But enough about you…

We’ve entered the baroque period of this election cycle, where every little curlicue added to the already over-decorated structure of our national politics only has meaning in relation to the previous curlicues and frippery and dongles, and whatever actual structure is under all that commentary has long since stopped being necessary. At this point, the election narrative could hold itself up on nothing more than hard-copy stacks of end-of-the-world predictions, and all our shared and unshared hatred for Donald and/or Hillary and/or Bernie and/or whoever you want to write in to prove the point that you’re a totally independent minded, never-gonna-budge bad-ass doesn’t matter. You’ve made up your mind and I’ve made up my mind, and this latest bit by the FBI director who is creepily pawing through Anthony Weiner’s digital drawers can be interpreted in a thousand ways to suit any prejudice.

Enjoy splashing around in your Karo-syrup, fakey-ass, B-movie blood-bath, news media, I’m taking a little vacation from all that and from now until November 7th, will be binging on 2 Dope Queens, ’cause I’m not just with her, I’m with all the hers.

What’s really shocked me the most about the Trump campaign is how un-American it is. In spite of his campaign motto, it is not possible to make something great while undermining the pillars the hold it in place.

As Hillary pointed out in the early debates and as Obama has addressed in several speeches, we’re a nation of laws, not men. We do not, by law, and should not, by custom, gravitate toward politicians and candidates who point to themselves as the solution rather than to their policies as the way forward. Trump points to himself as a solution because that’s all he knows: he’s a creature of the media, he’s a brand, and what he sells is himself. The claim of Trump Inc. is that if you partner with him and he lets you put his name on your project, you’ll be able to sell whatever your product is at a premium, and what he gets is a big cut of that premium.

And Donald Trump believes he can sell this same scheme to the American voter: To be clear, he’s not offering to add actual value to America, he’s offering to add perceived value based on nothing but his name. He has succeeded so far because he destroyed the Republican candidates who didn’t understand the kind of game he was playing, and he steamrolled the Republican party who also didn’t understand. He’s partially succeeded in the general election by keeping the media focus on side issues that play to his strengths, which are bluster and trumped-up rage, rather than on core issues involving policy, budget ideas and clear alternate solutions, because he has nothing to offer at that level.

Donald Trump is like the kid who pushes his way into a pickup baseball game and then insists that the rules be changed to work around his few strengths and to ignore his weaknesses: 7 strikes and you’re out.

So this is another state in a conservative movement to make government stop working; in this case, by turning it into a clown show. The first stage was loading the House of Representatives and the Senate with people who think that digging in their heels will at least slow down the forward progress of the country which is all too clearly heading in a liberal direction. The direction can’t be stopped, so the game is to make it very hard and slow to get to where we’re going.

All evidence is that mucking up the works is the goal of the conservative movement. It’s clearest in the resistance to the Obama agenda, in the existence of people like Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan, the repeated attempts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act or to stand in the way at the state level, of it having a chance to succeed. The agenda is always to obstruct and prevent progress of any liberal idea regardless of who it hurts.

The agenda is clearest and most damaging to the nation in the Senate’s refusal to consider Obama’s recommendation for the Supreme Court. By refusing to give Merrick Garland a hearing, the Senate has declared that they can decide which parts of their job they choose to do. Aside from the damage that decision does to the institution of the US Senate (and again, that works to the advantage of both anti-government and anti-American adherents), it does worse damage to the court and the nation. The court is diminished by being short a voice, short a point of view and simply short-handed, and America is diminished by being yet more fractured. Every time the court hears a case that results in a tie, or when it reduces its case load because it cannot handle the load, American law will be decided at a lower level. For every major decision made at a lower court level, and simply left in place because the higher court couldn’t take part, America becomes more regionalized, more fractured and less a cohesive country that moves in a single direction and that can make claims of being, in any way, great again.

I’ve been watching a sort of political harmonic convergence between my really right-wing, HIllary-hating, conservative friends and family, and my radical left-wing Bernie-hugging friends and family, and the Dark Matter pulling the two sides together appears to be a distrust of mainstream news sources.

