Wednesday, April 12, 2023

Pull The Thread, Unravel the Tapestry

I think I've found the problem, and it ain't the intertoobs:

Today, Tennessee represents the grim culmination of the forces corroding state politics: the nationalization of elections and governance, the tribalism between the two parties, the collapse of local media and internet-accelerated siloing of news and the incentive structure wrought by extreme gerrymandering. Also, if we’re being honest, the transition from pragmatists anchored in their communities to partisans more fixated on what’s said online than at their local Rotary Club.

Aside from the Shriners, because they run hospital for kids and advertise it relentlessly, where are the "business clubs" of old?  My father was in the Optimist's Club in my youth. I helped sell Xmas Trees in December, and cokes to parade watchers in the spring.  It was fun.  Dad made some business contacts he needed when he became a self-employed CPA.  Then it dissolved, and he never looked back.  Such "clubs" faded away in the '70's, a full 50 years ago.  And yet they are still supposedly a staple of Middle American life.  Where?  Where is this lost Americana that actually never was?

Same with old men sipping coffee in diners.  All the stories I read quadrennially about such men, now they're at McDonald's.  I stopped even noticing McDonald's when my daughter stopped being young enough to eat only Happy Meals when we were on the road (or needed a Beanie Baby.  Remember those?)  I'm 67, I'll never be one of those old men. 

I don't go on Facebook, I limit my reading on Twitter, but NextDoor is truly Twitter for old people, and the ignorance there is profound.  A recent thread on Houston ISD being taken over by the state (it was national news a few weeks ago; now it's disappeared again) had many people claiming the State had already established a new school board, so suck it up.  Except nothing is going to happen until June, and being on that board is such anathema I doubt anyone even semi-competent will volunteer for it.  Your name would be mud if you did.  But these people were sure they knew what was wrong with the district ("Corrupt!"  "Incompetent!"  "Wasting all that money!") and the truth is none of them know school tax dollars now flow to Austin to the statewide tune of $10 billion, of which only $2 billion makes its way back to the schools.  Texas currently has a $30 billion surplus; 1/3rd of that is school taxes.  Will the schools get any benefit from that?  No.  They need at least $1000 per student for the next two years.  Current proposals in Austin want to give them $50.  Does anyone on NextDoor know that?

Me, I guess.  And that's about it.

Is "NextDoor" siloed?  Or are we just happy in our ignorance?  This has been going on for 40 years, and nobody in the state (save the Legislature and the Governor) seem to know it.  Did the internet do that?  FoxNews?  Facebook?  Or have we always preferred not to pay attention, and every few years we find another shibboleth to blame, although nobody even notices what it is this time.  On NextDoor they blame school boards and teachers and "school districts" and anybody but themselves, because it all rests, ultimately, with them.  But responsibility is hard!  It's hard!  Far easier to blame some faceless "reason" and wash your hands of responsibility at all.

Where are the Rotary Clubs of yesteryear?  Where is this lost Americana that actually never was?

What Politico is actually lamenting is the decline and fall of a major American political party.  The GOP doesn't seek to govern and steer the ship of state or guide the fate of millions (without government intrusion, or with it; one or the other, or both and a little bit of neither).  It only wants to be in charge:  the be Gym Jordan and James Comey railing against "crimes" by Joe Biden and his son Hunter and, on a really bad day, Kamala Harris.  Crimes they can't identify or prove or establish but which crop up like mushrooms after a rain storm and, if they go away in the daylight, reappear in the darkness of their next proclamations of perfidy.  (Next I'll do "nattering nabobs of negativism," one of William Safire's proudest literary achievements.)  It's all as imaginary as the commies under the bed of my youth, but now the Goldwaterites are squishes next to Jordan and Comer and their ilk.  Curtis LeMay wanted to start a nuclear war with Russia, arguing we could win it by striking first (there's no small amount of LeMay in General Buck Turgis).  Trump, a GOP candidate for President, wants to invade Mexico just to interrupt the drug trade.  And Dan Crenshaw is introducing legislation to do it, because he thinks its a good idea!  And it's not because we've transition from "pragmatists anchored in their communities," it's because a GOP functioning as a real political party would never have let Donald Trump get near the nomination process in 2015 in the first place.

But here we are.  Gerrymandering didn't put Dan Crenshaw in office.  Texas politics did.  It was once impossible for a Republican to win federal office in Texas (oh, we had Poppy Bush and John Tower, but they were tokens, not outliers.  I mean, they weren't wild-eyed liberals; not even as liberal as Nelson Rockefeller.). Now it's almost impossible to get a Democrat into federal office from Texas.  Crenshaw isn't really as crazy as Ronny Jackson or Troy Nehls or Ted Cruz.  But he's a Republican, and you gotta dance with the ones what brung ya.  And that's not the party anymore; that's the base.  Al Qaeda, in Arabic (I'm told).  The base idiots no one seems to be able to control.

