Schadenfreude

 schadenfreude /shäd′n-froi″də

Pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others

I have never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.

--Commonly misattributed to Mark Twain. (Clarence Darrow once said something similar, but his was more refined. I’m sticking with Twain.)

While schadenfreude is not the loftiest form of human emotion, it has its place. The world is full of people who deserve some form of retribution that is beyond man’s ability to deliver. We have to settle for fate to handle it for us, if it cares to.

While I am genuinely disturbed at the prospect of many good people suffering under much of what The Orange Menace proposes to do – woman’s health restrictions, economy-damaging tariffs, citizens swept up in deportation raids, whatever else he comes up with – I take the edge off these concerns by anticipating how MAGA voters will react when some of this hits home and

·       Grocery prices – especially produce – skyrocket because there’s no one left to work the fields;

·       Other prices go up dramatically because companies aren’t going to eat those tariffs all by themselves;

·       They or a loved one is swept up in a broadly-based deportation raid. (Remember, significant numbers of Hispanics voted for him);

·       The veterans’ benefits they depended on are cut;

·       Things I haven’t thought of yet.

I’ll do what someone in my position can to help, but my “official” policy will be to ask anyone who complains about such things who they voted for.

If they say anything other than “Harris,” my only response will be to say, “Suffer.”

But I’ll be smiling when I say it.

Outrage Appropriation

 Earlier I wrote about Democrats not voting in sufficient numbers to get their way in elections, even when that way is what a majority of people want. I also mentioned another Democratic/Progressive problem was how they tend to turn on each other when the going gets tough. I’ll get to that today.

The Beloved Spouse™ belongs to a Facebook group of women committed to Progressive values. Everybody got along swimmingly until Harris lost. Now people who were all for wearing Chucks and pearls and blue bracelets are calling others out for continuing to do so after the election.

From what I can tell, this appears to be partly a racial issue. At least one Black woman called out white women for “letting us down again.” When it was noted that white woman do not vote as a monolith, then original complainant disagreed. Vigorously.

That was stupid enough on its face. What followed was worse. The accusation was made that white women who continue to wear their Chucks and pearls and blue bracelets are endangering marginalized groups by doing so. It’s allegedly virtue signaling to do these things now, and that white women shouldn’t point out how they may have stood up for a gay friend for fear of further endangering them.

That’s not just disappointing. It’s bullshit.

Wearing something to identify oneself as protesting endangers no one except the person so attired. Once a common theme for this appears – as did with the Chucks etc. – I’ll be all in on it. As it is, I wear a pair of rainbow sweatbands when I leave the house to show my support for the queer community. If people are willing to put themselves out there, who is anyone to complain?

Then  there are the white women who attack other white women for disagreeing, saying they can’t possibly know what it’s like to live as Black/brown/queer in this country. I have a news flash for them: neither do you. I love the term TBS has coined for this: outrage appropriation. Expect to see it in future posts.

It is not “performative” to show sincere support for others, however it’s done. Not everyone can afford to make donations, just as not everyone has the time to protest, and not everyone has the personality – or health – to organize or too actively take part in a group. They’re doing what they can. Shutting this down altogether can allow the MAG-ites to believe what they’re doing is all right with us. It’s not, and any way we can show this in greater numbers should be accepted in context.

This is not a new phenomenon. A while back a transgender acquaintance of mine posted to Facebook about a low passed in Tennessee(?) that required commercial establishments to display a sign if they allowed people to use the rest room of the gender they identified with. Clearly this was an attempt by the state to shame these establishments in the belief “good Christians” would neither shop nor shit there.

Why not, I suggested, use these signs to identify trans-friendly business and direct commerce their way, thus creating exactly the outcome the lawmakers didn’t want. Let’s see how quickly antagonistic business become more accommodating if being “good Christians” affected their wallets.

