Author: joannawriting_3o8z6x

The Big Game

So, the 2025 Super Bowl happened in New Orleans on Sunday, Feb. 9. On a national stage, much of the country watched. Nielsen estimates 127.7M households viewing, with a peak of 137.7M during the 2nd quarter, up 3.2% over 2024. But from a local perspective, as the city just started into Mardi Gras (begins Jan. 6, Epiphany or 12th Night/Day of Christmas in the Christian calendar), it was a one-off sideline/distraction before getting on with the main event/season, which continues till Fat Tuesday on March 4.

Big Game Blow Out/Disappointment

The Kansas City Chiefs had won the last two Super Bowls. And leading up to this one, there was buzz of a possible “three-peat.” That experience would triumph over youth and talent. That if the Chiefs took three in a row, they could become an unbeatable dynasty, led by one of the best QBs ever. But nothing’s a sure thing and action on the field can shift the narrative in moments. So, this game got away from the former champs, with the Philadelphia Eagles winning 40 to 22, in what’s been described as a blowout, not much of a game. And, how the mighty have fallen, the ex-heroes suddenly morphing into losers. Philadelphia’s underestimated QB was quickly reevaluated. And should some of the old guys think about retiring, like say Taylor Swift’s boyfriend?

Shadow of Violence

Everything happens in context. And this game took place in the shadow, a little over a month earlier, of the New Year’s Eve French-Quarter terrorist (lone wolf, but with an Isis flag) ramming that killed 14 and injured dozens. The perpetrator shot, but did not kill, a couple cops and was shot and killed himself. Backstory of how this could have happened: bollards to limit road access to Bourbon Street had apparently been removed but not yet replaced. The NO Department of Public Works website slated completion of a project to install new stainless-steel bollards for Feb. 2025. But that seems to have been optimistic: Years of warnings preceded Bourbon Street attack as bollard repairs lagged. (Rona Tarrant. CBS News. Jan. 6, 2025). The “city that care forgot” is not always timely in taking care of business. After-the-fact security measures likely focused on allaying the undertow of worry the city’s reputation/perception for violence could kill tourism and convention businesses that are its only remaining “industries.” When I travel, folks are intrigued when I mention living near New Orleans—the exotic, raffish, charm, the music, the food. But US News and World Report ranks the city #6 of most dangerous cities in the country. And then there’s the heat, humidity, severe weather. So, always and ever the city’s on the edge of falling off the itinerary.

Watching and Not

Have to say I was not among those watching. Viewing sporting events not my idea of fun, after spending a good part of my young life at baseball games. My dad was on the where-the-sausage-gets-made end, teaching young players basic skills and fixing struggling teams, so he probably lost more than he won. At least it felt that way. The hard work did eventually payoff: his Baltimore Orioles won the World Series in four straight games the year he died (1966). But I emerged with limited optimism for whatever team I might consider supporting. With this Super Bowl, I rooted for the city to make it through without another major violent incident. Fortunately, the tight security did seem to work, nothing big occurred except for the president being in attendance for the first Super Bowl ever. No throwing out the first pitch, as in baseball, which he probably would have liked. But he had photo ops, posing with surviving ramming victims and first responders. Were they gifted comp tickets?

Spirit of the Age

Recognize large events like the Super Bowl as public pageants, enacting/reflecting/mirroring currents coursing through the culture and the spirit of the age. Symbolism looms even larger in chaotic, confusing, confused, contradictory, confounding times like these, when multiple themes and voices crisscross and intertwine. Consider racism or not: some 53% of NFL players identify as Black or African American. But the NFL, perhaps responding to DEI bashing, decided to remove “End Racism” slogans from the end zones (Louisa Thomas. The End of “End Racism” In the End Zone. New Yorker. Feb. 9, 2025). However, the league also seemed conflicted, hosting probably the blackest half-time show ever. Does this suggest Kendrick Lamar was contracted to perform before the election? Whatever, black commentators shared thoughts. “I was there live, watching Kendrick give the world a masterclass in revolutionary music and imagery.” (Karlton Jamal. Kendrick Lamar’s Halftime Show Was Filled With Political Symbolism While Trump Watched On — Here Is Everything I Noticed Live From The Super Bowl. BuzzFeed). And “During Black History Month, with Donald Trump of all people in the audience, Lamar called out the streak of anti-Blackness that pervades this country’s past and present.” (Nadira Goffe. Kendrick’s Super Bowl Performance Pulled Off a Double Whammy. Slate. Feb. 10, 2025), with a “color-coordinated formation of an American flag.”

American History

And then, there was performance of the Black National Anthem. Recent practice has been to have it follow the Star-Spangled Banner. And frankly, James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing” is a much more melodic tune. (Ledisi stuns Super Bowl, with Black National Anthem. NY Post Video. Feb. 9, 2025). The singer was backed by 125 NO high school students, representing the song’s 125th anniversary and, we can hope, the future. But what might have been heartwarming stirred MAGA controversy. Some called the performance “divisive,” even threatening to boycott future Super Bowls. AI summary: “Some people view its designation as a separate anthem for Black Americans as divisive, implying a separation from the national identity, while others see it as a powerful expression of Black pride and a recognition of the unique struggles faced by African Americans in the United States.” Underlying message? Black entertainment is an old trope: take the money, entertain us and shut up. But black players and entertainers seem to have moved past that and out into worlds of their own making and vision.

America’s Game?

Over the years, while I’ve watched and not, baseball has been supplanted, and football has become “America’s game.” Baseball’s old nickname “America’s pastime” reflected deep rural, pastoral, roots, focus on individual skills, a slower pace. Football’s speedy aggression and warlike language, direct physical contact, emphasis on team rather than individual performance now seem a better fit for current national character. “There is no ‘I’ in team!” Other themes: Philadelphia fans are known for “football hooligan” behavior. Rioting, setting fires, fighting broke out in their home city during the game. So, we see sore winners as well as sore losers. Is this yet another expression of national jettisoning of any attempt at civility in interacting with each other? “President Trump…suggested [Taylor Swift, there to see her Chief’s fiancé play] was booed by his supporters.” Or was she? Philadelphia fans have even been known to boo Santa Claus. Trump later said, on his Truth Social site that, “The only one that had a tougher night than the Kansas City Chiefs was Taylor Swift. She got BOOED out of the Stadium. MAGA is very unforgiving!” (Taylor Swift booed at Super Bowl by heavily pro-Eagles crowd as she watches Chiefs. CBS News. Feb. 10,2025).

Athletes and Their Bodies

As with many big “shows,” there’s a lot of drama both on and off the field. Consider the players, who make it happen for everybody else. Male fans often played football in high school, know the rules, and may engage in wishful thinking that if they had just been a little quicker and luckier. This can lead to gladiator, “leave it all on the field,” expectations, with actual players viewed as making a lot of money and having the dream job. So, just shut up and play. The average NFL salary of $2.5M a year is skewed by big bucks going to high-ticket players. In fact, the real average works out to about $860K a year overall, with the average career, depending on position, about 2½ years. And these guys literally carry the whole enterprise on their backs, often at heavy physical costs. The NFL dragged its feet in acknowledging the concussion (CTE) scandal, which an estimated 90% of players suffer to some degree. We hear stories of former players who have descended into dementia, domestic violence, homelessness. So far, diagnosis can only occur with post-mortem study of the brain and players have donated theirs to help those coming up behind. Meanwhile, the NFL settlement with players remains problematic and flawed. “The ‘landmark’ deal promised payouts for suffering players. But strict guidelines, aggressive reviews and a languishing doctors network have led to denials.” (Will Hobson. The Broken Promises of the NFL Concussion Settlement. Washington Post. Jan. 31, 2024). So, there’s also a “What have you done for me lately?” effect. Here today but then forgotten.

High-End Amateur Hour?

Salary differentials reflect the class system among players. Big talent stars are not just paid much more. Individual name recognition opens the door to vastly more options after retirement. Case in point: Fox has paid Tom Brady, perhaps the greatest QB ever, $37.5M for a ten-year contract to do color commentary. The assumption seems to have been that he’d just automatically know how. But in real life, his rookie performances on regular season games turned out to be wooden and awkward. Less high-profile former QB Michael Vick acknowledged the steep learning curve, saying it took him 2 years to start to feel comfortable on camera. But the network went ahead and assigned Brady to call the big game anyway. No way they could send the GOAT to the “minor leagues” for seasoning. Criticisms abound (Mark Sielski. Column Tom Brady is on the verge of ruining another Superbowl. A no-show on Thursday. Here hoping he doesn’t ruin the Eagles-Chiefs Super Bowl. Philadelphia Enquirer. Feb.7, 2025; Andrew Katz. Why is Tom Brady calling the Super Bowl? Explaining Fox’s big-money hire, Greg Olsen demotion. The Sporting News. Feb.8, 2025). Humiliating for Brady, but he comes out with the comfort of his big payday and can fade away to activities like part ownership of another NFL team.

Shadow/Specter of Sports Gambling

And over it all looms another shadow, the specter, of increasingly big-business sports betting. (Ben Fawkes. Sportsbooks win big on Super Bowl 59: ‘One of the best single-game results in company history’. NYT. Feb. 10, 2025). There’s history here too: most spectacularly in baseball’s Black Sox scandal, when gamblers bribed most if the Chicago White Sox team to throw the 1919 World Series. A little over 100 years ago, popular sentiment, when it all came out, was that fans should be able to trust in the integrity of outcomes, that they weren’t being cheating. But these days, gambling seems to have become embedded in the social fabric, while we look away from potential for corruption and addiction (WGBH Scratch and Win podcast). And folks don’t just bet on the big game; they can also bet on point spreads and individual player performances. We hear reports of college and professional players leaned on, threatened (sometimes including their families), even receiving Venmo requests to repay “lost” bets. (James L. Edwards III. The dark side of sports betting and its impact on NBA players: Death threats, racism and Venmo requests. The Athletic. Feb. 11, 2025). And we hear too of college graduates emerging with gambling debts on top of student debt. Does this too reflect the spirit of the age? I remember the words of the disillusioned boy to Shoeless Joe Jackson, one of Black Sox players banned for life: “Say it ain’t so, Joe.” Sadly, these days the boy might demand a refund.

Disasters In the News

Disasters have been big news the past month. The devastating California wildfires were followed by the District of Columbia plane-helicopter collision, and then the Philadelphia medical-jet crash. The fires killed 29 people, destroyed nearly 17,000 structures, and forced tens of thousands from their homes.  The DC crash (the first major US air “accident” in 16 years), killed 64 passengers and crew, plus three in the military helicopter. The med-jet crash killed six in the plane and another on the ground and burned some neighborhood houses.  At first glance, we might characterize the first as “natural disaster,” the second as “human error,” the third as possible mechanical failure. But my bookshelf holds the title There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster (Chester Hartman and Gregory D. Squires. Routledge. C 2006). And extrapolating, it seems all three types contain backstories of short-term decisions that can lead to devastating varieties of human error, before, during and after.

Family and Location

My siblings and I came late to disaster awareness. We grew up with relatively mild weather in a valley in New York State’s southern tier.  But we’ve all ended up living in or near disaster-prone areas—hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfire territories. My brother is in southern California close to San Diego. My sister was in Berkeley near San Francisco, then moved to NYC and lived there till her death. I live in southern Louisiana just outside New Orleans.  We trade mutual check-in texts when big events occur nearby. My brother took good advice and avoided risky cliff-top and water-view locations. In NYC, my sister, after Superstorm Sandy, described floodwaters sloshing behind plate glass windows, so stretches of lower Manhattan looked like a series of aquaria. An artist, she told of galleries losing inventory stored in their basements to flooding.  I traded tales of Louisiana banks putting their computer systems in basements that Katrina flooded (2005).

Failing to Plan, Planning to Fail?

My husband, growing up in New Orleans, experienced hurricanes and flooding early and often. He later became the engineer of a coastal parish (county) outside the city. I worked for the same local government, and when we first met, noticed the slogan he’d posted over his desk. “Your failure to plan does not equal my emergency.”  But of course, big problems, often already in crisis mode, landed on his desk. Humans often procrastinate, especially with what are called low-probability, high-impact, events. Call this “disaster amnesia,” amplified by budget constraints.  “…And just as individuals tend to ignore disasters until the costs are all too clear—and then to overreact—there are powerful incentives for government to postpone action until crises hit…” (Ronald J. Daniels, et al., editors.  On Risk and Disaster. University of Pennsylvania. C2006).  Competing needs can seem more immediately critical or politically expedient, so can’t we put this off, get away with it, a bit longer?  Most of the time, yes, but there are those other times.

