Wonderfullest Things

It’s a cookbook!

So much that is going on with the Republicans these days makes so little sense. Don’t the rules of politics still apply? Why have they doubled down and then again on all this bat shit crazy stuff? Is it we liberals who have gone batty and we are just perceiving the GOP actions in a strange light?

At times it seems like we are fighting through a murder mystery constructed by some writer who is too clever by half. All the red herrings will fall into place (or out of place as red herrings should) when the big picture is revealed and we understand that the killer is really the first victim who faked his death to create the perfect alibi—or something like that. And we rerun all the seeming contradictions with a different camera angle and see what we should have seen all along, but were blinded by all the stuff that seemingly did not make sense or as a wise man once told me, we didn’t understand the sense that it made.

So here we sit, after Trump, after Jan. 6, after willful COVID-19 denialism, after hundreds of GOP-sponsored bills to make it harder to vote are introduced nationwide. All this can make sense, if we really stretch ourselves to the outer limits of political thinking:

The GOP has mounted a slow motion coup of the U.S. government to benefit an array of corporate interests and assure white rule far into the future despite the changing demographics of the nation.

If you make that assumption, this works as logically as simple algebra. If “X” is white supremacy and corporate hegemony then the “Y” is pretty easy to ascertain. And I speak as an English major here.

The recent slips of the mask, where Republicans say the quiet part out loud, are becoming more frequent. Some are blatantly saying they can’t win if everyone gets a vote. So maybe these aren’t slips of the mask, but the final mobilization signal for those who weren’t getting the hints.

And the hints were strong all along:

• The whole Russia connection. It seems that they could have been a lot more subtle in how they got help. But that is not the Trump way and they really thought with GOP in charge of House and Senate no investigations would happen anyway. The Mike Flynn bit seems especially chunk headed, working as an agent of Turkey, talking out of turn to Russian ambassador when he knows those kinds of conversations are monitored. But if, ultimately, he suffers no consequences what is a smear on his reputation in the short term. Only among libs anyway, to the believers he is a hero. Things got a little out of hand so there needed to be fall guys, but nearly of them knew the rough treatment was just for now and all would be forgiven later.
• The NRA/Mercers/Koch Connection. Lots of dark money here that wants an unregulated state. The NRA offered great cover. Nothing says American freedom like a gun so it the perfect way to actually undermine freedom. Increasing violence and the specter of non-whites in charge rev up gun sales and fear, make authoritarian “order” more saleable. This has been in motion for decades, but got more traction in 2016. Me thinks massive amounts of Russian money lubricating GOP campaigns at all levels using the NRA as the distributor.
• Sudden conversions to Trump. Take your pick, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan. At one time or another virtually every GOP leader said Trump was evil. Yet all fell in line slavishly. Could be blackmail or a come to Jesus meeting in which the big plan is laid out to them. They are all connected to NRA and Koch/Mercer. So if the conspiracy goes down, they all go down. But if you brass it out, there is a place for you the new order.
• The insurrection. This was the back up plan. Without COVID 19, Trump might have won a second term and then the rest of the authoritarian regime could roll out. But they had the wrong idiot in charge. A true evil genius might have made COVID19 work for him, but Trump was too flawed and tied up with his own ego to make the short term sacrifice of actual governance or pseudo governance. After the loss, the Big Lie evolved. Now this is something Trump could do with gusto. Too much is made of the idea that he convinced these weak minded followers that he had actually won. I think that was actually rare. They saw it as the only way left to achieve their goals. It is not so much that the Oath Keeper and Proud Boys believed the Big Lie. They believed he Big Truth, that their time running things is almost over. And the idea of smart, passionate people of color in charge makes their scrotums shrivel. That is why they recorded their own actions. They came very close to winning the day and these were going to be their bonefides. They saw themselves as the new founding fathers, but with social media instead of a quill to tell their story. Trump gave them as much time as he could, by holding back guard and other bits of intrigue, but apparently could not get the full military to actually act in his favor.
• Now with Biden and the Dems in charge, even if weakly, we are seeing what even a small advantage means in this long game. So the GOP goes to their last ditch plan, changing the rules. Making it harder to vote was already a go to for them, but now it is becoming ridiculous. But that is the hand they have and this is the only way to play it. The money people will pull the plug if they don’t go down the unregulated path. The actual right wing crazies, and there are millions of them, will demand culture war rhetoric and demonizations of people of color, uppity women, immigrants and LBGTQ communities. Through gerrymandering and the electoral college, the white man’s GOP has held on to power for far longer than was plausible given the demographics and the right’s inability to move center-ward on many issues. This is their last chance.
• Intrinsic to last chance is the reshaped judiciary. Trump and McConnel have filled the lower courts with young zealots who believe in property rights, corporate power and a weak central government. It is these folks, hand picked by the same dark money that has been behind the GOP for decades, that will decide whether election law changes are enforceable or any of the other Dem reforms can take effect. Then there is the Supreme Court. It was worth it for the GOP to ignore Merrick Garland’s nomination in 2016, quick step Barret Coney’s nomination and elevate an idiotic frat boy like Kavanagh. Much criticism on all these picks (although Gorusch was a pretty standard GOP nomination). But in the end, they got a solid majority of conservatives who are more likely to go along with an extension of corporate rights and a diminution of federal power.
• With these plots, the ability to oppose and even criticize is lessened. And that was the plan all along. If this is the goal, all these actions make sense. No one will face consequences if your side ultimately wins. Their main problem was having an idiot like Trump be the instrument. If you look back to the primaries of 2016, the Mercers with Bannon and Kellyanne Conway were backing Rubio and Cruz. But when the tide turned, the big money went with Trump who was only too happy to stride forward. Cruz and Rubio may be equally venal but they might have been smoother operators and gotten more of the evil agenda to the finish line and won re-election.

