Currently Reading:

Polanyi, The Great Transformation. According to a friend, this book figures into Deenan’s Why Liberalism Failed, and, since it is available free online, I started there. Will get to Deenan later, I hope.

50 pages of 375 in snapshot: after reading the forward by Joseph Stiglitz and the introduction by Fred Block, and the first chapter or so, had to google who this Karl Polanyi and these dudes were. Stiglitz is a New Keynesian economist with all the awards and sheepskins; Block is a prominent sociologist.

Keynes was the official economist of the Fabian movement – he was General-Secretary and later president of the Royal Economic Society, which was founded by Fabians to promote their communist views. As a New Keynesian, Stiglitz is one of a long line of Fabian economists, and part of the effort to salvage Keynes from the unfortunate (in the eyes of Marxists) success of the modern world in reducing violence and poverty to previously unimaginable levels. More people live safer, more secure and affluent lives now than ever before in history, and the trends are all good – so, who needs socialism, let alone communism? So New Keynesians focus on what, in the big picture, are blips in the overall trends, and ignore the overall story of success. (1)

Reminder: this is the original Fabian Society coat of arm: a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Fabians are nothing other than Communists, except even more devoted to lies and deception, if that’s possible.

Keep in mind that while Marx was infatuated with economics and legendarily whiled away several years doing research in the British Museum Reading Room, he’s also notorious for his extraordinarily weak grasp of the actual economic activity of the world he lived in, as well as for his use of nonsensical footnotes and references. (2) He established a tradition, in other words.

Block is a Critical Theorist, as are all prominent Sociologists, although it is customary to portray their devotion to Marx as merely one influence among others and a prompt to acting as gadflies against other, more ossified and less Progressive theories. (See: my theory of filters – once the heirs of the Fabians get control of a university department, they can then filter out the non pliable, let alone any outright opponents. After a couple generations, harmony is achieved. This harmony is achieved at the cost of honesty and academic freedom, which, following Gobels and Alansky, is what those enforcing that harmony claim their opponents are attacking. This would be amusing if it weren’t true.) Critical Theory is Marxism as manifested in academia. Take a gander at the home page of the American Sociological Association, and judge for yourself what they’re up to.

Stiglitz and Block are of course effusive in their praise of Polanyi.

Polanyi was also a Fabian, but is said to have a ‘complex’ relationship with Marxism, which, translated into English, means he did not find it expedient to tout his Marxism always and everywhere. His wife Ilona Duczynska worked in the propaganda department of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs and she was a member of the Budapest Central Revolutionary Worker and Soldier Council. So I think we can assume Polanyi had a high degree of sympathy, at least, with revolutionary ideas.

Anticipating a completely predictable read in at least this sense: anything bad or less than perfect that happens where free markets reign will be presented as proof of the conceptual failure of Capitalism; any failures under socialism, up to and including mass murder, will, if acknowledged at all, be attributed to human failings of one sort of another. Further, ‘democratic’ will be used to mean ‘rule by the enlightened few who, as communists, believe they have the right and duty to do whatever they want to the demos in the name of achieving the glorious future.’ This is the sense in which Stalin and Che were men of the people, not despite, but especially when murdering unarmed men, women and children. (3)  History proves socialism correct provided you assume your conclusion as the sole acceptable lens through which history may be viewed.

In the first 50 pages, that’s what I got. Also, there’s the heartfelt sympathy for those poor little people who suffer under the vagaries of free markets that is somehow not present at all for those who suffer under socialism. The theory is pure and correct, after all, so such suffering under socialism cannot be caused by it, while free markets are evil, so that any suffering, no matter how temporal or complicated it causes, no matter how much a blip on an otherwise very hopeful trend, proves that free markets must be snuffed out (along with, as history has shown, any *people* who do not sufficiently hate them. But that’s the small ‘h’ history where people do and suffer things, not the capital ‘H’ History that drives Progress.)

Will review when completed.