My acquaintance accused me of standing up for an abhorrent law. I thought I hadn’t made myself clear about how this could be a good thing for the trans community and was shot down eve harder. Turned out it wasn’t enough for me to support trans people; I had to support them in the way this woman wanted it done or I was as bad as the transphobes.

This, too, is bullshit. It’s also not the first time I encountered it. When someone who has no vested interest in standing up for you outside of a sense of decency wants to stand up for you, let them. Life is hard, we need all the help we can get. Support is where you find it, and that person may well not have the same ideas on how to accomplish things as you do. That doesn’t make them wrong. The best decisions are made through the most diverse set of inputs. Consider anything that might help until you know it will be counterproductive.

Needless to say, she and I are no longer even acquaintances.

 

Where Did All the Harris Votes Go?

 I’ve been keeping my head down since the election, in part because I don’t need to see or hear the venting I knew would go along with it. The Beloved Spouse™ is made of sterner stuff and kept me relatively current.

A couple of things are becoming clear to me. Neither are surprises. Both are disappointing.

Democrats lose pivotal elections because

1.    Low turnout

2.    A tendency to turn on each in a heartbeat.

From the New York Times:

Counties with the biggest Democratic victories in 2020 delivered 1.9 million fewer votes for Ms. Harris than they had for Mr. Biden. The nation’s most Republican-heavy counties turned out an additional 1.2 million votes for Mr. Trump this year, according to the analysis of the 47 states where the vote count is largely complete.

Apparently not enough people understood the assignment.

Altogether, Harris lost almost eight million former Biden voters. I’d like to give Democrats more credit than they seem to deserve for knowing what was at stake. The only other explanation for the falloff in Democratic votes is that too many stayed home. Total votes cast were down far less than the number of votes Harris lost compared to Biden in 2020.

This lends credence to something I have believed since the riots in Ferguson, Missouri. I was surprised to find a town that was 70% Black had no Black elected officials, and no more than a handful (One? It’s been a while) of Black city employees. The only explanation I could come up with was that Blacks weren’t voting, at least not in sufficient numbers to make a difference.

My understanding is that this has changed since the riots. Enough people got pissed off enough to pull the old “I’m not going to put up with this anymore” and get a government that better reflected their needs and desires.

I use Ferguson as an example not to pick on Black, but because what happened there crystallized my thoughts on why Democrats so often leave elections with unresolved grievances even though registered Democrats have outnumbered registered Republicans for years. I’m reminded of it every time I read of how people are adversely affected by some short-sighted or mean-spirited policy in their state. The power grid in Texas or abortion to name a couple. If the elected officials who put these things into place get re-elected  the only conclusion I can draw is that the people of that state are okay with it and should be left to enjoy the fruits of their decision.

But then we read reports of how a majority of people in the state are actually against that policy, which leads me to modify the above statement to:

“the people of that state who could be bothered to get off their asses and vote are okay with it and should be left to enjoy the fruits of their decision.

“But what about voter suppression?” What about it? If I knew I faced the possibility of deportation – and let’s not kid ourselves, they’re going to deport as many citizens as they can get away with – I’d stand in line in freezing rain all goddamn night if that’s what it took to vote. I’d check on my registration status and do whatever I could to vote early or by mail if those were options.

Focus groups showed that large majorities chose Harris’s policies over The Orange Menace’s when they were presented side-by-side without telling people who proposed what. The only explanation for her dismal showing is that Harris supporters stayed home. They may have had their own reasons for this but the factor that can’t be ignored is that they just. Didn’t. vote.

So at the risk of being even more of a prick than usual, my policy for the next four years, upon hearing someone complain about how the federal government is being run, will be to ask if that person voted.

If they voted for Harris, we can talk. Maybe comfort each other and discuss what we can do better next time.

If they voted for The Orange Menace, we can still talk. We may end up arguing, but there can be a conversation.

If they didn’t vote at all, they can tell their story walking.

The next post talks about the internecine warfare of the Progressives.

