Four Stories

My first note on everyday life concerns how hard it is to understand things when the world is mostly out to screw you.

Everyday life is giving me much to write about, but little time to do so. I set up this Substack newsletter on July 14. I figured I had no need to rush into posting, but the interval to this first post is increasingly embarrassing. I did manage an edit of Substack's "Coming Soon" starter, which I renamed Hello World. It serves as an introduction to me and my writing, and explains some of my thinking in signing up. I'll stay away from repeating that here. Besides, aside from the occasional bot or troll, I can assume that most subscribers know who I am, what I do, and what they're in for. I don't expect to do anything very different here from what I've been doing for the past 25 years: my own personal mix of left politics, smart music, and personal angst.

I have no business plan, and no real agenda. My domain is everyday life -- with the proviso that mine is not necessarily typical -- but my real subject is thinking. I'm conceited enough to think that some of my thoughts may be of use, or maybe just of interest, to others. But it's not just conceit: early on I internalized a set of ethics that emphasize the values of care and sharing. Writing, and publishing that writing for free, is consistent with those ethics. But I'm not here to lecture you, or to show off, and I'm not into virtue signaling. I write to clarify my understanding of the world, and share on the off chance that doing so will be helpful (or maybe just entertaining).

My blog posts will continue as before, but the newsletter should give you an alternate view: more focused on specific topics I want to emphasize, delivered in a more timely fashion, with an option to comment. (I often fear that my posts are like trees that fall unheard in a distant forest.) But I might also pick out bits of old writing to feature, and possibly to reflect on. And at 74, one thing I want to write more on is my own life and my experience of the times I've lived through. For some time now (but especially since Trump) I've been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of subject matter, which risks turning the blog into a huge, featureless pit of scraps and incoherent wailing. I don't really know how this is going to work, but here goes . . .

We've spent a lot of time the last couple weeks trying to replace out 19-year-old car, which was looking at a major clutch repair bill. We don't drive much, but need something. I did a lot of research, but ultimately made a snap decision, which I'm still a bit uncomfortable with. I don't care to go into details here. Suffice it to say that it's taken a lot of time and stress, as pretty much everything else slipped by the wayside. And rather soured me further on how capitalism works these days, while affirming my belief in what technology makes possible.

I have, for instance, fallen way off on listening to new music. Not being able to play CDs in the new car is a major disappointment. Having to deal with radio and/or streaming there is, so far anyway, enough to turn me off music altogether. I don't for a moment buy the argument about "a shift in consumer preferences." That may explain adding services, but "cost savings" don't explain taking CD support away. The net effect is to force you to be connected, instead of allowing one to own their own music.

Only music I've really enjoyed this week was the day I started off with Nick Lowe, Jesus of Cool, and Brian Eno, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy). When I opt for oldies, I usually pick old r&b, often from New Orleans, early rock classics, or for jazz something by Coleman Hawkins or Ben Webster. But the mid-70s was my heyday, and those two were deeply ingrained in my consciousness. (I had both the original UK import and the US version, Pure Pop for Now People; the CD reverts to the original title, but adds "Rollers Show" from the US edition, plus a couple more singles.)

On the other hand, while I was putting off writing this initial newsletter, I wound up writing quite a lot of material for the next Loose Tabs post. I have about 12,000 words so far, and there are still open tabs I need to revisit, plus the usual sources to visit. I'll probably post the whole thing sometime next week, but for here I want to pull out one (rather long) item, which says a lot about the current media ecosystem. This is the odd item out in a section called "Epsteinmania," where I reluctantly cite a half-dozen pieces on the Epstein-Trump scandal. In my introduction, I call the story "a complete waste of time," suggest that it's Trump who keeps the story active, because it's much more innocuous than what he's actually doing elsewhere, and that Democrats are being suckered because they're clinging to an ideal of propriety that a great many Americans (especially among Trump's base) have long since discarded. That doesn't mean that Epstein-Trump stories are always useless: both are/were billionaires, and have behaved in sordid ways that people without their money cannot. But when I saw Bryan Walsh's title, I knew I had to talk about his piece. I just had no idea how bad it could be. Here's the excerpt:

Bryan Walsh [07-26]: Four stories that are more important than the Epstein Files: This piece should have been an easy lay up. Instead, Walsh has done the impossible, and come up with four stories even more inane and useless than the Epstein Files:

1. America's dangerous debt spiral: maybe if he was talking about personal debt, but he means the old federal debt sawhorse, which Trump is pumping up (but lying about, because deficits only matter when Democrats might spend them on people).
2. A global hunger crisis: he's talking about places like Nigeria, with just one side mention of Gaza, even more casual than "surges in food prices driven by extreme weather"; while climate change could be a major story, the most immediate food crises in the world today are caused by war.
3. A real population bomb: the complaint that American women aren't having enough babies.
4. A generational security challenge: here he's complaining about America not being able to produce enough ships and missiles, with the usual China fearmongering, but no regrets about squandering stockpiles on Ukraine and Israel.

