Peter Pan's Crocodile and Donald Trump

Many years ago I heard a theatre legend, one of many such stories, in which a young and cocky actor playing the crocodile in Peter Pan managed to infuriate the stagehands. In crocodile costume, of course, he walked bent over, following tape on the stage, and one night, after a particularly egregious offence against the stage crew, he followed the tape, tick tocking away... straight into the orchestra pit.

The usual message for this story for actors is: don't piss off the stage crew. It also has a message for politicians and pundits: don't blindly follow the tape. In politics, of course, the tape we follow has many names and takes many forms: peer pressure, compromise or the allure of power. More dangerously, the tape we follow takes the shape of a phenomenon visible throughout politics and society: a series of minor propositions, each of which we may not want to agree to, but which at the time seem less painful than a sense of letting the team down, or losing friends, access, and influence. C. S. Lewis described this process in his great essay The Inner Ring.

On celibacy

Toronto Van Attack Memorial
by Quentin9909

At two thirty-seven in the afternoon of April 23, 2018, Alek Minassian drove a rented van down a crowded sidewalk in Toronto, killing ten people and injuring sixteen others. According to social media posts retrieved after the event, he announced his crime in the following words: 

Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161. The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!

We still do not know the exact relationship between Alek Minassian and the so-called "incel" movement. In the initial social media statement and subsequent interviews, he has claimed membership in what he, at least, appears to have considered a movement. His own claims to have a connection with the internet users who call themselves "incels" played some role in his criminal defence, but if any members of the "incel" movement have claimed him, the media appears not to have reported it. 

Alek Minassian's lawyers claim his autism has distorted his thinking so severely he could not understand running people  over with a van was wrong. This claim appalls most advocates for people with autism; it paints people already burdened by misunderstanding and hostility as a lethal threat. In a sense, though, the legal case matters less than the question of why Alek Minassian found the online snarls from the fever swamps of the Internet compelling. Whatever the judge in Alek Minassian's murder trial decides in a month's time, he can expect years if not decades in secure custody, the ten people he killed by running them over with a van will still be dead, and the sixteen people he injured will still have to live with varying degrees of trauma. The malignant whispers from the corners of the Internet will persist as well, ready to delude and snare the unwary. This tragedy has taught us the dangers of those whispers. It makes sense to ask if we can answer them.

Living not by lies but ignoring the truth

Reverend Dwight Longenecker has reviewed Rod Dreher's new book "Live Not by Lies", and his review essay is interesting. In fact, I would go so far as to call it fascinating: it brings to my mind an essay by Connor Cruise O'Brien called "What can become of South Africa?", in which he speaks of the potential of ideological rhetoric to "boggle the mind" and completely drive out ordinary, humble respect for everyday reality. Reading Fr. Longenecker's essay, I can't tell whether he actually does not see the contradictions in his writing, or whether he simply wants to know if his readers have paid attention, because he wrote the following paragraph in his glowing review of Mr. Dreher's book:

 No matter what you believe about the legality of Joe Biden’s election, the fact remains that half the country believe Donald Trump and his Trump army were planning a coup. The other half of the country believe Joe Biden accomplished a coup through a rigged election. Again, no matter what the facts are–the result is that the Joe Biden presidency appears to be propped up by military might. Calling up 25,000 troops to Washington this week was not just for “security”. It was clearly a show of strength by the winning side. It was a display of military might to remind the other half of America who won and who is in charge. 

 In case anyone has forgotten, one of the books praised in this review essay bears the title "Live Not by Lies". That context makes the above quote from the article quite remarkable. 

A welcome departure...

Jeff Sessions testifying
by Office of Robert Aderholt

 I begin to write this in the last few minutes of January 20, 2021. I will probably publish it in the first hours of January 21, which, among some other distinctions, marks the first full day of the Biden-Harris administration. TV news has shown President Biden swearing in new officials of his administration, with an admonition similar to Churchill's famous "blood toil tears and sweat", and a single, uncompromising requirement: he required all his appointees to always show respect for their colleagues and the American people. 