We're Gonna Have to Work Together on This

 (This blog originally carried the title “From the Home Office,: where I posted comments from 2005 – 2013. It has been on hiatus since then as I gradually moved toward posting my opinions on Twitter and Facebook. Recent events have prompted me to re-open and re-brand it to reflect the times. Please feel free to poke around in the archives and to hold be accountable for any evolving positions.)

I am a straight cisgendered white man in his late sixties. While my politics are left of center, I value traditional conservative perspectives and agree with more than a few. What I cannot abide is how the internal corruption of the Republican Party has bred the loathsome entity that is MAGA.

There was a time when my political views would have been described as “New England Republican:” socially liberal and fiscally conservative. The social element comes first. Government is uniquely suited to provide things people cannot provide for themselves. Infrastructure. Defense. Public safety. Food that is safe to eat, water that is safe to drink, and air that is safe to breathe. Affordable medical care. There’s more, but you get the picture.

The fiscally conservative part means I dislike spending money I don’t have. I’ll save for something before I’ll go into debt for it. Sometimes it can’t be helped. If the roof or foundation develops a fundamental flaw, I may have to go into debt to repair it. Few people can pay cash for a new car. Mortgages are long-term debts. All of these are parts of life.

The two perspectives are not mutually exclusive. We live in the wealthiest nation in history. There are people living here who are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars – millions, even – for a baseball card. They can afford to pay more for the general welfare. They’ll never miss it.

It has been said that a man who is not liberal when young has no heart, and one who is not conservative when old has no brain. This is bullshit. I was much more conservative as a teen than I am now; then I joined the Army. I saw and did things I had no idea about before, and I never left the country. The more I experienced, the more I learned, the more I looked at things from other points of view.

This led me to become a firm believer in treating people the way I’d like to be treated. This is so self-evident to me I have to assume everyone feels that way, which leads to what I call King’s Corollary to The Golden Rule: If someone interacts with me like an insensitive prick, he must want to be treated that way. It would be impolite not to oblige him. Or her.

Among the reasons I restarted this blog is I no longer identify as liberal; I’m a pragmatist. I’m willing to listen to ideas from either side of the aisle, so long as two conditions are met:

1.    They have to have a realistic chance of working.

2.    They have to benefit more people than the inconvenience.

So don’t tell me building a wall will solve the immigration problem. It won’t.

Don’t tell me cutting taxes for the rich – again – will stimulate the economy and balance the budget. It hasn’t in forty years of practice. Why would it now?

Don’t tell me voter suppression cost Kamala Harris the last election. It didn’t.

Don’t tell me “abortion” and “women’s health” are synonymous. They aren’t.

I’ll do my best to keep these posts relatively brief and on topic, typically the 600 – 800 words of a traditional newspaper column. I have long said the Internet needs editors and do not intend to add to the problem.

I expect I’ll come down harder on the right than the left – those who voted to make president a man not fit to run a whorehouse laundry showed more about their character than his – but I also have little patience with the purity tests too many on the left apply to measure wokeness.

All I want to do here is point out where we may be missing something that could help. Maybe get a passerby to think of something they’d not thought of before. I promise to make every effort not to be the old man railing at clouds or hollering for kids to stay off my lawn.

I need to work some things out for myself. So does this country. If anything I say here can contribute to even one person becoming willing to look at a different perspective – not necessarily change their mind, but maybe see where the other side is coming from – then this blog will be a rousing success.

There will be no regular schedule; I’ll post as things come to mind. I’ll send new post notifications through Facebook and BlueSky. Feel free to share them and to comment either here, or there. Comment moderation will be turned on, but only to weed out spam; all on-topic comments will be allowed to stand.

I hope we can start, and maintain, a cordial place to disagree on the way to finding common ground. And that you’ll come with me.

 

I Hope Some Day This Post Will Seem Quaint and Foreign

I work almost exclusively from home now, which means I interact with far fewer people than in the past. The more I learn about people, I’m good with that.

