Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Still Mystified

I'm still mystified.  I've given it some thought - not like I'm burning up brain cells or losing sleep or anything, but I'm mulling it over - and I still don't get people who vote against their own interests.
   Trailer Park Republicans, I'm looking your direction here.
   Just in case you call yourself a Republican and think I'm NOT looking your direction, there's one simple test to determine if you're a Trailer Park Republican: do you have One Million Dollars in liquid assets?  To be clear, I'm asking if you could go out tomorrow morning, to the bank or the brokerage house or the bunker under your private tennis court and have a lackey cut a check for $1 million, no questions asked.  If you answered 'No' then you, my deluded friend, are a Trailer Park Republican.  Sure, you may not live in a trailer park but the respect the GOP has for you is exactly the same as if you did.  Which is to say, none at all.
   Why do so many people persist in identifying themselves with a movement that holds them and their middle-class situation in contempt?  Like I said, I've been giving it some thought, so here goes: once someone has identified themselves with a group, it's very hard to separate from that group, even when the group's interests clearly run counter to the person's own.  Like when gang members realize what they're doing is going to get them killed but they still hang out with their hoodlum friends.  If you change your mind you run the risk of looking stupid, and no one wants to look stupid.  But there’s more to it than that.
   No one wants to feel stupid.
   Children are used to making mistakes, it’s how they learn, and nobody begrudges them a mispronunciation or a factual error.  When a child makes a mistake we correct them and both of us move on, no harm no foul.  But somewhere along the line, usually when we’re teenagers, things change.  Making mistakes becomes a matter of public embarrassment.  We’re ‘supposed to know better’ even though that’s patently untrue.  When we’re wrong we’re mocked, and no one likes that.  Being ‘right’ becomes a matter of personal pride, we become emotionally invested in it because the alternative to being right is not being wrong, it’s public humiliation.
   When we become parents our beliefs take firmer root, even the wrong ones.  As authority figures now the risk to being wrong is not just public humiliation, it’s the risk of the loss of trust and respect from our children.  Think about the first time you realized that one of your parents was dead wrong about something.  Remember the shock like ice water to your face?  Remember the dawning notion that if your parent was wrong about this one thing, there was every possibility they were wrong about something else?  Maybe everything else?  Parents dread that same moment coming upon their children so they do everything  they can to make sure they’re never discovered to be wrong.  As adults and authority figures it’s our natural tendency to circle the wagons, to put limits on what options we consider, on what information we take in.  We like to think things over once and then be done with it.  As adults we imagine that, once decided, our opinions are set in stone never to be re-examined.
   But the world changes underneath us.  What was true one day can suddenly become an uncertainty the next and an outright falsehood the day after that.  This is the agony and ecstasy of science and social progress.  Discovery is what makes us human beings, and as Ovid told us, there is nothing in the whole world that is permanent.  I think about the world my grandparents knew during the Depression: no transistors, no penicillin, rampant Jim Crow legislation, no computers, no TV, no interstate highway system, and the Soviet Union going full steam ahead.  The world seemed so certain, there were Communists to fight, FDR would always be President, and minorities certainly knew their place, as did women and the queers.  It’s a good thing my grandfather died twenty-seven years ago, because his head would explode if he were around today.  Almost nothing he believed to be true is still true.  His casual racism and matter-of-fact sexism seem almost quaint now, a by-product of more innocent, more ignorant time.  Quaint, but no less dangerous or oppressive.
   We’d be right there still, all of us as prejudiced as my grandfather in 1939, if none of us ever were willing to be wrong, if none of us took a minute to think about what we believed and the way we implemented that in our daily lives.  Sticking with a political affiliation that clearly holds entire sections of the electorate in contempt is not only shameful, and silly, and contrary to their own best interests, it's holding the Trailer Park Republicans back.  They're fighting battles decided decades ago, they're asking questions answered by our grandparents, and they're demanding a return to discredited, racist, sexist, just-plain-wrong policies that never worked in the first place.  And they're doing it all loudly, proclaiming the justness of their unjust cause at the top of their lungs, gleeful lemmings leading each other over the cliff of ignorance, secure in the belief that even if doom awaits them, in this crowd of like-minded companions at least they won't feel stupid.
   Okay, so maybe I do have some insight, but I still just don't get it.