 

1. Marx is said to have been revolutionary in his insistence on viewing economic activity as a whole, taking, one might say, a macro view of microeconomics. History is marching forward – what the little people actually do can only be understood as results or even side effects of this march of Progress. New Keynesians are, according to Wikipedia, involved in using microeconomics to prop up Keynes against the persistent claim that his analysis and policies make no sense, and, specifically, that history over the last 50 years or so has shown doesn’t, you know, work. The irony amuses me.
2. I’ve heard this ‘Marx’s footnote and references are nonsense’ comment from a couple of sources that I now cannot of course find; I myself will never live long enough to actually look up the copious footnotes in Capital. I long for someone to write a book on Marx’s footnotes – that, I’d try to read.
3. It’s no accident Fabians were huge proponents of eugenics. especially via the sterilization of the less fit (and one guess who would be defined as ‘less fit’ if they ever gained power).

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American Heresy

OK, that’s a little grand. And I’m posting on Good Friday – I mean, really, I and you have nothing better to do? Onward:

Voting age is in the news. People draw exactly opposite conclusions based on the same facts. A bunch of presumed teenagers are calling for repealing the 2nd Amendment (please – can we stop pretending otherwise?), from which fact we seem to conclude either:

• the voting age should be lowered to 16 (or thereabouts)
• the voting age should never have been lowered to 18/should be raised to 35 (or thereabouts)

Oh, yes, some of these teenagers went through a truly traumatic experience, which is further assumed to to bless their opinions beyond other people’s, and indeed beyond question. This moral high ground is granted despite the wisdom of Rocket Racoon:

Oh, boo hoo hoo! Everybody’s got dead people. It’s no excuse to get everybody else dead along the way!

The kidder in me is sore tempted to point out that the Founders never dreamed of modern medicine and plenty. In their day, the average musket-wielding farmer was dead before 40, and kids bred up by the destitute (who were even more likely to die young) got farmed out to more responsible and successful relatives or sent to orphanages – if they were lucky.  Life was hard. Even attaining 21 years was, for most, an actual achievement, back in 1776.

If they’d have known that any ill-bred, irresponsible jerk was as liable as not to live to 80, on the way to which he might very well breed up a passel of even more ill-bred and irresponsible offspring, why, they would never had allowed voting without some sort of test of mature adulthood. Maybe a firearm proficiency and safety test? Just spitballing here.

Now, before the coffee has fully kicked in, I’m sore tempted to give credence to the theory that progressives are watching in horror as their voting base disappears (note here an historical account of how they got a part of that base in the first place).  If voter ID were required and systems of voting otherwise hardened against fraud (*cough* Chicago *cough*), why, Fabian Socialists and their useful idiots might never win another election! It’s clear that successful people with non-frou-frou college degrees, for example, do not vote for progressive nutcases (e.g., the California government) in very large numbers.

But the products of modern state schooling do – at least, until they butt into some reality. Modern colleges are designed to prevent them from butting into reality for 4 to 5 more years, and to inoculate them against it during that time. It works surprisingly well for a fantasy. So, let’s get more of *those* people on the rolls! People we can count on to be on the Right Side of History, since we’ve spent 12 years of their lives putting them there.

What could go wrong?

There are a number of American Heresies. True to our Puritan roots, we can’t seem to shake the idea that we can build Heaven on Earth if only we establish the right state religion. (Over the years, what exactly the right religion is had changed, but not our faith in the need to establish it.) People just need to cooperate, perhaps even in the business of exterminating those who won’t. Egg, omelette, and all. Only mean people insist that (fallen) human nature stands in the way. NO! If we stamp our little feet hard enough, we can conjure New Soviet Men from the blood and ashes! Don’t make me sad!

But today we consider another heresy: The assumption that politics defines us. We *are* a Democrat or Republican. We *are* a Liberal or Conservative. We *are* enlightened Progressives or fascist scum who should be lined up and shot by designated government officials using appropriately non-scary but nonetheless lethal guns.

You know, the usual buckets.

