Brad Hicks is a blogger who writes only very occasionally, but at length, on a range of subjects, insightfully.
LiveJournal has deleted all of his writing since I originally created this post indexing some favorites of mine, so I have rescued the full text of them from the Internet Archive. One can find newer writing from him on Medium. Almost everything which follows is him writing, not me.
- Review: Amy Schalet, Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex
- Yes We Can Put Americans Back To Work. We Probably Won’t, Though.
- Atlas Shrugged 2: Shrug Harder
- Nobody Will Ever Believe How We Got Here #OWS
- Not That the Actual Forbidden Knowledge is as Interesting as That There Is Forbidden Knowledge
- Opposite Extremes
- Using It In Reverse
- It’s Not a M------F---ing “Miracle.” It’s Somebody’s JOB.
- Weimar America?
Christians In The Hands Of An Angry God
His best-known essay, for good reason. It is an important history, though not quite for the reasons it seems: Hicks recounts a story which historians know is in fact a lie, but the telling of the lie is itself significant. It will need its own post when I finally get around to pulling it out of the Archive, because it is long.
How did so many seminaries and so many preachers and so many authors get converted to this false gospel? What deal did they make with Satan himself, and why? What did they think that they were doing? These aren’t rhetorical questions. I’ve met one of the people who “signed” that deal and helped enforce it. He was quite proud of his achievement, and years later told many of us about the meeting where that decision was made. It is only recently that I came to understand just who the other side in that deal really was, as opposed to who the fundamentalists in that room thought they were dealing with.
It’s a five-part series; click through the next entry links at the top of each page.
Review: Amy Schalet, Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex.
3 January 2012Imagine two rowboats, both adrift at sea. The first rowboat has no oars. They can see an island in the distance. Somebody calculates the distance to it, and the rate at which they’re drifting, and concludes that they have only half the food and water they'll need for everybody to reach the island. The conclusion is obvious*: at least half of them have to be thrown overboard. And the sooner it happens, the fewer of them will have to die.
Now imagine the other rowboat. It has plenty of food and water, and it has oars, but it has a different problem: it’s leaking, and fast. Somebody does the math, and they conclude that they can all make it to the island in the distance. But they can only make it if everybody who can row, rows, and if everybody else bails water as fast as they can, and if they cooperate in sharing the rowing, bailing, and resting cycles; if anybody is selfish, if anybody doesn't cooperate, nobody will make it.
Call the first rowboat “America.” Call the second rowboat “the Netherlands.”
That's the metaphor that came to my mind after spending a couple of days deciding how to explain Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex, by Amy Schalet (University of Chicago Press, 2011). Even though the book has nothing to do with rowboats, and only indirectly to do with the overall differences between Americans and the Dutch. What the book is really about is the regulation of teenage sex by their parents. You see, as someone who grew up in both the Netherlands and the US, baffled by the differences between the two, and who went on to do her Ph.D. research in the sociology of adolescent/parent relationships, Schalet has dedicated an entire book to trying to explain a major difference between two different cultures that were substantially identical as late as the late 1950s: democratic capitalist republics who won their independence from colonial imperial masters around the same era, dominated by conservative Protestants, who went through the same Great Depression and two World Wars, and the same sexual revolution when contraception and antibiotics were made widely available, and the same economic shock after the OPEC crisis. But in the years after that, huge social differences appear, and Schalet concentrates, as her academic speciality, on one of them.
It’s a glaring difference, and it has to do with what American and Dutch parents and teens “know for a fact” about teenage sexual development and maturity during puberty. American parents and their teenagers both “know for a fact” that adolescent male sexuality is dominated by hormones that completely obliviate any capacity developed, up to that point, for sexual and emotional self-regulation. The parents also “know for a fact” that teenage boys are incapable of actually loving their partners; the sons all know that they have genuine romantic emotional feelings, but all feel freakishly abnormal and different from their peers because of this, because they “know” it’s true of all the other teenage boys around them. All of them, parents and teen boys and teen girls alike, also “know for a fact” that there are two kinds of teenage girls: the “good girl” majority who desperately want someone to love them but who think that sex is icky and unpleasant, and the “slut” minority who want sex just as much as the teenage boys do, and who have no more self-control. As a result, parents and teens participate in a process of dramatization, intended to exaggerate the expected consequences of any teenage sex or romance, and that also relies on control and punishment by the parents in an attempt to prevent their teenagers from succumbing to those out-of-control hormones, punishment starting at loss of privileges and potentially (or at least threatened) to go as far as parental abandonment, as far as expulsion from the home and imposition of homelessness. Teenage girls are taught to fear rape, infection with STDs, and unwanted pregnancy by out-of-control boys; boys are taught to fear infection with STDs and the imposition of crushing child-support burdens that will drop them out of the middle class for all eternity, stranding them irretrievably among the poor. Despite this, at around age 15, teenage boys and girls assert their independence, and exercise the emotional and physical drives that will push them towards eventual independence from their parents, by “sneaking around,” occasionally re-establishing emotional contact with their parents by “getting caught,” until they are either married or “can put their own roof over their heads,” because officially, those are the minimum preconditions before any American can legally and morally be allowed to have officially sanctioned sex.
Dutch parents and teenagers, on the other hand, “know for a fact” that only an infinitessimally small number of teenagers, insultingly called “pubers,” have out-of-control hormones that they have to grow out of; every parent and most kids have at least heard, second or third hand, of somebody who once knew somebody who knew somebody who might have been a puber once, but nobody interviewed could name one. They “know for a fact” that around age 13 or 14, boys and girls both start thinking about wanting romantic and family relationships of their own like the ones that their parents have. They “know for a fact” that by age 15 to 17, all but a few really abnormally immature children just normally and naturally find a partner they genuinely love, and with who they just naturally want to be cozily together with. They “know for a fact” that through consultation and proper education, parents and society have taught them that this is perfectly okay, as long as it’s someone who’s also willing to be cozily together with, comfortable with and acceptable to, the parents. They also “know for a fact” that any normal child, having been raised since early childhood to eroticize condoms, and any normal girl, having probably gone on hormonal birth control (for free) as soon as she started menstruating, isn’t going to hurt anybody or disrupt the all-important family bond if they bring their romantic partner over to sleep with them a couple of nights a week. They “know for a fact” that children that young will make the occasional mistake, and get gently humiliated by their parents and peers for immaturity, for having shown that they weren’t really ready or that they did a bad job of accomodating eveybody in the family's needs, and that they’ll learn from that how to self-regulate their behavior in harmony with the cozy, comfortable family that they “know for a fact” everybody, including teenagers, wants. (Parents do, however, worry about their children forming relationships with people who “don’t fit in with the family,” by which they mean “poor people or immigrants.” But they express confidence, for the most part, in their ability to steer their children towards someone more comfortable for the family. There's also a grating confidence that none of their children are “asocial” enough to be homosexual or polyamorous.) And, after all, since everybody in the Netherlands has free universal comprehensive health care, incuding birth control, STD treatment, and abortion, and nobody over the age of 16 needs so much as a parent’s permission to use it, and since everybody gets a guaranteed stipend to pay for their own living expenses any time they want to move out, as long as they're still in school, everybody, parent and child alike, “know for a fact” that the worst thing that can happen if somebody makes a mistake is temporary discomfort and embarrassment. The most important thing, then, is to make sure that nobody feels any need to be “sneaky” or “secretive” about any part of their life, because that might disrupt cozy togetherness.
I am, for the second time in two years**, convinced that I live in a country full of superstitious, primitive, blood-thirsty savages.
So, what’s this got to do with rowboats?
In interviews about this book, Schalet got asked a lot about what her opinion was, what did her research show, about why we’re so different? Why did we go in opposite directions after our sexual revolutions? That’s not her speciality, although she does speculate about it, some. She points out that hierarchical domination and winner-take all are also normal paradigms for American businesses and in American politics, whereas Dutch politics and Dutch businesses are a lot more collaborative; on some level, the difference in parenting styles do a pretty good job of preparing American teenage boys to appear to submit to those above them while sneakily seeking to form their own dominance hierarchies in which they can earn the privilege of dominating others, a pretty good job of preparing Dutch boys to go along to get along, to make and expect concessions, as part of collaborative structures in the rest of their adult life. But it’s a unsatisfying explanation; both cultures changed more that way in their politics and business around the same time as they changed in their attitudes towards adolescent sexuality and child-raising, so there's more likely a common cause.
