Joe is In

Looks like we have a new president, arguably the first one we've had in four years. Unlike his predecessor, Joe Biden has a long career of leadership roles in government office behind him. He's more qualified and more mature--and I mean that in a positive way. His detractors tend to go after his age which does seem like it's affecting him. He certainly seems wearier than the Joe Biden I remember running against Obama for the Democratic nomination twelve years ago. But that may be an advantage as much as a disadvantage. Certainly, we could use a less impulsive leader.

His inaugural speech, like most such speeches, had little in the way of substance, offering instead abstract soliloquising about unity. Some of it pretty good--I particularly liked the quote from Saint Augustine. But rhetoric about unity is really a slap in the face to the opposing side if it's not accompanied by any show of understanding. Implying Trump's followers are all racists who watch fake news isn't a unifying gesture. I continue to marvel at how people seem increasingly unaware of the inflammatory things they say.

I'm pessimistic, obviously. For all he said about the working class, I don't think Biden will find ways to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. or make strides to employ those left unemployed by the popular shift to online shopping. I don't know what power he has to reverse the homeless crisis and the bizarre real estate environment causing it. But maybe time will prove me wrong. At least he won't be distracted by petty squabbles on Twitter, or try to distract us with them.

Of Mobs and Government

It's been hard to focus on much but the news to-day. Especially since, as usual, it's difficult to find articles and reports unfiltered by significant bias. So often a story convinces me something happened but leaves me asking, "What really happened?" prompting me to seek out more and more sources. By a rudimentary net of cross-referencing I gain something like a clear picture of circumstances. Of course, when both The Guardian and Breitbart say Trump Supporters invaded the U.S. Capitol building, it's a good bet that's exactly what happened, though Breitbart has since removed the term "Trump Supporters" from their headline.

It's this widespread obfuscation that has led to frustration on both sides and fomented rage on both sides. Though to those Trump supporters who would argue that it's evidence of election fraud I would ask them to compare the 2016 and 2020 elections. When Hillary Clinton lost the electoral college and won the popular vote, she didn't incite invasion and vandalism of a federal building, she didn't stubbornly refuse to concede for months. And Biden won both the popular vote and the electoral college.

The invasion of protesters has rightly been called a terrorist act because it was intended to and succeeded in inspiring terror. And like most terrorist acts, the terror it inspired had the exact opposite effect of what the terrorists hoped to achieve. Republican lawmakers who previously supported Trump's dispute of the election results, like Senator Loeffler, changed their minds as a direct result of being frightened out of their minds by a mob intruding on and vandalising their workplace. Again, I'm reminded of 2016 when I said I thought the best movie to watch to understand the Trump presidency was Luis Bunuel's Viridiana. It was hard not to think of the dirty beggars rifling through the household finery, a move that shook the titular character's desire to champion their liberty, when I saw pictures of a Trump supporter kicking back in Nancy Pilosi's office, or that guy in the buffalo hood romping around on that familiar blue carpeting, amid the marble columns. Only now Trump isn't the figure of tighter security, of the iron fist who promises to keep the rabble in line. Now he's truly the figurehead of the rabble. There are few things he could have done that would more decisively turn Republicans against him.

For years, I've watched the rhetoric on both sides of the political spectrum ramp up and I see it in full, grotesque extravagance to-day. Both sides call for violence, both sides point to the irony of the other side's attitude about their own violent protests. And then both sides are seemingly shocked that the other side would dare use violent rhetoric.

I looked through the Twitter account of Ashli Babbit to-day, a Trump supporter shot and killed by police in the Capitol. She was unarmed but she was trying to break into the Speaker's office. The comparisons between her and George Floyd are already flooding social media. She's an obvious flashpoint for the two sides to condemn each other as monsters. As it happens, she's from San Diego, my hometown. Her Twitter is filled with pictures of familiar seasides. Mostly she retweeted other people but she also has videos in which she rants about border security, liberal media, and the California Governor, whom she blamed for many people losing their homes. She doesn't come off as a smart person, she may even have been a hateful person, but she seems like she genuinely cared about people. That's the kind of thing the Democrats are going to have to recognise if there's any hope in truly avoiding a civil war--the two sides have to recognise each other's humanity. That's looking increasingly unlikely.

