Disconfirmation Only Strengthens Their Belief

When the Founding Fathers (most of whom were Deists, and not specifically Christians) gave us the First Amendment, they intended to keep government out of the “religion” business, but they had to know at the time that there was little they could do to keep religion out of the government business. The “separation of church and state” as it’s commonly called really isn’t a true separation because it only legislates against cross contamination in a single direction, and in a curious way the debt and budget debacle in Washington this week is a byproduct of that situation. In a nutshell, the kind of fervent belief that causes a person to reject evolution and global warming can now also cause a person to reject rational principles of economics. “We don’t need to raise the debt ceiling because I don’t “believe” that we need to raise the debt ceiling.” It took 225 years, but eventually enough of these believers got elected to congress to actually have the power to take down the system. And it looks like that’s exactly what they intend to do. I wonder if the Founding Fathers saw this coming such a long time ago?

Three years ago I attended a neuroscience seminar titled “Hardwired to Believe.” (see my blog “Conference on World Affairs” 5/1/2008) The essence of the seminar was that people are hardwired differently, and some people just have neurological connections within their brains that make it easier for them to accept the idea of creation than to dig into the mountain of scientific evidence supporting evolution. And here’s the kicker. The more these people get their noses rubbed in evolution, the stronger becomes their belief in creation. The disconfirmation only strengthens their belief. Moreover, they’re not just being stubborn. They are following a neurologically based bias, and it’s this bias that we’ve all come to know as faith or religious belief. When this faith is applied to the question, “Where did man come from?” the answer isn’t immediately critical. If faith says that man was created by a creator, then, “So what?” It’s as harmless as believing in Santa Claus. But when these people band together to gain political power— and that’s exactly what happened with the Tea Party phenomenon— then their faith and belief systems are no longer inconsequential. Believing that the U.S. will still be okay if it defaults on its credit obligations is NOT as harmless as believing in Santa Claus.

Stop Blaming the Government and the Politicians

If China was going down the tubes (the reality for China is quite the opposite), then it would be appropriate to blame the government. In China, the government runs the country. In America, “we the people” run the country. That’s the problem. We now have a democracy— the very kind of democracy that frightened the hell out of the Founding Fathers who wrote the U.S. Constitution. That’s why they gave us a republic instead. The way it was supposed to work— in the original plan— a person might get elected to office by voters who were so petulant and spiteful that they were demanding a complete government shutdown, but then once that person joined other elected leaders in the seat of government, he or she would work in cooperation for the good of the country. And most essential of all, the voters were expected to be sophisticated enough to know they couldn’t always get their own way on everything. That’s how a republic works. That’s how America is supposed to work. That’s all in the past.

Last election, about 50 Republicans (most affiliated with the Tea Party) were sent to Washington with marching orders to shut down the government, and damned if they didn’t do exactly that. That’s true democracy in action. Why should we be surprised at what they’re doing when they said they were going to do it?

So how did America get to this point? I blame four things: Ubiquitous and incessant polling. Massive political advertising on television. The emergence of our current system of primary elections to choose candidates. And 40 years of “dumb down” public schooling. We now have elected leaders who first become candidates by winning a primary, as opposed to being selected by party officials. All too often, this “winning” is achieved by the hiring the best PR agency to design the most effective attack ads while, at the same time, raising the most money to pay for the whole negative advertising process. And the attack ads work because the electorate just isn’t very bright. But here’s the killer. Once in office, elected officials make their decisions and policies based on the poll numbers. And then they crow that they’re following the will of the people, which they are. By definition, that’s democracy, but that’s not how it was supposed to be.

Democracies, if we look back at the historical record of true democracies, never last more than a century or two, and this includes the Athenian democracy in ancient Greece which went belly up after 172 years. The Founding Fathers knew this. In a true democracy, the voters don’t just get what they want. They get what they deserve.

Also see: Dying From "Death By Polling" 6/27/11

Americans Don’t Want to Pay for the Government They Want

Ron Schiller’s departure from NPR is probably a plus for everybody. His remarks in the undercover “sting” video show that he just doesn’t “get it” when it comes to the Tea Party. The Tea Party probably has a racist or two in its ranks, but to explain away the Tea Party by calling it a racist organization is to miss the point. Racist organizations are despicable and socially unacceptable, but racism doesn’t have the power to drive the world’s biggest economy into bankruptcy. Things would be so much better if the Tea Party was the new KKK because the reality is much worse than that.

