

Then there were the smirkers. After watching the original “Top Gun” decades ago, I never paid to see Tom Cruise smirk again. Little did I know that, in watching the 2023 SOTU, I would see Ted Cruz smirk in a way that made me even sicker. His trademark smirk followed our President’s rhetorical trick, which seemed to extract a GOP promise not to touch Social Security or Medicare. Here’s what I imagined Cruz thinking under his smirk:

“Gloat now, if you want, Joe. In a few years, you’ll be gone, maybe in the grave. I’ll still be here, supported by an endless stream of money, blessed by our Supreme Court and donated by our ever-richer oligarchs. They will never rest until they cut their taxes so low that they no longer can help seniors and others in need. They, and I, are here for the long haul. And they are motivated by the most powerful force in history: love of self and celebrity. You, who care about the poor and old, are a dying breed. He who laughs last, laughs best. That would be me.”

With her “look at me!” dress, and with his trademark obnoxious smirk, Sinema and Cruz were just the tip of the iceberg. Somewhere in the crowd was George Santos, whose Olympic-class lying made no difference to a party for which celebrity and power have totally eclipsed service. Then there were the bomb-throwers: Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and Jim Jordan. The rhetorical bombs they threw accused the President of lying and causing the fentanyl pandemic without, of course, any evidence or time to provide it. So much for reasoned, serious discussion among adults.

Have I missed anyone? Does anyone in his/her right mind think any of these clowns strives to be a “public servant” in the way we Boomers were taught in high-school civics, and came to expect over a lifetime of political engagement? Does anyone think any of them lends our democracy wisdom, even basic cunning, let alone dignity?

But even this was not all. The crowning excrescence was Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ response to Biden’s SOTU for the Republican Party. You would have to go back to Joe (not ‘Gene) McCarthy to find a more execrable example of vague but vile, wrong-headed rhetoric.

I tuned in a tad late, so I can’t be entirely sure; but the part of her speech I heard contained not a single fact, let alone a verifiable one. All was claim, blame, name-calling, and emotional lament. It was an excruciating interval of mindless venting.

As a whole, Sanders’ speech brought to mind the turn of phrase by which David Brooks had described the writings of Harriet Miers, whose undeserved nomination for the Supreme Court later failed. Miers’ work, Brooks wrote, was “a relentless march of vapid abstractions.”

So it was with Sanders’ response speech. But hers got even worse. She spent whole minutes in obsequious sycophancy to our former president, reporting a secret trip she had taken with him to war-torn Iraq, to visit our troops. So star-struck, uncritical and flattering was her report that, in keeping with his current disfavor, she never even mentioned him by name.

This, it seems, is our current governor of Arkansas, a sovereign state. To tell from her speech, her head is full of strong emotions—mostly fear and hate—but not a single thought about policy, programs, or practical measures to improve her voters’ lives, let alone the actual current status of the voters who had elected her. Her speech was a world-class embarrassment to us, as wildly inappropriate to our nation and our times as Sinema’s iridescent day-glo, epauleted yellow dress.

In an impressive attempt to maintain journalistic objectivity, PBS’ Congressional Correspondent Lisa de Jardin tagged Sanders’ speech as the opening salvo of the GOP strategy for 2024: a campaign of all culture wars, all the time. But don’t count on it. Our oligarchs can see the writing on the wall. If their candidate (probably Ron DeSantis) doesn’t win in 2024, they are probably done. Our nation could return to true democracy, resurrect antitrust law from the dead, raise taxes on the oligarchs and their corporations, and show some care and concern for all of its various people, including recent migrants and our eleven-million mostly Hispanic serfs.

So I’m betting our oligarchs will pull out all the stops this time. They control the media, at least the ones their dupes follow. They control much of the Internet, spreading lies algorithmically for profit. And their Field Marshall McConnell is as wily and evil a traitor to democracy as ever rose out of the Old Confederacy. He will use every lever of power at his disposal to insure continued oligarchic rule, just as he did in denying President Obama a Supreme Court appointment. After all, this is a man who self-confessedly married for money.