She speculates, at one point in the book, that the defining difference is this: around the time of our respective sexual revolutions, the two countries experienced radically different disasters. The Americans experienced Vietnam, which set the young against the old and corporations and their defenders against poor conscripts, in a struggle for life and death, and normalized the language of intergenerational conflict. The Dutch, who mostly stayed out of Indochina, instead experienced a series of catastrophic nationwide floods, which taught every single person in the Netherlands that unless they all cooperate, unless they all give as much as they can, unless they all move out of their comfort zone a little, they’ll all drown. Or, in my metaphor: two different lifeboats.
* The lifeboat that’s out of food is an imperfect metaphor, but I knew it would be vivid for any of you who haven't studied extreme survival. It turns out that a lifeboat at sea, after about three days, accumulates a thriving ecosystem on the bottom of the boat, making it relatively easy to fish for turtles and other sea life for food, and their spinal fluid for water. Survive the first three days, and there’s no reason to sacrifice anybody. How many Americans do you think would actually think of that? Or, not knowing that, be willing to risk it, in hopes that “something will come along” to make it possible for everybody to survive? I think maybe a few of us, but the rest of us have been conditioned to be quick to try human sacrifice, throwing some people overboard, as the first thing to try in any disaster.
** See Thomas Geoghan, Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?
Yes We Can Put Americans Back To Work. We Probably Won’t, Though.
28 Jan 2009The American way of life depends, in part, on a specific illusion. It’s a lie that we tell ourselves, and tell our children. What we just did last Tuesday, an orderly, peaceful, even civil transition of power from one generation to the next, from one ethnic group to another, from one political party to another political party with a different political agenda? We lie to ourselves, and lie even harder to our children, that that is something we can count on, something we have always been able to count on, that any alternative is so unthinkable and unnatural for Americans that we need have no fear whatsoever of any alternative.
Historians know that that’s a lie. Even if one accepts the incredible claim that every US President who has ever been assassinated was killed by a deranged lone gunman, acting out of personal motives, with no political motive, and with no encouragement or assistance by anyone else, the fact remains: historians know that it can get so bad in the United States, economically, that the American people will withdraw their consent to be governed. We call one particular financial industry collapse that rippled outward around the globe (among other things, ultimately bringing the Nazis to power in Germany) not just any recession or depression, but the Great Depression, because the number of people needing work in the US rose to about 3.5 million, or about 20% of all working-age heads of households. In the hardest-hit parts of the country, it reached 50%. And it’s not a coincidence that the next several years saw three credible attempts to topple the United States government: a half-million man general strike called by Soviet-influenced CIO labor unions aimed at sparking a general uprising and Communist revolution that couldn’t quite hold out long enough to get their revolution before it collapsed, Huey Long’s astronomically-growing Poor People’s Army that aimed at overthrowing the Constitution which was only thwarted via its leader’s assassination, and an attempt by the 1930s equivalent of the Democratic Leadership Council, then called the American Liberty League, to use corporate money to bribe US military generals into placing them in power via coup d’etat. No, we know as a matter of objective fact: somewhere in the near vicinity of 20% prolonged unemployment, the USA starts running a serious risk of anarchy followed by totalitarianism.
We also know that by the same measure of unemployment that was in use at the time, as of this month the US unemployment rate is somewhere in the near vicinity of 15%. And rising. Fast. As in perhaps as much as 1% per month. No, really, trust me on this: everybody in both political parties now understands what everybody in both political parties understood as of 1933, when centrist (and wealthy) Democratic former New York governor Frank Roosevelt was sworn in as President: they were doomed if they didn’t find some way to lower unemployment. And trust me on this, both Republicans and Democrats in our own time understand that the clock is ticking on this now, too. What remains is the question: how do we do that? Nor are today’s Republican and Democratic leaders the first politicians to be faced with this question, it is the exact same question that was asked in 1933. And the political elites and the professional economists of our time agree 100% with the political elites and the professional economists of 1933. Our ruling class, just like the ruling class of 1933, believes that government by definition screws up everything it touches. That all government intervention in the economy is inherently bad, that the best it can possibly be is a short-term necessary evil. That the reason that big corporations are big is that they are lead by people who know how to make the best use of money and how to get the best work out of employees. Therefore the political elites and professional economists of our time 100% agree with Frank Roosevelt of early 1933 and with the American Liberty League of the 1930s that what we need is something like the Public Works Administration. What we need, they are 100% sure, is a public-private partnership: government identifies legitimate government needs that aren’t currently being met, and bids that work out to private contractors, and audits those programs and those contractors to make sure that not one thin dime of taxpayer money is wasted on any project that’s unnecessary or on any expense that can’t be justified. And in a sign of bipartisanship, Franklin Roosevelt appointed left-wing Republican Harold Ickes to do just that.
As Timothy Noah pointed out yesterday in a lovely pair of articles on Slate.com, “Wrong Harry: Four million jobs in two years? FDR did it in two months” (with Charles Peters) and an almost immediate follow-up piece when a news item proved his point for him even better, “CBO, Meet CWA: More evidence that Obama’s stimulus falls short,” FDR, congressional Republicans lead by Harold Ickes, and right-wing Democrats lead by Al Smith were wrong in exactly the same way that Barack Obama, congressional Republicans, and the Democratic Leadership Council are wrong right now. The Public Works Administration did its job. It did it under budget. It wasted not a single dollar. It attracted not a single critic. And it created almost no jobs. In 1933, it turned out that there just plain weren’t that many legitimate government jobs that weren’t being funded already. As Ickes took his sweet time coming up with more, lest he be criticized for wasting taxpayer money, he found out that there also weren’t a whole lot of companies out there begging for the chance to bid on PWA contracts. They weren’t crazy about the contract stipulations, and they weren’t all that interested in retooling and reorganizing their entire corporate structures to service contracts there were guaranteed to end as soon as the Great Depression ended. As an anti-poverty, anti-violent-revolution government program, the Public Works Administration was an unvarnished, absolute, indefensible disaster. Period. End of story. Nobody even tries to defend it any more; its supporters just pretend it never happened, so they can recommend the same thing the next time without anybody knowing it’s been tried before, because by their politics, it’s the right thing to do whether it works or not.
And along about the time that Roosevelt was about to lose his temper over this, the First Lady talked him into talking to a very successful social worker named Harry Hopkins, who only wanted a few minutes of the President’s time so he could ask one question. He showed the President figures (that he later showed Congress) showing that there were about 3.5 million Americans in 1933 who were heads of households between the ages of 18 and 64 that no employer was going to hire, no way, no how, not for any amount of money, and he asked: “Can you give one legal reason why we can’t just hire those people ourselves?” The thing is, he got that estimate of 3.5 million people by going through the state-by-state lists of people who were already on the dole, people who were already receiving some kind of charitable or government cash hand-out because they weren’t working. And what Hopkins realized was that not only did the American people deeply resent those people for taking money and doing nothing all day, the recipients weren’t any happier about it, either: they wanted to work. So FDR shoe-horned a program through Congress, first as pilot program called the Civil Works Administration, to raise about $1200 (1933 US dollars) per year per unemployed head of household: $1000 per worker per year for wages, $24 per worker per year for administrative costs, the rest for hand tools and raw materials for whatever projects he could make up. To get CWA funding, a job had to be something that no corporation was interested in providing, and that no government agency was interested in funding, and it had to be as labor-intensive as possible (see photograph above right).