Two gay friends of ours celebrated their first wedding anniversary the other day. The Beloved Spouse made a card for them; I delivered it. (I wouldn’t want anyone to think my contribution went no farther than a signature.) Last night I received a thank-you note, in which the money quote was:

We've both lost friends over their insistence that they "have no problem with us choosing to be gay" but they cannot recognize our relationship as a marriage.

I have no problem with such people choosing to be assholes, but I cannot recognize them as fully functional human beings.

In have several gay friends. (That I know of.) In all but one case, we were friends before I knew they were gay. Learning their sexual preference did not alter any of the things that made us friends. They had the same personalities, the same tastes, the same senses of humor, and enjoyed the same sports, music, television and movies. Nothing about them changed. Discovering they were gay was, to me, not unlike becoming aware they liked a style of music that did not interest me, or were addicted to Top Chef, or engaged in a sport in which I have no interest. (Yeah, I know…)

To allow same sex couples to have the same options as heterosexuals when it comes to marriage seems to be self-evident in the Preamble to the Constitution many homophobes claim to hold so dear. They are just as entitled to pursue happiness as any of us. As for the Biblical issues, I’m tired of God-fearing “Christians” only reading as far as Malachi. Even I am tolerant enough to understand there are those whose religious beliefs cannot accept homosexual behavior. Fine. If your church doesn’t want to perform or accept same-sex marriages, don’t. Christians are generally advised to follow St. Augustine’s admonition to “love the sinner but hate the sin.” Make an effort. (Do not take the liberty to consider this to be an anti-religious rant. It’s just that many homophobes like to dress their prejudices in religious robes in an effort to give them a veneer of respectability.)

Here’s an insight for homophobes: gays are just like you are. (Which is probably what scares them.) I’ve shared locker rooms with friends I knew to be gay; I’m sure I’ve done so with others I didn’t know about. Not one has ever made an advance toward me. I know of no gay person who would attempt to recruit someone—even if we grant the possibility that sexual preference is a choice—not because they’re ashamed of being gay, but because they’re painfully aware of the bullshit that must be endured.

Gays are parents, teachers, cops, athletes, soldiers, accountants, comedians, assholes, philanthropists, humble, arrogant, smart, stupid, loyal, faithless, religious, atheists, Buddhists, violent, passive, alcoholics, teetotalers, activists, and sloths. Just like everyone else. This is a line that need not be drawn, but, if you insist, you might enjoy Mississippi, which only last week got around to admitting slavery is a bad thing. You’ll fit right in on the wrong side of history.

So, Now What?

Most of you probably assume I’m voting for Obama, given the breakdowns I gave of him and Romney the past couple of days. Not so fast.

Our political system is broken from stem to stern. I don’t mind how much money gets spent. Why shouldn’t as much money be spent deciding who runs the joint as is spent advertising beer or gasoline? The issue is where the money comes from, and how much accountability those donors demand. We’re in an era of openly transactional politics, where, too often, you get what you pay for, and the long-term interests of the country as a whole get short shrift.

When I first became politically aware, the great debate in America was how best to take care of those who most needed it. Now the debate centers on whether we should take care of those people at all. The parties have hardened their positions and changed the rules to make it harder to find common ground. The voters complain, blaming the other side more every day, then dig in to support their favored positions, hardening the partisan lines.

What is really needed is a more parliamentary form of government. Five parties would do nicely. There would be the Tea Party on the extreme right, a counterweight just as far to the left, then basic liberal and conservative parties, and the Libertarians. No party would have enough votes to pass anything on its own, but no party would have enough votes to block anything on its own, either. They’d all have to work together.

That’s not going to happen. The existing parties have things too good for themselves. What can be done by the average voter, who may lean one way or the other when discussing whose fault it is but can agree this is a mess? How can a message be sent to say we’re not happy?

Don’t vote for either party.