At the end of the day, it was the oligarchs who destroyed ancient Rome. Their senators assassinated the demagogue of their time, Julius Caesar. But his death didn’t make much difference. The Pompeiian Civil Wars—a much bloodier version of our present harsh division—did their trick. And the oligarchs’ preoccupation with their own finances and prosperity did the rest.

Every long-lived democracy in human history has suffered the same fate: death by corruption. Today, even Britain is teetering on the edge. If our own relatively new democracy is going to avoid that common fate, we will need young leaders of intelligence, skill, experience, courage and utter dedication to majority rule.

People like Pete Buttigieg, Hakeem Jeffries, Wes Moore, Gina Raimondo, Rafael Warnock, and Gretchen Whitmer will have to step up, perhaps before even they think they are ready. At very least, someone like them must replace Kamala Harris as Vice President. (I would gladly add Stacey Abrams, but as she has yet to win a statewide election, she might have to serve by appointment.)

With Caesar gone, the “good” general (Pompey) won, for a time. But as Caesar himself had said in crossing the Rubicon, the die was cast. The corruption of the oligarchs, coupled with poison from the lead water pipes of Rome’s elite, sealed its fate, though the complete decline took centuries. In our case, the decline would be much faster, and the consequences for our species—in our era of runaway global warming and nuclear weapons—far more severe. And science has not yet told us how much our own unique environmental poisons, including endocrine disruptors, ubiquitous plastics, and nanoparticles, are hastening our own descent into madness.

Of course I will vote for Joe Biden if he wins the Democratic nomination. But we need new leadership. We need new blood. If Lincoln could do it after only ten years in public office, and Obama after twelve, others can, too. We can’t let the fate of our Republic and of our species hang solely on the health of a man who would be 82 years old on his next inauguration, however clever his performance in this otherwise farcical SOTU. The fate of the paragon and chief defender of modern democracy hangs in the balance; who will step up?


For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

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My Dream About Kids: A Challenge to Boomers

Last night I had a dream about kids. It was so weird, so unusual, that it stuck in my mind as if real.

I was at some sort of town-hall meeting in a huge cafeteria. Sitting at a formica table, I was holding forth on the subject of children and their education. I stressed how important it is that all kids have the best possible education—one that brings out their natural talents and then some. I noted how vital is early-childhood education, including pre-K. That’s what develops kids’ brains for their entire lifetimes.

Finally, I urged providing the best possible education to all of our kids, because that’s what will determine our collective future. We must have good schools, with excellent teachers, whom we pay well, because teachers will fix our species’ fate.

A positive home environment matters, too. But no society, by collective action, can insure that. Only teachers trained for the job can remediate a poor home environment or enhance a good one. Only they can give all kids have the knowledge, skills and moral compasses they will need to find their ways as adults.

In my dream, it was a simple speech, and I tried to keep it so. I consciously used simple words and kept my sentences short. I got embarrassed, in the dream, for using the word “professors,” instead of “teachers,” just because that’s what I had been.

When I had finished, there was a short pause. Then the whole huge room broke into applause. The applause went on so long that it embarrassed me in the dream.

When I awoke, I felt surprised. Like most of us, I rarely have dreams of triumph. Most of my dreams reflect fears, anxieties, inadequacies, and barely repressed dread. But as I woke up fully, I realized that this dream wasn’t really about me. It was about hope.

I’m a Baby Boomer. Actually, I’m a bit of a Pre-Baby-Boomer, born in 1945, not 1946. So I’m an honorary part of the best-educated, safest, richest, best-fed, healthiest, most comfortable, and most selfish generation in human history.

Today I see how quickly the rational, comfortable, safe world that we Boomers inherited is falling apart. Among many other things, the excellent and virtually free education that I got—from kindergarten through my Ph.D.—has become a thing of the past.