What, in America, is the ultimate confirmation of our value as human beings? The right to vote. Our role in politics is our role in life. Someone can be – and many are – without mother or father or family, without roots or friends, without God or church. This counts as nothing, we are not allowed to even consider how much being deprived of such things limits or destroys the space in which a person can be human and free. But not being able to vote? Outrage!

Aristotle said that we are political animals. He’s saying that we by nature live in a polis – a city. Human beings by nature live in and by means of relationships. The town or city is the daily functional unit of those relationships. (1)

He’s not saying that being a worthwhile person means being constantly involved in a minutia of government, or even being involved in government at all. It does not mean being a courtesan.

It does not mean having the right to vote.

But starting before the Revolution, with No Taxation without Representation, with tarring and feathering the King’s agents, with Abigail Adams, we drank in the notion that voting = the ultimate confirmation of full personhood.

The political state cannot grant or add to our basic human value. I fear that rootless people unconsciously cling to the fantasy that it can. Without mother or father or family worthy of the names, without acknowledging relationships that supercede any choice to be in them, many people grasp at the demagogue’s promise to give their lives the meaning they are deprived of by the lack of those real relationships. They think they are citizens of the omnicompetent state; they are citizens of no real city on earth, let alone the City of God. They will not have rest.

Before we grant 16-going-on-11 year olds the right to vote, maybe we should think through the point of voting in the first place.

Rather than seeing the running of government as one among many tasks adults must perform in order to provide and protect the space needed for the real, natural relationships that give life meaning, it becomes, somehow, the essential expression of that meaning. It was not enough for Abigail Adams – a thoroughly admirable woman, mother and wife – to be the beloved daughter, spouse and mother she clearly was. She wanted the vote. I get it – she was far more intelligent, educated and prudent than all but a few of the men around her. She assumed that women in general were or could become at least as well qualified to run the government as their fathers, brothers and husbands.

Perhaps she was right. Certainly, we as a nation could do (and have done) much worse than being ruled by the likes of Abigail Adams. What’s missing from the calculation here is that women who are called to be wives and mothers are now expected to also be sufficiently conversant in politics at all levels to vote and rule well. Is this reasonable or desireable from the women’s point of view? Why? Is politics really that empowering, or is it more like taking out the trash or dying in defense of your country?

Why would most women bother, given a choice? Under critical theory, women would bother because they’re victims of oppression, and political action is the only way to move forward on the Right Side of History. But if you truly find your freedom among your family and friends in the community you were granted to live in, and men are not your natural enemies but rather the natural sources and objects of love, would it at not at least bear consideration that the nuisance and duty of government is best left to somebody else? So that one might better focus on what is most valuable and important in life? We see here foreshadowed the ugly myth of the Woman Who Has It All – the job, the kids, the responsibility – except for the relationships that might make those other things worthwhile. The myth becomes a stick, with which to fend off or perhaps beat the reality of the lonely female cube-dweller, whose work is drudgery and whose family is chaos.

What if the running of the city were left, along with war and taking out the garbage, to some subset of adult men, say those 35 and older who have done some well-understood service for their community? That this is generally outrageous and unimaginable is the whole point of this essay. It doesn’t matter, for the argument, if the definition of the cadre of voters is altered to include some women or some younger people – but not everybody. What matters is that voting is seen primarily as a duty, and that this duty exists to protect the real world of relationships in which a person can be free and find meaning.

This duty must be taken up by somebody. That somebody must have the time and energy to fulfill it. From the point of view of the city as Aristotle envisioned it, men have always been more expendable than women and children. Men could and did and do go off to war, and many do not come back. Yet the web of relationships in the city survive. Would the same happen if the women were to leave and the men stay behind? We’re running that experiment now. Preliminary reports are not encouraging.

Again: much more important than who votes and holds office – I don’t really care, except for wanting to exclude as many gullible children of all ages as can be excluded – is recognizing the primacy of natural relationships over political actions. The latter serves the former, not the other way around.