So in conclusion, I have two older storylines come to mind. One, remember the John Grisham classic, “The Pelican Brief?” All these mechanizations and murders to make sure sympathetic justices are in place to hear a case years down the line. The other connection I have summoned up is a classic Twilight Zone where seemingly well-meaning aliens visit earth. They are very peaceable and accommodating and offer to take a spaceship load of earthlings back to Planet Zenon to begin what will surely be a mutually advantageous cultural and technological exchange. As a token of their benevolence they even have a little book they leave behind. It is in their native tongue, but the title translates “To Serve Man.” How sweet! The ambassadors are boarding the spaceship, but meanwhile earth’s crack decoders are working on the language in the book, using snippets of conversation heard from the big brained visitors. The work isn’t done, but the cryptographers have gotten far enough along to discern the drift of the book. One guy races to where the spaceship is set to launch. As the door is closing and the aliens are stuffing the last earthling aboard, the code breaker bursts on the scene. “Don’t go,” he yells. “To Serve Man: it’s a cookbook!”

That is the GOP playbook in essence and it needs to stop now.

Renaming schools to sever symbolic connections to past leaders who are now deemed out of touch or even evil is an issue stomping through our cities. Portland, where stomping is something of pastime, is going at it with both Birkenstock-shod feet. In recent years, the school district has been remaking older schools into 21^st century learning arenas—and taking the opportunity to recast the schools into new identities that better reflect community values and move away from honoring random founding fathers who were slave owners.

I graduated from Portland’s James Madison High School in 1977. Being a somewhat active alum, I am part of two Facebook pages one of which has been following the reconstructing of the school which first opened in 1957. Tearing down some brick walls within which some of us may have ogled this or that crush is an emotional tsunami for many. But the renaming issue has flooded the area with tides of anger.

But why? It is not like we need to go change our diploma or alter our Madison memories. If the people of today want to honor someone else, why should we be concerned. It was random for Madison to be honored by this pile of brick on the edge of Portland in 1957. I am sure that at the time there were advocates for various historic people. In 1959, Woodrow Wilson had a high school named after him in Portland. Then came John Marshall in 1960, Andrew Jackson in 1968 and John Adams after that.

We already had a Washington, a Jefferson, a Monroe, a Franklin, a Lincoln, a Grant, a Cleveland and a Roosevelt (Teddy). None of these guys had more than a tenuous connection to this place. Grant had been stationed nearby in the 1850s. Jefferson ordered Lewis & Clark west. TR helped create various national forests nearby. But that is about it. In the very least, we had governors and senators we could have honored, to say nothing of other local leaders. But the fashion was to name high schools for various founding fathers, name streets and parks after them as well. That and trees. Not very imaginative, but safe.

Politics were always at work. If you are going to name a school (or a street) picking a local person was almost always going to invite debate. What could be safer than a dead president? Who would ever question the rightness of naming something after Benj. Franklin or some other long gone luminary?