Precisely how we recover that halcyon past is beyond my pay grade. But we must.

Today, our entire species faces multiple existential threats. They include: (1) runaway global warming, (2) nuclear war; (3) rising fascism; and (4) the simple inability of our leaders and voters to focus on the things that matter most. We fight like kids among ourselves, over stupid buzzwords like “wokeness,” while the world burns.

As we face these multiple threats, the mood in our nation is nothing like the calm confidence that we Boomers felt in the postwar period, despite the Cold War’s menace. Watch JFK’s “Ask Not” inaugural address, or his “Let’s Go to the Moon” speech at Rice University, and you’ll get an idea of what I mean. (If you’re in a hurry, you can read the transcripts here and here, but they won’t convey the same feelings of hope and confidence.)

Recovering that hope, calm and confidence will be the work of kids born this year, and last year, and next year. So will facing our common threats with determination, science and common sense, not blame and conspiracy theories.

Good education is the key to our nation’s and humanity’s future. It’s as vital to survival as a strong defense, clean air, clean water, and mRNA vaccines against pandemics.

That’s why, though I have no kids of my own, I have never voted against a bond issue or a tax hike for schools or schooling. I never will. Educating all kids well, for me, is the primary obligation of every progressive, especially us Boomers. If we let our kids degenerate to the level of Lord of the Flies—as some adult members of Congress have already degenerated—our nation will be lost, and maybe our species.

Collectively, we Boomers have enjoyed the best lives of any single generation in human history. In my mind, that creates an obligation to all our kids and to the rest of humanity: to give every child a good chance at the same good life. That means, at a minimum, a fine, free education, beginning at age three.

It also means not calling each other names, not pointing fingers, but acting like what we Boomers are: privileged geezers who have had the best educations and best lives in human history. We owe it to our nation and our progeny to make that progress a tradition.


For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

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Why Morality Matters

If we search for light in darkness, we can see a tiny spark in the official response to the brutal police murder of Tyre Nichols. By historical standards, it was instantaneous. Not three weeks after his death, the five officers who had killed him had been fired and indicted for murder.

There have been many unjustified police killings of Black suspects and bystanders in recent years. In nearly all, the official response was agonizingly slow and inadequate. In comparison, this response was truly at “warp speed.”

More important, Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn “CJ” Davis—a woman!—called it like it was:

“This is not just a professional failing. This is a failing of basic humanity toward another individual. This incident was heinous, reckless and inhumane.”

When was the last time you heard a leader of a police force speaking in such stark terms of basic human morality? Usually, what we get is bureaucratese, the law, defensive “spin” on the evidence, and sometimes a resort to the “thin blue line.” From the chief to the DA, most police and their apologizers form a defensive crouch like the ancient Roman “turtle,” shields out in all directions.

There is right, and there is wrong. Increasingly, the difference gets lost in a dark melange of power, self-interest, over-zealous advocacy, self-justification, money and political polarization. Not this time. In the dismal amoral society in which we find ourselves today, this is progress.

But unjust police killings are just the tip of the iceberg. For some fifty years, the tobacco industry denied that its products were killing millions before their time, even as its own research revealed the deadly cause and effect. For an equal time, the fossil-fuel industry denied the chief cause of global warming, in the face of its own research. An Olympic-class liar, George Santos, is now a member of Congress. No Republican seems prepared, let alone eager, to recognize the glaringly obvious, that he doesn’t belong there. Whether as profits or political power, might outweighs right.

After repeatedly stretching facts and legal theories (of a stolen election) beyond any rational elasticity, Rudy Giuliani reportedly faces disbarment—over two years after his lies nearly helped steal our democracy. And, lest we forget, the greatest “advance” in communication history, aka “the Internet,” is mostly set up with algorithms that amplify lies because they shock and outrage people, attract clicks, and so help sell stuff.