Conservatives in both parties hated it. And still do. And campaigned hard against it in the 1934 congressional primaries. Al Smith’s right-wing Democrats convinced FDR that if he kept the CWA, it would cost him his majority in Congress, so he shut it down after only four months. In that four months, CWA workers had already built 1,000 rural airports, built 40,000 school buildings, built or resurfaced a quarter-million miles of roads, and laid twelve million miles of sanitary sewer lines, some of the first sewer lines laid in most counties. In four months. Right-wing Democrats and anti-tax pro-corporate Republicans screamed bloody murder about all the money that the CWA was “wasting,” but (and this is a point I’ll come back to again) we’re still using almost all of that stuff today. 75 years later, those “worthless” “make-work” projects are turning out to be some of the most valuable stuff the government had done in its first 150 years of existence. So contrary to what the right-wing Democrats in Congress were telling FDR he “needed” to do to “save” the 1934 congressional elections, terminating the CWA turned out to be the least popular thing he did as President, and as soon as the elections were over, on voter mandate, FDR brought it right back again, rammed it through Congress again as the Works Progress Administration (WPA).
Only this time it had full funding, and a Congressional and Presidential mandate to try to hire every single one of the roughly 3.5 million unemployed, non-disabled, work-aged heads of household in America. And in almost no time at all, they came as close as makes no difference, getting to 3.3 million, on one simple philosophy: you tell us whatever it is you “do,” and we’ll find you a job doing it. Those jobs paid very nearly jack squat; nearly all WPA workers ended up living with their whole families in roughly 8” x 10” or so rooms in improvised “boarding houses,” spare rooms leased out by people who were house-rich but cash poor, trying to save their homes, tenants with no control over the menu of the meal plan it came with and shared use of a single bathroom (or maybe just an outhouse and an outdoor water pump) with 3 to 8 other families. Nobody lived well on the WPA, but nobody starved either. On the other hand, nobody worked terribly hard, either, and I know this one from a very personal source: my paternal grandfather was a WPA veteran.
Grampa Hicks was himself a right-wing anti-tax anti-communist Democrat of the American Liberty League school, and he hated the WPA with a fiery passion for the entire rest of his life. It was from him I first heard the joke: “How many people does it take to do one WPA job? Three. One on his way to the bathroom, one on his way back from the bathroom, and one leaning on the shovel pretending to work.” But here’s the funny thing. You know what Grampa Hicks was before the Great Depression? He was a bum. A mostly-unemployed unskilled laborer on the rare occasions he had a job, a street brawler and small-time crook, a chronic alcoholic and wife-beater who spent most of the 1920s in jail. So when he showed up in one of Harry Hopkins’ branch offices and they asked him, “What do you do?” all he could answer was, “Nothing.” So they stuck him on one of the WPA’s archetypal projects: a National Guard armory. Under the thin pretense of “military preparedness,” Harry Hopkins made up this total BS scenario whereby some day, in some foreign invasion of the US, we might end up having to retreat all the way back to any random tiny little town in America, so every tiny little road-crossing town and every suburb and every city neighborhood in America should have a solidly built, concrete-block or raw stone building that the state militia can store their weapons in until that day, and can use as a fort when we get nearly conquered. Nobody was fooled. Everybody knew it was a lie: it was building buildings just for the sake of building pointless buildings. Furthermore, the whole “fort” thing was just an excuse to make the job take longer, to build out of improbably heavy materials and as slowly and carefully as possible, so those mostly unskilled laborers didn’t run out of something to do before Hopkins and his few staff could come up with something else to do. Grampa Hicks went to his grave still mocking the work he’d done.
But you know what? There’s a funny thing about that, something I’m pretty sure Grampa Hicks never thought about. First of all, if it weren’t for the WPA, we Hickses would still be bums. Grampa Hicks was desperate to get out from behind that wheel barrow and that shovel, but was too drunk to do plumbing. So he took to hanging around when the electricians were running wire, and managed to get himself a totally useless job as a sort of human Vice-Grip. “Here,” says the skilled electrician who was himself out of work, yelling over to my grandpa because the WPA wouldn’t spring for proper tools, “you there — hold these two wires together while I tape them together.” By following that guy around and watching over that guy’s shoulder, Grampa Hicks taught himself basic electrical wiring. And when the WPA was over, he was able to lie with a straight face to employers that he was a skilled electrician, and that got him his first real job, one his son learned from him, and that I learned from my dad that paid my way through college: electrical sign erector, IBEW local 1.
But never mind how much difference those “pointless” National Guard armories made to my family, there’s something even bigger that Grampa Hicks didn’t know. We’re still using almost every single one of those buildings. I saw an article a while back (citation lost, sorry) by an architecture student who’d gotten curious about what ever happened to all those National Guard armories, so he got some grant money and went on a national tour. And what he found was that in almost every single rural town in America and even in most suburbs, those “ridiculously over-built” armories were the first truly solid building ever built there. And because they were “ridiculously over-built,” they’re still in use. A few are grocery stores or other businesses. Some are schools or community centers. Most are police stations or city halls. Almost all of them double as emergency shelters for the town during natural disasters. So the student did some math to figure out, using standard construction techniques and assuming standard maintenance costs, and assuming that we would have built something to do those jobs some time between then and now, what it would have cost some of those counties to have done without those buildings. And compared that to what it cost them and their descendants in federal tax money to support the WPA and to pay off its debts. The WPA actually made money on its most “useless” projects.
You can take almost any WPA project from the 1930s that was widely mocked as a pointless waste of money; nearly all of them paid every penny back in long-term savings to the taxpayers, in taxes paid by people who learned their trade on those projects who would have otherwise stayed on the dole, or both. In the 1936 elections, Roosevelt’s political enemies handed out campaign buttons mocking the stupidest-sounding idea the WPA ever had. See, in even the smallest towns, the WPA built the first sewage treatment plants those counties ever saw, and laid sewer pipe for them. But lots of Americans still lived in areas too rural for even that. So the WPA paid teams of laborers to ride from farm to farm, shack to shack, shanty to shanty all over America looking for private outhouses that were rickety, or worse were too close to water supplies or food preparation. Those teams were given a standardized design with a water-tight roof, solid construction that would require almost no maintenance for decades, and most importantly: clean concrete floors and toilet hole lids that could close nearly air-tight, plus ventilation stacks that were designed to be insect resistant, in order to reduce both ground-water contamination by and insect-born transmission of fecal bacteria. Many areas turned the WPA down, especially suburbs around cities, and people all over America relentlessly mocked the WPA workers who thought that the US had “nothing better to do” than to waste $17 per rural house building massively over-engineered fancy outhouses. But you know what? Over the course of the 1930s and 1940s, almost every area that turned the WPA down on the outhouse project and other sanitation projects suffered major cholera outbreaks. Areas where the WPA built sewage treatment and sanitary outhouses escaped, saving tens of thousands of children’s lives, and probably millions of dollars in hospital costs and lost wages.
Some people were really determined to not even do anything as useful as pretend to dig ditches. So they claimed, when the WPA asked them “what do you do?” to be writers or actors or artists. Some of them were even sincere, and had actually studied those subjects in high school; others just made it up. When asked about it, Harry Hopkins famously shrugged and said, “Why not? Those people have to eat, too.” So the government made up make-work programs for them, too, all of which were relentlessly mocked all through the 1930s. You’re an actor? Here. You’ve got no budget for props, sets, costumes, or stage rights for plays. We’ll let you use an empty storefront and call it a “theater,” especially if you’ll bring in some WPA laborers to build a stage and some seats for you. No, wait, you can have some costumes, but not many; we have some households headed by widows who could stand to do some sewing for you at WPA wages. And you can have any public domain script you want. Now, put on plays. We don’t care what plays, or how many you do, but you will come in 20 to 30 hours a week and work on them, and put them on when you’re done ... including you, Mr. Orson Welles. Whose acting, then directing, careers are still bringing in taxpayer dollars every year; all by himself he’s probably paid back the entire cost of the WPA’s program for actors.