Sunday, August 26, 2012

Ant Politics

Do you suppose ants bicker?
  I have a fire ant mound in my front yard* and every so often I'll watch the ants going about their ant business.  They're oblivious to me, I think I'm on a scale that's almost incomprehensible to them, but then they're almost incomprehensible to me.  As I watched the other day I saw two ants bump into each other - more or less - back up, go forward again and bump again.  They did this a couple of times before they figured out to go around each other.  After that incident what did those two ants think of each other?
   'I saw Eduardo today,' one would complain to his ant friends at the ant country club.  'Bastard wouldn't get out of my way.  Who does he think he is?'
   'Stupid Dave was in the middle of the ant highway again,' Eduardo might say to his ant buddies, over a round of cheap ant beer.  'I swear, it's like he thinks he owns it or something. That ant highway is for all of us, not just him.'
   Such teeny tiny problems from such teeny tiny creatures.
   Which got me to thinking, of course.  Given the incredible vastness of the cosmos - truly unimaginable objects on colossal scales so large that they have no meaning to us - aren't all our problems really just a variation on the theme of ants bickering?
   I mean, think about it.  We're several billion people on a pretty small planet orbiting a fairly average star in a galaxy that contains over 200 billion stars.  That billion with a captial 'B.'  And that galaxy is one of about 170 billion that we know about so far.  Again, billion with a capital 'B.'
  Those kind of numbers drive you insane when you think about them even for a little while.  They let you know just how truly, incredibly vast the universe is, and how small we are.  Ants.  Bickering ants slowly murdering the planet that's their only home.
  Now, I know it's not in their nature, and I know this is just hyperbole, but what would happen if the ants in my front yard got together with the ants in my neighbor's yard?  What kind of ant community would they have then?  There are a whole lot more of them than there are of us.  And if the ants in my cul-de-sac got together with the ants in the next cul-de-sac over... well, that's actually kind of frightening.  But it would be kind of cool to see what they come up with.
   Same thing with us.  We're in control of the planet, undeniably, but in the grand scheme of things we're just larger ants, all our striving and scheming and plotting as inconsequential to the universe as the ants' bickering in my front yard is to me.  But... what if we started working together?  There are seven billion of us on Earth.  If we could get one billion of us - that's about 14% - all pointing in the same direction, trying to accomplish the same thing... we could, literally, move mountains.  We could change the course of human history forever.
   That would be kind of cool, don't you think?



*  which I am in the process of exterminating.  With all apologies to Nature and PETA, I can't have fire ants around the house.

Sunday, August 5, 2012

The Beer-Tax Allegory

There's a fable making the rounds through some inboxes that purports to equate ten men going out for a beer to the current tax rates.  It's pure trailer-park Republican stuff, poorly understood and poorly presented and full of manufactured outrage.  But it's been around for a while, and it bothers me when liars try to explain things in ways that are clearly false and intended to obfuscate rather than lay plain.  So I'm gonna make up my own fable.
  First, let's ignore the fact that trying to equate buying goods - in this case beers - with paying taxes is a completely false correlation.  For the sake of comparison I'll preserve the beer-tax allegory.
   The e-mail tale assumes all ten men are already in the same bar.  But let's back up.  Let's assume all ten people - not necessarily men - work at the same company.  The CEO decides to go for a beer and invites nine of his closest friends.  None of them could make it so he slums it with his workers.
   The CEO gets chauffeured to the bar.  His driver does not figure into this as he's an illegal alien.
   The next two richest employees drive their import cars and valet park them.
   The next three drive their own cars and feed the meter and hope the CEO doesn't keep them so long that they get a parking ticket.
   The last four poorest can't afford cars or the insurance on them so they take the bus.  Which makes them 20 minutes late.  The CEO and the two valet parkers rail at the insensitivity of the bus riders, wondering why they couldn't get to the bar with everyone else.

Once all ten are at the door the bouncer decides where they can go based on their incomes.
   The four who took the bus get to sit in the unfinished basement.  The bouncer doesn't go down there so it's a very sketchy rat-infested space, not safe at all, and no one pays attention to what goes on.  Three of the four employees are single mothers.
    The three who parked on the street get to sit next to the bathrooms on the first floor.  At least it's lit, and relatively safe, but there are better places in the bar, they're just not entitled to go there.
  The two who valet parked get to sit right up front, at the bar, where they get very good service and everyone pays attention to them no matter how stupid what they say sounds.  Thing is, they can also see the stairs to the second floor.  They're not allowed up there, but they can see and smell everything, and it's delicious.
  The CEO goes straight to the second floor via an exclusive entrance he doesn't have to share with the other nine.  He's the only one up there, but Goddamn it's a fantastic place.

The bar is the US Biergarten.  Everyone is entitled to have a beer at the US Biergarten.  And because Sam, the owner, is actually related to all ten of the people - he's their uncle - he really does care that they have a good time and take advantage of everything the US Biergarten has to offer.  Since they're all family he lets the ten pay according to their ability, because he's really the one who foots the tab for the entire US Biergarten.  Beer for all ten of them costs $100, and each of them has to pay up front before they can drink a single drop.

