GIN AND TACOS

(note: I'm currently working on a book bearing this title, and while I don't intend to blog about every minute part of it along the way I am not above the occasional trial balloon to make sure that the premise is neither flawed nor irrelevant.)

Imagine, if you will, a committed Catholic arguing with an atheistic fratboy about pre-marital casual sex. Assuming that all practical arguments would be refuted (i.e., "You'll get an STD" is met with "No, I'll use a condom") the dispute, if given enough time to play out, would eventually boil down to morality.
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Catholics believe it is a sin. Fratboy, neither believing in God nor sharing the Catholics' values, would have no context for such an argument. It would be rejected out of hand. If these two people cannot agree on a fundamental premise – God exists – then the religion-based issue of something being a sin or immoral simply can't take place. The believer and the atheist simply have two entirely different sets of facts underlying their decision-making and judgment. They will talk directly past one another.

These disagreements are common in the political sphere when we have to deal with inherently subjective issues. We can't really debate social welfare policies if we can't agree on the fundamental premise that government should do something to assist the poor. But this isn't a problem. After all, things like social welfare, abortion, gay marriage, and so on are "should" questions. There are no objective answers. Neither you nor I can definitely "prove" that society should or should not help the poor. One faction will make a stronger argument than the other, but that doesn't prove anyone right or wrong. Politics exist to peacefully and productively hash out disagreements about these unanswerable questions.

So here's the problem. Prior to the advent of CNN in the mid-1980s, Americans got broadcast news from exactly three sources: ABC, NBC, and CBS (discounting local or public-access programming). One could argue, and right-wingers have made a multi-billion dollar industry out of doing so, that those three news behemoths were biased. They leaned to the left. I'll accept that premise. They may have had a bias, but everyone was seeing the same news and getting the same sets of facts. That is crucially important. When people disagreed, they disagreed by diverging from a common point. Some people wanted to stay in Vietnam and some wanted to leave, but they had the same basic set of facts about how the war was going and what was happening.
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Now we have a bifurcated media and, predictably, a bifurcated public. People do not disagree about Iraq by diverging from a common understanding of the facts.
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They simply have different versions of reality – different facts about the same events. We do not have a simple disagreement about Staying vs Leaving in Iraq; there is a deep, fundamental, and unbridgeable gap in what different Americans "know" about the war and the run-up thereto. We cannot debate the rightness or wrongness of the invasion if, as surveys show, 30-40% of the public thinks we found WMD and that Sadaam was personally responsible for planning 9/11. A productive debate about right and wrong can only take place in the context of one set of facts. But Americans have self-selected (based on their existing biases) a source of information. There's the NPR/Blogosphere camp with one set of facts and the Fox News/Talk Radio camp with another. In between are the CNN/Big Three Networks camp with a confused porridge of correct and incorrect "facts."

And that's why we'll forever be talking past each other – we've abandoned the idea that there are such things as facts. We've introduced the kind of disagreement I mentioned in the Catholic vs Fratboy example into every area of politics. Everything is treated as subjective. Moral issues are subjective, but many other issues are not. Either Hussein did or did not plan 9/11. It is not possible to say "Well, we'll just have to disagree about that." It is either true or false. Period. Instead we've let lassiez-faire ideology and free-market worship redefine the way we are informed as a society. Each person is a demographic, and each demographic has a news source to tell them exactly what they want to hear and, in most cases, what they already believe to be true.

My lovely sister, who happens to be a Real Catholic, once told me that from a religious viewpoint, the biggest problem with our society is that it tells each individual "You are your own God." Therefore people no longer operate from a shared, common set of moral values. Each person defines his or her own. We can't say whether or not we "should" all be operating from a common set of Christian religious values because such issues are inherently subjective. But I do know that her logic applies very well to the way Americans consume the news today. The message is loud and clear – whatever you decide is true becomes the truth. There are no Facts, only Opinions. If someone proves you wrong, you don't have to admit it because it's all subjective. If the news won't agree with you, keep flipping the channel until you find the network that will.

On the heels of the announcement that the Fed is now expected to act as corporate America's playground monitor, I'm officially taking bets on when the entire airline industry goes back to pre-1979 regulation. As far-fetched as that sounds in the Reagan era, keep two things in mind. First, large corporations violently oppose regulation only until they begin producing an audible death rattle.
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Second, an objective look at the industry makes it entirely unclear how any airline is going to survive the next five to eight years.