Elections were nationalized by Newt Gingrich, replacing the wisdom of lifelong Democrat Tip O'Neill that "All politics is local."  Nancy Pelosi still understands that.  Gym Jordan thinks the only legitimate politics is his, and all others are false and heretical and probably tyrannical, to boot.  Who is responsible for that?  Twitter?  Tribalism?  Tarragon in the chicken salad?

Might as well blame that, too.  Politics in America has always been a tribal affair; that's why nobody talks about it.  At least the French argue from the context of the sanctity of the State, and that state draws its legitimacy from the people, who are France; the state is just the expression of their will.  One France; one people.  The British draw their legitimacy from the monarchy and the traditions of its shows of state pomp and circumstance.  Americans draw their government's legitimacy from the Constitution, but after 1954 and the Warren Court and the Civil Rights Movement and the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act (the latter was actually more monumental, which is why the Supreme Court has assiduously gutted it and declared it passe), they aren't sure what their Constitution is anymore.  Or rather, they are, but their politicians are not.  And the latter, in the interregnum between the seismic upheavals of the '50's and '60's, and the "revolutions" of women's liberation (primarily Roe, which was a Burger court phenomenon), gay rights, black rights, brown rights, everybody's rights (I mean no disrespect; just don't want to leave someone out), felt their Constitution was no longer their own.  By "their own" they meant the property of white men,  Old white men, after the 18 year olds got the vote (and did nothing revolutionary with it, despite promises that they would if they only could).

Those old white men are dying off, or dead already.  A handful of people who aspired to replace them have not been enough.  The consensus in the land is that we were just fine with Roe, and certainly better off without laws criminalizing abortion in any way (Abortion is a medical procedure.  We are learning that lesson.).  We're also find with gay lovers and lesbian lovers and transgender lovers and blacks in love with whites and whites in love with, well...non-whites (we're still working on moving on from "white" as normative.  We'll get there.).  The backlash, the whiplash, the refusal to accept that whites are a numerical minority now (and nothing dreadful has happened to them; as a class, anyway) is all but over.  After covid there may even be a nascent interest in true social justice, what Jesus of Nazareth 2000 years ago called the basiliea tou theou; and he didn't mean God had to be in charge for that to come about.  He meant simply that the law of Moses, the idea of that law, the fair and equitable treatment of all persons, would be the best way to order society, would take care of everyone and satisfy everyone (as much as anything can), would actually work.  The Hebrews, before they were Jews (i.e., before the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE) never even fully implemented it, because it was too radical.  So far as we know nobody has ever practiced a year of jubilee; or the 50 year return of all land ownership to zero, and begin again, that's also part of the jubilee.  It's just too radical; too egalitarian; too equalizing and levelling and....equitable.

But maybe someday we might still agree to try?  You can do it in the name of God, you can do it in the name of reason, you can do it because "What the hell, we've tried everything else!"  That would truly be a new thing about to break forth, wouldn't it?  That would truly be the shining city on the hill we've been told we're supposed to be, wouldn't it?  It's what Isaiah was getting at with his vision of the holy mountain:  not the forced subjugation of all humanity under the will of the God of Abraham; but the acceptance of all of humanity that this is, indeed the way: the best and most worthwhile way to live together.  

Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!

It is like the precious ointment upon the head, that ran down upon the beard, even Aaron's beard: that went down to the skirts of his garments;

As the dew of Hermon, and as the dew that descended upon the mountains of Zion: for there the Lord commanded the blessing, even life for evermore.


And you don't have to even acknowledge the Lord or the commandment to be part of it.

If you pull the right thread, unravel the right tapestry, this might be what you find behind it.  Not paradise; paradise, after all, is just a walled garden*.  This would be a garden without walls.

Is it coming?  Is it now?  I don't know.  I don't say it is.  I believed in the promise of the '60s.  Like Nanci Griffith sang, "I am a child of the '60's...And I believed, I believed, I believed."  I've never really stopped believing.  Believe in the right things, good things could happen.  What I believe is that people will choose good things, if they are shown they are possible.  The vision of Isaiah's holy mountain, the basilea tou theou of Joshua bar Joseph, a/k/a Jesus of Nazareth, was that if you build it, they will come.  Come to learn, and come to live.

We just have to decide whether it's worth trying to build; that's all.  Pull that thread, and see what is revealed.

*I'll get back to that, eventually

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