Last Friday night (actually it was on PBS) commentator Mark Shields said the smartest thing I’ve heard in years. He said “The American people don’t want to pay for the government they want.” That’s the problem in a nutshell, and leading the charge in this direction is the Tea Party. When you see Tea Party members gleefully registering their passion about this complex problem, they always look like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney who have just been told that the big high school play is finally going to be a musical. America’s financial crisis— if it can be solved at all (and I doubt that it can)— will be solved, not by passion from well meaning, enthusiastic amateurs who think you can change things with torches and pitchforks, but by informed and committed intellectuals who understand that the U.S. is not above slipping into third world status.

Ungovernable? You Bet!

During the last ten years, I’ve become increasingly convinced that the human race (whatever the culture) has pretty much become ungovernable, and this week’s revolt in Egypt helps prove my point. Blame it on the Internet. Even back at the inception of the Internet more than two decades ago, the really smart people realized that this new way of sharing knowledge was inherently seditious, and there’s no doubt that— if the governments of the world had known then what they know today— the Internet never would have been allowed to flourish. Even the best futurists back then, however, could never have predicted the impact of social mediums like FaceBook and Twitter, and WikiLeaks.

For ten thousand years or more, governance has always been a delicate dance between government and the governed. The United States, over the last 235 years, has arguably done the best job of consistently getting this balance right, but even this nation has experienced some monumental hiccups. Coming out of WWII, I believe that the American people were far too compliant and trusting of their government. The delicate dance was unbalanced, and McCarthyism and Vietnam were two pathetic results, both fueled by a government that exploited paranoia about communism and citizen trust to prey on the governed. The HUAC congressional outrages of the early 1950s could have been stopped before they gained any traction by just a few well-placed riots and a press that was willing to explain what was happening. Facebook and Twitter would have had a monumental influence as well.

The last two years have shown us street riots in France and Greece and England and Tunisia and, now, Egypt— but most Americans still think that it could never happen here. I say, “Wanna bet?” The U.S.A. is dead broke. The ultimate solution to the deadbeat status of the country is new taxation, most likely in the form of a national sales tax on everything but groceries and medicine. Problem is, now you’ve got the Tea Party (Taxed Enough Already), and these are some of the same self-proclaimed patriots who rushed out after Obama’s election and stocked up on guns and munitions in quantities never before seen by the American arms industry outside of a wartime setting. They weren’t doing this just to boost the economy. Wait and see what happens if the U.S. government, led by Obama working with the Republican congress, decides to try and implement a national sales tax. Wait until the Tea Party gun owners all simultaneously get cheesed off about a second presidential term for Obama, and they network with each other on the Internet. Wait until there’s a convergence between a new tax policy and a mindset that believes Obama is a Muslim and foreign-born (and did I mention that he has dark skin and kinky hair?)— and all of this is played out within a poorly educated, white trash population of people who can’t find a job or pay their mortgage. You think it can’t happen here? Guess again.

WTF is Up with Sarah Palin?

I’m starting to really enjoy Sarah Palin. Really. She provides just the right mix of amusement and astonishment that I used to get from a fresh copy of Mad Magazine back in my teenage years, but even publisher William M. Gaines could never have dreamed up something as outrageous as the cartoonish diva from the frozen North. Tuesday night in Obama’s State of the Union speech, Palin must have felt that she hit the mother lode. In the President’s slogan, “Winning the Future,” she saw the acronym WTF, and she made the connection with the same three letters used on her favorite communication medium, Twitter, as raunchy shorthand for “What the Fxxx?” Then Palin immediately posted a video and a tweet to let all her fans know how clever she is. Watching the video, it’s obvious that she was experiencing the same snickering titillation that a pre-pubescent child feels when it first learns that the word, “pussy,” has a double meaning.

Months ago, I decided to give it a rest with Palin on my blog. To use an old cliché, writing about her was like wrestling with a pig. It just made me feel dirty, especially when I knew that the pig actually liked it. But as I said, I’m starting to enjoy her more and more. You don’t hear much from the Democrats about her these days, but now the Republicans have taken up the charge. I think I know why. The Tea Party is a very real problem for the Republican Party, and since Palin seems to be the de facto leader, taking shots at her has the effect of clipping the wing of the Tea Party movement without overtly offending the Tea Party constituents. And god knows, she is such an easy target. I almost feel sorry for the Republicans. George W. Bush was not exactly a modern Jeffersonian version of presidential genius, but Bush was intellectual light years ahead of the Tundra Tootsie.