Aloha Airlines just went down after filing for Chapter 11 for the second time since 2002. Delta** (bankruptcy: 2005-2007) is trying to buy out 30,000 workers after failing in its Fat Guy Looking For A Prom Date search for a buyout partner. United (2003-2006) launched a failed LCC (low cost carrier), partnered with Aloha (brilliant!), and is also looking for a buyer to no avail. US Air and America West went bankrupt and then merged, which is approximately as intelligent as two dirt-poor, debt-laden people getting married.

ATA died. Nearly every airline abandoned its pension responsibilities and dumped them onto Uncle Sam via PBGC. While some major carriers crawled back to making small profits in 2007, the mad increase in fuel costs and unrelenting LCC competition will take care of that.

The air travel industry grew exponentially in the 1980s when airlines figured out that, by and large, people don't give a shit about amenities. If the average consumer has two choices – a no-frills service they can afford or a high-end service they can't – the former wins out 100% of the time. Now we have a perfect storm brewing. Fuel costs are making even "no-frills" service very expensive at the same time that middle- and working-class incomes are feeling a serious squeeze due to stagnant wages and rising prices. Make no mistake, you and I are what the airline industry needs to survive.

The only people doing well in the past 8 years – the top 5% of income earners – can only fly so much. Certainly not enough to fill existing capacity.

I only see a few outcomes. The major airlines can continue limping along by filing bankruptcy every 4 years, which amounts to government intervention to keep them alive. The government could subsidize fuel. Southwest (tenuously assuming that they can continue making money, which they won't once their fuel hedges run out) could become a de facto monopoly on domestic traffic, necessitating regulation. Or the entire damn industry could teeter on collapse until Washington steps in to assign routes and set prices.

Or we could send everyone a check for $600 in an election year effort to cover the fact that there's a lot of shit you can't afford anymore.

**(Seriously, fuck Delta. If it isn't the world's worst airline this side of Tajik Air, then I don't know what is. One flight is enough to tell you that there's more to their bankruptcy than fuel costs.
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How is history going to judge George W. Bush?

While the answer may seem obvious (he will be ranked somewhere between Warren Harding and the Holocaust) academic work on the presidency shows an interesting lack of objectivity on the matter.
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We like to think of ourselves as impartial observers, but look no further than Ronald Reagan to understand how history interacts with PR campaigns.

Various attempts at ranking the presidents – some academic, some popular – show substantial variance in Reagan's placement. In reality, Reagan was a pretty middling president. His assets were his tremendous confidence, optimism, and ability to soothe with his words. These qualities become very important only when considered in the proper context – the miserable 1970s. Post-war prosperity ended. The economy was in shambles. Major cities often resembled war zones. America's position in the world was not as strong as it once was. Under these circumstances, Reagan was just what the doctor ordered. He also excelled at working constructively with the Democratic majorities in Congress – the mark of an outstanding president in the Neustadt model.

On the downside, Reagan was not a rocket scientist. He strongly advocated economic policies he didn't really understand. He engineered a dangerous, possibly reckless, increase in tensions with the Soviet Union. He accomplished no major act of domestic policy save the 1986 revision of the tax code. Most importantly, he created a "Government = Bad, Period" ideology that left government oversight of public health, education, safety, and the environment in shambles.

So what was he? He was an important president who was the right person for the moment. He also had serious flaws in his legacy, although on balance let's be generous and call his two terms more positive than negative.
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That would suggest a president in the top half of the rankings, but not an excellent one. If the 43 presidents are broken into quartiles, Reagan deserves a ranking in the 12-20 range.

Instead, the trend in recent years is to rank him somewhere in the top 8, occasionally even the top 5. Make no mistake: this is pure appeasement. To the right-wing media, Reagan is #1. Any ranking system that does not recognize his greatness is biased. So Ronnie has steadily crept up the list as academics, historians, and journalists cave in (deciding that it's easier to just throw him at #6 than to deal with conservative histrionics). Twenty years of retrospection have made him Great.

My question is, are we are going to have to play this game with George W. Bush? I mean, Ronnie was likeable enough that most people do not have to swallow too hard to sneak him into the top ten.

Overrated? Definitely. Awful president? No. Bush, on the other hand…ranking him higher than Ass Cancer would qualify as "overrating." And he is certainly a thoroughly awful president. Which will the Cato Institutes and Fox News anchors of the world choose: will they simply try to forget Bush as quickly as possible?