Out of Our Control

Disasters, by definition, are inconvenient. They fracture and sometimes break business as usual. At their screaming extremes, they can feel like the end of the world. Armageddon tales are a trope of Western Christian culture, going back to the original in the Bible’s Book of Revelation. “Apocalyptic narratives” abound in “pulp novels, video game designs, Hollywood movies.” (Laura Miller. The Big Finish: Why do we love telling stories about the end of the world? Slate. Feb. 4, 2025). Assessments of damage and destruction afterward parallel origin stories that morph into who-dun-it tales. Was it arson, sparks from a campfire, New Year’s fireworks or electrical infrastructure, poor water management or even terrorism? And who can we blame, prosecute, and maybe sue? The British doc series What Went Wrong? (1999), focused on human-caused disasters and showed it’s never that simple. Misses, miscues, neglect, inadequate inspections, deferred maintenance, any one of which can start cascade effects.  And in the ensuing “fog of war,” little factual info available, rumors become yet another attempt to control the narrative. Consider the one about the Hollywood sign burning down.  It did not, but AI generated visuals on social media depicted how that might look. How bad could this get? Could it really be the end of the world?  Remember Charlton Heston in the Planet of the Apes, coming upon the wrecked Statue of Liberty and knowing he’s still on earth after all. And in this “attention economy,” verifiable facts increasingly scarce, conspiracy theories often fill the void, when folks on the spot need accurate info. (Charlie Warzel. Beyond Doomscrolling. The internet we have, and the one we want. The Atlantic. Jan. 16, 2025). Meanwhile, far-right groups use the wildfires to recruit—even posing as fire fighters. Disasters also bring out scammers. (David Gilbert.  Far-Right Extremists Are LARPing as Emergency Workers in Los Angeles.  White supremacists and MAGA live streamers are using the wildfires to solicit donations, juice social media engagement, and recruit new followers. Wired. Jan. 14, 2025).

Who Takes Responsibility— Or Not?

Disasters, when they do and will strike, require hands-on managing during and after. Who takes on that responsibility? Think of President Harry Truman, who famously said “The Buck Stops Here.”  Yes, he used “the bomb” against the Japanese and called Robert Oppenheimer a wimp for worrying about it. But he clearly took the job seriously. Does current leadership enjoy the perks and powers, but when “the rubber hits the road,” look for somebody(s) else to blame? “No matter what goes wrong in America these days, President Trump and MAGA world have the same wrong, racist, explanation.” (Miles Klee. 10 Catastrophes the Right Has Tried to Blame on ‘DEI.’ Rolling Stone. Jan. 31, 2025).  The list is long, including not just the fires and the DC plane crash, but also the Afghanistan withdrawal; the Norfolk Southern train derailment and hazardous materials spill; etc., etc. And then there are the water wars (Lisa Mascaro and Chris Megerian. Trump says he may withhold aid for Los Angeles if California doesn’t change water policies.  Associated Press. Jan. 23, 2025). And don’t forget the proposal to dissolve the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).  Yes, FEMA’s messy and chaotic, but that seems to be a function of trying to impose order and bureaucratic structure on the fly.  And I speak from experience, having worked for the agency, in Long-Term Community Recovery, for a few months after Katrina and Rita (2005-2006). With all the downsides, I also discovered a depth of organizational knowledge and expertise assembled in one spot you couldn’t find anywhere else. State governments won’t have that and lack the extra capacity to specialize while waiting for the next “big one.” (Andrew Freedman. Trump, Vance Vault FEMA Overhaul high on agenda. Axios). And all this raises questions around when, if ever, current leaders might admit that a disaster happened on their watch and that it’s theirs to own, address, manage.

Post-Truth Perspectives

So, what might we expect disaster management to look like in this post-truth and possibly post-FEMA era? Major disasters are very real events, with real-world consequences, very real people hurt, dying, losing all they possess. But are we witnessing rapid erosion of our capacity and willingness (?) to cope with that much reality? And could that extend to our capacity and willingness to manage disasters during and after? Do I detect an element of wishful thinking, that ignoring them can just make them go away? How did we get here? Consider pervasive social media brain fog. “…[M]yriad screens and streams of information make reality so fragmented it becomes ungraspable, pushing us toward—or allowing us to flee—into virtual realities and fantasies.” (Svetlana Boyem).  So, a disaster becomes just another story?  And what if focus on the user and “eyes on screens” as measures of entrepreneurial success (Kevin Slavin. Design as Participation. MIT Journal of Design and Science. 2016) has ireduced empathy, the sense we’re all in this together?  So, just watching screens, fake AI of the burning Hollywood sign allowed dissociation while actual places were “actually on fire…[in what] seemed…like a refusal to confront the reality of the burning world…”  (Hanif Abdurraqib.  Lessons For the End of the World. The New Yorker. Feb. 2, 2025).

When Facts Matter

Facts are, of course, “not always the most pleasant things, [but] they can be reminders of our place and our limitations, our failures and, ultimately, our mortality.” Hard lessons for those in power to accept.  Facts, though, are also “undeniably useful” for taking action in the real world, like say building a bridge or recovering from a major disaster. “And we need facts if we hope to find a way into an evidence-based future.” (Peter Pomeranatsev. To Reality—and Beyond. MIT Journal of Design and Science. 2019). That will be a challenge, when “terror attacks sit next to cat videos..[and AI images crowd out the real thin].The result is a sort of flattening, as if past and present are losing their relative perspective.” (Boyem).

Finding Our Way Back?

But expect real facts to make a comeback, whether many folks wants believe or not, “…..[Climate and decaying infrastructure] crises…are here and…speeding along, and they are not particularly interested in whether you, or I [the vaunted and courted “user,” or those in power], or any of us are clocking their presence. The crises have no ego, no desire for acknowledgement. The world will collapse with or without the agreement of the people inhabiting it…Yes, we are doomed—doomed to adapt, to define our comforts and part with them when we must…” (Abdurraqib). So, will current trends veer far enough from reality that things fall apart to such an extent we’ll have no choice but to circle back to real, fact-based, reality?  And how long might that take?  And how much damage could occur in the meantime?  Back in the 1980s, Octavia Butler wrote an account of fictional wildfires that seems to foreshadow the recent fires. “There’s no single problem that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead, there are thousands of answers, at least. You can be one if you choose to be.”  (Parable of the Sower.  C1983). Amen to that.

Who Goes Here and There?

As the new administration dives into mass deportation of “illegals” with both feet, I remember that undocumented Hispanic workers rebuilt New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina’s devastation (2005).  And that “Dreamers,” brought here as children, and now American in every way except the crucial matter of citizenship, could be sent back to countries some may never even have visited (Jim Carlton. ‘Dreamers’ Make Emergency Plans as Trump Vows to Deport Millions. Wall Street Journal. Dec. 24, 2024). But acknowledging contributions and aspirations clearly doesn’t fit current narratives.

Family History

My feeling for edges and borders began early, noticing slight differences in ways folks did things across the random states and locations we visited on our summer baseball treks. We only ventured outside this country to Canada twice—Toronto when I was under 1½ and then, when I was 8, to Quebec and another language and culture.  But the following year, I recall riding with my dad on booze “runs” from the dry Texas county where we perched one summer to a wet Oklahoma county, across the Red River, barely a trickle that year, though it would flood the next. Just off the bridge, on both sides of the road, flimsy booths had hatch, swing-up, windows. The structures resembled concession stands at ballparks, but even that young, I understood I was witnessing a different kind of drive-thru exchange. One side could feel legally/morally virtuous and upright (uptight?), while depending on the other side to provide a safety valve to release human frailties and “vices.”

Borders and Boundaries

Borders, even those that appear geographically obvious, are always human creations, matters of negotiation, dispute and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. Though policed and defended, borders can shapeshift, through war, colonial conquest, eventual “liberation.”  Ever since it spanned the continent, the US has had a convenient ocean to either side, a perfect fit for historic American exceptionalism and isolation now making a comeback.  But as climate change accelerates, even those edges are frangible, receding and eaten into by coastal erosion. Land borders to north and south have been more ambiguous, subject to negotiation and sometimes aggression. Canada may appear simple:  I have a picture, pinned to my bulletin board, of a mural from Buffalo’s City Hall: “Frontiers Unfettered by Any Frowning Fortresses.” Nice alliteration, but not historically accurate. The British burned an earlier village of Buffalo. The US tried invading the other way during the War of 1812 but was repulsed. Canada maintained border fortresses until around our Civil War, when we were presumably too busy to threaten. Disputes with Britain flared again in the northwest, defining the upper limits of what’s now Washington State (originally part of the Louisiana Purchase). The southern edge is far more complex. There’s the history:  much of the now southwest US was taken, via the Mexican War, with the US legal system then deployed to expropriate land, water, other rights and resources, and political power from conquered Mexican-origin populations. And then there are the ethnic and cultural differences. So, “The border between [the two countries as] cultural formations is…not arbitrary and artificial (wherever it finally was delineated, geographically…) …[view] borderlands as a colliding ground of two major sociocultural formations.” (Josiah McC. Heyman. Culture Theory and the US-Mexico Border.) [Note: this and other sources, indicated by **, are from Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan, editors.  A Companion to Border Studies. Wiley Blackwell. C2012).

What Does an American Look Like?

What, with growing ethnic diversity, does an American look like these days? Certainly, we’re a lot less “white” than we once were. Hard, being a nation of immigrants, to claim ethnic purity, though white supremacists certainly try. Black, brown and mixed-race folks’ status/standing remains complicated by our domestic caste system, so embedded we take it in like the air we breathe. Though “an artificial construction, [it sets] a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry.” (Isabel Wilkerson. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.  Random House. C2020). Forget any melting pot notions. NPR interviewed a group of professional Arabic-heritage women, raised here, who had expected/hoped to gradually be accepted as American in their generation, but now see their children face the same challenges. And violence can sometimes flare at disjointed, jagged, edges of discomfort, resentment, mental illness. Black shoppers at a Buffalo supermarket, typically here for generations, were killed for being who they are. Vietnamese women working in nail salons in Atlanta were killed for being who they are, for being here (where they don’t belong?!), and because the perpetrator couldn’t get a date(?).

Border Myths and Realities

There are an estimated 11M undocumented persons within this country’s borders. Difficult, of course, to be more precise, the whole point being to avoid official detection. About 72-76% are Hispanic (from Mexico and south), here to work and send money back to their families. Many bring their families with them. They make key contributions in our agriculture, food processing, supply chain, and construction sectors. The vast majority are law abiding and, it’s often said, take on jobs Americans don’t want to do. Tax ID data show they paid $59.4B in federal and $13.6B in state and local taxes in 2022 and sent some $81B back to relatives. Yet they carry negative stereotypes—criminal activity, drug trafficking, violent street gangs, sucking down benefits they’re not entitled to.  Only takes a few examples to “prove,” since the very idea of the “illegal” has morphed into “a thing-in-itself, reified, fetishized, as the deliberate acts of a spectacular mass of sundry violators of the law, rather than what it really is, a transnational social relation of labor and capital…” (**Nicholas De Genova. Border, Scene and Obscene).

Border Enforcement

Was the first week’s seemingly endless cascade of Executive Orders a rush to deliver on promises to the base within the short post-inauguration “honeymoon” (Alex Leary and Meredith McGraw. Why Donald Trump Is Racing So Fast to Remake America. Wall Street Journal. Jan. 24, 2025). Was the chaos meant to confuse and overwhelm any opposition? Probably both, but legal analysts say, despite four years in the conservative policy pipeline, many orders are poorly crafted and short on valid legal bases.  A federal judge put a stay on the attempt to revoke birthright citizenship of children born here to non-citizens, calling in clearly unconstitutional and ineptly argued. So far though, immigration agents have been authorized to raid previously off-limits “sanctuary” spaces (Alicia A. Caldwell and Max Rivera. NYC to LA Brace for Deportations as Trump Lets Immigration Agents Raid Churches. Bloomberg. Jan. 25, 2025). The Justice Department announced intent to pursue legal action against local officials of Sanctuary Cities, if they impede or obstruct deportation. In California, the Border Patrol conducted racially profiled traffic stops, scooping up undocumented farm day laborers, as well as naturalized citizens. (Michael Hiltzik. Column: Inside the Bakersfield raids that showed how Trump’s immigration policies will sow chaos. Los Angeles Times. Jan. 22, 2025). Immigration and Customs agents without a warrant raided a NJ business, arresting both undocumented and citizens, including one who’s a veteran. (Steve Strunsky. Newark Mayor: ICE raided business without a warrant, detained US citizens. NJ.com. Jan. 23, 2025; David Lopez. Trump’s attempt to bust up communities deserves moral blowback. NJ.com Opinion. Jan. 26, 2025). And we’ve seen the first visual of a line of detainees, in shackles, being loaded onto a military plane.

Human Factors

Important to remember that actions/raids are always “encounters between persons.” And that those on the receiving end are real people who suffer genuine fear, anxiety, trauma, with their already precarious lives further upended. Treating them as objects and “means to an end” is reflected in ways policies are carried out on the ground, where agents’ actions are “often a function of the enactment, effective or not, of scripts and routines that satisfy narrative expectations and categories…of authority and control.” (**David B. Coplan. Border Show Business and Performing States). The title of the California operation, “Return to Sender,” sends a cavalier and mean-spirited message, casting hard-working, law-abiding, non-citizens as criminals.  In the California raids, one citizen’s video of an agent during slashing his tires (in the heat of the moment?) went viral. (Hiltzik).  That has me thinking about some folks who might find their ways into such jobs. I remember the old Kuder Preference Test of possible vocational choices. Could there be high percentage of certain personality types—macho, cowboy, highly physical—like those often featured in cop shows? And I think of Waco and Drug Enforcement agents and how frustration led to overreach that eventually emerged in the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building. I’ve been there and walked through the monument of stone (concrete?) chairs, full-sized for adults, heartbreakingly small for babies and toddlers killed in the building’s day care center. Proof that violence and trauma never just fade away: they carry consequences, can haunt and reverberate and come around in other places and at other times and sometimes strike the most innocent.