You say you’re a journalist or a historian or a writer? Hmm. Tell you what. During westward expansion, an awful lot of tiny little towns got founded, and the people who founded those towns are getting old; go ask them who founded the town, and why, and what it was like, and write it up as a history of the county. Take all the time you want. Nuts, we’re out of tiny little towns, and still have writers left over. Think of something. I know, go interview former slaves; we’ll give them some time off from their WPA jobs so you can write down what they say their lives were like. What, we’re still overstocked on people who say they’re writers? Fine, here, we’ll hand ‘em to the state tourism boards; we’ll send teams of ‘em to just walk around every state in the Union, get drunk in the local bars, describe the local sights, and make tourist guides. And, oh, by the way, who knew? That’ll turn out to include an entire generation of America’s most famous writers, including America’s third and fifth ever Nobel prizes for literature. Just the taxes on the movie rights to John Steinbeck’s novels have probably paid for that entire program all by itself, and are still paying taxes. Not to mention that we still have all of those books, and most of their notes towards the unfinished books, and guess what? Generations of grad students in history are extremely grateful to the WPA; they wish every generation of Americans had been as well documented.
I don’t think you can come up with a single dollar of WPA spending that actually counts as wasted, not a single WPA “make-work” project so pointless and stupid that we didn’t get our money’s worth out of it, especially if you count all the on-the-job job skills training it gave the 8 or 9 million people who went through the program. And that’s even if you don’t factor in the analysis of very serious historians who question whether or not American “G.I.s” would have fought so hard or so well to save the world from 1941 to 1945 if they had been as resentful, and as starving, as they were in 1930. But no, the blunt fact of history is that if the truth were ever told about the WPA, if the truth hadn’t been being smothered in lies by the same political factions that opposed it at the time all the way up to this very day, everybody would know what the WPA proved as inescapable facts. No dollar of government spending is wasted, if it does a job that nobody else was going to do and it builds something that lasts. Almost nobody is so greedy and lazy that they actually would prefer to be paid to stay home and watch TV or get drunk or stoned all day; there are untold tens of millions of us now that no employer would touch for any of a long list of bad reasons who would rather be working. And no matter how lazy you think they are, boredom is a powerful motivator, and so is a desire not to let down your team, and so is a desire not to look bad in front of others: bring ‘em to work, leave ‘em alone, and nearly all of them actually will work, will actually build things that are built well, built for the ages, built to last. Paradoxically, the really wasted money is the money that gets spent on government overseers determined to make sure that none of the workers waste any money: point people at jobs, give ‘em simple hand tools, and tell them to take their time and build something solid and it’s almost impossible for us to not get that money back in long-term savings.
Nor is this even all that “liberal” an idea. Ronald freaking Reagan himself briefly campaigned on it, calling it “Workfare:” if you can’t find a job, we’ll make you one, whether you like it or not. But he didn’t even get sworn in before the same pro-corporate Republicans and right-wing Democrats convinced him to drop it, to instead concentrate on cutting taxes for corporations as his only unemployment-fighting measure. No, there is now, just as there was in Franklin Roosevelt’s time, a bipartisan consensus of the elites in this country that the way to put Americans back to work is that taxes must be cut on investors and corporations. We are, apparently, supposed to ignore the last thirty years of history, which teaches us that every tax cut we pass and every subsidy we grant to big corporations will be used to hire robots or to move jobs overseas. No, this time we’re supposed to believe it will be different and this time they really will use that money to make more jobs. Trust them on this, they say. And just as in Roosevelt’s day, the exact same political coalition of big-corporation Republicans and big-corporation Democrats insist that if that won’t do the job fast enough, then what we need are even more public-private partnerships. And ironically, even Barack Obama, who very nearly lost his political career early on because he was caught on the fringes of Tony Rezko’s financially corrupt public-private partnership, one that Barack Obama had gotten for him, somehow hasn’t learned that it’s public-private partnerships and tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, not government make-work programs or benefits for the unemployed, that are the real welfare cheats. Being a Harvard graduate who grew up under the steady drumbeat of pro-corporate propaganda about how evil the WPA was, he’s still talking up the need for more public-private partnerships like Harold Ickes’ old Public Works Administration.
So I figure the odds at roughly 4 to 1 that he’s going to screw up the unemployment situation in America, at the very least doing nothing to help it, and quite possibly making it worse by funding the elimination of yet more American jobs, because that’s exactly what the new President and his cabinet officers are talking about doing, lately. Sadly, these are even better odds than we would have had under either Clinton or McCain, neither of whom would have even considered anything but public-private partnerships. Obama will, I think, at least think about it. But I don’t think he’ll do anything but try to set up another PWA. Which is a damned shame. Because what we really need is another WPA.
Atlas Shrugged 2: Shrug Harder
25 May 2008I don’t know how many of you realize that Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s science fiction classic, is actually only book 1 of a trilogy? Hardly anybody knows this, because she never got around to writing the missing middle volume. She wrote book 1 in the series. She wrote book 3 in the series, but didn’t explicitly label it a sequel to Atlas Shrugged, she and her agent marketed it as a stand-alone volume. She never got around to writing the middle volume that bridges the two. It’s probably because she found it too depressing, the way that Heinlein never got around to writing The Stone Pillow, the missing volume in the Future History series that comes between “All You Zombies” and “If This Goes On.”
Atlas Shrugged, for those of you who never read it, can be summarized entirely fairly as follows. Unknown to our viewpoint characters at first, an inventor named John Galt has invented a “free energy” machine, a motor that runs on ambient static electricity and the Earth’s own inertia and puts out enough electricity in a fairly small unit to power almost anything, including vehicles, force field generators, energy weapons, even an invisibility cloak if you use a big enough unit. He invented this while working at a company where his contract gave them rights to stuff he invented on the clock, like most professional engineers and inventors, but he assumed that as the inventor, he was entitled to all of the profits from this fabulous new invention. The company’s management and other employees, though, saw just how much resentment would happen if one company owned the monopoly on an invention this valuable, and started making plans for how to invest some of the profits into charitable ventures, so they wouldn’t get the whole thing taken away from them via eminent domain. John Galt, outraged that anybody would even suggest that he or the company he worked for owed anything to the nation that provided his education, protected him from infectious disease outbreaks, protected him from Communist invasion, built the roads that got him to work each day, provided the police that kept him safe, and provided the court system that protected his property rights at all, sabotaged the Galt Engine, so nobody could have it.
Then he went further and, in a fit of offended pique, promised to “stop the motor of the world,” to kill 90% or so of Earth’s population by intentionally wrecking the economy. Which he then did. How? By finding every other competent engineer or manager in the US and persuading them to be just as selfish as him, just as unwilling to pay back or protect their country; he declared a covert “strike of the mind,” as he called it. He hid them all in a secretive compound in the Rocky Mountains, protected by force field and invisibility cloak, and waited for the US economy to collapse, which, obligingly, it did — because John Galt had carefully sabotaged the bridges and railroads that made it possible for fuel and seeds to make it from the coastal cities to inland farms, and make it possible for food grown on inland farms to make it to the coastal cities. And as chaos was breaking out, he and his fellow inventors hijacked every radio transmitter in the US to broadcast his manifesto: You all deserve to die, for asking us to pay you back even one nickel, because we are all so selfish we don’t consider any of the things you all paid for out of your taxes and that you did with your labor to have been at all helpful to us as entirely self-sufficient brilliant inventors and managers. So die.
And that’s where the series is interrupted. But from where the third book picks up, and by applying a little common sense, we can outline the main plot points, if not the characterizations, from the untitled middle volume, the one I’m whimsically calling Atlas Shrugged 2: Shrug Harder. When the previous book ran out, America was winding down to what was clearly going to be the last harvest, ever, and the Strikers were planning for the day that they, as the only people possessing any high tech or any capability of mass production of food or anything else, would ride out of their hidden Colorado fortress as humanity’s saviors. They were pledging to themselves to build a new world based, as John Galt’s manifesto had promised all Americans, on the virtue of selfishness. They assumed that a grateful (or at least desperately needy) and vastly reduced in number population would welcome them as liberators, chastened and having learned their lesson. Except that we know from the third book that that’s not what happened, and anybody who knows human nature should have been able to predict that.