I’m not saying stay home. That’s not a protest; it’s abdication. I’m not saying throw out all the incumbents. That will only create a Won’t Get Fooled Again scenario. (“Meet the new boss, Same as the old boss.”) Pick minor party candidates. It doesn’t even matter so much who they are, though if you find someone who aligns well with you, go for it. Your candidate won’t win, but your vote won’t be wasted if enough of us do it. If the major parties see other parties are siphoning off four or five times as many votes as usual, they may have to sit up and take note.

Don’t be stupid about it. This is best done in election where there is no real contest. We still have to live with the results of our actions, and you don’t want to cut off your nose to spite your face. (See “Conservatives who voted for Ross Perot, 1992” and “Liberals who voted for Ralph Nader, 2000”) Pick your spots. I live in Maryland, where Mitt Romney has as much chance of winning as he does of becoming pope. My House and Senate races are no contests, as well. Since my vote doesn’t really matter in that context—we know who is going to win—I might as well try to say something with it.

I looked at my available options and will vote for the Green candidates in each race. Not because they’ll win, or even because I want them to win. I’ll vote for them because I don’t have a better way to show I have had enough of the status quo.

Mitt Romney

Yesterday the topic was Barack Obama’s plusses and minuses as president. Today is Mitt Romney’s turn.

I have been voting in presidential elections since I became eligible in 1976, when I voted for Gerald Ford over Jimmy Carter. That makes thirty-six years; this will be my tenth presidential campaign. In all that time, I have never seen a more cynical, calculated campaign than what has been put together by Mitt Romney and his team.

The election is upon us and Romney still has not put forth plausible numbers to show which deductions he’d do away with to offset the tax cuts he proposes. We’re supposed to trust him. How much trust has he earned?

He tacked harder right than any of his primary opponents, having farther to go after his tenure as governor of Massachusetts. When asked if Romney had moved too far right last March, senior campaign advisor Eric Fehrnstrom replied, “"I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It's almost like an Etch-A-Sketch. You can kind of shake it up, and we start all over again." English translation: Nothing we said before counts. We’ll say whatever each audience wants to hear.

Later in the campaign, Republican pollster Neil Newhouse let this slip, when questioned about the accuracy of a claim in a recent ad: “We're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”

Politicians make their livings through playing fast and loose with the truth; it’s why people dislike them in general. (Sometimes on principle.) They deceive, fabricate, mislead, dissemble, prevaricate, and misrepresent. Rarely do they flat out lie, and I have never seen a presidential campaign so willing to say, “So what?” when caught. What will Romney actually do if elected? It’s hard to say, though it’s safe to predict he’ll do whatever is most politically expedient at the time.

Gaffes are part of the political theater, never more so than in this day of You Tube and camera phones. Too much is made of them, even in debates. Candidates speak millions of words on the campaign trail, usually while handling multiple responsibilities on little sleep. They’re going to say something stupid once in a while. Still, Romney’s comment in the third debate (“Syria is Iran’s route to the sea.”) is disturbing on multiple levels.

It’s not a one-time misstatement; he’s made the same claim at least five times over the past year. It doesn’t take Magellan to look at a map to see Iran has a long coast (1,100 miles), and does not border on Syria. (Note: it has been said Romney means Syria is Iran’s route to the Mediterranean. They’d still have to go through Iraq—friend or not, that will not go unnoted—and to what end? To take on all of NATO’s navies, when whatever fleet Iran can muster still has to go around Africa?) Romney either doesn’t care what he said is not true, or—what? Someone must have told him. Shown him a map. Something. Is this the person we want making war or peace decisions?

Another concern has to do with Romney’s ability—or willingness—to empathize, or even care about, people less fortunate than himself. Lyndon Johnson was a world-class SOB; Ronald Reagan was the original presidential champion of trickle-down economics. Both were able to see what needed to be done when it was needed most by the most people, set aside some differences, and get it done.