Border Messaging

While retro nationalism may represent strategic border theater, it lags global realities, rapidly morphing more toward “trans-state networks…across boundaries,” and a “transnational social relation of labor and capital.” But even as “national politics become a melodramatic sideshow…states initiate countervailing (and largely unavailing) appeals to economic nationalism and the performance of borders, including re-bordering by coercive means.” And “…Claims to status through such identities are legitimated through stories, and the passionate senses of self that are forged, recreated, and contested…” (**Coplan).  Does underlying insecurity also help explain 19^th century mode neo-Manifest Destiny/gunboat diplomacy proposals to expand borders—invading Canada, annexing Greenland, taking back the Panama Canal, renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America—to assert greater control?  Or are these just “symbolic culture-war measures of vague declarations of intent?” (Jonathan Chait. Trump’s Second Term Might Have Already Peaked. The Atlantic. Jan. 22, 2025.). And then there’s the question of where to send non-Mexican deportees.  Mexico and the Bahamas have said no. Inquiries were also put to Panama, Grenada, Turks and Caicos, but all refused.  A deal is plan is being worked out with El Salvador, based on personal relationships between the presidents. (Trump Zeroes in on Country to Dump Migrants From All Over. Daily Beast. Jan. 26,2025).

Signifying Moments

As I finished this piece, Inauguration Day converged with official celebration of Martin Luther King Day, a whole other story.  Frigid weather forced the ceremony inside, but despite heavy input by tech billionaires, no jumbotrons were provided for MAGA faithful left out in the cold to watch.  Flags at half-mast to honor President Carter’s passing were apparently raised and then lowered afterward. In Vermont, of all places, a border agent was shot and killed by an “illegal.”  The outgoing president had earlier warned against the ascendancy of the money elites. So, we have a whole bunch of signifying going on at once. And take as given that Tower-of-Babel social media and combat-heavy macho computer games have been major factors in forming what the current populist, nativist, vibe, aka the fancier German Zeitgeist (“spirit of the age”)—what’s happening culturally, religiously, intellectually. Speaking of personal relations, those same tech oligarchs, arguably architects of the age, and erstwhile nerds, are now buying their way onto the macho MAGA train. (Rebecca Shaw. I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down—I just didn’t expect them to be such losers. The Guardian. Jan. 16, 2025).  So, META (Face Book and Instagram) will follow Musk’s Twitter/X in removing fact-checking in favor of “Community Notes” and ditching all Diversity Equity and Inclusion programs. That will make it harder to tell what’s going on. But not impossible: other sources will take up fact-checking tasks as needed.  Take genuine gamers’ debunking of Musk’s claims he hit the top level of one game.

Other Voices, Other Narratives

There’s a “don’t confuse me with facts”—or the Constitution –tone to all this.  And we can expect a four-year tsunami of lawsuits, countersuits, and counter-countersuits, with the ACLU, United Farm Workers, states, cities, etc. in real legal battle rather than virtual/video combat. Meanwhile, there will be stories and counter stories; times like these do generate a whole bunch of content. Storytelling is the most human of superpower, which can travel over, under, around, and through boundaries. A friend keeps saying, “You can’t make this stuff up.” But in these over-the-top-times, we don’t have to. Comedians and late-night talk show hosts have already begun. And there’ll be plenty to lampoon, embroider, as with the silly invasion scenarios, ripe for borrowing and adapting using genres such as Latin American Magical Realism, a la writers like Jorge Luis Borges (A Thousand Years of Solitude) that mix reality and fantasy, folktales, myth. Similar scenarios played out in the former Soviet Union. A common pattern under dictatorships or regimes trying to act that way. Using spoof and satire and flights of fancy to tell the truth slant made it possible to survive and continue the narrative. And, in these litigious times, it might also help avoid revenge lawsuits that seek to gag and stifle.  Over time, I believe telling our own human and humane stories can help heal the “enormous harm to the soul of this nation” currently being done….. “and allow us to consider less hateful [and realistic] solutions.” (Lopez).  Amen.

TALKING TO MACHINES?

What does it mean to be human in the age of AI (Artificial Intelligence)? We’re still figuring that out. Is the term an oxymoron, an extension or a rip-off of actual human cognitive abilities, talents and skills? Could we be increasingly sucked into talking more to machines than to each other? And what will AI do to kids, who’ve known no other reality and are still forming neural connections?

CONNECTING OR NOT?

“Human life and humanity come into being in genuine meetings. There, man learns not merely that he is limited by man, cast upon his own finitude, partialness, need of completion, but his own relation to truth is heightened by the other’s relation to the same truth—different in accordance with his individuation and destined to take seed and grow differently.” (Martin Buber. Distance and Relation. 1950). But the digital age seems to have short circuited the process. Though it dawned with promises of more connection, more community, in actual practice, bonds can “deteriorate with AI dominating various aspects of life. Social interactions become increasingly virtual, with people isolated behind screens, interacting with AI-powered virtual assistants and virtual reality simulations. Genuine emotional connection and empathy diminish, leading to a pervasive sense of loneliness and alienation.”  (Nicole Serena Silver. AI Utopia and Dystopia. What Will the Future Have in Store? Artificial Intelligence Series. Forbes. June 20, 2023). Pessimists warn “we’re outsourcing our minds and bodies to algorithms.” And some “very smart people [among them a number of early AI developers] worry that AI may make slaves of us all.”  (Ali Minai. Between Golem and God: The Future Of AI. June 7, 2021).  Assume exponentially greater impacts on adolescents, still in formation.

STORYBOOK MEANINGS

As a species, we’re described as social and “meaning-making animals.” We use stories and narrative to make sense and learn; share and expand on ideas. This happens at both indivdual and societal levels. My own fascination with stories began early and very pre-digital, with mass-market “Little Golden Books” my mother picked up cheap at dime stores and supermarkets. Visual memory can still summon up an image of the bindings, a kind of “gold” tape with black filigree design. And the tales inside the covers, watered down but brightly illustrated, became my framing devices for trying to navigate the world. I had my first encounter, around age 10, with a kind of tech. “Modern” furniture—folding chairs in molded plastic—appeared in the gym of my very conservative Catholic school.  They felt incongruous, out of place, disorienting. Limited life experience: I’d only seen metal folding chairs before and couldn’t reconcile these being products of human hands.  So, I imagined their being machine-made. No idea where or how that might have happened, but kids are born magical thinkers and don’t get bogged down in details till later. And why not, if Rumpelstiltskin could spin gold from straw?  Years later, studying the history of modern architecture, I recognized similar chairs. Aha! My early sighting proved to be knockoffs of originals, indeed human-made, in semi-utopian workshops—Bauhaus, Ray and Charles Eames’ studio—aimed at changing the world by giving us more aesthetically pleasing places to sit.

TECH TALES

Tech has its own fairytales, also adapted from what’s already known. “When new technologies are born,” most of us “tend to think of the new in terms of the familiar, lacking fully developed language unique, still drawing on the language of previous models.” (Gillian Crampton Smith). Bill Moggridge profiled fellow inventor/innovators from Silicon Valley, who shared “beginner mind” creation/origin narratives of trial-and-error attempts to form human-computer connections, often utilizing borrowed features like pull-down menus (developed at Xerox Parc), iterations of the mouse, etc. (Designing Interactions. MIT Press. c2007).  Even the most transformational tech needs stories woven around it to “shape the way we envision our future, forming what we imagine as our prospective possibilities or limitations. And…shared imaginaries of the desirable or undesirable meaning of technology serve to shape its development and acceptance into society.”  (Amir Vudka. The Golem in the age of artificial intelligence. NECSus. July 6, 2020).

GOLEM TROPE TALES

Archetypal AI origin tales typically cite 18^th century Jewish folklore. The Golem, situated between fairytale, sci fi and horror, was “fashioned [by a Prague rabbi] of clay to do human bidding,” and under human control to protect at-risk ghetto communities. But a shadow side reflects “deep rooted anxiety…concerning the prospect [tech could] slip…from human control. …and eventually wreak havoc upon its human creators.” (Wikipedia). Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and Stanley Kubrick’s rogue computer Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey personify cultural and societal anxieties in times of massive change—the industrial and cyber revolutions.  With GenAI on the rise, Golem themes resonate once again, with novels like The Golem of Brooklyn (Adam Mansbach. 2023). Current accounts seem to downplay the scary/horror aspects in favor of a lighter, playful, ironic, sci fi, hipster, perspective, with “golems that can… learn and have agency…pass as human, seek romance, learn English by binge-watching Curb Your Enthusiasm, and set out on their own to seek revenge.” (Betsy Gomberg. Cognizant creations: Golems and artificial intelligence: How AI interacts with Jewish texts. Jewish Chicago. February 21, 2024).  Does this tone indicate hipster over confidence?

FRAMING FUTURES

Very smart folks living in earlier highly challenging times had the foresight to develop models to help navigate futures they already sensed coming. In 1942, as WWII raged and victory was still uncertain, sci fi author Isaac Asimov formulated the Three Laws of Robotics: 1) a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; 2) a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; and 3) a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.”  And in post-war 1950, Alan Turing, “father of theoretical computer science,” responded to the raging paranoia of early cold war days with what’s now known as the Turing Test. He called it “the Imitation Game.”  How could humans tell if/when a machine equals human intelligence? Now, over 70 years later, two GenAI programs have finally passed. And one succeeded “by fooling a panel of judges into thinking that it was a human…through a combination of natural language processing, dialogue management, and social skills….” and “In some cases, evaluators were unable to distinguish ChatGPT’s responses from those of a human.” (Damir Yalalov. ChatGPT Passes the Turning Test. MPost. December 8, 2022; updated January 20, 2023).

GenAI TALES

Generative AI (GenAI) builds on borrowed/appropriated stories, “learning the patterns and structures of its training data, and then us[ing] that knowledge to create new data. It can learn human language, programming languages, art, chemistry, biology, or any complex subject matter.” (Google AI Overview).  Where do such “training materials” come from? The NY Times has filed suit claiming Times’ articles were used [without permission] “to train chatbots that compete with the newspaper.” (Lucia Moses. Crosby leads lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft for AI training data. Business Insider. October 24, 2024). User-generated Wikipedia has been another major source. Could AI eventually replace? Unlikely so far, since it seems “Generative AI models need to train on human-produced data [including Wikipedia] to function. When trained on model-generated content, new models exhibit irreversible defects….” and in what’s known as “model collapse…synthetic training data breaks AI.” (Irving Wladawsky-Berger. Why Human Input Matters to Generative AI. Medium. October 24, 2023. Originally published in MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy).

MONEY TALES TALK

Tech euphoria tends to brush aside concerns and issues, too caught up in the aura of promise and magic, dollar signs, and showmanship.  Open AI, maker of ChatGPT, has raised $6.6B, increasing its valuation to $157B and is transitioning from a non-profit research institute into a for-profit corporation. “[M]ore important than any algorithmic scaling law…might be the rhetorical scaling law; bold prediction [pitches to venture capitalists looking for the next “unicorn”] leading to lavish investment that requires a still-more-outlandish prediction, and so on.” (Matteo Wong. The AI Boom Has an Expiration Date. The Atlantic. October 17, 2024). “Perhaps new and bullish wave of forecasts …reflect a flurry of industry news” of mind-boggling price tags and immense energy requirements far beyond the capacity of existing grids, the drag of development costs on major players’ stock values. And then there’s the conflict with efforts to reduce emissions and tame/reverse effects of climate change.

FUTURE UTOPIA OR DYSTOPIA?

As my dad used to say, everything has its plusses and minuses. And “chances of a utopian or dystopian future with AI are uncertain and dependent on various factors, including how we develop, deploy, and regulate AI technologies…” and “like most technology, the outcome is dependent on whether a good or bad actor is utilizing it and how we have chosen to regulate and interact with it.” (Silver). So far, the record is problematic—online trolling, deep fakes, misinformation, massive hacking data breaches of personal information. And cautionary tales reflect business models that seem to emphasize maximizing profits over human factors, and often target vulnerable populations like adolescents and children. Kids seem to be exploited in a new version of unpaid child labor on social media and AI apps. Correlations have been found between online manipulation and bullying and increases in various forms of self-harm and teen suicide.  Recent headlines: TikTok executives knew about app’s effect on teens, lawsuit documents allege. (Bobby Allyn, Sylvia Goodman, Dara Kerr. NPR. October 11, 2024); The Age of AI Child Abuse Is Here (Caroline Mimbs Nyce. The Atlantic. October 18, 2024).  US Teen killed himself after he was preyed on by a chatbot described as “hypersexualized” which he allegedly said he was in love with.” (Joshua Thurston. The Times/Sunday Times. October 24, 2024). The boy, aged 14, had been diagnosed as on the Asperger’s syndrome. His mother is bringing a wrongful death suit. The target company issued the usual generic statement of sympathy—but not responsibility. “We care about our users and their safety.” These are often accompanied by appeals to freedom of speech and references to self-regulating forums. Saying users, rather than clients or even customers, suggests a disturbing degree of distancing.