Outside the valley, the conversion to local subsistence farming and the work of scavenging the dead cities for any usable metal would have been rough. No time or energy would have been available to save even minimal technology. We’re looking at a collapse all the way back to (at best) early iron age levels, maybe even all the way back to the bronze age, and nobody will even have time to teach the next generation to read and write. But one thing very clearly did happen, in every survivor’s village, and became world-wide policy as soon as even minimal travel and communication made it possible for the chiefs of the scattered villages of survivors began to reunite society into any kind of a civilization, and that is a fierce determination to make sure that the next generation remembered who had done this to them, and why they had done it. They would have educated their children to remember the names and descriptions of every one of the hated Strikers who had personally murdered four and a half billion people for a political point. And they would have educated their children that one idea, one idea in the Strikers’ twisted minds, had lead to those four and a half billion deaths, the greatest act of genocide in human history: selfishness. How far did they go to eradicate selfishness? They went so far as to eradicate the first person pronoun from the language.
Because she died without telling anyone, it’s not entirely clear how Shrug Harder would have ended. We know that at some point, at least one of the Strikers does leave Galt Valley. He built a high-tech home, stuffed it with a library and all the wonders of the Strikers’ science, and then (apparently) set out to make contact with the nearest survivors’ village, assuming that they’d worship him as a god for his technological superiority, assuming they’d cheerfully feed him and provide him with anything he wanted for the products of his labor. And, rather obviously, they did what anybody would do: they executed him for crimes against humanity. His technological redoubt was never found. Did other Strikers meet the same fate, or are they all holed up in Galt Valley still? We’ll never know. But that brings us to the book that would clearly have been relabeled once the trilogy was complete … Atlas Shrugged 3: Anthem.
Anthem is actually the best book of the three. And it’s a credit to Rand that she realized just how monstrous the real results of the Strike would be. Many, many so-called Objectivists and Libertarians, who only read the first book, thought they were supposed to cheer for the Strikers, believed the Strikers’ personal delusion that the Strike, and the resulting mass genocide, would usher in a techno-libertarian paradise on earth. No, in Anthem we get a view of John Galt’s Earth from the viewpoint of someone who grew up in the next generation, never having known a technological world, knowing only a world in which selfishness is labeled the ultimate sin. The massive die-off from John Galt’s strike has resulted in the rise of the most vicious and backwards and cruelly unfair totalitarian regime in human history. And our nameless hero slowly has it dawn on him that the ruling council is so afraid of selfishness that they’re retarding any attempt to restore human technological civilization, no matter how miserable and stunted low-tech life is, until they figure out some way to integrate technological progress into their civilization without anybody being able to claim credit for it. Which cannot possibly work.
Our nameless hero, having found working light bulbs and a working electrical system in the ruins of the city his farming town is built over, even offers to forgo personal credit for the discovery, offers to accept no credit for it at all. But their paranoia and terror that he’s a prospective future Striker pushes them to hound him to the point where in desperation he and his girlfriend flee the city into the uninhabited wasteland … where they find the technological trove, and the library, left behind by the unnamed Striker at the end of Shrug Harder. He and his now wife settle down to raise children, to use the subsistence farming skills they learned from their own civilization to sustain them, to gather any other stragglers who escape the cities, and to stay out of sight until they find a way to overthrow the horribly dictatorial Councils that rule the world and lead it to a saner middle ground, one that (presumably) knows to watch out for civilization-wreckers like John Galt but that also knows that giving personal credit is a prerequisite for technological advance. It is, if not an entirely happy ending, a hopeful one.
Oh, except for one thing. I made up the whole bit about the second book. I don’t think Ayn Rand was aware enough of the limitations of her philosophy for her to realize that the communo-primitivist dictatorship of Anthem, not a techno-libertarian utopia, would be the inevitable outcome of a genocide of almost the entire human race by techno-libertarians. Oops. Never mind, then. Sorry!
Nobody Will Ever Believe How We Got Here #OWS
17 October 2011I got extraordinarily lucky when one particular person offered me a ride home from St. Louis’s Archon science fiction convention, and here’s why: she is a very smart person who has just spent the last year under a near-total news blackout. No internet access to speak of, news mostly restricted to sports except during (of all things) the argument over the debt ceiling. And that’s how it happened that I got asked to explain, in five minutes or less, how in the hell Occupy Wall Street even happened. Not what it was about, not what it was standing for, not what I thought was going to happen; she was interested in those things, but the one she really wanted to know was “why now and not three years ago, and how did it happen?”
I don’t think I flubbed my answer. I’ve now had a couple of weeks more to think about it, and I’d give the same answer. But the more I think about it? The more I want to write this down and send it to historians in the future. And the more certain I am that they won’t believe me.
Here’s my understanding of how it came about:
It all started with a possible US war crime in Iraq, and, more importantly, with the cover-up by people who were acting like they thought it was a war crime. A bored sysadmin at a US facility in Afghanistan, with not enough to do, went browsing through his users’ files and saw the video showing US air cavalry in Baghdad shooting up a journalist and the Iraqi civilians he was interviewing, then shooting up the family of four who stopped, in their van, to try to take the wounded to a hospital. So he did what you’re supposed to do under those circumstances: he took it up his chain of command. Who punished him for asking about it, for not leaving it up to the JAG officers. That annoyed him so much that he took advantage of the cypherpunk whistle-blower support website WikiLeaks, sending them the evidence that the JAG corps and his chain of command declined to investigate.
But WikiLeaks was already under pressure from governments around the world, including ours, so he gave them one more thing to use in their defense. It was a “nuclear option,” something so big that even they wouldn’t really want to release it, but that they could threaten the US government with: go after us on (what came to be called) the “Collateral Murder” video, and we’ll pull the trigger on this: over half a million classified State Department internal memos, downloaded from SIPRnet. The US government apparently thought that WikiLeaks wouldn’t do it, or thought they could stop them, or something: they put pressure on banks all over the world to cut off payments processing for donors to WikiLeaks, over the Collateral Murder video.
This was, frankly, nuts, since “Collateral Murder” was a murky and not terribly interesting story. No matter how much anti-war activists wanted to portray it as My Lai in Baghdad, it was a mistaken identity case made worse by adrenaline rush; all it had in common with My Lai was that the chopper pilots who were eager to gun down the people evacuating the wounded were guys who’d lost friends to insurgents in that area, who were gunning for revenge, but that happens in every war zone. It was a very brief news story, already well on its way to being forgotten, but the government went ahead and ordered the banks to punish Wikileaks for their part in it, just because they could. Which the banks did. And so Wikileaks pulled the trigger on “Cablegate.”
Cablegate had a lot of minor effects, most of them predictable, but nobody could have predicted one of them, because it was just that weird.
Despots all over the world have always told their subjects, “Everybody else in the country agrees with us, the despots. You’re the only one who has a problem with it. Well, you and (some much-hated minority group). Which just goes to show, there’s something wrong with you.” In places where the despots have control over the media (which is most places there are despots), they get away with this, because for all most people know, the despot-controlled media is telling the truth about that. Maybe they and their friends really are the only ones who have a problem with it; how could they prove otherwise?
One of the absolutely least interesting, least important State Department cables in the whole “Cablegate” SIPRnet dump was a routine report from the US embassy in Tunisia, that said something that would surprise nobody anywhere in the free world: as the Tunisian dictator freaked out more and more about one thing or another, and got more and more brutal about it, lots of individual Tunisians were seeking out US diplomats and saying, “hey, I’m not okay with this, is it just me?” People from all walks of life. You’re shocked, right?
Let me add something else, something that seems to have gone completely over the heads of the people of Tunisia: lots of stuff in the Cablegate dump is pure bullshit. Nothing in the Cablegate dumps should be taken at face value. There are brilliant, well-educated, deeply culturally embedded foreign-country experts in our foreign service. There are also one holy hell of a lot of dim-witted partisan political hacks who can barely read their own language at a 3rd grade level, let alone the language of the country they’ve been sent to. They both file reports to the Department of State that got dumped onto SIPRnet.