1. The functional big cities Aristotle knew of contained around 50,000 people. Most were smaller.

 

Friday Flotsam

1. Zuckerberg. Ah, Zuckerberg. Not a big fan of armchair psychology unless it’s me that’s doing it. So, grain of salt and all that.

Over the years, have run into a number of people in my position: working with techies without being a techie. People in sales, PR, management, even a retired corporate psychologist. It’s remarkable how the discussion will eventually, usually pretty quickly, get around to the same issue; the blindness of successful techies to how normal people think and react. Stereotypes get that way because they’re so often accurate.

If I have a big Theory of Life, it might be described as Filter Theory: with greater or lesser intent, people are sorted and assigned roles according to filters. Nobody becomes a cop, for example, unless he can tolerate lots of rules and bureaucracy and don’t shy away from the threat of violence. The vast majority of people, it seems to me, would not make very good cops, at least according to the current job description. We find common denominators across all sorts of otherwise different people if they share a profession. (1) Nothing too profound here, just an observation to keep in mind.

Our once and future robot overlord. 

Nobody can become successful in computer technology unless he can tolerate sitting in front of a screen for hours every day and stay focused on increasingly arcane minutia. People with a high need for human interaction need not apply. In fact, finding human interaction baffling or unpleasant would tend to drive people toward careers where they can be successful without having to deal too much with other human beings.

Further, there are kinds of insanity that result in sleeping in a cardboard box or padded cell; there are also kinds that result in becoming CEO or sales leader. In the case of tech, there are many, many really good guys who are aware on some level that they’re not very good at picking up what other people are feeling or thinking. These folks tend to be that sort of shy geek that is easy to love – and who rarely rises much in the hierarchy.

Then there are those who, if not out and out sociopaths, are at least blissfully unaware of how other people think and react. They just assume other people are stupid or ignorant. They are confident that things would go so much better if only they were in charge. In a tech environment, these people tend to become management. Sometimes – woe to us! – they even come up with a good enough idea that they found a company or 3.

Thus, we get the spectacle of Zuckerman. I believe he really, truly does not get how hopelessly arrogant and frankly stupid he looks to normal people. The most terrifying aspect: he’s rich enough to have gotten away with it so far. His ego is probably utterly impenetrable. He is absolutely sure the only problem here is that everybody else is stupid.

I passionately hope somebody finds a way to put him in jail for a year or two. That’s about the only hope we have of getting through to these fools. It’s a slim hope, but it’s about all we’ve got.

2. A discussion of this article took place on this blog. Here we have Science! in all its glory: some sample of people in nations around the world are asked, using a variety of ‘instruments’ no doubt, about how ‘religious’ they are and how ‘happy’ they are. Then, tossing all this ‘data’ in a blender, we are called to conclude that the more religious the people in an area are, the more unhappy the people in that area will be.

Where to even start? Note first of all that it’s not claimed that the it’s same people – in other words, one set of people might be very religious and happy, while another set, let’s say a bigger set, is mildly irreligious and very miserable. The average – whatever that might mean! Average of what, exactly? – might show relatively high religiosity on average and relatively high misery on average, but miss entirely *who* was happy and who was miserable.

Really, too much stupidity to be sorted through. Let’s landry-list this thing, at least the high points:

• Reification. To plot the graphs shown, you would need *numbers*. Happiness, sadness, religiosity are NOT in ANY WAY numerical. Nobody is 0.7 happy, nor 28.334 sad, nor 87% religious. Do not pass go until you understand this. It is simply nonsense to assign numbers to responses on a poll and act like you can then add them up and perform math on them. Simple and complete nonsense. Cooking up an ‘instrument’ that forces people to give numerical answers doesn’t magically make the thing numerical.
• Polls. Undefined terms. So some undergrad needing extra credit shoves a poll into somebody somewhere who has time to answer polling questions, and asks something like: on a scale of 1 to 10, how happy are you? Somebody says 8. Somebody else says 6. Yet another person says 3. Well? Who is happier? WE DON’T KNOW!!!! Happiness is not numerical, and, even if it were, 3 people will each have his own unique and possibly mutually exclusive ideas of what happiness means.
• Self reporting. In America, one routinely asks ‘how you doing?’ and routinely gets a reply such as ‘fine’. In Italy, nobody asks how you are doing, because the answer will be a litany of ills. Yet we assume without any objective check that the American who says 8 is really twice as happy that the Italian who says 4?
• Cultural differences. See above. Even apart from individual differences, some cultures consider themselves happy, others consider it bad form to tout one’s happiness. Yet all answers are treated as the same.
• Religion. The poll assumes that Calvinism is a religion in the same way Islam is, or Hinduism, Buddhism or every flavor of Animism is. Just no. The concept of a devout Animist is absurd. Calling Buddhism a religion in the same way Lutheranism is a religion is absurd. Within each subset, similar problems are revealed by a moment’s reflection: Catholics – a group I know fairly well – consist both of those who were last in a church when baptised and will next be in a church for their funeral, who couldn’t give an account of what the Church believes, who nonetheless see themselves as devout, and those who attend daily Mass and study the catechism, who nonetheless feel themselves but meager Catholics. We count them all the same?

This baby is EXACTLY 9.7365 happy. EXACTLY! It’s SCIENCE!

And so on, across problems with language – do the terms mean the same things across all languages? – sampling questions, consistency, methodology – non of which matters in the least because HAPPINESS AND RELIGIOSITY ARE NOT NUMBERS.

If you call yourself a scientist or even a supporter of science, and fell for this, you are an ignorant fool. Not to put too fine a point on it.

3. Looks like we’re done with the rainy season here in Contra Costa County and perhaps the state as a whole. Last storms are petering out in the eastern mountains, and nothing else is forecast. We typically get very little rain after March.

I got a weighted average of 72.26% (speaking of ridiculous claims of accuracy – but hey, it’s math!) of average rainfall over the 30 rainfall gauges of the Contra Costa Flood Control District. Last year, we had 178% even over 29 gauges. Over the last 2 years, according to my highly suspect but probably about right methodology, we got 125% of average rainfall.

So? I don’t know, but it seems to me we should probably not have to worry about water supply now, except the long-term worry about how we capture, distribute and use it. How about a 50 year project to improve water capture, reduce transportation system loses, examine if we’re using water wisely and returning a large chunk of the Delta to wetlands? Instead of shrill panic? A man’s gotta dream.

1. A favorite example from childhood: read an article, probably in Sports Illustrated, where a guy claimed to be able to tell whether a professional American football player played offence or defense just by looking at his locker: offensive players would have all their stuff neatly hung up and organized; defensive players would just stuff their gear or pile it on the floor. Why? because offensive players who reach professional level have to be able to execute a very specific and detailed plan for each play, while defensive players are filtered by their ability to disrupt those detailed plans. In the article, an exception was pointed out: there was an offensive lineman in this particular locker room whose gear was piled on the floor. A moment of interrogation revealed he’d been a defensive lineman until switched to offense in the pros.

Thought on Black Panther

Some minor spoilers ahead.

As part of a 14 year old’s birthday party, saw Black Panther last night.

Ok, maybe just the Alps. But, seriously?

It was pretty OK. Beautiful to look at and very well acted (if you ignore what I suppose is supposed to be everybody’s generic ‘African’ accent). But I got up at one point to use the men’s room, and all I seemed to miss was how the Himalayas ended up in central Africa. (Really –  isn’t Kilimanjaro the only peak in equatorial Africa that ever gets any snow? Or did I miss a geography lesson? Or are we hiding major mountain ranges now?)

Couple thoughts:

Viewed as mythology,  the Black Panther is fascinating. I’m not much of a comic book or classic pulp guy, most of what I know I got from movies and hearing other people talk about them.  Take that into consideration here.

