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Friday, March 31, 2017

What Star Trek Can Teach Us About the Danger of Ideological Purity

It's not every decade that I get to see firsthand what is meant by a work of fiction being "ahead of its time." Star Trek is certainly no stranger to this; the original series boasts the first interracial kiss on US television, at a time when people were burning down radio stations for playing Janis Ian's "Society's Child." It also featured a Russian character played by an actor of Soviet descent at the height of the Cold War.

But 24 years ago, the third series of the franchise premiered: Deep Space Nine. And over the course of the show, the story would take twists and turns that, re-watching it today in the current political climate, seem oddly...prescient.

I'm not saying Obama was the real-world Benjamin Sisko. But where we are as a nation is right around the end of the show's fifth season. The Cardassians have taken the station. The Dominion is on the move.

While there has been plenty of analysis of the show as a World War II allegory (which it was obviously meant to be), in relation to today's crisis, I think one of the most important points the series makes is that when dealing with existential threats, there is a razor-thin line to walk that will get you through to the other side. Deviate from that line in any way whatsoever? And you'll either end up as the monster you're fighting, or you'll be torn limb from limb by it.

Two sixth season episodes in particular illustrate this point: "Rocks and Shoals" and "In the Pale Moonlight."

"Rocks and Shoals" is an illustration, bit by bit, of how Major Kira -- who survived the series' equivalent of the Holocaust as a child -- slides into a mindset of rationalization and cooperation in order to survive the Cardassian takeover of the station. A kind of Stockholm Syndrome that one of her people's religious leaders, Vedek Yassim, tries over the course of the episode to clue her into. Eventually, Yassim commits a public suicide in protest of the occupation. And it's only after that, that Kira begins to realize that she's being complicit in not only her own oppression, but that of the entire Alpha Quadrant.

"In the Pale Moonlight" involves Sisko and Garak hatching a plan to get the Romulans into the war as allies against The Dominion. The plan involves manufacturing evidence that The Dominion were planning to violate the non-aggression pact with the Romulans. The short version is that while it doesn't go off exactly as planned, it does happen. Albeit with more unnecessary death and manipulation than Sisko originally wished for.

What these two episodes represent are the two fates on either side of that razor-thin line. Giving up all of your scruples in order to survive, as Kira did, or trying to keep your hands clean, as Sisko tried to do.

We have, at the moment, two extreme factions of progressives. The first faction are The Collaborators. People who think they can compromise with Trump's regime in order to escape unscathed, or at least minimally scathed. If you want examples, look no further than this chart. The only Trump cabinet nominee to receive zero votes from Democrats was Betsy DeVos. All others -- including Jeff Sessions for Attorney General and Rick Perry of all people for Secretary of Energy -- have received at least one vote from Democratic senators, many of whom have shown an astonishing willingness to placate the new administration. In particular Joe Manchin (WV) and Heidi Heitkamp (ND), whose No votes combined can be counted on a single set of hands.

And no, not even Bernie Sanders, the self-appointed anti-corruption guru of the Senate, has really stood up to Trump all that much. On the contrary, he even declared Trump would have him as an ally if he "stands up to corporate America" like he promised to do; Sanders then went on to vote Yes (along with the rest of Congress) to confirm Shulkin for the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, despite Shulkin's ties to for-profit healthcare and his not even being a veteran, a first for the position.

But it's not just Sanders. It's the entire activist landscape and everyone in it who advocates "working with" the new administration rather than opposing it and "empathizing with" the people who voted for Trump, even when they'd been some of Trump's staunchest opponents during the campaign. Spineless louts like Jim Wright, Kyle Plantz, Michael Lerner, and Les Leopold -- unsurprisingly, all white men -- who gleefully throw progressive causes under the bus if they have something to gain in this new era.

Capitulating to oppression -- and that includes the "wait and see, give him a chance" kind of capitulation -- is like a bystander telling someone about to be raped "hey, you might enjoy it." It's just as callous, cruel, and morally reprehensible as committing the rape themselves. If you don't feel scared in Trump's America, it's because you have no reason to. And rather than going with the flow and being a Collaborator, it means you, of all people, have even more of an obligation to be part of the Resistance.

For Major Kira, it took witnessing Vedek Yassim's public suicide in the middle of The Promenade to knock that into her head. Dare we even ask what it's going to take for Manchin and Heitkamp?