The title works as clickbait, as I imagine there are lots of people out there thinking there must be more important matters than Epsteinmania. And I could imagine this as an AI exercise: gimme four topics that sound big and important but aren't widely covered, except for scolding mentions by fatuous frauds. Still, as usual, natural stupidity is the more plausible explanation -- at least the one my life experience has trained my neurons to recognize.

To some extent, the Epstein-Trump scandal recapitulates the conspiracy-mongering after Vincent Foster's death. I don't care about either enough to sort out the sordid details. But this got me wondering about a 1990s edition of "Four stories that are more important than Vincent Foster's death." I'm not going to hurt my brain by trying to imagine what Walsh might come up with, but these strike me as the big stories of Clinton's first half-term:

1. Clinton's surrender of his "it's the economy, stupid" platform, which he campaigned and won on, to Alan Greenspan and "the fucking bond market," effectively embracing Reagan's "greed is good" policies and "the era of big government is over."
2. Clinton's surrender to Colin Powell of his promise to end discrimination against gays in the military, which was not only a setback for LGBT rights but the end of any prospect of a peace dividend following the end of the Cold War, as Clinton never challenged the military again; they in turn were able to dictate much of his foreign policy, laying the groundwork for the "global war on terror," the expansion of NATO, the "pivot to Asia," and other horrors still developing.
3. Clinton's prioritization of NAFTA, which (as predicted) demolished America's manufacturing base, and (less publicized at the time) undermined the political influence of unions and triggered the mass influx of "illegal immigrants" -- factors that Republicans have taken advantage of, not least because they could fairly blame worker hardships on Democrats.
4. Clinton's health care fiasco, a bill so badly designed and ineptly campaigned for that it set the right to health care back by decades (while ACA was better, it still contained the corrupt compromises of the Clinton program, and still failed to provide universal coverage).

It took several years to clarify just how important those stories actually were (or would become). It's taken even longer to appreciate a fifth story, which is arguably even greater and graver than these four: the commercialization of the internet. At the time, this was regarded as a major policy success, but one may have second thoughts by now. The Clinton economy was largely built on a bubble of speculation on e-businesses. While some of that bubble burst in 2000-01, much of it continues to inflate today, and its effect on our world is enormous.

But in 1992-93, Republicans were so disgusted as losing the presidency to a hayseed Democrat like Clinton -- especially one who claimed to be able to do their pro-business thing better than they could -- that they latched on to petty scandal. They flipped the House in 1994, largely on the basis of checking account scandal. Bringing down Clinton was a bit harder, but started with flogging the Foster story. It grew more important over time, despite everyone agreeing that there was nothing to it, because it ensconced Kenneth Starr as Clinton's permanent prosecutor, uncovering the Lewinsky affair, leading to the sham impeachment, and more significantly, his circling of the wagons, which turned the DNC into his personal political machine, eventually securing Hillary Clinton's doomed nomination, and Trump's rise to power.

I'm not really sure yet which four stories I'd pick if I had to write this article -- mostly because there are so many to choose from, and they overlap and are replicated and reflected in various guises everywhere the Trump administration has influence. While the wars trouble me the most, and gestapo tactics initially directed at immigrants are especially flagrant, one also cannot ignore the gutting (and extreme politicization) of the civil service, the use of extortion to dominate various previously independent institutions (universities, law firms, media companies), the carte blanche given to fraud and corruption (with crypto an especially flagrant example of both), and the utter debasement of the "rule of law."

There are also a whole raft of economic issues, which only start with fraud and corruption, but mostly stem from a shift of effective power toward corporations and their financier owners, increasing inequality and further entrenching oligarchy. The emerging Trump economy is not only less efficient and less productive, it is increasingly unfair and unjust, and much fuller of precarity, which will sooner or later cause resentment and provoke resistance, sabotage, and possibly even revolution. Inequality is not just unfair. It is an acid which dissolves trust, faith, and good will, leaving only force as a means of preserving order. Sure, Trump seems cool with that, as well as the Hobbesian hell of "war of all against all," figuring his side has a big edge in guns, and maybe God on his side. But nearly everything we do in the world depends on trust that other people are going to be respectful, civil, orderly. It's hard to imagine coping in a world where our ability to trust the government, other institutions, and other people has decayed, stranding us in a savage jungle of predators.