It seems that the archetype for an American hero is either a vigilante fighting as much against a corrupt system and against bad guys, or a tragic yet honorable character who finds himself the possessor of mystical powers. With of course some overlap. Batman versus Superman, I suppose. Or The Shadow versus Spiderman. Philip Marlowe versus the Cisco Kid? Either way, a lone man, or a lone man with a tiny support team, takes on Evil for the sake of Justice. In Superman’s case, that would be defending the innocent. In Batman’s, part of the tragedy is his love for a city full of the not-so-innocent. Both are good men, motivated in the end by a desire to do good. They are only accidentally public figures.

The Black Panther isn’t one of these. He’s a king, and not just a king but an absolute monarch. His kingdom depends on his virtue for its survival – and not just his, but his ancestors back for thousands of years! The only thing holding him in check are tradition, especially ancestor worship, and some sort of mysticism. The only laws shown to constrain him at all were laws of ceremonial combat – which merely determined who got to be absolute monarch.

As if that isn’t enough fantasy for one movie, it is also imagined that this little nation that could have easily conquered the world given its massive tech advantage, didn’t because something something. Instead, they use all that tech to hide so that, evidently, Wakandans can buy colorful hand-woven baskets from each other in open markets when they’re not inventing nanotech.

(Aside: were the war rhinos a nod to Jared Diamond? He speculates in Guns, Germs, and Steel that the Zulus, who for centuries had better steel tech than contemporary Europeans, might have conquered Europe if they’d only had domesticable mounts  – he even used rhinos as his example!)

In real life, African mysticism has never constrained Africans from slaughtering each other, in the same way neither Buddhism nor Christianity have succeeded in stopping Asians and Europeans from slaughtering each other. But we accept it, somehow, like we accept Superman’s race being super just and peaceful when they’re not blowing up planets (as mentioned above, I’m fuzzy on the details here.) It makes the Black Panther and his people as alien in this respect as the natives of Krypton.

Clearly, Black Panther is meant to some extent as a departure from American superhero stories. I think the better comparison goes back much farther. Camelot leapt to mind as a better match. Not perfect, by any stretch, but better.

Arthur is a king like no other. He seeks first Justice, and the reform and improvement of those around him. His mythical kingdom is an island of high ideals in a sea of brutality and bloodshed. Fabulous and magical weapons are everywhere. The land he trod is in some sense hidden and impossible to exactly locate.  His downfall and the downfall of his kingdom is due to his personal weaknesses as embodied by Mordred.

And that’s about it. With the Gawain from the Orkneys and Palamedes the Saracen, Arthur’s court was symbolically drawn from the ends of the earth, not a monoculture hidden in secret. Arthur came from flawed parents and left a destroyed kingdom behind him – no mythology of millennia of practical perfection.

Yet we await the Once and Future King, who will be God’s chosen instrument to set things aright. That’s the core mythology that Black Panther shares. His inhuman moral strength contrasts with Arthur’s clear personal failings. The vague mysticism that somehow guides T’Challa to seek justice and refrain from exercising his absolute monarchy to his personal benefit contrasts greatly with the concrete demands of Arthur’s Catholicism which Arthur concretely fails.

Of course, people are mostly talking politics. I have my doubts: an absolute monarchy that bans all refugees and refuses all trade with the outside world? Talk about border control. The happy ending isn’t a scene where millions of impoverished Africans cross into Wakanda and are welcomed and taken care of, but rather Wakanda sending way-cool aircraft to Oakland and delegations to the UN. Ummmm – what?

The best part: a black boy is deprived of his father and inheritance and grows up to be a psychopathic mass killer. The man, a king, no less, deprives this child of his father then abandons him to his fate when it was well within his power and was his duty to care for him. This act of betrayal ends up almost costing that man his own son and almost destroys his kingdom. N’Jadaka is pretty much Mordred, in other words. That all this begins in Oakland is almost too broad. The message here would be?