The other faction is something of an ideological carbon filter. The side that seeks to remove "impurities" within its own movement. You'll recognize this group as anyone who voted for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein or wrote in Harambe or stayed home or literally did anything other than cast a vote for Clinton. People who are still screaming that Bernie would've won (but won't say how). People who are protesting against Democrats not because of how they're voting but who they're funded by. People whose only mission is "shaking up the establishment" and don't really give a rat's ass what happens as a result.

Some have begun to refer to this faction as the "Alt-Left" (as opposed to the "Alt-Right"), but I think that's giving them entirely too much legitimacy. Being made up largely of the same demographic that finds Trump an attractive candidate, I think it's far more appropriate to simply refer to them as populist anarchists. It's even more telling when, faced with direct comparison to white nationalist propaganda outlet Breitbart, Cenk Uygur is more perturbed at being compared to a publication with fewer unique viewers rather than because Breitbart openly promotes bigotry and Nazi ideas. They're not even two sides of the same coin so much as two parts of the same side of the coin; popular anarchy is the smooth and shiny background, while white nationalism is the stark, in-your-face relief.

This faction, like the Tea Party before it, seeks to essentially kick out everyone that doesn't fall into goose-stepping formation with their ideology of political campaigns run on everyone stuffing $20 in an envelope. For one thing, not everyone has that $20 to throw into an envelope. And even if they did? As someone who has had to work an annual fundraising event for the last 4 years, and for an organization that doesn't require anywhere near the kind of penetration that a political office campaign does, you can't get elected without money. It's just not possible. You have to court large donors if you expect to even win the primary, because coordinating advertising, voter registration drives, and the dissemination of info on vital shit like deadlines takes a fuckton of cash.

Bernie Sanders learned this lesson the hard way. A big part of the reason he didn't get the nomination was because he simply did not run his campaign very well, and his numbers in actual primaries (as opposed to caucuses) reflected that. A huge part of campaigning is registration drives, particularly in primaries because they're closed in most states; you have to be registered as a Democrat in order to vote in the Democratic primary (whereas the national election is completely open; it doesn't matter what party affiliation you have as long as you're registered to vote). Sanders did not do enough to get people who were already registered as Independents in closed primary states to change their party affiliation in order to vote for him in time, or to get new voters who supported him registered as Democrats in time to cast their primary ballots. This had nothing whatsoever to do with the DNC; Sanders could've done this regardless of how much the DNC favored Clinton's campaign (rightfully so, being that she is a Democrat, and the DNC actually gave Sanders some very generous accommodation by letting him run on the Democratic ticket without changing his party; they would've been perfectly within their rights to tell him "LOL NOPE"). But he didn't, because he couldn't. Because his campaign simply did not have the money to pull it off, since he snubbed corporate donors.

Sisko's lesson in "In the Pale Moonlight" is that sometimes, you have to strike a deal with the Devil in order prevent the apocalypse. You have to do things that aren't ideologically -- or even morally -- pure. But you have to do them in order to prevent a total catastrophe from happening. It was a lesson that anyone who voted third party and anyone who still insists they were right to do so is deliberately trying not to learn. Or to put it another way, they're ignoring the 109th Ferengi Rule of Acquisition: dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack.

Resistance in the Trump Era is a moral imperative. We cannot compromise. We cannot "work with him." And at the same time, we may have to do things we find ideologically repugnant in order to have any chance at all of avoiding disaster. We fucked up not by "disregarding the economic anxiety of the white working class" but by not uniting against a very obvious threat. We fucked up by not recognizing evil when it was staring us in the face, and sacrificing unity and victory simply because doing something ideologically impure was an inconvenience.

We must learn from that mistake, or pay dearly for it. We have a moral imperative to fix this mess. Now is not the time for an ideological war with our party's establishment. Unify and survive. Resist or perish.

As Vedek Yassim's final words commanded, "Evil must be opposed!"

Tuesday, March 14, 2017

The Ancient, Cruel Notion At the Core of the ACA "Replacement"

Speaker of the Rich Paul Ryan has finally released a statement on the new "healthcare" bill. Which is really not so much a healthcare bill as it is federally sanctioned mass murder of everyone that Republicans deem undesirable: women, the poor, communities of color, the mentally ill, and the very sick and disabled. The question so many have been asking -- and rightly so -- is how people who purport to be in favor of "family values" and the tenets of Christianity can take a gigantic steaming dump on everything Jesus ever taught. Your answer is an idea that dates all the way back from the Calvinist bullshit of the Middle Ages. This is how far Republicans want to turn back the clock.