He famously said 47% of the people in this country—presumably those who pay no federal income tax—“Believe they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.” Romney either lacked the curiosity to find out—or didn’t care—that those who do not pay are predominantly those living on Social Security, disability, have legitimate deductions (itemized deductions, tax credits for education, and the income tax exemptions for everything from disability payments to interest on municipal bonds), or work and don’t make enough money to reach even the minimum threshold for income tax, even though they do pay Social Security and Medicare taxes. Reagan would have seen the breakdown and asked what could be done to help some of those people, especially those who flat out didn’t make enough money to qualify; Johnson would have offered to kick Romney’s ass for him.

It’s become a joke, but how many people do you know put their dog on top of the car for a long trip so the luggage can ride inside? That’s not politically relevant, but it says something about the kind of person we’re dealing with.

So, who will I vote for? Come back tomorrow. It might surprise you.

Barack Obama

The Beloved Spouse will be happy to tell you I’m no Obama booster. What he says he wants to do is generally what I think needs to be done, but he too often leads from behind. When the Tea Party was savaging the Affordable Care Act for its “death panels” in town hall meetings, shouting down any reasonable discourse, he alone had the pulpit to speak to the nation to describe exactly what end of life counseling is, and how badly many people need it. He didn’t. He did much the same with the original stimulus plan, as well as Dodd-Frank. Their passages were far more due to the efforts of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid than to Obama, but, like the quarterback on a football team, he gets both too much credit and too much blame for the results.

His record on executive decisions is no better. Joe Biden had to (probably inadvertently) shame him into coming out for same sex marriage. He allowed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” to go away when he could have ordered it as Commander-in-Chief. (Doing so summarily would have been a tough call, but he could have pushed for it more than he did. As it was, he accepted a fait accompli, hardly a sign of stellar leadership.) Guantanamo still holds prisoners.

On the other hand, he does have accomplishments. The Affordable Care Act is law, and will, over time, prove to be a major advancement in solving our health care problems. Dodd-Frank will help to avoid the kinds of cumulative disasters that led to the crash of 2008. The stimulus, while not big enough to pull us out of the Great Recession, kept things from being worse than they are. He has come around on some things, such as Gay Marriage, instead of digging in his heels.

The facts are, he did quite a bit, and quite possibly would have done more had he faced an opposition interested in governing as a loyal opposition, instead of treating the past four years as a campaign to rid themselves of Barack Obama. This is not a casual excuse on Obama’s behalf. Senate Minority Mitch McConnell publicly stated his prime objective would be to deny Obama a second term. Record numbers of filibusters have shown this to be no idle boast.

Republicans have criticized Obama for not working with them, of failing to reach across the aisle to compromise, yet it is they—especially in the House—who have consistently refused to negotiate in good faith. The prime example comes from the Grand Bargain negotiations between Obama and Speaker John Boehner to reach a deal on the deficit. The original plan was to make one dollar in spending cuts for each dollar of taxes raised. Boehner took that back to the House, and was told in no uncertain terms by the Tea Party wing of his own party—which makes up no more than 20% of the Republican caucus—that it was unacceptable. So Boehner went back and cut a deal for two dollars in cuts for each dollar of revenue. Obama agreed; the Tea party cut him off at the knees again. A three-to-one ratio was offered. Six-to-one.

After a while, the Republicans’ true position came out: no revenue increases at all. The deficit would have to be controlled exclusively through spending cuts, which would fall disproportionately on those who could least afford them. It can only be concluded this was what they had been shooting for all along. The negotiations were shams. Obama’s primary fault was in allowing himself to be jerked around for as long as he did.

This brings the argument full circle, to a lack of leadership. He didn’t spend his political capital when he had some, which was right after the 2008 election, when he had an enthusiastic base and ample majorities in both houses. Political capital does not gather interest if ignored; it withers like an unused muscle. When Democrats lost the House in 2010, Obama was more interested in conciliation than in leadership, only becoming vocal on the situation when the presidential campaign began in earnest. Say what you want about Obama and his predecessor, George W. Bush had far better leadership skills. He may have led this country off a cliff, but he knew how rally the troops.

Tomorrow we’ll talk about Mitt Romney.