Possibly the weakest part of the movie is N’Jadaka’s sort of reconciliation with T’Challa at the end. We are given the ‘this is a bad, bad man’ scenes that make N’Jadaka not just a bad man, but an insane, evil man – he simply kills his lover in cold blood to get at Klaue  and shows not the slightest remorse over this or any other of his dozens of kills. Yet, he gets almost soft at the end. Next to the fantasy elements of an absolute and absolutely virtuous monarch of an invisible country, this deathbed conversion of sorts is the least realistic thing about the movie. That, and the Himalayas.

Anyway, rough outline of what’s going through my mind at the moment. Subject to revision as my loyal readers point out just how crazily I missed EVERYTHING about this flick. 😉

This Could Prove Useful

Something I came across on the interwebs:

That is all.

What The Results of Schooling Look Like in Practice

I’m sure we all have examples. The flip-flop on the importance of The Memo provides a very real current one, as clear as Winston Smith feeding the Memory Hole. Up until The Memo’s release, we were told by all the usual suspects that releasing such delicate classified information would be the End of the World as We Know It, a dastardly betrayal of our internal spies.

Then, upon release, The Memo became a nothingburger.

We have always been at war with Eastasia. How can millions of people be wrong?

A few years back, when the IRS’s treasonous perfidy came to light, I saw first hand, as K remarked, “everything we expect from years of government training.” In failing to approve tax exempt status of groups that would oppose the current administration, the IRS hamstrung any grassroot efforts of Obama’s opponents. That’s treason, however you dress it up.

On the day the news escaped into the wild despite the best efforts of the press to ignore it, my lovely niece, a lawyer with multiple degrees from elite universities, looked a little baffled. Then, the press  nothingburgered it. And the next day she assured me it was no big deal, had been completely overblown.

A lawyer said this.

She just needed to wait to hear what the cool kids were saying, and that became the reasonable, right position. Shoving news from a few hours or minutes earlier down the chute to history’s incinerator is, frankly, a small, a very small price to pay to maintain one’s membership in good standing with all the Right People. The trick is that, with 16 or more years of training, the knee jerk reaction, the jettisoning everything needed to maintain the consensual hallucination, is so well ingrained that the process stands no chance of rising to consciousness. Like the children of alcoholics, the well schooled have learned thoroughly that the price of contradicting daddy’s version of events cannot possibly be worth the trouble. The little kids learn from the older ones to shut up and get in line, even if mommy’s story makes no sense and contradicts the evidence of their eyes. It’s a basic survival technique.

Peace, after this fashion, is way more important than the truth. What is truth, anyway? These victims are almost blameless. As with most of us in some way or another when it comes to our besetting faults, it would take a miracle to make them see themselves.

Good luck storming the castle!

Which brings us to the theological point of all this: Christ says He is the Way, the Truth and the Life. We are to defend small ‘t’ truth in the name of big ‘T’ Truth. For the devil is the father of lies. We are not asked, usually, to swallow the big lie that is death all at once. Rather, we are inured, one little bite at a time, until we will swallow the manifest contradictions and hypocrisy of our betters without a hiccup. We develop the unhingeable jaws of the snake, our maws stretching wide such that, after proper training, we can swallow things unimaginable to the observer, things way bigger than our heads.

Chicago & the FBI

I can’t shake this, but I also lack time to do the level of research to even make it a good working theory. So take this as the speculation it most certainly is:

‘Bathhouse’ John Coughlin, Alderman for 46 years. Good Irish boy, threw a hell of a party. Hey, what’s a little prostitution, gambling and racketeering among Paddies? It’s not like it’s your sons and daughters having their lives destroye – oh.

When looking at the history of Chicago for the last century or so, one thing is clear: it has been run by the Mob. Much of the time, such as under ‘Bathhouse’ John Coughlin in the early 20th century or Fred Roti in latter part, the Mob’s running of the city was quite overt – these men were both well-known criminals and elected officials, and you crossed them at your very real peril.

Other times, the Chicago Outfit has been more subtle – not a lot more subtle, but at least the guys in charge weren’t widely known to be made men. But any way you slice it, Chicago politics has been Mob politics for generations now.