INTERROGATING EXTERNALITIES

Digital tech has often been called a “clean” industry. But not so fast. Consider what economists call “externalities: “consequence[s] of an activity…not reflected in [its] cost…and not primarily borne by those directly involved.” But, in fact, consequences are typically borne early and late by surrounding environment and communities. I view through the lens of work on a case study of the Love Canal hazardous waste site; living near the Little Valley nuclear waste site in upstate NYS, where exposed workers had children born with genetic defects; running a Brownfields program to assess and clean up properties with environmental issues. And so, I recognize three key issues—the “collateral damage” to kids, unsustainable energy requirements, predictable waste generation and disposal—that can’t just be brushed aside. But a recent interview with a Google spokesperson (NPR 1A. October 22, 2024) raised concerns they might still be. How would waste be handled if small nuclear reactors(?!) are used to make up energy shortfalls? The response struck me as empty spin. Contractors (not the company directly?!) would follow regulations on “appropriate” handling. But what does that mean, assuming disposal will likely happen out of human view? Could AI perpetuate more of the same, become déjà vu all over again, a la Yogi Berra?

BALANCING CONTROL?

So, avenues are opening for greater regulation of the tech industry. Regulation, though often too little and too late, and inadequately enforced, is at least a place to start to require greater accountability, transparency, responsibility.  Tech billionaires won’t like it, will fight against. Hard to surrender being new Gilded Age robber barons bestriding the age. But even admitting society benefits from such risk-taking entrepreneurs, times have changed. The information environment they’ve created also means they can’t act with impunity, as their predecessors did.  And so, we might have hope of establishing greater balance.

DOWNSIZING?

And if we’re weaving an AI story, perhaps it’s time to start treating tech moguls with less reverence. Stop assuming that they know best or at least better in all spheres, because they’ve been successful in one. And perhaps we could add a bit of humor, pop their gilded bubbles a bit. I take heart from hearing the comedian Fred Armisen talk about playing dictators, probably a not dissimilar self-impressed population: the pathetic childlike playacting, the uniforms. The medals. The thin-skinned unwillingness to take criticism. The murderous rages/tantrums if crossed, having views contradicted.  Laughter seems like a good place to start to reintroduce the human touch, as the Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplain showed us years ago.

Election Demographics: The Impact of the Youth Vote

The past few years, I’ve heard folks claim that young people, the next generation, will save us. So, not to worry. “Described (favorably or unfavorably) as climate warriors and gun-control activists, youth was even [viewed] by some older commentators as ‘the nation’s last hope’ “ (Faith Hill. The Not-So-Woke Generation Z. The Atlantic. Nov. 14, 2024). I’ve always been skeptical, recalling how it felt to be young in the ‘60s. Part of the outsized baby boom, carried along, but often clueless, with typical adolescent and young adult insecurities and uncertainties.  A visual and soundscape memory/ tableau: on an anti-Vietnam-war street march, with Stephen Stills’ For What It’s Worth wafting down from a second-floor window. “There’s something happening here; What it is ain’t exactly clear.” I’ll say. Yet by sheer weight of numbers, we managed to shift the national narrative for a while. And, in the process, sparked a dislocating culture-war backlash that still hasn’t quit.

Public Expression?

As per Mark Twain, “History doesn’t repeat, but it does [sometimes] rhyme.” And each generation more responds to than forms the zeitgeist, the “defining spirit, mood, ideas and beliefs” of its time (Oxford Dictionary). And I’ve talked with enough young folks to recognize significant areas of mismatch and disconnect. They’re not just following in our footsteps. So, not that surprising that many in both genders voted to the right in the recent election. And a few days after, I witnessed, while driving, what I took to be a mobile tableau of the moment. A lone young man in a shiny white pickup almost cut me off and I classified him as one young jerk.  But then, I noticed three other immaculate pickups—white, black, silver—also piloted by lone young men, weaving in and out of traffic. Were they playing a game of chicken, full of themselves in a post-election celebration of wild oats and testosterone? In another turbulent time between the two world wars, the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, wrote that “…Public life is not solely political…; it comprises all our collective habits, including our fashions both of dress and amusement.” (The Revolt of the Masses. C1932. W.W. Norton Co., paperback 1964. Reissued 1993).

An Adolescent Nation?

A miracle, it’s often said, that males between ages 15 and 25 make it to adulthood. And road accidents are a leading cause of death for a population prone to overestimating its own abilities and reflexes, while underestimating personal risks, let alone peril to innocent bystanders and drivers. For individuals, “Adolescence is a period…of begin[ning] to assume adult positions socially….[it also] is the most difficult period of one’s life…[with] far too many significant life changes occurring…physical, psychological, and behavioral….” (Chris Churchill. America is a Teenager. Literate Ape.  May 28, 2018).  At national levels, youthful populations make for far less stable societies. In search of certainty, young folks may be radicalized, drawn to extremist ideologies and/or religious cults. The US, despite our now rapidly aging population, still seems to present as a perpetually adolescent nation. Perhaps this reflects our pioneer and wild-west origin stories, always reinventing, in “identity formation, and sometimes impulsive behavior…still figuring out its place in the world while facing challenges and uncertainties, often leading to social and political turmoil.” Fareed Zakaria has called this, The most dangerous moment since the Cold War. (Washington Post column. Oct. 11, 2024), with significant potential to step away from and “upend the [Pax Americana] international order” the US has presided over since WWII.

Conveying Discomfort and Doubt

“Young men and women especially voted for Trump messaging…that speaks to their deep unease and uncertainty” beneath the bravado. “Many are struggling—to feel financially secure, psychologically safe, or hopeful.  Trump managed to mirror what many young people already felt: The world is a frightening place, and it’s not getting better.”  (Hill). And the spirit of this age has thrown up a “huge backlash to all the economic change, the technological change, the cultural change that has been roiling Western societies and really societies everywhere for the last few decades. We’ve thought that these changes get digested or maybe there’s a spasm of a backlash. But we’re in a long period of reaction to these forces. And we’re developing almost a kind of new politics around it….What we’re seeing is a major realignment of politics around the idea that we’ve gone too far. We have to rethink the entire way in which we have been approaching these massive forces of structural change, economics, globalization, information revolution, cultural change.” (Zakaria on What Just Happened, and What Comes Next. Freakonomics Radio with Stephen Dubner. Nov. 14, 2024).

About the Popular Vote

Elections matter, both in direct results and as public performances. “The health of democracies…depends on a wretched technical detail—electoral procedure. All the rest is secondary. If the regime of the elections is successful, if it is in accordance with reality, all goes well; if not, though the rest progresses beautifully, all goes wrong….[And] it might seem necessary to falsify.” (Ortega y Gasset). Speaking of reality, remember that no alternate-truth, “stop the steal” challenge of 2020 ever mustered sufficient fact-based evidence to make it through a court of law.  The recent election was “clean,” yet not the landslide initially claimed. “…[T]he “steady drip of late ballots has eroded the percentage to (currently) 49.87%, with further slippage very likely before all the votes are in.” (Ed Kilgore. Trump Has Lost His Popular-Vote Majority. New York Magazine. Nov. 29, 2024).   In fact, “the victory was slim, not a landslide.” (Anita Chabria. Column: The Trump landslide that wasn’t. Los Angeles Times. Nov. 21, 2024.). So, Donald Trump Doesn’t Have a Mandate to Radically Remake America (Eric Lutz. Vanity Fair. Nov. 22, 2024).  The popular margin was the narrowest since 2000. But in the current environment, facts likely won’t keep landslide and mandate narratives from continuing to spin.

Who Will Take the Lead and Guide the Way?

Trump’s transition team, in triumphal mode, scoffs at the outgoing administration’s “niceness” and civility. (Asawin Suebsaeng and Nikki McCann Ramirez. Trump and His Team Are ‘Laughing’ at Biden’s Commitment to Decorum. Rolling Stone. Dec. 1, 2024). Why bother playing nice, when they’ve taken all the marbles and are here to change existing rules and even tear down much existing structure? Elon Musk’s and Vivek Ramsswamy’s new Department of Government Efficiency (not an actual department and supposed to be only advisory) has already started naming names, in what some call a “politics of revenge.”  Not to mention conflicts of interest around large government contracts.  Meanwhile, there’s a feeding frenzy of job seekers who want in on the action (Antonia Hitchens. Donald Trump’s Administration Hopefuls Descend on Mar-a-Lago. The New Yorker. Nov. 22, 2024).  “It’s like to call out the absurdities of the system by forcing down your throat people that I like that I’m not supposed to.” And “With inexperienced people, I guess the question is, can they root out all the bad stuff going on at the departments, and still do good?” Yet a Goldman-Sachs survey of Wall Street revealed widespread investor skepticism that even a small portion of the new agenda will actually come to pass. (Sean Craig. The Massive Clue That Donald Trump’s Threats Are All BS. Daily Beast. Dec. 5, 2024).

Reality Lessons?

But even sticking with the preferred narrative won’t ensure the new administration smooth sailing. To paraphrase the policy analyst Aaron Wildavsky, the basic lesson of government is how hard it is to make even the simplest things happen.  Republican control of Congress is not absolute. To avoid a government shutdown, the outgoing Congress (with a Democratic majority in the Senate) will need to pass a bi-partisan, short-term continuing resolution to maintain funding at current levels. That will push budget negotiations to March, which could pull focus from confirmation hearings for often controversial cabinet appointments. And there might also be another fight over the House speakership. And even in the new Congress, Senate Democrats may still have bargaining power, since funding bills are subject to a 60-vote threshold, while Republicans hold only 53 seats. (Sahil Kapur. Congress faces shutdown dilemma that could mess with Trump’s first hundred days. NBC News. Dec. 3, 2024). “Given that perilous hold on power, Trump might want to reconsider his current strategy of ruling Washington like a devastated and occupied enemy city with a Cabinet largely composed of men and women who appear to hate the departments and agencies they are supposed to oversee.” (Kilgore).

The Populist Shift

So, Democrats, traditionally the party of labor and have-nots, have landed on the side of the status quo, while “the mood…as in electorates all over the world, [has turned] profoundly anti-establishment.” Zakaria paraphrased from a conversation with Tony Blair, former UK Prime Minister: “When people feel deeply insecure, they don’t move left economically. They move right culturally…their impulse is to say, ‘I need a return to the world I knew.’ That’s why the politics of nostalgia are so powerful. It’s a return to something comfortable.” And this will likely be most extreme in young people in most extreme time of life. But yet another lesson of politics is that nothing lasts forever. And “The Trump Reaction is more fragile than it now seems…ideologues, opportunists, and crackpots [rampant]….[and may] turn on one another….[and] overreach on [polarizing] issues such as abortion and immigration, [and] enact[ing] economic policies that favor…allies among the rich at the expense of its new supporters among the less well-off.”  (George Packer. The End of Democratic Delusions. The Trump Reaction and what comes next. The Atlantic. Dec. 2, 2024).

MAGA Visions

Speaking of nostalgia, MAGA seems to envision a return to an earlier “golden age,” when men were men and women were, well… “If you think about gender issues, you’re seeing on the one side a lot of women feeling like they need to have their rights protected. But you’re also seeing a lot of men who feel like politics has gotten too feminized, that they are being forgotten and that in a post-industrial world, women do better than men. There is a kind of male backlash. Just take me back to before all this was happening. Take me back to that world where a man was able to be a man and was the dominant player in the family and in society.” (Zakaria).  Wildly unrealistic to expect change to happen once and for all, a done deal without backlash, and women welcomed to take seats at the table. We have, after all, only had the vote for about 100 years and now, some extremists want to take that away. Now, I too recall how it used to be, but refresh my memory watching episodes of the old 1950s Perry Mason and Peter Gunn TV series. Both featured huge, gas-guzzler cars with giant fins (“drill baby drill?”) and caricatures of women in Stepford Wives mode. In the former, oblivious women were often railroaded as defendants for Perry to save in the courtroom. And all in the context of his sexless “office wife” relationship with his often-smarter secretary Della Street. Gunn featured lots of gunfire without blood or consequences and moved closer to the “sexual revolution,” generating some heat with his chanteuse girlfriend. But it’s in Hugh Hefner “Playboy” mode, with “the girl” longing desperately for a real relationship and marriage yet falling for the well-dressed “bad boy.”  No wonder Betty Friedan felt compelled to write the Feminine Mystique a few years later (1963).  And “Today, by the very fact that everything seems possible to us, we have a feeling that the worst of all is possible: retrogression, barbarism, decadence.”  (Ortega y Gasset).

What’s Next?