   The four in the basement pay less than a dollar each, because they make about 1/174th what the CEO makes.
  The three who parked their own cars pay about $4 each, or $12 out of the $100, but then they make on average about 1/66th of what the CEO makes.
  The two who valet parked pay a little more than $5 each - $11 between the two of them - because even though they're doing really well, they still only make about 1/15th of what the CEO does.
  The CEO pays $75.  But he's the one with the chauffeur, with the private entrance, and the entire posh second floor to himself.  He makes the most money, he uses more resources of the US Biergarten than anyone else, and he enjoys special considerations the other nine don't, and so Sam decides he has to pay the most for a beer.

The end of the night comes, and it's time to settle the tab.
   Sam has seen the four in the basement and he knows times are tough for them, so he gives them back the tiny amount they paid.  It's not like they didn't pay, he's just refunding them their money because they've been handed such a raw deal compared to everyone else.
  For the three who street parked Sam returns a little of the money they paid, a few cents on the dollar.
  The two who valet parked show Sam that, in actuality, they didn't make nearly as much as their pay stubs said they did, with allowed exemptions their taxable income was much, much lower.  So Sam shrugs and refunds them about $2 each.
  The CEO shows Sam that everything he's enjoyed, from the chauffeur to the private entrance to the posh second floor, is really a business expense.  Sam scratches his head, wonders how this could be, but it's all proper according to the law, so he returns the CEO $35.

Sam now has $58.  For beer that cost $100.
  The four poorest employees did enjoy a beer, they paid for it but got that money back.  Yet they still had to sit in the unfinished basement with the rats.
  The three who parked on the street paid $11 out of the $58, or 19% of the tab, even though all three together make 4.5% of what the CEO makes.
  The two who valet parked paid $7 out of the $58, or 12% of the tab, even though they make 13% of what the CEO makes.
  The CEO had his tab reduced by 46%.  He didn't spend that extra $35 creating jobs or helping his employees drinking beer in the basement, he sent that money overseas and parked it in offshore accounts so he could retrieve it later, tax-free.

The tab for all ten still cost $100, so where does Sam get the $42 he's down?  Next time the three street-parkers come in he charges them more.  He wants to charge the richest three more, but they have well-paid attorneys who come in every day to argue against it, so Sam has given up that angle.  He also borrows money from other bars to cover the tab, and then has to pay interest on that money, which just raises the tab for everyone the next time.

And that, trailer park Republicans everywhere, is how the tax system really works, at least in the tortured metaphor of equating beer purchases to income tax.
   Just to be clear, all of you would be the four in the basement or the three parked on the street.  The valet parkers and the CEO don't give a rat's ass about you, they only care about fooling you with false analogies so you'll vote contrary to your own interests.

Friday, August 3, 2012

Where My Bigfoot At?

I want Bigfoot to exist.  Seriously.  I want there to be a Loch Ness Monster too.  And a chupacabra, and ghosts and gray aliens and a hollow Earth and... all of it.  I want every crackpot thing anyone's ever come up with to scare kids around a campfire to really exist.
   But I want a picture of it.  With it holding a newspaper. Or with it using an iPad.  Or with it strapped to a fender like a deer with a tag in its ear before it goes for processing and becomes Sasquatch sausage.  Which would be Sasquatchage.
  Have you noticed how there are far fewer claims of the paranormal in the last five years or so?  No UFO abductions, no Bigfoot sightings, no ghosts.  Nothing.
   It's because everyone has a camera.
   If you have a cell phone you have a camera.  Cops know this now, they assume they're always being filmed, at least the smart ones do.  In the good old days, with film cameras, you'd have all sorts of backwoods folks claiming to have been abducted, or to have shared a pot of beans with the Jersey Devil.  Nowadays, though, if someone makes an extraordinary claim, the first question everyone asks is 'where are the pictures?'  There are no more excuses, if you claim to have seen something out of the ordinary - say, a gray alien eating a Hungr-buster at the DQ - you'd better have a picture.
   As Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.  And while I would dearly love to saddle up and ride the Loch Ness Monster, I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen.  Grainy, faked 8mm film isn't going to cut it any more, only HD pictures will do.
   You know what?  I think we're a little poorer for it.  I'm not sure anyone ever really believed in Bigfoot,* but absence of proof was not proof of absence, at least back before every American carried a camera in his pocket or her purse.  There used to be room for doubt, for the possibility however slight that you might one day come across a chupacabra caught in the act of chupa-ing some cabras.  I don't think that chance exists any more.  Too bad.  A little of the light of magic has gone out for us.
   I'm still holding out hope, though.  Maybe Bigfoot is just really, really, really camera shy.


*except for card-carrying weirdos, and even then I think they were doing it for the attention