At the same time, the officials, strategists, functionaries and hangers on of the previous administration have departed Washington, one or two clutching freshly printed presidential pardons, others just leaving. As Americans celebrate a hard-won transfer of power, in the last minutes of this day I want to celebrate the departure of a man who left Washington over two years ago, and now lives in well earned obscurity, his attempt at a political comeback denied by Donald Trump for precisely the wrong reasons. That man, Jefferson Sessions, implemented the most egregiously cruel of all the policies of the Trump administration, the policy of family separation at the American border with Mexico. 

January 20

As I write this, Joe Biden prepares to take the oath of office as president of the United States. He now has an opportunity: to move American politics in a new and humane direction. He also has a series of challenges: a republic fractured, with at least some bitter end fans of the previous chief executive who will not accept him as their president, and who have made no secret of their propensity for violence. He has to lead his country through the worst months of a pandemic, made far worse by the blundering, posturing, and dishonesty of his predecessor. He has to deal with a historic deficit and a government burdened by over seven trillion dollars more debt than it carried when he left at the end of his terms as vice president. He, his government, and the American people also face the task of weaning the American economy off the twin narcotics of easy money and fossil fuels.

I wish him well. 

Laying down a marker

Trump Rally
by Ted Eytan from Washington, DC, USA

Imagine a miracle. Someone with the power to do so takes every Trump supporter through the voting systems of American democracy. They examine every contested state, every urban precinct, every ballot, voting machine, line of code, signature and mailer envelope. All the millions who came to his rallies, sent in their money, or voted for the man and his enablers, get to see in detail how the voters recorded their choices, how the poll workers counted them, and how the tallies and the counts and recounts worked. 

Let us assume this examination would reveal exactly what the  Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council has said of the election as a whole. Let us assume it confirms what Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has told the world about the Georgia election and its associated recounts, and what the Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona government officials had to say. Assume our imaginary audit shows each Trump supporter why American state and federal courts have rejected thirty-eight lawsuits by the Trump campaign and layers aligned with him.

How many of the Trump supporters who have refused to accept the election results would change their minds? How many of the protestors chanting "stop the steal" would, if presented with irrefutable proof no corruption or tampering sufficient to tip the election results had taken place, change their minds, still their protests, and accept Joe Biden as their president?

A trophy of ashes

At a pivotal moment in the film "The Bounty",  when the mutineers under Fletcher Christian (Mel Gibson) are about to put Captain William Bligh (Anthony Hopkins) and the crew loyal to him into the ship's boat and set them adrift in the Pacific, Bligh asks his former second in command if he thinks he can command the mutineers, "this rabble". Bligh reminds Christian he failed, and Bligh had the law behind him. 

Dr. Biden, I presume...

Ralph Alswang, White House 
photographer

Now eighty million American voters, well over fifty United States judges, and the electoral college have awarded the title of president elect to Joe Biden, mainstream conservative publications have a problem. Refusing to call Mr. Biden the president elect looks increasingly desperate, increasingly unrealistic, and with increasing clarity, it reveals a lack of respect for American democracy. At the same time, it seems evident a great many people with influence among conservatives don't believe in conceding with any grace. Perhaps they have internalized Winston Churchill's quote:

Nations which go down fighting rise again, and those that surrender tamely are finished.

 Most of us can discern the difference between the Wehrmacht and the Democratic Party, but American politics has grown more extreme lately. Some conservative opinion journalists in search of a hill to defend have found one: they may have to call Mr. Biden the president, but to call the incoming first lady by her academic title of Dr. Biden: never.

It started with an essay in Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal decrying Dr. Biden's use of her title, then spread to National Review, where one article gives the laxity of American libel standards a serious workout by suggesting, with no apparent basis save the writer's own opinion, the University of Delaware had chucked its standards to award a degree to the spouse of a senator.

Voting, voters, and entropy

Tucker Carlson
by Gage Skidmore

A popular metaphor for entropy, attributed to Schopenhauer, goes like this: if you take a barrel of sewage and pour in a glass of fine French wine, you have a barrel of sewage. If you take a barrel of fine French wine and (shudder) pour in a glass of sewage, you have a barrel of sewage.

In one of his nightly opinion pieces, Tucker Carlson sarcastically lauded the triumph of voters who cast ballots from the grave. He later had to retract one of his examples after learning one of the ballots he cited had come from a very much alive widow, who had identified herself as Mrs. (husband's name). Carlson's sarcasm had an interesting effect: it produced an emotional reaction sufficient to briefly cloud my analysis, and I had to take a (virtual) step back to analyze what he had to say. Once I broke his arguments down and considered them, I found a couple of interesting layers, ones hinting at American Conservative strategy going forward. 