The Tea Party, and Why I Love It

I love watching the Tea Party for the same reason I always loved watching Wylie Coyote chase the Road Runner out beyond the edge of the rock precipice. It’s just a lot of fun to see that look of surprise that comes with the realization there’s nothing underneath but empty air. Tea Party candidates will undoubtedly win seats in congress come November, at which time they will come face to face with a number of unsolvable problems. The jobs necessary to bring down unemployment simply no longer exist in sufficient quantity. The national debt can’t come down when people absolutely refuse to pay higher taxes. The war in Afghanistan, like the war 40 years ago in Vietnam, is not something we can win. Deregulation, “getting the government off our backs” in TeaPartyspeak, is guaranteed to result in more episodes like the BP oil spill, and the home mortgage meltdown, and the salmonella-tainted egg recall, and the Wall Street derivatives scam, and the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical failures— because as hideous as government is, it’s not nearly as damaging as the unregulated and unprincipled corporate pursuit of profit above all else.

Unsolvable problems are a gift from heaven to a candidate running against the establishment, but a nightmare to an elected official when it comes his or her turn to make things better. The American electorate has basically become ungovernable— a good thing for those outside government looking to get in, and a frightening thing for those in power. One thing I would like to see is a breakdown of the unemployed along party lines, because it seems like unemployed Republicans blame the Democrats, and unemployed Democrats blame the Republicans. This, of course, raises the question of what happens when both disgruntled groups turn their sights on the Tea Party?

During the next two years, watch for the Wylie Coyote look of helpless resignation on the face of newly-elected Tea Party honchos. For a sicko like me, who gets off on the humor of satire, cynicism, and sarcasm, it just can’t get any better.

Examining Just Why, Exactly, Sarah Palin is Electrifying

From the years 1932 until roughly 1964, citizens of the U.S.A. felt positive about their Federal government, and for the most part they invested trust in their elected leaders. But this was only a brief anomaly in the long history of our country, and it ended with Watergate and the Vietnam War before it could take hold and flourish. For most of our national history, the opposite sentiment toward Washington has prevailed and from the earliest years of our Republic, Americans historically viewed their government with suspicion, and even outright contempt. So I guess you could say that the Tea Party movement is really a throwback to another time. What’s new is the emergence of Sarah Palin.

Given this high percentage “anti-government” sentiment, it’s surprising that Sarah Palin hasn’t gained more traction with her message of suspicion and distrust of Washington. Recent polls put her disapproval rating at 55%, with fully 71% of Americans saying that she is unqualified to be the next President. Perhaps the reason for this can be found in the recent Tea Party convention in Nashville.

Never, in my recent memory, has so much adulation and applause been given to such simple utterances about simple-minded solutions to galactically unsolvable problems. Evidently, to be in lockstep with the Tea Party, one needs to believe that a speaker is “electrifying” and “galvanizing” when they observe that the United States Government spends too much, by borrowing too much, in order to deliver too little in the way of problem solutions. Knowing this, Sarah Palin is able to rally her troops by overstating the obvious about Washington. Okay, now we know that the Tea Party “gets it” — the Federal Government is inefficient, and generally doesn’t work as well as it did in the past. The thing is, mainstream Democrats and Republicans “get it” too. The only difference is, Republicans and Dems don’t feel that such self-evident truths are “electrifying.”

My politics are, admittedly, schizophrenic. My objection to Bill Clinton molded me into a rabid Conservative, then eight years of George W. Bush transformed me into a flaming Liberal. And after a year of Barack Obama, I’m now a dejected cynic who believes that America is basically ungovernable, and that even an outwardly decent and intellectual person in the Presidency can have very little positive effect on the problems that face the country today. Sarah Palin, we are told by the Tea Party members, should be elected as our next Chief Executive because she shares a certain folksy commonality with the average person. To this I reply, “Not so fast.” My advice is to go out into the street and talk to a lot of common, average Americans, and then ask yourself if you want your grandchildren to inherit a world that is shaped by the common, average American.

For the record, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and all the men who signed the Declaration of Independence were considered to be aristocratic at that time, and there wasn’t a single man among them who would have qualified today as a common average American. I suspect that none of these founding fathers of our country would fare very well in today’s modern Tea Party, and as the Tea Party goes, so goes Sarah Palin.