So it was, Naming in Portland should always be taken with a grain of salt. Afterall, the burg itself got its name based on a coin flip.

But here we are in 2021 with much gnashing of teeth that the Madison name is being cancelled. First thing, it ain’t being cancelled. Our lettermen sweaters have the same deep meaning they always had as do our Pee Chee’s. As editor of The Constitution, our school’s newspaper, I have old issues from 1975 to 1977. I don’t need to drop them down the memory hole. Maybe our stuff will be more valuable on Antiques Roadshow since new promotional items are no longer being made.

The names being tossed around include an African-American principal I recall and a pioneering judge who was a person of color. Then there are some Native American names that reflect what the place meant to the original people. To me, these are all worthy choices that a new generation can choose, maybe as randomly our parents chose Madison in 1957.

At least whoever is honored will have some connection to the place and the community. James Madison could not have found the place with a map, even one recently drawn up by William Clark, fellow planter, whom Madison appointed governor of Missouri.

Weirdly, I find this very different than Confederate statues in the south. As painful as it is for people of color to see the enslavers of their ancestors honored in bronze, at least it a reflection of actual history there. I don’t think we need portraits of Hitler everywhere, but we should never reach a point where people don’t know who he was. The same should be true of Jefferson Davis and Donald Trump. Still, local governments can choose who they honor and if things change so that a person is no longer held in honor by the community, or maybe should never have been so honored in the first place, then so be it. Andrew Jackson is gone, make way for Harriet Tubman or Rachel Maddow or Eugene Goodman.

But here in Portland where statues and names of historic figures usually have no local connection, it was always random in the first place. I miss the statue of George Washington that used to stand on the corner in my old neighborhood before it was pulled down during the protests calling for racial equity in 2020. Because I grew up with it. But I also miss the Dairy Queen down the hill from it (now a great teriyaki chicken place) and the barber shop within sight of the statue where I got my hair cut with my dad. But the barber shop has not been cancelled, just torn down. The Dairy Queen has just evolved into an Asian chicken place, Maybe its next incarnation with involve perogies.

Yet I have an understanding of what that statue meant to people of color. Within sight of the statue in the 1950s was a big restaurant called the Coon Chicken Inn. You would enter through the mouth of a clownish Negro caricature. Pictures of this infamous place have for decades been held up as an example of obvious racism. Rightly so and with George Washington looking stoically on, the Father of Our Country gave his nodding approval.

The Coon Chicken Inn went out of business in the late 50s and the place rebranded as a steak house called the Prime Rib. It was too expensive for us although we went a few times when relatives came to town. In the early 2000s, an African American entrepreneur took it over and kept the classic menu. He made it into a retro steakhouse with pictures of Sammy Davis, Jr. and the Rat Pack. There was great live music that tended toward R&B. He knew about the place’s history and took subtle joy in the irony. Eventually he sold it as well so he could retire.

We did not need to tear the place down in order to move forward. We got rid of what was hurtful and insulting and carried on, keeping what worked (horseradish salad dressing) and adding new wrinkles (R&B and better wine).

We can put the George Washington statue back up with a plaque giving more historical context about the man. Or replace him with a Native American Chief. We can replace the master of the Montpelier Plantation in 18^th century Virginia with Leodis McDaniel, the great-great grandson of slaves who spent years inspiring Portland youth of all colors.

The important thing is that future generations learn our nation’s entire history and see it reflected in the public buildings and squares. Prime rib, teriyaki chicken and possibly perogies just add to the mix.

Extreme speech. Inflammatory speech. Misleading speech. Misinformed speech. Just plain dumb speech.

I am continuing my Ode to the Gatekeeper. Two weeks into Trump’s twitter ban, more shoes have fallen. But the right has not been entirely muffled. Taking away your unfettered access to a megaphone Is not the same thing. Unfiltered speech is not something we should consume on a daily basis. It needs to exist and be free up to certain limits (hate, inciting violence, shouting fire in the theatre and likely some sports talk).

The Gatekeeper was supposed to hear several sides of an issue and present them fairly, stripping away spin, pointing out omissions doing research to bridge apparent contradictions vs just doing he said/she said. Again, somewhere along the line being a Gatekeeper became a bad thing so we all but eliminated the job.