Last week I listened to the infamous hour long recording of Trump in a phone conference all but begging for votes, his argument pathetically dissolving into flat assertions that he'd won the election. As though, like a spoiled child, he could make something happen just by saying he wanted it. And I thought again, how could anyone take this guy seriously? How could anyone think he belongs in a place of authority? But maybe it's not surprising when so many have praised selfishness for years while the quality of education has decreased.

I hope for the best but I think we're in for the worst.

The Wrong Way

Lately I've found myself watching interviews and lectures by the late Roger Scruton available on YouTube. As I've started seeing reports of the widespread riots in the U.S., I've been constantly reminded of a story Scruton told multiple times about the moment he became a conservative, when witnessing the riots in Paris, instigated by Communists and Socialists, in 1968.

"The thing that most struck me about those students in the street was the sentimentality of their anger. It was all about themselves. It wasn't about anything objective. Here they were the spoiled middle class baby boomers who never had any real difficulty to cope with, shouting their heads off in the streets, burning the cars belonging to ordinary proletarians whom those [students] pretended to be defending against some imaginary repressive structures erected by the bourgeoisie--the whole thing was a complete fiction based on the antiquated ideas of Karl Marx, ideas which were already redundant in the mid-19th century. They were acting out a self scripted drama in which the central character was themselves."

I've had a similar growing feeling since the election of Donald Trump. I didn't vote for Trump, I thought he was incompetent, and I plan on voting for Joe Biden. But almost immediately after Trump's election, reactions against him have felt oddly disconnected. As though Trump was the figurehead of an enemy in a war that had absolutely no substance for me. Which would be bad enough if I liked Trump but seems even worse because I don't like him. The oddly mechanical feeling of new young voices suddenly injected in news media, the stark bifurcation of reality between news media of different political stripes, the persistent recasting of heterosexual male libido as perverse. When I became concerned about lockdowns harming the economy, I immediately felt concern for my former coworkers at JCPenney who found themselves furloughed, sent home without pay. I can understand the belief that quarantining is more important than the economy but rhetoric from the left typically hadn't even a shred of sympathy for that proletariat the left is classically supposed to advocate.

And now, somehow, we're to believe that the horrific, the absolutely despicable murder of George Floyd calls for businesses across the country to be destroyed and looted, for Nashville's City Hall to be burned.

Again and again, I'm glad to be in Japan partly because there are so many things here I used to love about the U.S. Early on, I walked down a street with a coworker and I pointed out to her all the small business along the street we were walking down. There are so many little restaurants here, each distinctive with its own personality. I remember when San Diego was like that, before one by one nearly every place with any shred of individual personality was strangled to death by oppressive rents. And now this. I don't know what else to say because I know the kind of Fred Madison madness I'm talking to can't see or hear the other side. There are no eyes to see or ears to hear any appeal I can make. All I can do is hope.

On the United States and Dependence

Happy Independence Day, United States. Though Aladdin has now outgrossed Independence Day to become Will Smith's biggest hit of all time and the country is 22 trillion dollars in debt. I live in the United States, in southern California, where there was an earthquake this morning I didn't feel but know it happened because I read it on the internet. There's a massive homeless crisis here and property values are going up because anonymous buyers are purchasing lots of property with cash. What is independence? A state of mind? Hopefully.