After 2016, a friend wondered if somehow that outcome was what the country needed to go through. Does that mean we now need to go through a more extreme version? That said, I believe it’s important not to fall into general outrage and despair. The President-elect says he’ll pardon January 6 defendants (Michael Sainato. Donald Trump promises to pardon January 6 rioters on ‘day one.’ The Guardian. Dec. 8, 2024) and that January 6 committee members should be jailed. (Mariana Alfaro. Trump says members of Jan. 6 committee should be jailed. Washington Post. Dec. 8, 2024). Don’t know what else to expect, but like Democrats in the Senate, we have some leverage and work to do. The Brits have the concept of “loyal opposition,” not giving fealty to the current regime, but to our shared, collective, life as a nation. “Despite the sea of red on the electoral maps, it shouldn’t be forgotten that this election was close…millions fewer people voted this year than in 2020. That alone tells a story of lack of enthusiasm, or perhaps of other disenfranchising conditions in our ostensible democracy.” (Lorrie Moore. A Fourth-Rate Entertainer, A Third-Rate Businessman, and a Two-Time President. The New Yorker.  Nov. 7, 2024).

Envisioning a Future?

So, perhaps, as with teenagers, we might take a few steps back approach our nation, caught up in the current moment, with a degree of exasperated affection, patience and hope rather than scorn. That we can listen and try to understand and respect more. It’s often said that all politics is local, even in this digital age. And that people (including the young) “are complicated and even persuadable…”  Packer quoted F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wish that we can “see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”  Thinking back, I recall Lincoln, that “you can fool some of the people, etc.”  And that reminds me again of the ‘60s, and the Who’s We Won’t Be Fooled Again. We probably will be and more than once, but, in the process, I hope we’ll grow up some, figure things out, and find a way forward.

Are We Watching the Right Games?

I did not watch the 2024 Olympics, nor the Paralympics for disabled athletes either.  After years of viewing the former, my memories are stocked with visuals—victors taking laps wrapped in national flags, podium ceremonies with flags and anthems rising. These linked to current headlines, photos, videotapes that popped up in morning news feeds.  And besides, I’m more interested in what it takes to get to those shining moments.  Probably goes back to growing up in baseball, but on the sidelines, and curious about what went on in “no girls allowed” dugouts and clubhouses/locker rooms.

Who Truly Gets to Compete

The modern Olympics started with a shining idea, bringing together the “best of the best” from around the world in friendly competition. The origin myth envisioned a boys’ club in the 19^th century ideal of “gentlemen amateurs,” who in the classic (and class-bound) definition, would compete not for gain, since they didn’t need to, but for love of the game/sport. (Wikipedia). But almost from the start, outsiders/interlopers who didn’t fit the ideal insisted on joining.  A scene in Chariots of Fire (1981) captured the push-pull.  Cambridge college masters chided the Jewish protagonist, well off, but not quite “the right stuff,” for hiring a professional coach to help him prep for the 1924 games. Unseemly, too much striving, they told him. Recognizing their anti-Semitism, he pushed back, calling them antique relics of a fading age. Yet the amateur myth persisted, despite pervasive proof/evidence that talent is unpredictable, randomly distributed, often emerges in athletes who need to earn a buck. And such “outsiders” often pay a price. The great Native American Jim Thorpe had his 1912 medals stripped for playing minor league baseball a few years earlier. The multi-sport Babe Didrikson [DATE?]  had her amateur status revoked after she appeared unpaid in a car company ad. The great African American Jesse Owens, though fames as the “Buckeye Bullet” at Ohio State, was never awarded a scholarship and had to work his way through college. His four 1936 gold medals discredited Hitler’s racist policies, but he later sometimes raced horses to help support his family. (Wikipedia).

Creating Space for Non-Traditional Bodies?

Women didn’t fit the original shining standard either. No “lady amateurs” competed the first year (1896). US women didn’t take part in the first swimming events (1912), because they couldn’t cover up in long skirts!  Not until 1928 were women allowed to run and jump. A photo shows the 100M women’s final that year.  With skirts shorter, they wear what appear to be billowy shorts (topendsports.com). The American Avery Brundage, dominant during his 20-year tenure as International Olympic Committee (IOC) president (1952-1972), had “well-publicized run-ins with female athletes.” And he didn’t shy away from displaying his prejudices. “You know, the ancient Greeks kept women out of their athletic games. They wouldn’t even let them on the sidelines. I’m not so sure but they were right.” He was known for suspicions of female athletes, suspecting that some were actually men in disguise. (Wikipedia). As for the disabled, I doubt they even entered anyone’s mind, being essentially invisible, unless as some kind of carnival freaks. And shouldn’t they just gracefully or not remove themselves from the scene? But then WWII chewed up and spat out a large cadre of disabled veterans who might otherwise have qualified. What evolved into the Paralympics started in the UK in 1948, with former RAF pilots and crew who’d sustained spinal cord injuries helping save their country and the world. The doctor who organizer recognized the role physical action in restoring a sense of personal agency.  “Until then, the problem was hopeless, because we had not only to save the[ir] li[ves]….  but also give them back their dignity and make them happy and respected citizens.” (History of the Paralympics. Olympics.com

GENDERING WARDROBES

What a difference, for female athletes, a little over a century has made. Once constrained to cover up, they’re now clad in skin-tight Speedos and Spandex. Cuts down friction and aerodynamics to promote speed, we’re told. But these also leaves “little to the imagination,” while male athletes in sports like gymnastics are allowed to compete more fully clothed. Perhaps, girls starting out, young as many do, miss the nuances and are so eager for their chance they just do what they’re told. But other women I’ve discussed this with agree there’s too much “eye candy” messaging and too little respect for the effort and discipline it took to get there. So, how much progress in views on and of women have we really seen since the Brundage era? And isn’t it past time for some serious rethinking? “Form-fitting costumes may be necessary, make sense, in sports like swimming and diving.” But shouldn’t there be “more clothing options when the uniform does not serve a performance-increasing function?” And that don’t leave athletes “basically naked?” (Erin Rubenking, Associate Director and Clinical Care Coordinator, University of Colorado Athletic Department. Quoted by Zoe Martin del Campo. Athletes Learning to Balance Body Image and Sport. Oberlin Review. March 4, 2022).  And I wonder who makes wardrobe decisions. Are men still deciding for women? If women aren’t given more input, why not? I’ve read that some famously underdressed Beach Volleyball players have suggested introducing longer stretchy shorts. Seems like a place to start.

When the Olympic Shine Begins to Tarnish

Wardrobe issues pale in comparison to scandals the Olympics have weathered over the years—doping, fudging on amateur status, whispers of under the table sponsorships.  And the business model, rather than addressing issues directly until forced to, seems to be downplaying, with a pattern of denial, looking the other way, and trying to shore up the image/brand/facade rather than fix what’s broken. I have a particular interest in behind the scenes of women’s gymnastics. Years back, a coach I helped assemble a loan application for a new gym told me he’d stopped doing competition training because of the way the girls were treated. But there’s no shortage of willing coaches and still enough shine to attract ranks of naïve new recruits. Use the term women loosely, since many haven’t even hit their teens yet. Eager for their own shining moments, their chances to fly, they enter, innocents in tiny leotards, into a world of challenges and contradictions. Nowhere to hide in those outfits, so it’s easy to police and enforce body shaming even as puberty sets in, and bodies undergo natural changes. “Society often idealizes an unrealistic thin body type for women, a stark contrast to the athletic build typically required for high performance in sports.” (BSN. Sweat, Strength and Self-Image: The Battle of Body Image Among Female Athletes). No surprise contradictions and clashing demands can trigger eating disorders and mental and emotional struggles. Instead of “listening to their bodies” and finding their own voices, girls are conditioned to listen to coaches and trainers who hold all the power. “You know these children are all being advised by adults, as to how they can realize their Olympic dream. So, they’re basically using that child’s dream to build [their] brand. And they’re so busy trying to sell, they didn’t have time for those girls.” (Steve Berta, Investigations Editor. Indianapolis Star, which first broke the Dr. Larry Nasser sex abuse scandal).

Who Controls These Bodies?

Athletes are, of course, more than their bodies.  But most of the time, training and competition are all about bodies. Young female gymnasts willingly hand theirs and their young lives over to coaches and trainers, well before they understand what they’re getting into. Rising to the elite level, it seems there’s a “culture of physical and emotional abuse…” [that leaves] many “conditioned to accept any and all treatment.” (Jennifer Sey, former elite gymnast, previously identified as “Athlete A,” one of the first girls to speak out, and producer of the 2020 documentary of the same name). “[C]onstantly belittled and berated” by coaches, girls are “stretched to the point of injury, they’re denied food, the’re fat shamed.” Girls have reported ”being hit by coaches, being pushed to train while injured, and being repeatedly insulted, berated, and ridiculed.” Some “success stories” admit the training was tough, but worth it for the results in medals. Reads to me like brainwashing and the demented and dehumanizing illogic of domestic violence, only in gyms. Visual memory flashes legendary coach Bela Korolyi carrying, to the gold medal podium, a gymnast he’d pushed to continue after she’d badly injured (perhaps even broke?) her ankle.

Levels of Brutality

Though orders of magnitude more brutal, I can’t help but see the murder of Ugandan marathon runner Rebecca Cheptegei as a more extreme example. Her ex-boyfriend doused her in gasoline and set her on fire. Burned over 75% of her body, she died a few days later. He too later died, of burns and respiratory damage from the fire. Note that he was her ex, so she was leaving or had left. Assume he had a proprietary, owner’s, view of her body. “And if he couldn’t have it/her, no one could.” The backstory is that African women runners are often as a means to an end, prey to men who go after prize money well above regional incomes. (Ammu Kannampilly. Alleged killer of Ugandan Olympian dies from burns, hospital says. Reuters. September 10, 2024).

Exposing Olympic Dirty Secrets

Olympic coverage used to include feature, “Up Close and Personal” stories—home or training center visits, tales of overcoming physical challenges, families sacrificing and relocating for the “best” training. Interviews might mention self-doubts and performance anxieties in passing, but only in terms of overcoming them. Clearly, this was not the whole story. My coach-client didn’t mention sexual abuse. But we now know that, like rolling Catholic Church priests-and-young- altar-boys scandals, gymnastics was another nexus of male pederasts, who swore their young female victims to silence. “There were sexual predators everywhere….They were in my gym…They were everywhere across the country, and we knew who they were. But more broadly, emotional and physical abuse was actually the norm. And we were all so beaten down by that and made so obedient that…we would never say anything. We felt utterly powerless.” (Sey. Chalked Up: My Life in Elite Gymnastics. Harper Collins. 2009). Sadly and similarly, no adults stepped in and the sordid mess only came out when girls themselves—over 500 since the 1990s—broke the silence. (Wikipedia).

Paralympics: Inspiring But Also perfectly imperfect

In contrast, the 2024 Paralympics seem refreshingly wholesome, feel-good, inspiring.  We saw tales of love in bloom, with marriage proposals on the field. We saw the couple who both won gold, she in the Olympics and he in the Paralympics. And behind the scenes, we saw a disabled war photographer (leg blown off by an IED) take photos of disabled athletes with far more empathy than mainstream media who seemed intent on capturing the most awkward moments. Was this a subconscious reference to carnival sideshow geeks? Old habits and POVs on who belongs can die hard. One image showed prosthetic limbs stacked up and waiting, just part of life. But nothing’s perfect. Probably no surprise that, as “global audience, economy, and money [have] risen, so have incentives for cheating. There are growing murmurs pf “classification doping,” overstating levels of disability to gain an edge. (Roman Stubbs and Matt Higgins. As Paralympics get bigger, some athletes say cheating is more prevalent.  Washington Post. August 28, 2024). And again, the authority has been slow to respond.

Owning Names, Images, and Likenesses

With all the challenges, there are bright spots. Owners of whatever type no longer hold all the cards. As of June 2021, college athletes can now profit from use of their own (NIL). Previously, the NCAA could strip amateur eligibility from any who tried.  That meant all gains went to their colleges and universities and athletes essentially traded away, for scholarships or even just the right to play, any “ownership” of their very own bodies and persons. This ignored the fact that only a few will be able to transition to professional careers. And that some who do may suffer injuries or illnesses and see their careers end prematurely.  So, isn’t it only fair to allow them to make the most of opportunities while they can? Recent TV ads showing female athletes taking charge to explain NIL to fans. “I love the game, and I need to take care of my family.”  In my state, the NPR station announced workshops to help student athletes navigate and manage NIL opportunities.

Empowering Athletes To Exercise Personal Agency and Opportunity

Even mature professional athletes typically operate in bubbles, with handlers and teams to take care of their lives on and off the field—and with ample chances to rip them off.  Sadly, as we’ve seen, paternalism mixed with exploitation is solidly in the Olympic tradition. Fortunately, digital resources have expanded athlete’s options to develop better post-play Plan Bs. The unspoken truth of shining moments is that even “the best of the best” will eventually age out and need to figure out what to do with the rest of their lives. And if it’s time to think about changing clothes, athletes now have the chance, like the young gymnasts who stood up and spoke out, to stop depending on those who too often fail to act in their best interests. This remains more of a challenge for disabled athletes, who have a whole lot of catching up to do. And who can tend to fade from view between Paralympics, with less chance of sponsorships and revenue generating activities. But, from what I read, many are aware and working to create more options aimed at a growing audience of other non-standard bodies.