But I guess nobody pointed that out to the Tunisian people. The Cablegate “bombshell” that many Tunisians, not just al Qaeda, were angry at the Army and the dictator of Tunisia arrived right in the middle of an army crackdown, and emboldened by the (ridiculously poorly sourced) reassurance from western journalists that if they rose up against it, others would do so too, the Tunisians tried it. And it shouldn’t have worked, because the army had all the guns. But it did work, for a reason not explained in the Cablegate files: right that minute, for their own personal reasons, the Tunisian army wasn’t terribly happy with the dictator, either. So they declined to machine-gun the protesters. And the dictator fell.
Understanding little or none of this, people living under western-backed dictatorships all over the Arab world freaked out: “we can DO that?” So they tried it. In Iran, the army backed the regime, tortured and gunned down as many protesters as they needed to (which wasn’t all that many) and won. Being a dog-bites-man story, hardly anybody talked about this much. In Syria, the army backed the regime, tortured and gunned down as many protesters as they needed to (which wasn’t all that many) and won. Being a dog-bites-man story, hardly anybody talked about this much. In Saudi Arabia, the government handed out a few million dollars’ worth of bribes, and sent the religious police and the army out to crack a few heads of people who wouldn’t take the bribes, the regime won, and this being a dog-bites-man story, even you probably barely heard of it. But in Egypt? The Egyptians who tried to follow the Tunisians out into the streets lucked into the fact that the Egyptian army was also, for its own personal reasons, ticked off at the dictator; they refused to torture and gun down the protesters, and the protesters won. And now there were two, and even though the success rate was only “two for five” the world giddily declared the “Arab spring.”
Which would have meant nothing. If it weren’t for the second thing that happened because of “Collateral Murder” and “Cablegate.”
People who live and die by the internet, who think that the internet is a Really Big Deal? A lot of those people saw the US government crackdown on Wikileaks as an internet censorship story. And nobody freaks out more, about internet censorship, than Anonymous.
Maybe you’d never heard about Anonymous until recently. I knew a couple of the 2nd or 3rd-wave hangers-on even before Anonymous had even consciously noticed Wikileaks. Anonymous’ original issue was, of all things, Scientology. The Scientologists have been really angry, ever since their most-secret scriptures got dumped onto the Internet after they were briefly unsealed in a lawsuit. To contain that damage, Scientology lobbyists have been pressuring governments (and, by some press reports, Scientology black bag squads have been blackmailing government officials) to get governments to censor Scientology materials from the internet. And so a bunch of 4channers and /b/tards and Something Awful Goon Squad members got together on an anonymous chat server, and decided to protect themselves from Scientology black-bag squads by donning Guy Fawkes masks (the recent movie V for Vendetta was on their minds) and protest outside of Scientology centers. Nothing much came of it … because Scientology is a much harder target than any government, if you ask me. And, if nothing else, it’s also one that a lot fewer people care about. But that’s who Anonymous were.
When Anonymous found out that the government was cracking down on banks that processed credit-card payments for Wikileaks? And when our own government started torturing Bradley Manning, the suspect in the Collateral Murder/Cablegate leaks, to (according to Manning’s lawyer) try to coerce him to testify (falsely) that he didn’t volunteer to send that data to Wikileaks, that he didn’t come up with the idea on his own, that Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, put him up to it, so they could get NATO member countries to extradite Assange to us for espionage? Anonymous went ape-shit, forgot all about harassing the Scientologists, and signed onto an idea from the artsy anti-corporate magazine Adbusters for an American Fall following the model of the Arab Spring, calling on Anonymous’s tens of thousands of anti-censorship fans to get the word out to Occupy Wall Street the way that the Egyptian people occupied Tahrir Square.
So, here we are.
Millions of Americans have been told by the corporate media, ever since the 1980s, that nobody but a handful of dirty hippies, and evil Satanic commies, and lazy welfare bums, and illegal immigrants, and of course more recently al Qaeda, but other than those people, nobody else but you has a problem with winner-take-all laissez faire oligopoly capitalism. They’ve been told that if you’re not okay with fewer and fewer of us having jobs, or if you’re not okay with more and more of us being robbed of our savings by Wall Street fraudsters who don’t get punished (“laissez faire” means “leave us (businesses) alone,” you know), or if you aren’t okay with hedge fund managers like Mitt Romney making a thousand times the salary of the factory workers they lay off while liquidating their profitable companies for short-term gain, or if you don’t agree with all of the Republican candidates and 90% of the Democratic candidates that those are the best policies for the American people? It’s just you. You and al Qaeda and the illegal immigrants and the thieving welfare bums and the dirty hippies and the anti-Christian communists. So what’s wrong with you that you agree with those people, and not with the rest of America, the real Americans? And people meekly shut up and took it, thinking that even if they did have a few friends who agreed with them, maybe it was just them. How would they know differently?
Just like the Tunisians. And the Egyptians. And the people of Saudi Arabia. And the Syrians. And the Iranians.
We didn’t have Wikileaks to tell us otherwise. It shouldn’t have mattered if we had; we should have known not to trust the roughly-half-BS stuff that was in the Cablegate files, but maybe it would have mattered to us if they had told us, like it mattered to the Tunisians and the Egyptians and the rest. But we did have Anonymous to tell us. Which shouldn’t have mattered, because none of us knew who Anonymous were, and probably most of us wouldn’t have approved if we did know. (You took the word of cypherpunk anti-Scientology freaks from three of the most notoriously awful BBSes on the internet over the word of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times? Really?) But somehow, when they told us, even though it shouldn’t have done so, it did matter: by current polls, about 2/3rds of Americans now realize that no, it’s not just a couple of us, and a few bad people, it really is at least 2/3rds of us who have a problem with this. And it’s a month later, and the protest encampments are still going strong, and getting bigger. Pretty soon, maybe, the Wall Street regime’s hand-picked politicians will order the cops and the Army to clear those camps, like the pro-Wall-Street regimes in Tunisia and Egypt and Saudi Arabia did, and the even worse regimes in Syria and Iran. And then we’ll find out who the cops and the army like better, here, just like they did.
And in the far future, when they already know whether the police and the Army will have sided with the Wall Street regime or with the 2/3rds of Americans who aren’t okay with the Wall Street regime, if they read my account of how it all started? They won’t believe me. Because how this all happened? Is just plain nuts.
Not That the Actual Forbidden Knowledge is as Interesting as That There Is Forbidden Knowledge
14 April 2007In my famously favorite passage from Arthur Machen’s influential short story “The Great God Pan,” just before the end, one of two amateur investigators has just uncovered the secret of what it was that was driving young, healthy, wealthy, secure young men to commit suicide on three continents, in a manuscript left behind by one of the suicides. After reading only a few words, the partner says, “Take it away, Villiers, never speak of this again. Are you made of stone, man? Why, the dread and horror of death itself, the thoughts of the man who stands in the keen morning air on the black platform, bound, the bell tolling in his ears, and waits for the harsh rattle of the bolt, are as nothing compared to this. I will not read it; I should never sleep again.” The original investigator assures him that it is true, but finishes by agreeing with the sentiment: “Oh, Austin, how can it be? How is it that the very sunlight does not turn to blackness before this thing, the hard earth melt and boil beneath such a burden?”
I think that 30 scientists and researchers from a half dozen or more different fields who gathered in rural France in 1990 to check each others’ work must have felt something of that same horror when they found that they could not disprove their mutual finding. It was something that none of them wanted to believe. It was a thought that only one of the 30 of them was willing to confront the implications of, and do further research to explore the implications of. And I’m sure that they knew or at least suspected that no matter how important their scientific finding was, they would be vilified for a lifetime if they made society confront this awful truth, and that was a price that they were unwilling to pay. And see, that, to me, is the fascinating thing, even more fascinating than the awful truth itself. On the contrary, almost all of my friends that I’ve discussed this with since I read the book have agreed with me that, given the weight of the evidence, the awful truth in question is pretty undeniable, is important to know, and (contrary to what some might think) it is something we can learn to live with the knowledge of. If this knowledge becomes widespread, it may and probably will cause some hardship for some innocent people. But the good to society will, I believe, out-weigh those harms. So no, really, the awful truth that I’m about to reveal to you will seem anti-climactic compared to the dread that the scientists who discovered it felt.