So, let us go back to Medieval Gatekeeping. The old popes where good at this. You speak out of line and it was thumbscrews and the stake. Any king of the time did the same. Gutenberg’s press made it harder to control the written word, but still there were fairly few printing presses by the early 1600s and it was relatively easy for rulers to clamp down, confiscate books, wreck the machinery and punish the publishers. It took several more decades for the penny press to take root. Cheaper paper, cheaper printing. This was the revolution that Gutenberg had promised.

And it was often used for scurrilous broadsides by anonymous authors. In London in the 1600s pamphlets were everywhere. Accusations could be wild and spread from street to coffee house to palace in hours. Sound familiar? Only with the Internet, “fake news” is out to everyone in seconds and lives forever.

Stephen Marche, writing in the New Yorker in 2018, had the right perspective

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/how-we-solved-fake-news-the-first-time

Marche notes that little has changed over the centuries when it comes to attracting clicks. “Then, as now, successful strategies included exaggeration and hating others (in the pamphlets’ case, Catholics). Elaborate conspiracy theories were popular, too.”

All these opinions coming from God knows where was very destabilizing for a culture that had always been very top down: “The turbulence was severe. “There is nothing more congruent to the nourishment of division in a State or Commonwealth, then diversity of Rumours mixt with Falsity and Scandalisme; nothing more prejudicial to a Kingdome, then to have the divisions thereof known to an enemy.” That was the judgment of “A Presse Full of Pamphlets,” in 1642.”

Then as now, rank and knowledge did not matter: “Expertise was irrelevant….The quality of an opinion in terms of its relationship to reality has never been of all that much importance at the point of sale. The commodity of ideas requires freshness and mass appeal. That is true wherever and whenever ideas are sold,” opined Marche.

In the 17^th century this unceasing wave of dreck led to the creation of The Royal Society as a sort of cultural fact checker.

Per Marche: “Its organizers seem to have sincerely believed that the enterprise to which the early Royal Society was dedicated was healing, that it would in some sense escape from politics by bringing together reasonable men from a wide range of ideological positions who could collaborate in gathering information which they hope that all would be able to accept.” The motto of the Royal Society was (and still is) Nullius in verba: “take nobody’s word for it.” I wish that motto were inscribed at the top of every smartphone.”

Marche concluded: “There is an idea out there that the forces of technology are both inevitable and ultimately liberating. It is a philosophy popular among people who prefer their history vague, so that their ideas can stay simple and grand. Making the comparison between the Internet and the printing press has always indulged in this laziness. “Hey, look, that was good in the end. Things worked themselves out for the best there.” No. They didn’t work themselves out. People worked them out. People of great intelligence and good will, able to think beyond their narrow interests, worked them out, and they only worked them out partially, incompletely.

Disruption and creative destruction have been the watchwords of the information revolution. Those who celebrate disruption believe they are serving progress, but they’re just celebrating their own power. There are people who build and there are people who tear down. That’s always been true. It’s true now.”

Allow me to supply a bit more of a bridge to current times. The broadsheets evolved into newspapers. While all were tilted in their view, the tilt was usually well known. But the wily Daniel Defoe defied it all all. He edited nominally Tory papers to serve the interests of the Whig and Whig papers to serve the Tories. But that is a topic for another day. Objectivity (as a journalistic ideal if not a practice) would wait until the late 19^th century to bloom.

Here is where the Gatekeepers took over and held sway until about 2008 and the hegemony of Twitter, Facebook, Google, Amazon and, yes even Craig’s List, took over and “What, Me worry? All opinions are equally good” became the new media mantra.

So now we stand on a battlefield of this great war which asks if this or any media so conceived can long endure. Do we a need a Royal Society for the 21^st century? Who is with me?

Donald Trump has been booted from Twitter for inciting violence, but he still has the nuclear codes with which he can do more than incite violence. And the power to order the military into action. Pundits can decry this seeming anomaly and bluster about the irony, but this strange place we find ourselves brings us back to the essence of what it means to have freedom of speech and what responsibilities are tied to the exercise of free speech.