Olympics: A Reflection of Society and Culture  

No surprise that the Olympics reflect society and culture, with our general messiness, our tendency to try to look good rather than fix what isn’t.  But if we can learn to navigate them, challenges like exposing abuse scandals, though painful, can come with “silver linings.” Can create opportunities to look out for ourselves and each other. To see all of us as more fully as perfectly imperfect, one way or another. And we can thus prepare to move forward, no longer blinded by the spotlights of shining moments, and grow up into the next and much longer stages of life. And perhaps, moving forward, that can become the true Olympic ideal.

The American Scene Part III: POLITICAL LANGUAGE

Sticks and Stones: The Power of Political Words

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” Reversing the second half captures some sense of the current presidential “race,” now rapidly devolving into “adults” (hmmm?!) trading schoolyard taunts. It’s said, “the one with the best story wins.”  But which one “worked” is only revealed after voters go to the polls.  Till then, news feed algorithms keep delivering more of what we’ve clicked on before, and we find ourselves with a slanted echo chamber view of what’s going on.

Language-Games in Politics: Malleable Words and Shifting Narratives

English is an odd language, full of words that sound similar but have different meanings and connotations, that can be subject to misinterpretation. And campaign language/words take that to extremes, become even more malleable, like quicksilver shimmering away when we try to grasp. As the BeeGees sang, “It’s only words and words are all I have to steal your heart [vote] away. And throw in a variant on “Lies, damn lies, and statistics” (Mark Twain credited to British PM Benjamin Disraeli) substituting politics for the final word. Like numbers, words can be made to show anything you want, just need to convince enough folks to believe. And, of course, in politics there’s never just a single story. Multiple voices and POVs join in a kind of dissonant Greek chorus, and even more so in the digital age. We hear not just from candidates and their teams and surrogates. We also receive fundraising texts, and communications from cadres of pundit-provocateurs on both sides. A quote from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein strikes me as both relevant and instructive: “If we imagine the facts otherwise than as they are, certain language-games lose some of their importance, while others become important…..When language-games change, then there is a change of concepts, and with the concepts the meanings of words change.”   (Ludwig Wittgenstein. On Certainty in Major Works. Harper Perennial. C2009). If politics is the ultimate language-game, I wonder what he’d have made of spurious “Alternate Truths” manipulations.

Echo Chambers and Alternate Truths: Who’s Shaping the Story?

Expect political campaigns to make it up as they go and to predict dire consequences if they don’t prevail. But what we’re seeing this time seems to take that to the extremes. The ex-president has remained constant, sticking with habits established throughout his personal and political life. “He’s demonized his political opponents as ‘animals,’ ‘scum’, and ‘vermin.’ He’s [called] for jailing his opponents without cause and forcing them to stand before military tribunals.” Lock ‘em up! “He speaks of a ‘bloodbath’ that will occur if he loses the election.” (Gil Duran and George Lakoff. Donald Trump and the language of violence. Framelab. July 14, 2024).  And this intersects with a history of apparently view the world from within his own echo chamber. John Bolton, his former National Security Advisor, doesn’t think the ex-president “knows when he is lying and doesn’t really care.” (David Gardner. Trump ‘Can’t Tell’ If What He Says Is True or False Says Former Advisor. Daily Beast. August 9, 2024.). “He makes up what he wants to say at any given time.”  And “If it happens to comport with what everybody else sees. Well, that’s fine. And if it doesn’t comport with anybody else, he doesn’t really care, and he’s had decades of getting away with it.” So, in his mind, the truth “is whatever he wants it to be.”

The Rhetoric of Fear: Extreme Language in Campaigns

The former president also has a habit of claiming that “those who stand in his way shouldn’t be ‘allowed’ to run for office. Kamala Harris has now joined the list.” (Steve Benen. Trump says Harris shouldn’t be ‘allowed to run,’ recycling weird claim. MSNBC. July 25., 2024). The list already included Hillary Clinton (2015); Ted Cruz (2016); John Kasich (2016); Joe Biden (2020). Apparently, he’s never given reasons, only making vague claims of criminal activity and corruption. And never forget Obama and birther claims. Meanwhile, since the change of candidates, the other campaign and supporters have struggled to reboot. And we’ve heard a whole lot of whining and outrage that seems to imply this is a new kind of dirty political trick. Not fair. Changing the rules.  Not legal. It was a coup. Bring back Biden! Only supporting Harris because of her ethnic background. Can’t be president because she doesn’t have kids. She doesn’t speak well and doesn’t work hard. (Igor Bobic. All the Ways the Right Is Melting Down over Kamala Harris. Huffpost. July 22, 2024). And what about her gender, her mixed-race and immigrant heritage?

Who’s Allowed to Run? The Battle Over Political Legitimacy

But the Democrats have surprised by deftly managing to reboot. The often-fractious party has pulled together behind the V-P and changed tactics too.  Long known for trying to shrug off attacks and not respond. Slogan: “When they go low, we go high.” But this time we’ve seen a segue to “When they go low, we go with the flow.” Democratic pundit James Carville said, “One of the things you hear from folks is that Democrats are not known to fight, they do not project strength.”  He was optimistic that Harris and Walz could “project strength and style and substance.” Democratic strategies Antjuan Seawright, “We saw what happened when we let them define us. Now, we define their messaging about us.” She thinks this reflects a generational shift, less focused on civility and more on mixing it up. Carville said there’s been “no discussion among anybody about going high. That’s a luxury we may have some time in the future, but we certainly don’t have now.”  (Irie Sentner. ‘When they go low, we go with the flow’: Dems ramp up attacks on Trump. Politico. August 17, 2024). Pushback has often come in the form of ridicule and humor, labeling the opposition “weird” and “creepy.” This approach is sparking memes on social media. But while it’s probably an effective short-term strategy, I wonder if general lowering of the tone is good for the country in the long run.

Talking Back: The Democrats’ New Strategy

So, how’s the campaign going at this point? Non-partisan The Hill website published a pointed and cutting opinion critique of the ex-President’s “lack of discipline” and “continuing to run as a reality TV candidate.”  Winning elections requires “focus on a few winning issues and attack lines.” The reality TV mindset, in contrast, [needs] “new [and different] content to keep people tuning in. And “[This] plays out in his rallies, where he gets huge applause for his insult comic routine. But reality TV is not real life…cannot win with just the rally vote.  It’s worth noting, the best audience his [show] did was 12 million viewers in Season One, which diminished every year after. Kind of sounds like [his] political career.” (Keith Naughton, opinion contributor. 10 Ways Trump Is Throwing Away The Election. The Hill. August 16, 2024.)

Dissecting Campaigns: The Reality TV Candidate vs. the Real World

The Lincoln Project (lincolnproject.us) represents the most prominent example of non-Trump Republicans. Slogan: “We’re here to stop Trump, break MAGA, and save America. Are you in?” While iconic GOP pollster Frank Luntz may not have quite defected, he’s all over the media expressing his dissatisfaction. He’s suggested a change in strategy: “Ask the V-P one thing she has accomplished in that role.” But he doesn’t believe the ex-president is capable of making that his core case. (William Vaillaincourt. Pollster Gives Donald Trump 10-Word Question to Beat Kamala Harris. Newsweek. August 3, 2024; updated August 5, 2024.). Luntz also sees gender-based attacks as a mistake driving a gender gap in the election. (Filip Timotija.  GOP pollster Frank Luntz: Trump driving gender gap among voters with insults. The Hill. August 17, 2024).  He sees the V-P “riding a surge of enthusiasm…and bringing in people uninterested in supporting…either [of the other candidates]….has changed the pool of voters who will decide the election. If trends continue…they may not only win the presidency and retake the House, but also cling on to the Senate…” (Nicholas Liu. ‘I haven’t seen anything like this: GOP pollster says Harris took massive ‘advantage’ from Trump. Yahoo! News. August 15, 2024.)

Can We Break the Name-Calling Habit? A Vision for the Future        

Speaking of visions for the future, I like to hope we can do better.  That the majority of Americans have grown weary of overwrought and mean-spirited politics. Perhaps this election might help desensitize us, as in reduce the effects of allergies.  That we can become more mindful of impacts our words can have. “For so long, the free speech debate has been built upon an incoherent premise: that speech is powerful enough to solve social ills but can’t inflict as much damage as a fist.” (Kevin Litman-Lavaro. Wittgenstein on Whether Speech is Violence.  JSTOR. August 30, 2017).  But “when people say they do experience language as violence, it’s not because they’ve confused speech with physical assault; it’s because the language-game in which the speech-act takes place is different.”  And perhaps together we might just start to change and elevate/improve the ways we talk to and about each other.

Weekend Shockers: Do Major Events Always Happen on weekends?

Is it a Murphy’s Law that big things happen on weekends? Whether or not, it’s held true recently. One Saturday, a friend and I on a short getaway heard of the failed assassination attempt on the ex-president. Back home, just over a week later, the current president made his Sunday announcement he was withdrawing and endorsing his vice-president, a woman of color, of mixed Black and Asian heritage. My friend and I traded texts: hard to imagine what might come next. Could be a whole new ballgame?

Immediate Reactions: The Emotional Rollercoaster

Trauma slaps like an out-of-nowhere gut punch, adrenaline and shock mixed with disbelief/denial. How’d that happen? And then, for survivors, there’s the quick realization it might have been a lot worse and the urge not to think too much about what-ifs. Jon Stewart of the Daily Show captured the progression and was widely cited/quoted in both political and entertainment media, this election sitting in between. The Guardian, The Daily Beast, Hollywood Reporter, Variety, etc. quoted: “We dodged a catastrophe.” Comedians often seem to have their fingers on the national pulse and voice what others may leave unsaid. He shared another common response. “I’m following social media…to find out who did it because it’s this pattern I feel like we now have in the country, when we hear about a horrific event. You’re on pins and needles in this sort of reverse demographic lottery to make sure that the psychopathic shooter doesn’t belong to one of your teams.”

Shooter Profile: What We Know So Far?

We still have only fragmentary backstory. And characteristic of the times, it’s hard to tease out fact from rumor.  The FBI’s delving into social media (Maya Yang. A social media account possibly linked to Trump shooter under FBI scrutiny. The Guardian. July 30, 2024). But despite discovery of “more than 700 ‘extreme’ anti-immigrant and antisemitic comments from 2019 to 2020,” this looks less political and more like “lone wolf” stalker with mental health issues. Think the obsessed fan who sought to copy/appropriate John Lennon’s persona and life and then progressed to killing his “hero.” In photos, the shooter looked about 12 years old, a fresh-faced every-boy. He was just 20, in early adulthood when mental issues typically begin to manifest. And when anchors to social structures that might temper negative impulses are still unformed. He had researched depression. Did he feel himself slipping and tried to hold on? But he’d also researched whereabouts of various celebrities.  So, maybe he couldn’t resist. And the rally was conveniently near his home. He’d registered to attend. He flew a drone over the site prior to the event. Yet another reminder that the world’s much less safe and secure than we like to believe. He borrowed his father’s AR weapon.  What was his father doing with one, if that was even true? His parents had called police with concerns. Law enforcement officers occupied different floors of the same building, but not the roof.  Though they were on nearby roofs. And folks at the rally reported sighting the shooter up there. So, as in Uvalde, TX, there were many dropped balls and convergences.

From Classroom to Crime Scene: A Potential School Shooter?

Seems this shooter may also fit a bit of lone-wolf school shooter. Two years out from graduation, perhaps he exported impulses he might have inflicted on fellow students into the community. The Secret Service recently released findings from a study to help guide prevention (Study Confirms School Shootings Are Preventable If You Know the Signs. sandyhookpromise.com). That site, curated by parents who lost very young kids in one school shooting, is intended to help reduce risks other families and communities will suffer similar trauma. So, no surprise being bullied often formed the core grievance and motivating factor (94%). Key signs of trouble are “…significant behavioral changes, sadness, depression, social isolation, escalating anger, and interest in violence.” Chilling that some “plotters spent as long as three years planning their attacks, providing ample opportunity for people to discover the warning signs and intervene before it was too late…many… posted disturbing messages on social media, changed behaviors, and caused concern among those around them.” Given the social media trail, had this shooter been planning for 4 or 5 years? Notable that classmates who reported to a trusted adult uncovered nearly two-thirds of thwarted plots. Again, since he was no longer in school, that did not happen in this case. Classmates were only interviewed after he acted.

Unraveling the Event: Conspiracy Theories and Facts?

Again, no surprise in these polarized times, that dueling conspiracy theories have sprouted like weeds. Did the ex-president’s campaign stage the “event” to garner more support?  Was the attack coordinated by the “left” and/or “deep state?” The FBI Director, testifying to a Congressional committee, wasn’t sure whether the ex-president was struck by a bullet or by a piece of shrapnel. (Allie Griffin. Trump tears into FBI director who questioned if ex-prez was struck by bullet during assassination attempt. NY Post. July 26, 2024; David Rothkopf. Bullet? Shard of Glass? Welcome to Donald Trump’s Ear Wound Theater. Daily Beast. July 26, 2024). Could the projectile have been a piece of Plexiglas a bullet shaved off the teleprompter? Those pesky teleprompters again! Used to mock the current president for his memory lapses and then blamed by a speaker at the Republican National Convention for posting the wrong speech rather than the intended “softer, gentler” version written after the attempt. The questions could have been settled with standard practice of hospital after-action press briefing.  But since that didn’t happen, we’re left to wonder.  Meanwhile, the ex-president insists it was a bullet. And though he appointed this very FBI director, he now says, the man “knows nothing about the terrorists and other criminals pouring into our country at record levels.”