You might be wondering why I haven't mentioned climate change yet. I've long described failure to act on it as an opportunity cost -- a choice due to political decisions to prioritize other things (like war), but so many opportunities have been squandered that one suspects more malign (or at least ignorant) interests. Although one cannot doubt human responsibility, it is effectively a force of nature now, beyond political agendas, so the more urgent concern is how does government copes with inevitable disasters. With Trump, no surprise that the answer is badly -- even worse than under Biden -- and not just in response but in preparation, even to the ability to recognize a disaster when one occurs.

Climate change may well be the factor that destroys Trump: he can't keep it from happening, he has no empathy for victims when it does, he lacks the ways and means to respond adequately, and having denied it at every step along the way, he has no credibility when his incompetence and/or malice is exposed. It undermines his very concept of government, which crudely stated is as a protection racket, as the people who normally pay him for favors will soon find they are anything but protected. Sure, lots of poor people will be hurt by climate change, but the rich can take little comfort in that, because they own the property that will be devalued and in some cases destroyed -- and even if it doesn't hit them directly, the insurance spikes will do the trick. Businesses and lenders will go under because they can't bear the risks, and no amount of blame-shifting Fox propaganda is going to cover that up.

I could say similar things about AI, automation, and other technological advancements, but the issues there are more complex. Suffice it to say that Trump's let-the-market-and/or-China-decide stance (depending on who chips in the most) won't work. There is much more I could mention. Civil rights enforcement is dead. Does that mean old-fashioned racism will rebound? Antitrust enforcement is dead (provided you bribe the right people, as Paramount just did). Federal grants for arts and sciences are pretty much dead. So is any chance of student loan relief. There is very little but your own scruples to keep you from cheating on your taxes, and who has those these days? Want to talk about pollution? Measles? We're not even very far down the list.

And the kicker is, instead of having all this ridiculous stuff to complain about, we're really in a position to do some extraordinarily good things for practically everyone on the planet. What's holding us back is a lot of really bad thinking. And it's not just Trump and his toady Republicans and their rabid fanbase, although they're easily the worst. I spend a lot of time reading Democrats on strategy, agenda, media, etc., and they still fall way short of what is needed, due to lack of understanding and/or will power. I'd like to think that they at least are capable of empathy, understand the concepts of civil rights and a government that serves all people, and are at least open to reason, but all too often they leave you in doubt.

By the way, only later did I notice that none of Walsh's stories implicate Trump. He gets a glancing mention in the debt story, as Gaza does with hunger, but he's effectively saying that everything else involving Trump is even less important than Epstein. I limited my alternate to Clinton stories, because they were easier to weigh against Foster. There were other big stories of Clinton's first half-term, like the dissolving of the Soviet Union, the founding of the European Union, the Oslo Accords, and even the Hubble Telescope, but I tried to keep my head in the game. Walsh seems to be hoping for another game entirely: one where we can pretend Trump doesn't matter.

I'm not sure whether the election of Donald Trump was because we are facing really serious problems which we simply do not understand and have no idea how to address, or whether it shows that that people think they have so few real problems that they can afford entertainment like Trump instead of actually facing the consequences of our mode of living. The shift from "we" to "they" matters, because we have the problems -- regardless of how critical they really are -- while only a subset of them think that Trump is any sort of answer. (They were wrong, of course. There is no problem that Trump is the solution to. But his slogan, "Trump will fix it," suggests that some people thought we had problems that he could fix. I think Trump's slogan was very effective, especially as Harris made little or no effort to show how very ridiculous the boast was.)

As I will argue, we have many real problems, but most of them are easily addressed if only we can think about them better. Some can be fixed quickly and simply. Some can only be contained, limited, and compensated for. Some may require rethinking cherished concepts, and some may butt up against human nature, which is neither as rigid nor as plastic as many people suppose. I would caution against thinking that any are intractable, although that isn't impossible.

I should also acknowledge that changing how people think will not be easy. Bad ideas persist because they are established, seemingly forever. They are accepted uncritically, and become deeply embedded in our psyches. They can only be dislodged with great difficulty, sometimes by reason, more often by some external shock from reality. But shocks don't guarantee good responses. WWII, for instance, moved many Japanese from militarism to pacifism, while the very different experience moved many Americans from isolationism to faith in their campaign for global hegemony: a far worse idea.

Thus my focus on thinking. And my penchant for sketching out fanciful schemes for more-or-less radical changes. The next Loose Tabs already offers a half-dozen of these, ranging from schemes to salvage what's left of Gaza (which I could extend to include the tarnished soul of Israel) to a restructuring of the banking system. I have dozens of these. At some point I fancy collecting them under Paul Goodman's title: Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals.

In future letters, I may end with a section on records I've been listening to, books I've been reading (or contemplating), perhaps the occasional TV show or movie. While new is to be expected, some may be old. I don't have such a section ready at the moment, and don't want to hold this up just to satisfy a formatting idea. But books and records are constants in my life, so it's likely that I will have such a section in the future, with extras as needed.