Our ancient ancestors knew better. They put prohibitions on lying and murder right into the Ten Commandments. They knew that most people are not abstract thinkers, and that raw self-interest is a powerful motivator for evil.

So they made morality simple. Then they made sure to drum it into ordinary people’s heads, day after day, Sunday after Sunday. They relied on ten simple moral principles. In the original Hebrew, the Commandments are even shorter than in English.

Today we have an infinitely more complex and powerful society. We can make mRNA vaccines at “warp speed” and send people to the Moon (again!). But we’ve forgotten the basics of human civilization.

If you want to know why we have so many unjustified police killings, watch Wesley Lowery, author of They Can’t Kill Us All, explain on PBS’ Washington Week. [Set the timer at 19:06 or see transcript below.] He reports that roughly six out of ten police officers, once fired for misconduct, get re-hired by the very same police department that fired them. Of course some of the rest get hired somewhere else, just like the predatory pedophile priests who got transferred to new parishes where they could predate again. Lowery reports that some jurisdictions don’t even allow any authority to talk to cops accused of misconduct for seven to thirty days after the event. This gives them ample time to weave a consistent and credible fabric of lies to defend the indefensible.

This sort of thing, says Lowery, varies widely from locality to locality, along with the power of police unions and the whims of cities, counties and states. Many, it seems, are more interested in the power and comfort of those charged with protecting us than in the Ten Commandments.

Human morality is no accident. It’s not something arbitrary. Nor are the two most important “bumper stickers” in human history: Jesus’ admonitions to “Love thy enemy” and “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

On the contrary, human morality is rooted in our species’ fundamental evolutionary path. It’s rooted in science.

Individually, we are small, slow, weak and (our few geniuses notwithstanding) relatively stupid. Together, we can fly around our planet in a day, put satellites into orbit, travel to the Moon and (soon) Mars, and create mRNA vaccines against Covid in less than a year. Everything we are and have depends on our communication, cooperation, and ultimately on our empathy. Our grapefruit-sized brains and opposable thumbs matter only when we work together for the common good.

Distrust or hate each other, and everything falls apart. And lying is where distrust and hate begin. It’s happening within Russia as it commits and denies daily atrocities in Ukraine. It’s happening within our own country, rotting from the inside even as it tries to stem the atrocities in Ukraine.

Even among our greatest thinkers, few have told us that “morality” is a practical, cause-and-effect thing, part of the science of living well. Among the greatest (and most recent) who did so is the late Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr.

A year before his assassination, on April 4, 1967, King gave a speech explaining his personal epiphany that turned him against the War in Vietnam. It’s a gorgeous piece of English prose, full of biblical and other literary allusions. But most of all, it’s a work of supreme logic. It’s a piece of cause-and-effect deduction worthy of a physicist, engineer, or prophet.

King predicts the consequences of our continuing that war—the most catastrophic foreign-policy blunder in our history. He sees how it would corrupt and weaken our society, exacerbate inequality, stop Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” dead in its tracks, set back the causes for which King later gave his life, and ultimately make all of us Americans and our entire species worse off.

Looking back from the perspective of 56 years later, it’s impossible not to view King’s speech as prophecy, and him as a seer. Only three years after his death, with the publication of The Pentagon Papers in 1971, did our people come to realize how big a part official lying, by both soldiers and statemen, had played in that disaster.

Those of us who are religious might think King divinely inspired. I just think he was smarter—a lot smarter—than the rest of us. He applied his superior intelligence and legendary mental discipline to detect the signals of history through the noise of racist and militaristic chatter. Like a modern American Nostradamus, he analyzed cause and effect and came to sound conclusions that (unfortunately for us) have stood the test of half a century and counting.

Far from having a “monument” to him that doesn’t even show his face, the Reverend King should have his bust in front of the Capitol, or on the Lincoln Memorial. His image should sit at the seat of our modern liberty, just as Sir Isaac Newton has his bust in front of The Royal Society of London. As long as our Republic stands, every visitor to our capital should know who was one of our greatest modern thinkers, what he looked like, and that he was Black.