Words and Deeds: Presidential Responses to Violence:

The serving president issued a statement that such violence has no place in American life. Has he studied our history, not to mention recent headlines? Consider how this country has navigated previous overheated times. (Becky Little. Violence in Congress Before the Civil War: From Canings and Stabbings to Murder: 19th-century congressmen went to work carrying pistols and bowie knives—and sometimes used them on colleagues. History. Original July 24, 2019; updated Oct. 16,2023). Rep. Preston Brooks’ “Caning and beating [Senator Charles Sumner] to unconsciousness is probably the most famous violent attack in Congress, but it is far from the only one. In the three decades leading up to the Civil War there were more than 70 violent incidents between congressmen.” This gives context/perspective to current rules that prohibit bringing weapons into Congressional chambers. Feelings and language can run high, and “as the prospect of political violence becomes enmeshed in daily life, even an assassination attempt can come to seem routine.”  (Stephanie McCrummen. ‘I Guess This is Normal Politics Now.’  The Atlantic. July 23, 2024).  According to Wikipedia, assassination is most frequent in “countries in which the means of leadership succession lack regularity.” And perhaps where conflicts between traditional religious and secularizing elements are mounting? Could this country be lumbering/stumbling toward morphing another such country? The ex-president has been telling Christian followers to vote this time they’ll never have to again. (Michael Gold. Trump Tells Christians ‘You Won’t Have to Vote Anymore’ If He’s Elected. NY Times. July 27, 2024).

Inside the Mind of an Assassin: Psychological Insights?

With so much at stake, we still seem to know more details about celebrities (also essentially stalked) than about folks who may be prone to acts of nation-rocking violence. Does this indicate collective denial amplified by the twin blind spots of easy access to guns and limited access to mental health services? Do we just plain resist looking too closely at ourselves? Recall Walt Kelly’s old comic strip Pogo: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”  In a recent summary, Psychology Today found just three major studies (one dating back to 1984, and the other two more recent, both issued in 2016) of a combined total of 163 subjects who had “killed, wounded, or otherwise assaulted presidents, Secret Service personnel, or other persons of interest.” (Raj Persaud, MD. Inside the Mind of an Assassin:  How the Secret Service has used psychological research to profile assassins. July 15, 2024). Key findings/conclusions seem depressingly consistent:

• Crushing sense of inadequacy, high levels of depression, anxiety, frustration and “liv[ing] in a fantasy world…that can eventually [seem to] offer a chance, once and for all, to prove themselves, to pull off one enormous undertaking, to get attention…from a world that has systematically ignored or rejected them.” And until then, individuals tend to “appear bland, …quiet, harmless…”
• “Nothing personal” against their targets: Instead, “the president [or other public figure] merely symbolized the frustrations they experienced or personified the ‘system’ that was forever letting them down.”
• One of the few dependable associations in emotional life is that frustration leads to aggression.
• Fame [in the digital age] has changed so that the public experiences aspects of a [perceived] connection [and expectations?]. And attacks become more personal.

The Wild Card of Unpredictability

Again, the “wild card” is the unpredictability.  No indication if investigators directly asked subjects what set them off.  Would they even be able to explain and articulate? The term Stochastic refers to a “random probability distribution,” which “may be analyzed statistically but not predicted precisely.”  So, we …“[c]an predict [that violent acts]  will happen, just not where or when.”  A shooter is “someone who becomes activated and violent when triggered by outside pressures,” but “[n]o one can be sure which triggered individuals will become violent.”  (Annalee Newitz.  Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. Norton and Co. c2024.

Avoiding the Rush to Judgment

Easy, amid so much uncertainty, to succumb to the temptation to over depend on tools like profiling that seem to offer a degree of precision.  And this may feed into police temptation to look for look only at “the usual suspects,” stereotype, rush to judgment, especially in high-profile and pressure cases. How often have we seen the trope celebrating obsessed and sometimes rogue cops who won’t sleep till “the criminal’s” caught? But then, consider the mass of wrongful convictions overturned by state Innocence Projects, as well as cases like NY’s infamous “Central Park 5” case, in which the former president played a major public role. “In 1989 five black and Latino boys were wrongfully convicted of raping a woman jogging in New York City. Leading the charge against them was a real estate mogul whose divisive rhetoric can be found in his presidential campaign today.” Leading up to the 2016 election, an article first published in New York Magazine and then in the Guardian provided a reminder. (Oliver Laughland. Donald Trump and the Central Park Five: the racially charged rise of a demagogue. Feb. 17, 2016). The young men, eventually exonerated, were the subjects of Ava DeVernay’s documentary When They See Us (2019). They won a decade-long lawsuit against NY City and were awarded $41M.

 Cultural Climate Change: Finding Solutions Together?

Surely, almost 40 years later, we can learn to at least repeat the same mistakes less often. A good start could be each doing our part to lower the cultural temperature by toning down and no longer rewarding language that incites and amps up violence. Can we, like Sandy Hook parents and high school- shooting survivors, find meaning in uniting against the proliferation of guns that make it easier to act out murderous fantasies? Can we push instead to enhance access to mental and emotional support systems and services before things get that far?

Most important of all, can we keep remembering we’re all in this together? I find clues to a possible path forward in a collection of essays based on oral histories collected from survivors on the receiving end. (Mark Cave and Stephen M. Sloan, editors. Listening on the Edge: Oral History in the Aftermath of Crisis. Oxford University Press. c2014).  “….What remains when the cameras turn away, and reporters go home, are individuals and communities [a country] in the process of redefinition, forever changed by the event.  Exploring the process of this change in…the life of a community [a nation] can tell us a great deal about who we are and who we are likely to become.”  And perhaps then we can start to heal ourselves and each other.

Can the presidential campaign get any more chaotic/kaleidoscopic? Judging by the past week, we’ll have to wait and see.

The Debate: A Conflicted Choice

Must admit I didn’t watch. Conflicted with weekly folkdance group, a far less anxious choice for me.  But there’s no avoiding the contentious follow-up narratives. Do charges of cognitive slipping vs. imbalance/espousing alternate realities make the two candidates so unfit both should immediately withdraw? As if it could be that simple. And would it be if it actually happened.

How’d We Get Here?

As Americans, we all have a stake in the outcome. So, of course, does the rest of the fraying international community. (Francesca Chambers and Michael Collins.  Biden, Trump fears loom over NATO summit, Europe’s defense. USA Today. July 10, 2024). We’re supposed to be choosing the “Leader of the Free World” here.  Jon Stewart of the Daily Show did watch and asked, “is this the best we can do? This is America!” His words reflect a longstanding sense of American exceptionalism, immunity, superiority. Political and societal messes happen elsewhere, not here. But if that was ever true, we have mounting evidence it’s no longer so. And fault lines and contradictions widen, like growing ageism even as our population becomes grayer. And this despite only 3 years difference between the two men and multiple verbal flubs by both.

The Rise of Televised Debates:

How did presidential debates take on such importance in the first place? The short answer is they’re TV shows.  Way back before mass media, personal campaign appearances were considered unseemly, beneath the dignity of the office. Stand-ins represented the candidates. Later, came whistle-stop tours from the backs of trains and then radio. Then TV created the opportunity to see candidates and how they perform live. The first televised presidential debates pitted Kennedy against Nixon in the 1960 election. Admen and marketers recognized the relatively new medium’s potential to manage and manipulate images and personas. And the savvy Kennedy campaign hired the “first TV consultant on a presidential campaign” (Obit: documentary on the NY Times. 2017).  Taller, in a custom-tailored suit, behind an almost-not-there podium, no five o’clock shadow beard, their man came off cooler, more stylish, less sweaty. Though he started with lower name recognition, he presented the identity Americans wanted. So, it seemed debates could work magic?

Tech’s Influence on Politics:

Constantly developing new tech expands opportunities to manage and manipulate. And what we see or think we see can slide increasingly farther from the truth and nothing but. “New threats and aces in digital technology mean that old bargains don’t work anymore.” Secrets aren’t as easy to keep. And “Amid…steps and missteps, partisan rancor, media hype, and changing threats, the nation is seeking an accommodation between openness and secrecy for the digital age. Far from being helpless, ordinary citizens have a leading role in deciding what the new bargain [the new social contract] will be.” (Mary Graham. Presidents’ Secrets: The Use and Abuse of Hidden Power. Yale University Press. c2017).

The Hero Leader Archetype:

Anthropologist Gregory Bateson pioneered using tech—still and film cameras—into fieldwork conducted to study cultures. Over 50 years ago, he voiced what strike me as prophetic concerns over “… addition of modern technology to the old system…Conscious purpose is now empowered to upset the balances of the body, of society, and of the biological world around us.”  (Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Random House. 1972).  One of our oldest forms is hero culture, age-old traditions around how we want our leaders to be or seem to be.  The idea of divine right, extraordinary powers. Could this explain why many presidents have been former generals?  Quintessential strong men/heroes, by definition leaders of men, though they’re now aging.

Presidential Debates as Modern Duels:

Neither candidate served in the military, but required to present as heroes, they must prove themselves.  And so, debates turn into a kind of Single Combat. Wikipedia describes duels taking place in the context of a battle between two armies. Champions fight in no-man’s-land between opposing forces, which stay on the sidelines till one man wins. Examples occur throughout history, from Classical Antiquity, the Middle Ages and worldwide. This carries forward in sports, with “stars” becoming icons for fans and local communities. The ex-president didn’t participate in earlier debates with GOP opponents but saved himself for the main event. Didn’t watch but I can’t help picturing the two old/aging men in suits and ties, grappling in front of the cameras. Turns out I have company; New York magazine just ran a doctored photo of the two men in underwear on the cover on its Health Issue (Josephine Harvey. New York Mag Cover of Near-Naked Trump and Biden Sparks Backlash. Huffpost. July 18, 2024).  The former president did reportedly tout his superior golf game, while he managed to simultaneously present as the “strong man” and victim/martyr persecuted by political enemies. (Russ Buetner. Martyr Inc.: How Trump Monetized a Persecution Narrative. NY Times. July 24, 2024). Meanwhile, the current president was described as “significantly compromised in his ability to express thoughts and recall words.” (Aaron Zitner and Clare Ansberry. A Nation on Edge Fears an Election Careening Toward an Ugly Finish. Wall Street Journal. July 14, 2024).

The Power of Alternative Narratives:

Despite the usual comments about the ex-president’s repetition of “alternate truth” claims, he got off relatively lightly.  Perhaps the public and media have grown desensitized. Shouldn’t be a surprise, since he first sprang to general public attention with his reality show The Apprentice.  Emily Nussbaum, a cultural critic, has been a long-time observer of that genre. (Cue the Sun: The Invention of Reality TV.  Random House. 2024; also featured in an NPR Book Review June 25, 2024). “Critics [keep] writing off reality programming….” The dismissive pattern continued for decades – “and critics were wrong every time.” Though much-maligned, it’s “always been a trap” that can lead to a tendency to “succumb to the temptation to treat reality too lightly.” Bateson foretold this as well.  “…[E]rror is often reinforced and therefore self-validating.  You can get along all right in spite of the fact that you entertain at rather deep levels of the mind premises which are simply false.”

Propaganda in Politics:

Bateson also understood that using propaganda and “alternate truths” becomes a reactive, rather than an active game. The practitioner “…[must] always have his eyes open to tell him what the people are saying about his [story/narrative].  Being responsive to what they are saying…cannot [allow for] a simple lineal control.”  A case in point is Project 2025, product of the conservative Heritage Foundation, that “calls for sacking of thousands of civil servants, expanding the power of the president, dismantling the Department of Education, sweeping tax cuts, a ban on pornography, halting sales of the abortion pill, and much more.” (Mike Wendling. Project 2025: A wish list for a Trump presidency explained. BBC. July 12, 2024).  Note the source of that article. Yes, the rest of the world is watching. The ex-president has backpedaled, saying he knows nothing about Project 2025. But really!? (Steve Contorno. Trump Claims Not to Know Who Is Behind Project 2025: A CNN Review Found at Least 140 People Who Worked for Him Are Involved. CNN. July 11, 2024).

Reality TV’s Impact on Politics:

Of course, the term “reality TV” is a misnomer. Shows seem to be loosely storyboarded but encourage participants to improvise and are then edited to appear spontaneous. Nussbaum based her book on interviews with “a staggering 300 people who worked in every conceivable capacity – from network executives to show creators to crafts people and cast members…” And she found that, “For many people, doing this kind of television wasn’t a naïve misstep at all – it was a conscious choice to participate in an extreme sport, one whose risks they embraced.”  Think of Andy Warhol’s 15-minutes of fame. Recent reports reveal behind-the-scenes secrets—low pay, exploitation, false imprisonment, physical and sexual abuse, promotion of substance use.  (Nussbaum. Is Love Is Blind a Toxic Workplace? New Yorker. May 20, 2024).  And actual reality is shielded with tight Non-Disclosure Agreements enforced by punishing lawsuits against participants who don’t comply.