After a several year career as one of the second generation of women to do fieldwork in primatology, Sarah Hrdy and her husband decided to have their first child. She was already in the middle of preparations to shift her career from primatology to a subject that would allow her to do her fieldwork closer to home, with fewer long absences from home, and in a more comfortable setting to raise a baby in, namely evolutionary biology, when it occurred to her (as a mother to be) just out of personal interest to study the mothering patterns of the colony of monkeys she was observing. She knew to expect high infant mortality. Primatologists have known for over a hundred years that baby monkeys and baby apes are at extreme risk from any male other than their father. (As are baby humans.) But Hrdy was startled to discover, when she tracked the mothers of new infants carefully, that infants were at almost as much risk of murder from their own mothers as they were from unrelated male adults. This baffled her for several reasons, not least of which that while there had been a great deal of research into infanticide in primates, nobody had ever reported a case of a female primate killing her own offspring except by freakish accident. The other reason it baffled her was that, as an evolutionary biologist, she could make no sense whatsoever as to how evolution could produce individuals that destroyed their own offspring, especially among such slowly reproducing species as primates. So she contacted a few other primatologists studying other colonies of monkeys and asked them to carefully monitor the actions of new mothers … and to their astonishment, they observed the same thing.
So she gave a preliminary paper on the subject in 1976, suggesting that more research was needed to explain how this behavior could possibly have evolved in primates, only to be interrupted in mid talk by an audience member, a prominent expert in her field. He stood up, tried to stop her from finishing reading her paper, announced that primate females absolutely do not every murder their own children, and that if she had observed a primate colony in which primate females were killing their own children, it could only be because of something she had done to them; she must have committed some horrible breach of experimental ethics that so deranged these monkeys that she had driven them insane enough to do something that no monkey had ever done before. He then stormed out of the talk and went directly to the scientific press to denounce her for whatever it was that she had done to that monkey colony, so it probably is a good thing that she was already planning on changing fields, no?
So she quietly continued her study, working behind the scenes with other researchers while she directed her own studies towards less controversial animals, such as insects. Eventually she discovered something that appalled even her with its simplicity. Not only do mothers sometimes kill their own children, they are almost never insane when they do so. On the contrary, for a mother to murder her own child is an evolutionary adaptation without which our species would not have survived some of the environmental and social disasters of the past. What’s more, the actual reasoning behind this is so simple that a straightforward simple equation in four variables is sufficient to provide a reliable estimate of the probability that any particular mother will murder any particular infant: the age of the mother, whether or not this child is the gender that the mother wanted (which, itself, turns out to be easily and universally predicted based on only two variables, the mother’s social status and the predicted reliability of the food supply), the child’s birth weight (and to a lesser extent other indicators of long-term viability), and her estimate of whether or not attempting to nurture this particular child will only get both her and the child killed. When she took her early estimates for this equation to the 1990 conference, she discovered that epidemiologists studying SIDS, primatologists studying infanticide (following her 1976 tip), historians digging through old records to try to quantify infanticide throughout the ages, criminologists and social psychologists trying to come up with statistical models to predict mother-on-child infanticide, and anthropologists trying to statistically analyze what variables are most consistent with cultures that have high versus low rates of infanticide, had all independently discovered the same equation. And from her viewpoint as an evolutionary biologist, Hrdy demonstrates that any sane, healthy, normal, intelligent mothers who weren’t capable of coldly murdering their own infant children almost certainly had no surviving descendants at all to be our ancestors during some of the species-wide threats that have been demonstrated to have happened from the fossil record and from studies of rates of genetic drift.
I mention SIDS. One of the researchers, she says, was an epidemiologist who, in the process of trying to quantify his hunch, initiated a study in which social workers and police very, very intensively interviewed and background checked a long string of crib deaths that had been explained away as unexplained random respiratory failure. It turns out that his equation was able to predict, with high (but not absolute) reliability, which infants had actually been the victims of homicide or malign neglect. If the infant was a boy when the mother wanted a girl or vice versa, if the infant was born weighing less than 8 pounds, or if the mother was in any kind of economic or physical danger if this child survived, then the baby was doomed. His final estimate, from that initial study, was that seventy five percent of all SIDS cases are actually homicides. But, he admitted, just acknowledging this possibility puts us in an awful dilemma. To catch the 3 out of 4 women whose babies suddenly die that were actually murderers, we have to treat all SIDS cases as potential homicides, therefore piling yet more heartbreak and tragedy on the 1 out of 4 who just randomly went through the worst tragedy any family can know, the sudden and unexpected death of a beloved child. Even using the predictive equation to narrow the field of homicide investigations, we’d still be casting a very scarily public accusation of homicide on an uncomfortably large number of grieving mothers.
I also mention social psychology. The central tenet of the field of social psychology is that if under a given situation, all or nearly all individuals will engage in the same unwanted behavior, then there is less to be gained by stigmatizing those individuals and lauding the ones who don’t than by studying the situation with an eye towards changing it. And you can see in a heartbeat how that applies here: if infants are at extreme risk whenever one or more of three variables are present, then we can reduce the rate of (massively under-reported, intentionally under-investigated) maternal infanticide by decreasing the economic and evolutionary pressures behind gender preference, by providing mothers with as much economic assistance and physical protection as it would require for them to feel safe providing for this baby, and by intensify supervision for the first several months of life of mothers of infants who are born weighing less than 8 pounds or looking otherwise sickly. But addressing the issue in this way, and looking into the roots of the equation that predicts maternal infanticide, makes social psychologists confront the queasy implication of all of their work: if it’s that sane and natural for them to do this awful thing, if this awful thing is so hard to resist, how can we justify stigmatizing and punishing them? And if we can’t, then how can we live with ourselves having just (the historian points out) joined the 85% of all known historical societies, up to and including Christian western Europe as late as the late 19th century, that socially tolerated infanticide any time in the first couple of days after birth? There’s pro-choice, I mean, and then there’s being so pro-choice as to join the ranks of societies that have denied the humanity of a breathing infant up to 48 hours old … are we willing to go there? Or to at least show understanding and compassion and tolerance towards societies that did or that do? The anthropologists at the conference were especially terrified of releasing their research findings, because they knew that the accusation that a society or tribe kills children has been used to justify no shortage of genocidal invasions.
I cultivate a readership that’s willing to think the unthinkable, so perhaps most of you are still baffled by what part of this spawned such a terror of confronting their own research findings that 29 out of 30 scientists who discovered it immediately and without any external pressure moved to suppress their own research findings. Frankly, good — I distrust that impulse, too, and think that we are always better off knowing the truth than not knowing it. But as you go about your day, remember this: research shows that your own mother consciously or unconsciously considered murdering you in your crib, off and on for at least the first 48 hours after your birth and not improbably for the whole first two weeks of your life, maybe even the first two months. And if your mother was under 30 when she had you and you were born male in a poor family or female in a wealthy family during times of economic hardship, or weighing less than 8 pounds, or at a time when your mother thought that her own chances of survival would improve if you didn’t survive so (for example) she could get pregnant by her new husband more quickly or so she could return to work more quickly, you very nearly didn’t make it. And she would have gotten away with it, too, because mothers have traditionally had along list of potential murder weapons ready to hand, from handing you over to caretakers or adoption agencies even if she knew they had a 99% chance of killing you, to smothering you with a pillow, to switching you to infant formula that she knew was diluted with unsafe water, to declining to lift a hand to save you from some mortal peril. And because “everybody knows” that mothers don’t kill their own children, nobody would have questioned her about it. Have a nice day!
Opposite Extremes
25 April 2008True story.
I’m not really close to any of my family, but I hear of one of them rather more often than the others. About once every three or four years, he makes the news locally, in some minor way, and I recognize his name: he’s in law enforcement, and he’s the officer quoted in some news story about that often. And I notice something every time, without exception. But first, some preface.