And it still seems to be. I’ve looked in vain for the reform moment, the point where somebody cleaned house, threw people in jail, and made a fresh start. Nope. When Fred Roti, a made man dying of cancer, was ‘caught’ by somebody wearing a wire – a wire that, oddly enough, never caught anybody else doing anything illegal – he went to jail in 1993 without too big a fuss, and left a ‘legacy’ of having launched the careers of dozens of current and former Chicago politicians.

At what point, then, did political control of Chicago pass from criminal hands? It never did seems to be the only viable answer.

I have friends and acquaintances who are proud Chicagoans. They seem to more or less consciously make the self-fulfilling assumption that all politicians are crooks. Certainly, nothing in their immediate experiences would prove them wrong. Therefore, all that really matters is that the crooks keep enough of a lid on their criminal activities so that it can plausibly be maintained that it isn’t *that* bad, and keep the pork rolling to the constituents.

You think this is too harsh, maybe? Consider the Boston Southies, who treated Whitey Bulger as a hero because a) he was one of them; and b) he sometimes played Robin Hood and threw around a little cash. His willingness to support his brother Billy Bulger’s political career was standing up for his brother, like any good Southie would do. Only when he was tried for murder as an old man did it seem to dawn on people that the guys getting murdered and the families left behind were most often ones of them, too. It might even have been them getting murdered or left widowed. But, like retractions in the New York Times, their changes of heart were relatively muted.

Coughlin and his partner and fellow alderman Michael ‘Hinky Dink’ Kenna were generally thought very kindly of by the people of Chicago. True, under their management the perhaps less lovable but vastly more, shall we say, efficient Italians took charge –  Johnny Torrio & Al ‘Scarface’ Capone, who in turn more or less handed off much of the leadership duties to the Roti clan.  Fred, the youngest Roti, seems to have handed off leadership to a committee. I suspect Rahm Emmanuel runs it now, or at least is the designated figurehead (although Rahm’s intelligence and ego would appear to make him a poor choice as a figurehead. Unlike a certain former president, who would seem to have the perfect skill set for the job. But I digress.)

Business as usual, in other words.

Hinky Dink Kenna and a younger, more dapper Coughlin.

Back to Chicago. So, as I said, the only viable theory about Chicago politics is that it remains in the hands of the heirs of Fred Roti, his hitman father Bruno ‘the Bomber’ Roti, Al Capone,  Johnny Torrio, Big Jim Colosimo, Coughlin and Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna.

The Untouchables famously got Al Capone. While the Mob works hard and with considerable success at making sure it has control of local law enforcement, the FBI has, as in the case of Capone, proven on occasion more difficult. The FBI got Roti, but under conditions that make it pretty clear Fred was taking one for the team. I’m pretty sure – and here’s where I should stop and do some research, but I just don’t have time right now – that the FBI has been deeply involved in the endless stream of Chicago politicians and mobsters (but I repeat myself) who have been caught and convicted.

So here’s my little conspiracy theory: one of the goals of the Obama presidency was to reign in the FBI. Not that Obama himself would get involved in this – he seems to be the Warren G. Harding of this age, except without Harding’s self-awareness – but he brought essentially his entire team with him from Chicago to the White House. In that team were certainly people that the likes of Roti knew they could work with, as it were. A key guy here, an informant there, a guy in position to put the brakes on over there – and, voila! While you may not be able to stop the rank and file agents from doing their jobs, you can make sure nothing much comes of it.

All this is brought to mind, of course, by the items in the news describing how, shockingly, a number of people in the FBI seems to have their loyalties first to Obama and then Clinton, and only second, if at all, to their duties. This is exactly what I would have expected, and is one of the reasons for the clear panic that seems to have gripped many in Washington with the election of Trump. I’m guessing – and here, again, is mere speculation – that there’s a lot of agents with a lot of dirt, starting just below the head honchos.

I suppose we’ll see. Or, if the Outfit is still at the top of its game, maybe we won’t.