Just a word of caution: in 2008, John McCain supporters thought he was going to win because the right wing only listened to right wing news sources and fooled themselves into believing the echoes of their own prejudices. All through 2009, the Republicans said they were going to re-think who they were and how they approached elections, and then in 2012, they ran exactly the same campaign, appealing to exactly the same voters, alienating exactly the same broad demographic with Mitt Romney, and congratulated themselves once again that the voices bouncing off exactly the same wall of the same echo chamber from 2008 were telling them they had a winner.

In the 2016 election things shifted just a bit – the Republicans ran another set of exactly the same kind of weak, angry, narrow-minded candidates only this time they were so weak and narrow that the media machine that is Donald Trump easily steamrolled them. Now the Republican machine is back to the same strategy of telling themselves that their polls are more true than all those silly mainstream polls, and there are still people this late in the game who believe that they actually have a shot with The Donald.

Well, it’s not true.

The reason the mainstream media is the mainstream is because it has the pulling power of the center of the river. The main-stream of news is the main-stream because it draws from many sources, weeds out falsehoods and faulty thinking, employs the bests minds and does the most legwork. For my friends on the right: The mainstream is too big and too diverse to be gamed by what you think is some Clinton cartel. To my friends on the left: The mainstream is too powerful to be driven by falsehood and conspiracy. There are too many good people out there in the strongest part of the currently working to make things right.

You can pull for whomever you want in this election. You can vote your single issue if that’s the only thing you care about. You can choose to be narrow. But we’re a big complex country with a big, complex population, and the best representation of it is not narrow or weak or small-minded. It’s not bigoted or angry or racist or misogynistic. We are the farthest thing from a single-issue country. America is a Mississippi River of humanity, pushing toward a more open, inclusive, strong, intelligent and sensible society. You can cling to the muddy bank of your narrow little news source or your screechy, single-issue blog if you like, but you’d be better off opening your eyes and seeing where things are actually going, grappling with that reality – because if you don’t, that reality will happily leave you behind.

Namaste

Want to do something good for your country? Want to do something really good for both your country and yourself at the same time? Go take an adult ed course.

No, this isn’t some sort of snide joke about you or me or anyone else being stupid; we all need to smarten up and we need to smarten up fast. Taking a college course, right now, will help you and it will help America in the most tangible and long-lasting way. Behind almost every problem in America, be it street violence, jobs, diet, health, climate change or political engagement, is a lack of education, a lack of involvement and a lack of trust in the institutions of the country, one of the major ones being our education system. So if you claim to be a patriot, go prove it: Make America great again. The first step toward greatness is to improve things, and you’re not going to improve anyone but yourself. So get to work.

On September 11, 2001, when al-Queda managed to hijack a set of jets and use them as bombs, it was following a philosophy espoused by Osama bin Laden that the weaknesses in western culture could be used to destroy us. The man who used a truck to mow down innocent people in Nice, in July of 2016 was following the same philosophy, and the San Bernadino killers used America’s easy access to guns against us. In all cases the death and destruction was made possible by an open and trusting society that left the door unguarded to a powerful instrument of destruction.

And guess what’s even more destructive than a truck? More destructive than a van full of assault rifles? More destructive even than four airplanes full of jet fuel? How about a hundred million people who deny climate change because they don’t understand the science behind it, even though our military leaders list it as the greatest threat to American security? How about an estimated fifty million Americans who believe the 9/11 attacks might have been a US government conspiracy? How about all the people you know who can’t tell the difference between a fact-checking site and a propaganda site on the web? Or the millions of people who currently have viruses on their computers because they fall for online scams and bad links. Computer viruses are both a personal risk and a societal risk because we can carry that bad code with us into industry and government offices, infecting everything along the way.

You have the ability to not be one of these dupes – just get yourself down to a community college or your local adult ed office at a nearby university, and skill-up with a computer course.

Or how about this: Everyone currently hates the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but few people know why Obama has pushed so hard for it. Even if you’re a die-hard Obama hater, do you honestly think he just hates American jobs and is trying to give them away to Peru and Singapore? Take a poli-sci course and find out what’s actually going on there. Stop accepting easy answers because they’re exciting or simple or scary/fun/sexy/cool and make you feel all counter-culture-y, and be one of the people who actually knows the answer – you might still be violently against this trade agreement, but with some education you’ll base your argument on facts instead of a routine you saw on Comedy Central or Fox News.