The Problem of Traditionalism

 The American Conservative published a somewhat predictable jeremiad against modern thinking, lamenting the inability of the modern, rationalist outlook to comprehend the phenomenon of Donald Trump's popularity. The author wrote:

 As the AP European History concept outline in my textbook uncritically puts it: “They [Enlightenment thinkers] sought to bring the light of reason to bear on the darkness of prejudice, outmoded traditions, and ignorance, challenging traditional values.”

He later writes: 

One can almost imagine the line I just quoted grafted onto the present: They [Democrats] sought to bring the light of reason to bear on the darkness of prejudice, outmoded traditions, and ignorance, challenging the traditional values of Trump voters in flyover country.

Well, everyone has the right to imagine, or if you insist, "almost imagine" anything, although I cannot quite see why anyone would go to the trouble of "almost imagining" anything. But equating the traditional values of mediaeval and pre-enlightenment Europe with whatever motivated Americans to pull the lever for Donald Trump ignores almost all of the specific principles at issue. The Declaration of Independence, and even more the Constitution of the United States are, after all, manifestos of 18th century enlightenment principles. The analogy falls apart the moment you apply hard specifics: voting, the idea of the people collectively selecting the head of their state, specifically repudiates the idea of the divine right of monarchs, a cardinal value of European politics from the fall of the Roman Republic up until the Long Parliament and the Glorious Revolution. The voters who went to pull the lever for Donald Trump acted out a basic ritual of the enlightenment.

The article did mention a peasant revolt against the extreme rationalism of the French Revolution, but instead of addressing the critical divide between principled conservatism and traditionalism, the author descended into a lament for the students these days.

And thus we have another article exemplifying traditionalism: a bare-knuckle defence of the outrageous innovations of a decade or a century (or two) ago. 

Looking ahead

 

Gen. Gus Perna, second from left 
(Photo Credit: U.S. Army)

Sunday night, the CBS news magazine program 60 minutes interviewed General Gus Perna about his work preparing to distribute Covid vaccine to all Americans upon completion of the necessary clinical trials. Seeing him speak, seeing him hold himself accountable for achieving results for the American people, seeing him describing the gaps in his knowledge and his method of educating himself, I had two thoughts.

First, for the sake of my American friends, I hope this man succeeds. Second, I hope he's a Republican. The only candidates for the next Republican presidential nomination I have seen floated so far have no practical experience or qualifications except in opinion journalism. Even a short glimpse of General Perna at work suggested how much better Republicans, and indeed Americans, can do.

General Perna may not deliver, of course. A single 60 minutes interview hardly provides a basis for a comprehensive assessment of anyone's character and abilities. Operation warp speed may fail. The whole project, and particularly the military role in it, may turn out badly, and I have observed this administration long enough to know their decisions do not come with a guarantee of quality. But seeing the way General Perna took responsibility for his part in the work, without qualification, gave me a reason to hope for his success, and a reminder of how much better the Republican Party can do.

Alex Trebek and the Donald

RIP to a giant who made knowing stuff cool. https://t.co/GQybsCTDLo

— James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) November 8, 2020

 If the clue reads: "In 1984 George Orwell wrote this thing was statistical, though the book says, clearly, it isn't", the correct response is: "what is sanity?"

On the day after most media outlets called the election for Mr. Biden, Alex Trebek died at his home, with his family, after a brave struggle against pancreatic cancer. In his public fight over a year and a half with the cancer, he showed grace, humility, and a defining gentle, self-deprecating humour. 

He provided a useful, even healing, counterpart to the career of that other TV show host, the one who disastrously took his act into the White House. Alex Trebek did more than making "knowing stuff cool"; he made reaching for the truth cool. He made acknowledging and correcting his mistakes cool. The TV show "Jeopardy" taught us many things, some trivial, some not, but perhaps the most important lesson the show taught came not from the clues or the questions, but from the occasional adjustments to scores as the judges accepted a response Mr. Trebek had rejected, or rejected a response he had allowed. Alex Trebek always conveyed these changes courteously, always with a tinge of regret for taking away points, and never, not ever, with any hint of wounded vanity at having his calls overruled. In doing so, he taught us nothing matters more than the truth, not the flow of the play and certainly not the ego of the host. Without display, without fanfare, without even speaking to the matter directly, he taught everyone who watched the show the importance of getting things right. 