In the Calvinist view, disease and illness and injury are just physical manifestations of sin. If you are chosen by God, bad shit will never happen to you; if you're not worthy, welp, sucks to be you don't it? The current Evangelical support of legislation that rewards the rich and punishes the poor is centered around this. In their view, it's only natural that we reward God's "chosen people" so they'll put in a good word for us. Everyone else who is poor and sick? They've already been rejected by God, so who cares about them anyway?

If this sounds like a terrible way to view the world, then congratulations. You're not a sociopath.

Republicans love the fuck out of this sentiment because it absolves them of having to do anything to fix the country's problems, literally all of which go back to poverty. Crime? Drugs? Violence? All directly tied to poverty. Because when people are poor, they get scared. When they get scared, they get desperate. And desperate people do drastic shit in order to survive.

Abortion? Most abortions that occur are done because the mother can't afford to care for a baby, or even the cost of giving birth (bare minimum with no complications, childbirth costs around $30K; abortion is just under $1,000 at its highest). In some professions, she risks being fired from her job just because she's pregnant (it's been illegal since 1978, but it still happens with alarming frequency, and if you can't afford a child, you sure as hell can't afford a good lawyer).

Poverty is also a direct cause of ill health itself. Healthy, nutritious food is expensive. The highly processed food that poor people can afford is loaded with salt, sugar, fat and empty calories (calories that provide no or very few nutrients). Being able to cook requires energy and free time that many working poor families don't have. On top of that, jobs with shitty pay tend to be physically demanding (retail, food service, etc.), and because the pay is awful, employees need to work longer shifts or multiple jobs to buy even the shittiest food. This doesn't even factor stress into the equation, or urban food deserts where there's no grocery stores for miles and your only options are fast food and bodegas (which overwhelmingly sell the aforementioned highly-processed crap food).

For Republicans, the problem is that fixing this mess would require going back to the income tax levels of the mid-20th century, where top-earners paid around 70%, as well as building stronger unions and better regulation of the financial sector to prevent the kinds of market collapses we saw from the 1970s onward. And that, of course, means listening to the people rather than their campaign donors, who tend to skew wealthy as fuck and, like Thorin at the end of The Hobbit, don't want to part with a single coin.

It would be much more beneficial to them if all us pesky poor folk were kept in a highly efficient queue of high birth and death rates, so we could continue to work shitty service jobs for shitty pay until we drop dead of heart attacks and get replaced by the next desperate shmoe. And the easiest way to do that? Restrict abortion and birth control such that the rights to them are merely ceremonial in order to force the birthrate to go up, and gut healthcare for the working classes so we die faster.

That's where the American Health Care Act comes in.

Immediately, you should notice three words missing from the bill's title compared to the ACA: "patient protection" and "affordable." This is not an accident; this bill is not intended to protect patients, nor is it intended to make healthcare affordable in any way unless you're young, rich and already healthy. In other words, already chosen by God, and fuck the rest of us.

It's the same Victorian-era bullshit of regarding wealth itself to be a virtue. If you're rich, then you're obviously a shrewd and virtuous person. If you're poor, it's because you obviously did something awful or stupid, so why should you get any sympathy?

This is what lets hard-right God-fearing Christians sleep at night while they vote to slash the safety net for the country's most vulnerable. All that stuff about charity and helping your neighbor? That only goes for people who already have God's favor.

This is one of the biggest reasons I walked away from Christianity in my college years and didn't look back (besides figuring out I was gay). The idea of a "chosen" people never sat well with me, because the next logical step is to dismiss those not "chosen" as deserving of their fate. I'm not saying all Christians do this, not by a longshot; there are many wonderful churches and Christian charities that do a lot of good in the world. But ignoring individual churches who do good things for a minute? All the major players in the Bible who came after Christ promoted this idea of chosen vs. damned, and to defer to God's word (or what people assumed was God's word) rather than trying to understand things on your own. I found myself unable to maintain my faith in a system that just about required me to leave my empathy and critical thinking at the door.

But this is exactly the thought process that has brought us to this point. And it's not just limited to Evangelical fundie whacknuts. Everyone who voted for Trump did so for one reason and one reason alone, regardless of the language they couched their decision in: he is a straight, white, rich cisman, the epitome of privilege, and therefore "chosen." If they vote for him, they can be "chosen" as well.