I still haven't seen that Aladdin movie. I'd like to, I hear it's good and Aladdin was my favourite of the 90s Disney films when I was a kid (though it's lost some lustre now that I know how much it borrowed from the superior 1940 film The Thief of Bagdad). It's weird how no-one adjusts for inflation when talking about box office records. In article after article, from one record breaking film to the next, no-one seems to think it worth mentioning the ranking isn't adjusted for inflation. I guess it wouldn't be very interesting to keep saying, "And 1939's Gone with the Wind is still number 1." This wouldn't make money for anyone right now and it's a movie not reflective of current popular cultural values. Maybe. Though it's a little hard to tell when so many sites ping-pong back and forth between saying how regressive cultural attitudes are an ever present danger and acting like they don't exist.

I was reading The Communist Manifesto a few days ago after watching Property is No Longer a Theft. Not that I'm thinking of turning Communist--quite the opposite, really. I used to consider myself a Communist, or at least a Socialist, but I've changed my mind over the past few years. The way I used to look at it was to say even if it's true what some on the right say, worse case scenario, that people are fundamentally out for themselves and most people are selfish--even if it turns out that's true, surely it would be best to embrace the philosophy that says we can all work together one day in a single wonderful cooperative where everyone knows that we all need to work for each other. Where enough folks get up in the morning and think, by gum, society needs plumbers so I'm going to volunteer myself as a plumber. Surely, even if humanity isn't psychologically ready for that, it's best to believe it has a potential to be and to work toward that end. But I've already waited too long.

I've been really liking Robert Louis Stevenson lately. My mind goes back to an essay he wrote partly about his own shift from Socialist beliefs to Conservative called "Crabbed Age and Youth".

For my part, I look back to the time when I was a Socialist with something like regret. I have convinced myself (for the moment) that we had better leave these great changes to what we call great blind forces: their blindness being so much more perspicacious than the little, peering, partial eyesight of men.

But Stevenson, at the end of the essay, acknowledges some self-contradiction because at several points he also asserts that he is not "abashed" at having been Socialist and argues that it's good for young people to have strong opinions, even if they're wrong. "[I]f St. Paul had not been a very zealous Pharisee, he would have been a colder Christian." It's this magnanimous view Stevenson has towards mistakes, which I tend to sympathise with, that makes Socialism so unattractive to me now. When I see young and extreme leftists exercising the full strength of their ironic wit to make those who disagree with them seem the epitome of evil, when leftist journalists carefully massage stories to downplay inconvenient details or outright omit them, I feel, in a way, the most sorry for that commentator or writer. Sooner or later, these people will think or do something that will make themselves guilty in their own unforgiving rhetoric. Then they can either punish themselves, delude themselves, or change their minds. I've seen firsthand enough of the kind of perpetual terror some of the self-deluded live in that I prefer to be one who has a change of mind.

It is in vain to seek for consistency or expect clear and stable views in a medium so perturbed and fleeting. This is no cabinet science, in which things are tested to a scruple; we theorise with a pistol to our head; we are confronted with a new set of conditions on which we have not only to pass a judgement, but to take action, before the hour is at an end. And we cannot even regard ourselves as a constant; in this flux of things, our identity itself seems in a perpetual variation; and not infrequently we find our own disguise the strangest in the masquerade. - Robert Louis Stevenson

I'd still describe myself as a liberal. But I can see too much of the trouble caused by the "fairy tales of Socialism" as Louis Stevenson calls them, not only for the believers themselves but for everyone else who may have benefited from a more practical form of liberalism.

So I'll conclude this July 4th ramble by simply reminding my fellow liberals it might be constructive if the country thought electing someone other than Trump was a reasonable thing to do.

Twitter Sonnet #1252

Considered cups were left in dusty sun.
Reflected rooms return to mind at once.
As language drifts along the table run.
The ink evades what Word forever hunts.
The steady peel of paper bares the wall.
The drapes beneath a pallid film revive.
The figure beams of light obey a call.
With shadow paint the plan's at length contrived.
A blanket shroud conceals a shifting form.
The working clocks compel the frame to stand.
The chilled and rusty limbs again're warm.
A signal heart appears on ev'ry band.
Perspectives blurred beneath the bourbon tap.
The moving ground remained a single map.