401-k and fantasy

 In the American election just past, a voter gave the state of her 401-k retirement savings plan as a reason for voting for Donald Trump. I don't begrudge anyone feeling happy about the state of their preparations for retirement. I don't even feel moved to condemn anyone for overlooking Mr. Trump's egregious offences, from the hundred thousand excess American pandemic deaths to the separation of families on the Southern border of the United States. We live in a merciless, every person for themselves society, and  some of us come to terms with that by taking steps to secure their future.

I have something else to say to this Trump voter: the numbers in this person's 401-k statement and in the stock market section of the news she reads may make her feel happy, but they have a good chance of meaning as much to her actual life in retirement, or even her ability to stop working, as Darth Vader's revelation to Luke, or Aragorn's marriage to Arwen. Three related reasons explain why.

Police and Violence

 Justin King (Beau of the Fifth Column on Twitter and YouTube) recently noted, in a tweet, the lack of sympathy for police in an online forum for military and security contractors. After a gunman shot and seriously injured two Los Angeles Sheriff's deputies, he noticed a series of comments ranging from ironic to hostile, and it puzzled him.

I don't pretend to know the reason this particular community appears to have turned against the police, but I do know about some trends in police training. When I consider the notions of honour I observe among people in high risk occupations, and compare that with what I see in police training and police behaviour, I can see one explanation for the hostility in the series of tweets Justin King quotes. I may not have the right explanation, but I think my hypothesis fits the available information.

Watch any television show from forty years ago and compare it with just about any similar show today, and the change in police tactics and equipment will appear instantly. Where twenty or thirty years ago a pair of detectives might knock on a door, today's shows portray squads of officers in full body armour taking down doors with battering rams. Television may exaggerate, but it tends to track social change, and police behaviour has indeed changed. Radley Balko has written about this, calling the phenomenon The Rise of the Warrior Cop. In the most important sense, however, the dominant attitudes in police training and department policies make the police of today less truly warriors than the police of forty or fifty years ago. Driving a Bearcat or an MRAP and wearing a plate carrier and a tin hat does not make anyone a warrior. Trading a revolver for a Heckler & Koch rifle doesn't make anyone a warrior. One thing only defines a warrior: a willingness to die for something outside yourself. Warriors die for a principle, or for their friends, or their country. A generation of training and policy have combined to impress on police the idea they have a single duty: to go home at the end of their shift with a whole skin. In one particularly egregious case, in the United States, a municipality fired an officer for failing to kill a citizen, claiming he took an unacceptable risk by attempting to deescalate a confrontation instead of shooting. 

It is a commonplace to say the police have a problem with "bad apples", but I consider "the fish rots from the head" a more appropriate metaphor. Many of the issues with police behaviour arise from official policies and training, often with provincial or state and national support, and driven by promoters and influencers with an international reach. The result seems clear: much of official and unofficial police culture inclines officers to kill people in their charge rather than take the risk of making non-violent choices. It does not surprise me to see respect and support for the police have declined as well. 

Steps Toward Abolishing Police and Prisons

I’d like to present some steps toward police and prison abolition. These proposals assume three overriding principles: first, do no harm; second, make progress sustainable; third, follow the golden rule.

Start by understanding we can make things worse. If we eliminate a large part of the police force and end up with a greater role for private security, we will certainly have made things worse; private security doesn’t answer to anyone but the people who write their salary and expense cheques. However bad the police and justice system today, at least in theory they answer to the whole public and not only to the wealthy.

Nobody, no party or coalition and no political program can guarantee uninterrupted progress toward liberation. Ground one government gives their opponents will try to reclaim. To make reforms sustainable, we have to make them work, we have to make sure they take root in our communities, and we have to make certain we make, and keep, the public aware of their benefits. That means, always, making sure each change we make responds effectively to the actual needs of people and communities. It means making each step sustainable on its own, so if our progress suffers a check we have the least risk of going backward.