Celebrity Culture’s Influence on Society:

Easy to recognize parallels with social media that make celebrity culture both too close and too distant. Channels offering 24-7 coverage need content and so, they track relationships, breakups, divorces, custody battles, nepo babies. And there are of course the rumors. The intent seems to be turning us all into gossips and voyeurs and, most important, consumers.  And that generates envy and comparison, ultra-fandom, pseudo-identification and intimacy. And, by the way, what are they wearing? And can I buy something similar for less?  This expands on a long history of privacy invasion that comes as part of the tradeoff for any kind of fame. Think Hollywood gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons in the 1930s and 1940s and paparazzi as shown in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. And there’s the pattern/trope of building a “star” up only to tear him or her down.  Not to mention potential for that to morph into deadly stalking a la the murder of John Lennon.

The Limits of Sympathy for Celebrities:

The other side of envy and comparison is lack of sympathy for targets/stars. The includes a tendency to let tech and its growing capabilities take the lead in the ways we use it. Bateson early noted “..the temptation to obey the computer. After all, if you follow …you are a little less responsible than if you made up your own mind.”  And, as Nussbaum noted, “Most people don’t see going on a reality show [or becoming a celebrity or a politician?] as work…it’s simply a different category of behavior: gonzo volunteerism, or an audition for fame… in which people agree to put themselves at risk, emotionally or physically, for an adventure or the chance of future opportunities.” If something bad happens to reality stars (as in porn, cast members are always “stars”), “they literally signed up for it.”

A Fragmented Society and National PTSD:

Chaos roils on:  we have the Republican National Convention—again, I don’t watch but I read—and continuing calls for the current president to step aside as candidate (Edith Olmsted. Biden Finally Sees Writing on the Wall After Brutal Triple Leak. New Republic. July 19, 2024). And there are reports that his handlers have been regularly covering up his slips. This again, as per the title Graham’s book, repeats the presidents and secrecy trope, going all the way back to George Washington. Woodrow Wilson remained in office after he suffered a stroke and was unable to fulfill his duties or over a year, his condition covered up by his wife and doctor. Secrecy and stubbornness converged back then too.

NATIONAL PTSD?  FORGETTING AND YET REMEMBERING?

Are we suffering a form of national—perhaps even global—PTSD? And can we find ways to navigate the current morass, rediscover semi-solid common ground, and eventually come back together?  (Linda Kintsler. Jan. 6, America’s Rupture, and the Strange, Forgotten Power of Oblivion.  Guest Essay. NY Times. June 15, 2024; NPR Think with Krys Boyd interview. July 1, 2024).  Can we manage to find the odd balance between not over remembering grievances yet not over forgetting the wrongs that generated them?  Can we find ways to “consecrate” and memorialize losses and wrongs yet still move on and relearn the lesson that we’re all in this together? Examples cited include South Africa’s Reconciliation Commission following that country’s generational history of crushing apartheid.  Start by taking as given there’s no way to punish enough. In this country, the author noted the imbalance of continuing trials of January 6 “foot soldiers,” while leaders/instigators remain largely unaccountable. Recent court actions probably make that less feasible for now. But USA Today headlined folks losing jobs for mean-spirited comments on the assassination attempt against the former president.

To reiterate Graham’s point, “ordinary citizens have a leading role in deciding what the new bargain [the new social contract] will be.” What kinds of narratives about ourselves will we choose to follow? “…In the mythos of modern documentary reality, what matters most is how things work….in today’s world we need to extend the discourse to include everybody’s involvement in the mythos of documented reality….in the cultural politics of authenticity.” But can authenticity pay/work these days of “alternate truths?” I hope it can.  And that we can do this together.

Introduction to Parallel Narratives

Two or three times a week, I drive by a mural of clenched fists raised over the bannered slogan “The people united will never be defeated.” This abuts a small-business incubator for fledgling entrepreneurs in the very individual process of striving to secure a foothold in late capitalism. No idea of origin story—when painted, by whom, with what intention. And which was there first. By now, the image has faded into street scape, hardly noticed, an idea with its teeth pulled. But then, one day I drove by a Dollar General Store and saw a group I took to be workers there waving what appeared to be handmade protest signs protesting low pay and unsafe conditions. Of course, they too yearn for a firmer foothold, at least a few more dollars per hour. Next time I passed, personnel and signs were absent, and I saw a big “We’re Hiring!” sign.

The Faded Mural and Dollar General Workers’ Protest

My impromptu “windshield survey” coincided with students taking over university campuses to protest the Israel-Hamas-Gaza war/conflict and pressure their schools to divest from related financial alliances. The juxtaposition had me thinking about the distance between workers’ modest aims and elite students’ change-the world ambitions. Though the two populations may live in the same country, they inhabit very different worlds, at either end of the great economic divide of “Income and wealth inequality…[and] related disparities and anxieties …stoking social discontent…increased political polarization and populist nationalism…” (Zia Qureshi. Rising Inequality: A Major Issue of Our Time. Brookings Institution. May 16, 2023). And the different actions indicate how “An increasingly unequal society can weaken trust in public institutions and undermine democratic governance.”

Juxtaposition of Workers’ Aims and Students’ Ambitions

The DG workers fit United Way’s ALICE (Asset Limited Income Constrained Employed) definition. Typically, unskilled or semi-skilled, living paycheck to paycheck, they have scant financial reserves for emergencies. Most days, they too fade into the background, taken for granted, hardly noticed. And yet, in the moment I witnessed, they looked excited, as if reveling in their own courage, reminding that they’re Atlas holding up the whole structure. Cashiers, stockers, warehouse workers, pharmacy clerks, day care and nursing home aides, without whom many key functions grind to a halt.  Yet they are often treated as interchangeable “hands.” More where they came from.

Economic Divide and Social Discontent

View student demonstrators, in contrast, as lifelong winners. “The best and brightest,” they beat the competition to make it into top universities. Some may be scholarship kids, but many presumably have parents who can foot the massive tuition bills. It’s said most have only a cursory grasp of the Middle East’s complicated history, newly picked up watching the conflict on social media. (Tawnel D. Hobbs, et al. Activist Groups Trained Students for Months Before Campus Protests. Wall Street Journal. May 3, 2024). Note the headline’s slant, trying to blame “outside agitators,” in an echo of the 1960s. PBS’ Frontline Crisis on Campus (2024) suggested many students view this as just another anti-colonial war of liberation, rather than “one of the world’s most intractable and complex conflicts.” But interviews with Jewish and Arab students and professors at Columbia University in NYC indicate strong grasp of issues from opposing perspectives. Campuses across the nation have been polarized, roiled by dueling accusations of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.  Jewish students at Columbia sued the university for failing to address threats to their safety. A major Jewish donor stopped his contributions to the university.

The Invisible Workforce: ALICE Workers

Disruptive behaviors could be the catch phrase for these restless, jittery, times, “rife with violence, injustice and disappointments.” (Sara Marcus. Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis. Belknap Press of Harvard University. c2023). Passion and resentment carry individuals, groups, society along on tides of “mistrust, failures of elites, and weakened institutions.” (Zeynep Tufecki. Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. Yale University Press. c2017).  Does the urge to direct action reflect a growing sense (from top and bottom) the world’s grown too complicated and nothing’s working, except for a very few?  And it starts to make a different kind of sense to go DIY, intervene and break everything down and start over. Nathan Schneider captured that impulse in his informal case study of the earlier Occupy Wall Street movement (2011). (Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse. University of California Press. c2015).  It also emerges in miniature with comedians’ subversive campaigns for higher office. Must all be a joke. Kinky Friedman, who recently died, once ran for Governor of Texas with the slogan “How Hard Can It Be?”

View of Student Demonstrators as Lifelong Winners

 But, of course, effective disruption takes organizing and is no joke. It takes belief in/hope for the possibility of a different future—vividly imagined, talked about, manifested. (Jesse Bossewitch paraphrased in Schneider).  And weaving those beliefs and hopes into stories with the power to shift the narrative to capture minds and hearts (Tufecki). Hard not to suspect Hamas stage managed this story, calibrated the October 7 attacks and hostage taking to provoke Israel into scorched-earth retaliation. And stationed its fighters to put their own people in harms’ way in residential areas, hospitals, schools, knowing resulting images of death and destruction would bring the issue onto the world stage as never before. “The ultimate goal is changing the American and worldwide conversation.” But can that lead to a clear resolution? The only “solutions” offered remain finding a way to single state (a non-starter after decades of trying amid mounting mutual distrust, animosity, violence) or dismantling the state of Israel (not acceptable). And thus, the bloody circular stalemate drags on and on. (Bazelon).  And could break out into wider warfare with other Arab factions.

Complexity of Disruptive Behaviors in Modern Times

DG workers aspirations for something closer to a living wage don’t have the same degree of resonance. But if our domestic arena has become international, it’s yet another signal of “mounting global disparities [that continue to] imperil geopolitical stability.” (Qureshi).  It also raises a critical question. Why does it seem so much easier to empathize with folks on the other side of the world than with people right here, our fellow citizens, like the DG workers? Because they’re less abstract? This distance plays out in the ways the two groups interact. We can’t quite say, “never the twain shall meet,” but the power imbalance is undeniable. Have student protestors ever entered a dollar store? Their interactions are more likely with barely noticed “support staff,” like janitors, baristas, wait staff, Uber drivers, etc.

Impact of Organized Protests and DIY Interventions

And that has me wondering. Can’t we do better? If student protestors can imagine a new order, why can’t I? Fortunately, I am not alone in this kind of thinking. I’m even aware of two possible alternate models. I first read of “The Great Game of Business” in Inc. Magazine almost 40 years ago. This is a self-described “management system that starts and ends with getting employees educated, engaged and involved in making the financial, process and cultural decisions that build a company.” And understanding that “allowing employees to set their own targets can lead to increased buy-in and engagement….and commitment towards achieving goals.”

Media Influence on Perception of Conflicts

Then, on another drive on another day, (I do drive a lot), I listened to Freakonomics Radio on NPR: Should Companies Be Owned by Their Workers? (Episode 587. May 8, 2024). Host David Dubner explored that question with 1) the director of the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) Association; 2) a very mainstream private equity manager who founded the non-profit Ownership Works to promote profit sharing during mergers and acquisitions; and 3) a Democracy Collaborative critic of private equity and its influence on the economy and concentration of wealth. Only tried on a small scale so far, but the ideas are slowly gaining ground.

Global Disparities and Domestic Implications

So, if we have these models, why have we been slow to adopt them? Both might smack of creeping socialism to some. And no surprise, given corporate and CEO egos, there’s resistance from the top. Climbing the ladder tends to come with a fondness for command-and-control management. And what would folks like the DG workers think anyway? Could they imagine/envision workplaces leaning even a bit more toward dialogue than monologue? Where they’d be “treated with respect for their intelligence and creativity” as per the Great Game? Would that seem too good to be true? Would they suspect, if not a scam, it’s window dressing, lip service like the bromide “Our employees are our greatest assets?”  That they’d be expected to work harder for no more gain?

Exploring Alternate Business Models for Worker Empowerment

The greatest barrier seems to be assumptions about workers, that they lack the capability. They may even doubt themselves.  Think of John Fogarty and CCR’s song “It Ain’t Me,” with the refrain “I ain’t no fortunate one.” But what if we can start changing these perceptions? Our most revolutionary act could be doing all we can to ditch deep-seated prejudices and stereotypes that discount many fellow citizens. Philosophers like Edmond Husserl identified the practice of Othering, “…labelling and defining a person as belong[ing] to a socially subordinate category…exclud[ing] persons who do not fit the norm of the social group…[and]…displac[ing] them…to the margins of society…” (Wikipedia). This shows up, of course, in race and gender relations.  And it’s certainly prominent on both sides of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It also applies to income differences, as summarized in NIH National Library of Medicine. National Center of Biotechnology Information. “Rich people…are cross-nationally (37 samples in 27 nations) stereotyped as more competent (but colder) than poor people, especially under conditions of greater income inequality. In contrast, poor people are stereotyped as lazy and substance abusers in the US as well as in egalitarian Sweden.”

Overcoming Assumptions and Stereotypes to Foster Inclusion

From a human perspective, the toughest part of capitalism for workers must be knowing they’re perceived as interchangeable parts, easily replaceable. Probably a legacy of mass production and batch processing that persists in the service economy and customizing. Old habits do hang on. What can we do to change this part of the narrative? If we’re imagining, perhaps we could recruit already energized student protestors. Could we pique the curiosity of these future captains of industry and finance about how the world works and doesn’t for folks like the DG workers? And encourage them to test drive and improve alternate business models like the ones described above. The venture capitalist Dubner interviewed belongs to a working-class family, so such crossover can happen. At my most optimistic, I can envision such efforts leading to greater worker inclusion not just in economic benefits, but also greater agency and fuller participation in running businesses, since they are the ones with actual experience of what it takes to do the job. I like Schneider’s quote from an Occupy participant adjusting to the aftermath of that movement. “Keep walking and keep asking questions.”