How about jobs? The job market is actually pretty good at the moment, but the robots are coming, and guess where they’re coming the fastest? They’re heading for the most common jobs in America, because that’s where corporations stand to make the most profit by robotizing. If you’re a truck driver today and you’re 55 years old, you’re probably going to keep working until a standard retirement age. But if you’re driving a truck and you’re 30 years old, you will definitely find yourself out on the street in 10 years because robotic trucks will take over. Bank clerks, toll booth operators, automobile final assembly-line workers, gas pump operators, medical lab technicians, printers, typesetters, photo retouchers and hundreds of other jobs are disappearing or have already disappeared because computers – if not outright robots – can do the job for us and can do it more cheaply and often more more precision. A generation ago one of the top jobs in America was ‘secretary’ or ‘administrative assistant’. Look around you now: aside from the very top echelon of corporate America, there is no such thing as a secretary because most executives and office workers just don’t need them.

Even people like me, with deep knowledge of databases, security, network configuration and performance/tuning – 30 years ago you’d have hired someone like me to set up your database and you’ve have paid me $100/hour or more to do it because you had no choice. Now? Get a free account at Heroku or Amazon AWS, press one button and you’re done: you have a world-class, highly-secured, high-performance database, with file-design assistance and automated backups for absolutely nothing. A robot will keep it free of viruses and hacking, and another robot will recover it for you if you screw it up through your own mistakes. Programmers are constantly scrambling to learn the newest technology because we’ve written systems that automate the jobs we were doing just a minute ago. We technicians are snakes eating our own tails. I take classes all the time in my own area of expertise; because if I didn’t I’d wake up tomorrow morning to find that I’m no longer a database expert, I’m a Walmart greeter.

Constant and meaningful education is the only thing keeping me one step ahead of the ‘bots. So many people are standing up against trade parternships and unions, against offshore manufacturing and jobs moving the Mexico, when the actual danger to your standard of living is that your job will soon be done by a machine, or by nobody. Jobs in America are not disappearing, they’re transorming, and if you don’t transform yourself you will find yourself angry at someone who’s taken away your standard of living, only you won’t know who it is and you’ll be left pointing in the wrong direction by those who planned it.

Education will save you, a better educated population will save America.

And finally, you can’t talk about dangers to America and making America great again without addressing propaganda. All countries propagandize. America has radio stations worldwide that pump out pro-American messages. We export the American ideal with every film, book, television program, Apple product and four-wheel-drive truck we sell. Our spy agencies work to plant pro-American messages deep into the media of other countries. All well & good. We Americans don’t call this propaganda, we call it getting out the message of freedom and liberty.

Do you think China doesn’t do the same thing? Or Russia? How about Saudi Arabia? Iran? England? Germany? All countries put out messages in their own favor, but the messages differ in content and intent. America remains, since the end of World War II, the most powerful nation on earth. We are very hard to attack economically and we’re almost impossible to attack physically (beyond the aforementioned localized terrorism). But culturally we are wide open to attack, and the propaganda pumped at us is designed to undermine the trust in our institutions. Every time somebody posts about how all politicians are evil or untrustworthy, or refuses to differentiate between political parties, to take our politics seriously; every time someone fails to check facts before spreading innuendo, Vladimir Putin has a giggle, because we’ve fallen for a story designed to undermind trust in our society. If you don’t understand the institutions of your own government you will never trust them. If you don’t understand the mechanisms of the press, you won’t know which ones to rely on. If you’re afraid to be challenged by a teacher to defend your position or change, then you’ve lost faith in the American ideal of self-improvement. The goal of foreign propaganda is to undermine, and it’s all too easy to do that to an under-educated population.

Most people look at the Statue of Liberty and see the torch, but what’s she holding in her other arm? It’s called a tabula ansata, it’s a pair of hinged tablets. That’s right, the other arm of liberty is holding a book. You want to really make America great again? Go crack a book.