Or are we honestly going to be expected to Seriously and Solemnly look at him in hindsight before concluding that he belongs on Mount Rushmore?

Every year I think about writing this post exactly once. It happens when I mail a check to the IRS.

Even though we have essentially the lowest rates of taxation in the industrialized world, incessant bitching about taxes seems to be an American birthright.

Some people allow it to take over their lives until they become, at best, unpleasant, consistent and predictable ranters in the office break room. At worst they become "tax protesters" who divide their time between tar paper shacks in Idaho and Federal courtrooms.

Oliver Wendell Holmes said "Taxes are the price we pay for civilization." That sums up the way I feel. Due to peculiarities in the manner in which grad students are paid at my University and a pair of very active online trading accounts, I inevitably end up owing Uncle Sam several hundred dollars annually. I don't like paying it. You could even say I dislike it. I often utter profanities as I write the check. But you know what? I put it in the mail and proceed to get the fuck over it.

The fact that millions of my countrymen are unable to do so is, well, sad. I pity them. The amount of energy they waste and the amount of time they spend being pissed off about this is as unfortunate as it is illogical. The ideology of the Tax Bitcher seems to imply that without taxes and their accompanying rage he or she would be happier. The older I get, the more I doubt that.

Tax rage is just a symptom of how the (largely white) middle and upper-middle classes react to the steady erosion of the American Dream(tm) since the 1960s. No one understood the proper formula for political success in this era and with this demographic better than Ronald Reagan: pick something that angry white people are predisposed to dislike and blame it for their fading prosperity. The statement "_________ is/are taking all of your money" may be Ronnie's greatest legacy. It works with just about any convenient target. Welfare queens. Government. Immigrants. The liberal media. Black people. Any noun will do in a pinch.

People buy so heavily into a system and a way of life, even though it regularly fucks them, that they're willing to defend it more viciously than those who actually benefit from it.
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Explaining one's miserable, unhappy, unprosperous life by confronting the systemic flaws and rampant inequality built into our society is emotionally difficult after a lifetime of defending it.
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Picking a target and blaming the hell out of is easy. All it requires is a willing suspension of rationality, as if dropping the Tax Bitcher's burden from 28% to 20% would solve all of his problems and lead to non-stop, rainbows-out-the-ass happiness.

It is my dime-store opinion that homeschooling is little more than legalized child abuse. Physical abuse and brainwashing are simply opposite sides of the same coin. I'm pretty confident that no one who thinks it is appropriate to control every piece of information that reaches their child should have children in the first place. Your anecdotal story about how you were homeschooled and loved it does not interest me. Good for you. For every one of you there are a dozen socially retarded zombies wandering the Earth with wholly fictional versions of reality in their heads – courtesy of their tinfoil-hatted mom and her Teach the Controversy textbooks.

This video has been making the rounds, taken from an ABC special about a group of homeschooled fundies (homeschooler logic: if we put all of the asocial kids in a room with one another once a month, it counts as social interaction – no different than school, really!) being taken on a tour of a natural history museum. Rather than try to describe it, just watch as much as you can before you vomit.

Let us ignore all of the obvious points of criticism for the moment. If you have ever taught a class in your life – from preschool to med school – the pedagogy on display here has to horrify you. It certainly made me want to projectile vomit. These people seem to have taken the Learning = Rote Memorization formula to an extreme that would shame the worst public grammar school teacher. The concept of "teaching" on display here consists of the guide speaking and then stopping for the children to fill in the missing word. In unison, mind you.

Here we see the three pillars of religious fundamentalism: all-encompassing ignorance, fear, and unquestioning obedience. Nothing says "fundie" quite like a pasty, empty-eyed gaggle of Children of the Corn extras listlessly reciting dogma memorized out of fear of punishment. It's hard to do anything except feel bad for them and baselessly hope that one or two of them will find a way to think for him- or herself. It's a longshot.

On one hand, it's tempting to say Who Cares to the homeschooling issue. After all, homeschooled kids are exceptionally unlikely to bother you or I. The few that enter the economy at any level above Sandwich Artist or Wal-Mart night manager will get degrees at Regent or Patrick Henry before returning to Lizard Lick, NC to embark on a long career of shitting out kids. But the kids didn't volunteer for this treatment. Public and private schools may do a pretty outstanding job of messing up kids, but at least one has a fighting chance of emerging from that environment with cognitive and social skills.