Finally, follow the golden rule. We still have no more effective guide to moral decision making than reciprocity, asking ourselves what we would think, feel, or do in the other person’s position. That means taking the obligation to listen to the concerns of other people seriously. It means both respecting other people’s pain and anger, and not working in such a way as to inflict more pain.

Unto us a child is born.

The birth of a child, any child, represents renewal, the next generation to whom we will pass our wisdom, the offspring we hope will make better mistakes than we did.

Crying out for a great conservative

As an acolyte in the Anglican tradition during my youth, I often had occasion to read the last edition of Archbishop Cramner's great work, the Book of Common Prayer. In it, quite separately from the main burial service, was a specific service for the burial of a child. In my naivety, I regarded that as an acute and kind response to the trauma the death of a child must be to any family. Only much later did I come to realize the truth: for most of the nearly half millennium Anglicans have used Cramner's work, the death of a child was not an infrequent horror but a routine grief. Through the four centuries preceding antibiotics and other effective disease control methods, the burial of children was something relatively few families escaped. Family histories routinely chronicle births and then provide the number of children who lived.

All of the history of the human species as we know it has taken place in the shadow of routine child and infant mortality. Family traditions, religious rituals, and state policies revolved around that single fact. Then, in a historical blink, everything changed. Vaccinations, antibiotics, indoor plumbing, antiseptic surgery and food safety all sprang from the discoveries of the late nineteenth century, and in barely more than one generation, they transformed a routine misfortune into a rare catastrophe.If we no longer lose half our children, more or  less, before they reach adulthood, what does that mean? If the number of humans doubles in one generation, our population will grow over thirty-fold in a century. Unless someone has a large supply of Minshara-class planets available, we will have to change our approach to bringing the next generation into the world.

That's not a small change. It means changing who we are as men and women; because most of us experience our humanity as members of one sex or the other, that eventually affects everything about us. It's a wrenching change, one we have to negotiate at the same time as we thread the narrow path between technological progress and mutual annihilation, and find a way to cope with the promise of automation that offers us wonders as it leaves more and more members of society with no place in the productive economy. But it isn't optional.

The phenomenon many of us call the "sexual revolution" did not begin with hormonal contraception. If I had to pick one representative pharmaceutical product to award the role of herald of the sexual revolution, I would pick diphtheria vaccine. 

On collective humility...

At the end of an eventful day, to say the least, I offer a brief anecdote, just to quell the worst of our impulses to indulge in self-righteous indignation. Just over a year after I returned to Toronto after a forty year absence, John Barber, one of the journalists who spoke for Toronto's downtown urbanists, wrote a column gushing with praise for the lawless thuggery of Richard Daley's destruction of Meigs Field. The former mayor of Chicago destroyed that city's waterfront airport in what Barber described as a "midnight raid", a romantic description leaving out the multiple laws this "raid" broke, or that it endangered everyone in the air over the American midwest that night. If "Ford Nation" has produced a leader determined to get his own way, law be damned, well, they have had some good teachers over the years, and those teachers have sometimes included ourselves and our friends.

Humility alone, though, won't save us. Yes, we, collectively, have contributed our share to the sorry record leading to Doug Ford's determination to cut down every court in the province, if he must, to get at Toronto's City Council. We still have to deal with the situation.

Next steps

This morning, we celebrated a victory. We hoped, briefly, Doug Ford would respect this city, respect the law and constitution, and let the election, already seriously, disrupted, go ahead. By this afternoon, we learned to our distress he was willing to try to break a long and honourable Ontario tradition of respecting the constitution and the principle of judicial review, in order to enforce his will.

An open letter to MPPs

Doug Ford by Bruce Reeve

In a few days, possibly even less, you will receive a summons to Queen's Park to vote. Doug Ford wants you to invoke the "notwithstanding" clause in order to override a judicial decision preventing him from changing the size of Toronto's wards in the middle an the election already underway. You can do it, but you don't have to. You shouldn't.

The notwithstanding clause has always marked out a line, a line between the collective will and the rights of the individual. Until now, Ontario has always stayed on the side of individual rights. We have always had governments, and representatives, in this province who undertook to reconcile the desires of the majority with the rights of minorities. It made governing harder, but it should be hard. Members of the Provincial Parliament get offices and good pay and respect because you have taken on a difficult job. Make it easier by curtailing our rights and you lose that respect.