Only now, with the very real threat of shredding healthcare to a point even worse than it was before the Affordable Care Act, do they realize what "chosen" really means: everyone else is damned.

Wednesday, March 1, 2017

You Can't Compromise With Fear

Normally, I like Jim Wright. But as I've learned over the years, even he suffers from the same problem that every white guy does: since he's not really going to lose much in Trump's America, he feels he has the authority to tell progressives how to win.

His entire post, linked above, is the ramblings of a guy so steeped in his own privilege he's turned the water into milk.

The lede is the only good part of it. But then he starts screaming at fellow liberals to "turn the red sea purple" by "compromising with fear." I very calmly challenged him on Twitter earlier today to explain just how on earth we're supposed to do that, and got blocked for my trouble.

Because, as I finally got him to admit in that thread, you can't compromise with fear.

Not the kind of fear we're dealing with, at any rate. When a child comes to you in the middle of the night scared of monsters under his bed? Your natural instinct is to lift the bedskirt and show him there are no monsters. Maybe check the closet with a flashlight just to go the extra mile. But then the child turns to you and says "no, there really are monsters, they're just invisible so of course you can't see them!" At that point, the child's fear can no longer be compromised with, because he's going to make up reasons to stay afraid.

Trump voters are that child. The monsters under their bed are literally everyone and everything else.

In his post, Jim Wright suggests reaching out to these fearful people instead of dismissing them, by going to churches and assuring them they won't have to marry a gay couple in their house of worship.

I literally laughed out loud reading that, because:

1) why the holy fuck would they believe a word "Crooked Hillary" says? These are the same people chanting "lock her up!"

2) to say that their fear is having to marry a gay couple in their church is to treat it with far more rationality and credibility than it deserves. They don't actually give a shit about that. They don't want gay couples getting married, period. Not in their church, not in any church, not in their courthouses, not in their city, not in their state, not in their country.

The part Mr. Wright doesn't seem to grasp is that compromising with them in any way is compromising with hatred. This is the same guy who was literally targeted by Neo-Nazis, but can't seem to understand that their fear is based on hatred. It's built directly on top of it. Hatred is the foundation of everything conservatives do. They fear change because they hate having to deal with anything different than themselves.

As far as blaming liberals for not showing up at the polls? That is a valid point. At least for privileged white liberals like himself. The problem is that in 2013, the Supreme Court ruled on Shelby County v. Holder in a 5-4 decision that de-fanged the Voting Rights Act. Afterward, we saw a veritable orgy of voter suppression legislation passed.

In key states like Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Michigan -- the states which cost Hillary the Electoral College -- many liberals, progressives and moderate conservatives who might've shown up to vote for Hillary were turned away and not permitted to cast a ballot. This is also not even counting the fact that communities of color (who vote largely Democrat) suffer disproportionately high rates of incarceration for non-violent felonies, which in turn means they are legally barred from voting.

Many liberals and progressives didn't show up for the 2014 midterms and 2016 election not because they didn't want to, but because they weren't allowed. Maybe smug white guys with the same privilege Jim Wright has decided to sit it out, largely because of their privilege. But to lump everyone else in with them is not just misleading, but insulting.

If you want to turn the red sea purple? Don't waste your time compromising with fear. Don't lose sleep trying to convince an irrationally scared child to go to bed when he's going to have far more reasons not to than you can keep up with.

You can't dismiss all of their concerns, because they do have valid ones. Poverty, drug use and failing health are just as bad in rural areas as they are in urban, but without any of the (still inadequate) support centers that city dwellers have (soup kitchens, shelters, sliding-scale clinics, etc.). But you can most definitely dismiss their fear, when that fear has equal parts jack and shit to do with their concerns.

You want to mitigate the damage Trump can do? You need to put the pressure on your Congresscritters. The people who put shit on Trump's desk to sign. They're already too scared to hold town halls. Don't let that stop you. Flood their inboxes. Flood their phones. Flood their mailbags. Hold protests. Stop traffic.

Make them so pants-shittingly terrified of losing their seats in 2018 that they'll have no choice but to break with the party line for self-preservation. Force them to be the check on Trump, with the threat that if they won't, you'll elect someone else who will.

Don't compromise with fear, and don't negotiate with terrorists. Resist.