Twitter is exercising its freedom of speech by finally becoming a classic gate keeper, something we were told was so passé as to be amusing. But that is what we need and have needed for decades in the media. Someone should be in charge of public discussion. Who that is, how they exercise that power is all debatable and fixable. Personally, I miss Walter Cronkite. But rather than have the debate and make the eternal alterations that are needed every day, with the mutation of the Internet platform into social media we basically threw up our hands and said true freedom is having everyone (meaning no one) in charge. We are back to the Tragedy of the Commons. But instead of a field of clover being mismanaged, we have in this 21^st century media example ploughed under public discourse with layers of bullshit and are for some reason committed to calling it a fertile place for expression.

The marketplace of ideas needs consumer protections every bit as much as the consumer marketplace. But we quit demanding high quality content, are unwilling to pay for it, even though its cost might be as minor as exposing our tender sensibilities to advertising, and let ourselves be led around by “influencers” who tell us how to make chili, do make up, and most tragically transact the business of democracy. And here the ads we get would make the authors of “The Hidden Persuaders” spin in their Betamax graves.

For years, I was a Gatekeeper in a very minor way. High School newspaper editor, college newspaper editor, local reporter, community newspaper reporter, eventually a regional business editor. I covered things I thought people needed to know, things that I thought were interesting. I wanted my outlet to be read, respected, looked to for wisdom. There is no perfect way to be a media Gatekeeper. You can have your standards and a finely honed sense of fairness, but you may not hear every voice and your ingrained attitudes may cause you to ignore some voices. And you may be pressured to look the other way or distracted by the circus’ high wire act when the story that needs to be told is the mistreatment of animals But if you remain open and never become too set in believing what it important, you can do more good than harm.

For a Gatekeeper, that is as good as it imperfectly gets. In college I was being trusted with these decisions at the age of 19. That says less about my innate brilliance than it does about how much the whole gatekeeping thing was cultural expression on autopilot. I covered a lot of things that might have been considered daring (Hey we were all under the influence of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers in the late 70s.) But still many folks found me tame. The editor a few years before decided that the most important issue in the country was the trial of the Native American leaders accused of shooting federal agents in South Dakota. Although her college paper was located in Portland, Ore. this did stop her from exercising her Gatekeeper speech. She largely ignored all local topics and blasted news of the trial every week, She traveled there herself and that raised all sorts of hell cause she did so with student fee revenue that helped fund the paper. So, me delving into the cafeteria and finding rate feces in the chili and giving voice to an assortment of campus malcontents was pretty tame.

But the key here is responsibility. A Gatekeeper owns the gate and what passes through it. My predecessor was fired as editor and faced some fraud charges for the travel expenses. If you publish something really poorly done, insensitive, inciteful or just plain dumb, you get called on it. They take away your keys to the gate.

You want to have standards so you can defend your decisions. How you create and then apply these standards can reveal many of the ingrained prejudices you don’t even know you have. As a good Gatekeeper you are trained to sluice out these prejudices, but in the meantime –because you let stuff through the gate every day—you are essentially the enforcer of these prejudices. If you are writing the first draft of history, even if you are covering a faculty senate meeting, then you are the voice of the current culture when you write your lead. In the 1960s, it was common for a newspaper to identify a speaker at a public meeting by race. I remember when Stokley Carmichael came to town in the late 60s he was identified as a “colored speaker,”  which was one thing he definitely was not.

When I was starting out covering local government in the early 1980s my paper’s style guide called for me to ascertain whether a female speaker was Miss or Mrs. Or Ms. Of course, all men were Mister. I was enforcing this when people got up the speak at the planning board. More than once, my editor dropped a quote from a woman because I did not track her down after her testimony to ask her how she wanted to be addressed. I didn’t do my job; her voice was lost. Likewise, I might designate every woman who spoke as a Ms, That was easier for me and an attempt to strike a blow for feminism, circa 1982. Yet if I did that too broadly, I could well be called on the carpet by a nice old lady who might tell me she has been married to Donald Bentley for 42 years and you have no right to call me anything else than Mrs. Donald Bentley!

This is fairly small beer compared to Trump’s nuclear codes, but it was a process (more women and people of color in the newsrooms helped) and over the years how people were identified became less sexist and racists. Were we covering a full range of issues? Nope. Never have, never will. Was it at least kind of fair and able to adjust? Here I risk being defrocked as unwoke, but I think so. Like American democracy, it is the worst possible system—except for all the other systems.

Prevailing Gatekeeper wisdom is that I have exceed 1,000 words and must come to a halt. However, I will complete this assault on current standards soon.