But I digress. King understood, as few in human history have, that human morality is a science, not an art, far less a religion that can only be taken on faith. There is a direct line from what we nebulously call “morality” to human peace, happiness, tranquility, and (yes) prosperity. Far from being better off when everyone is selfish, greedy, profit-seeking and power-seeking, we are better off when we work together, cooperate, and “love” each other as Jesus advised.

Whenever we as a species have broken that rule, catastrophe has ensued. Keep the peasants who grow your food so lowly—in esteem and income—that they can’t feed or house themselves, and you have a bloody revolution (the French one). Call people “souls (души)” who (and whose progeny) belong to the land you own, as if they were trees or foxes, and you have another, even bloodier revolution (the Russian one). Let leaders on another continent take the wealth of people on yours, but don’t let them help select those leaders, and you get a third kind of revolution (our American one). Keep people as property and treat them like animals (often worse!), and you get our Civil War, still the bloodiest in our history.

The cause-and-effect aspect of morality is not confined to history. Take jobs away from people who work with their hands. Sell those jobs to peasants abroad who are willing to work for less. Let the resulting riches accrue to the most privileged here, who brag about raising millions of Chinese out of poverty even as they wax obscenely wealthy and our broken workers turn to opiates. What do you get? You get the modern GOP, with its theft of working-people’s support. You get Donald Trump, extreme libertarianism, a broken society and a nearly broken democracy.

Build private companies that preferentially feed people lies and misinformation because they’re startling and help push ads, and you get a huge fraction of people who have no clue what is true. Tell people falsely that a big election was “stolen” by fraudulent voting, and you get the first attack on the US Capitol and its leaders since the War of 1812.

Keep eleven million mostly-Hispanic serfs in bondage by subjecting them to instant deportation with a phone call, and you can have low-priced, docile labor. You can even demonize them and build a useless wall to draw the votes of dupes. Maybe you can scare more migrants from coming. But eventually you come to depend on the migrant surfs’ labor, and your society can’t bear the contrast between ordinary paid labor and their serfdom. So it begins to rot from the inside, as it fights itself over more migrants coming in, even while neglecting and tormenting those already here.

Human morality is not rocket science. Conceptually, it’s much simpler than making mRNA vaccines, putting people on the Moon, or even running an efficient airline. It all boils down to the Golden Rule, or its simpler corollary: treat people badly and meanly, lie to them, and, eventually, they will do the same to you. Cooperate with them for a common purpose, speak honestly to them, listen to them, empathize with them, and give them an honest choice (or vote) and they will help you build a great corporation or a great nation.

So “morality” is not just the province of religious leaders, teachers, nannies and today’s “day care.” It’s the science of living within our evolutionary means and limited individual capabilities. As our Founders dimly recognized, it’s the way to “form a more perfect Union.” It’s the route to, and the scientific rationalization for, the “equality,” “justice” and “de-marginalization” that all oppressed people seek, especially here at home.

At the moment, we human sheep have gone far astray. So have we Americans. We’ve worshiped the false gods of profit, self-interest, and ultimately oligarchy for far too long. We’ve lied to ourselves so long and so often that many of us actually believe—with something like religious fervor—that yet more selfishness will make us all better off. So our nation is rotting from within, even as we face the greatest challenges in our history: a resurgence of brutal military imperialism in a China and a Russia armed with modern science and nuclear weapons.

Truly we have lost our way. Only by paying a decent respect to our greatest thinkers, including King, can we find our way back. Our time is short, as China prepares a land grab in Taiwan and Russia prepares for a brutal, if suicidal, spring offensive in Ukraine.

We can win, but only if we change our ways quickly. We can’t be strong unless we are good. We can’t be good unless we are moral. Chief Davis’ candid admission of how far the Memphis police fell from grace is just a starting point. But it’s a desperately needed beginning.

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

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