I’ve scarcely seen him at all since a family holiday event a smidgen over 25 years ago. I was back from college, he was a recent college graduate working for the county police department. And it came up in conversation that he’d been recently assigned to the vice and narcotics squad, working undercover. Knowing what I knew about vice and narcotics work in general, and about the then truly awful reputation of the county’s vice and narcotics squad, I expressed my sympathy, and assured him that most officers find it pretty easy to rotate out within at most a year or two. He demured, and stated right out loud that he’d asked for the transfer to narcotics and vice, and intended to make a career out of it. I couldn’t square that with his life-long reputation as the straightest of straight arrows in the family, as someone with zero taste for any kind of moral or ethical compromise, couldn’t see how he could do work that compromises you ethically and morally even in the cleanest of departments, which the county vice and narcotics squad absolutely wasn’t at the time. He couldn’t understand what part of it was confusing me. So after talking past each other for a while, I brought up all the scandals I’d seen in the past year’s worth of newspapers, asked how a guy who felt the way he did could make the ethical and moral compromises necessary to do undercover work at all, let alone participate in cover-ups of criminal activity by fellow officers and superior officers, and not want to escape it as fast as possible?
I think I was expecting some kind of nuanced answer. I did not get one, nor was I braced at all for what I got: an explosion. Incoherent, angry raving and screaming. To which, being no more mature than any other 20-something, I responded by trying to yell over him to try to ask him what he was yelling about, which, of course, only made things worse. The family began to steadily gather around us from other rooms, to see what the yelling was about, just in time for he and I to figure out exactly what the point of conflict was between us:
My relative is firmly of the opinion that it is flatly never acceptable to place your own moral judgment above that of anybody in authority over you. Ever. Not only is it never acceptable, it’s never moral. Not only is it never moral, it is never even legal, he insisted. Not only is it illegal, but it’s a sign of a sick mind; only the most twisted and psychopathic and immoral of perverted reprobates says that their moral judgment is more reliable and more trustworthy than that of any authority figure over them. If someone in authority over you tells you that something is moral, then either that settles it, or you’re the kind of criminal monster sicko that guys like my relative have sworn to protect society against. And when he got that across to me, I lost my temper even bigger than he had. I reminded him of the Fourth Nuremberg Principle, as I’d been taught it all the way back in first grade: “I was only following orders” is not a defense, it’s an indictment. I reminded him that we had sent Nazi and Japanese war criminals to long prison sentences for not exercising independent moral judgment when given immoral orders by their superiors. Within seconds, we were both screaming apoplectics, and that’s when the whole family stepped in to separate us. Both his mother and my father said the same thing: “There is no way for you two to ever talk to each other ever again, if that’s how you both feel.” And we've both stuck to it, even at my parents’ funerals; he stays over there, I stay over here. Even though he's almost one of the only living relatives I have in the local area, we never, ever interact, and it suits us both just fine.
And the thing is, in the immediate aftermath of that screaming match, my parents said something to me that took me decades to even grudgingly accept the possibility of: they told me that both he and I are completely insane on this subject. Someone who can never accept another person’s moral authority when that person is in authority is just as crazy as someone who can never question it, they told me; the sane course is to know when the other person’s moral authority is more trustworthy than your own, and to know when to question it. Some days, I can even intellectually accept that. But I cannot make myself actually believe it. I can be persuaded, when no moral issue is at stake, to follow orders I disagree with, because I accept that sometimes it’s just not up to me. When moral issues are at stake but those in authority decree that there is to be no punishment for the path that’s abhorrent to me, I can usually pretty effortlessly persuade myself to suspend judgment on others, usually even mind my own business, especially in cases where the people who’re accepting the moral mis-steps are themselves the only ones being ripped off or hurt. But I can never, ever, ever judge right and wrong, especially as it applies to my own actions, by any standard other than my own moral compass.
Chalk it up as more evidence that I’m crazy, I know. But here’s the thing I notice, every time he’s in the news: he’s gotten another promotion. Every couple of years, he moves up in rank, moves to a more prestigious department, or both. My particular insanity on this subject has rendered me unemployable, made enough actual and potential employers and co-workers uncomfortable as to have explicitly cost me three jobs, for not being unethical enough. Even when I was willing to go along to get along, people felt judged. His insanity, on the other hand, has been steadily lucrative for him, a lifetime source of satisfaction and prestige. And that makes me uncomfortable in ways I can’t even begin to express, not all of which I even understand myself.
Using It In Reverse
30 August 2006I finally remember what I was trying to remember to write about last night. There was a big story yesterday on the AP wire headlined, “Sisters Were Whistleblowers in Katrina Claims Handling Case” (Michael Kunzelman, August 29, 2006). Two women who were working for an engineering firm doing claims inspections for State Farm say that they smuggled thousands of pages of engineering reports that their subcontracting firm submitted to State Farm that agreed with many homeowners that their homes were primarily damaged by wind (which would have been covered) rather than rising flood waters (which wouldn’t have been), reports that were rejected and rewritten, under orders from State Farm, to contradict the evidence and claim flood damage so they could fraudulently deny the claims. State Farm denies it, of course. Nor do the two claim that only State Farm was doing it. The only reason that we know that State Farm was doing it was that the two women had a family-friends connection to Richard Scruggs, who’d handed a prior very famous whistle-blowing case: Jeffrey Wigand and Brown & Williamson tobacco. They smuggled the documents out to him; he turned the documents over to the attorney general and is advising homeowners in a lawsuit against State Farm.
But here’s one of the thoughts that struck me. The two women admit that their careers are over. Right now they’re working for Scruggs’ firm as document preparers, helping him build the case but at a small fraction of what they were making before. And what they make afterwards will be anybody’s guess, because nobody in the insurance industry (or much of any company) will ever touch somebody who was that “disloyal.” They sacrificed their own careers to help other people get their homes back, starving their own families to try to save many other people’s families from ruin and starvation, not even knowing in advance whether they’d be successful in doing so or not. Heroic? I’m a little uncomfortable thinking so. I’d like to think that everybody knows what would happen to their own children in a society where nobody blows the whistle on stuff like this, where all companies know they can get away with it. But then, I would, wouldn’t I? My religion, Hellenism, teaches that you have an obligation to your family. But your family can’t thrive if you let your neighborhood goes down the drain, and your neighborhood can’t thrive if your city goes down the drain because you didn’t stop it, and your city can’t thrive if you fail to sacrifice for your country and your whole country fails.
But the other thought that struck me after that is that somewhere out there, some CEO is missing a bet. I read years ago that human resource departments all over the country subscribe to a database that lists everybody who’s ever been a whistle blower, who’s ever gone public with damaging information about their company. (It’s the same company, I think I remember, that also lets them look up whether or not a prospective employee has ever sued an employer, engaged in union activities, or filed on occupational safety or health complaint.) Human resource departments routinely blackball such prospective employees, to protect their employer from possible trouble-makers. But it occurred to me that if I were a CEO, I’d absolutely want to subscribe to that database … and use it the exactly opposite way the designers intended.
One of the things that every truly awful, truly monstrous boss I’ve ever had had in common was that they all demanded a very specific and very one-sided loyalty. Not to what was right, and certainly not to what was right for the company; they wanted to know that you could be counted on to always do what was right for them, personally. If they had any doubt in your personal loyalty to them, they’d find a way to sabotage your career and get rid of you, as happened to me twice and nearly happened several other times. And without exception, the managers who expected me to screw the public, screw the customers, screw the company, screw anybody necessary to protect them personally, all had something big that they needed to hide. Maybe it was some way they were cheating the company; more often it was just simple incompetence. But if I were the CEO of a company and I had managers like that working for me, I’d want to know that! I’d want to specifically staff my company with as many people as possible who did have their own internal moral compass, who could be counted on to go over their immediate supervisors’ heads if they saw something dodgy. I’d want to be able to tell potential investors that I had staffed the company with people who could even be counted on to rat me out if I was screwing the company, the country, or the investors. And who better to hire for that than as many former whistle-blowers as I could find?
It’s Not a M------F---ing “Miracle.” It’s Somebody’s JOB.
16 January 2009First, let me disclaim something: this is probably not going to be the best writing job I’ve ever done. I know what I do best. What I do best, in writing, is a factual essay on a subject I’m very interested in, where I calmly and rationally explain relevant history and facts and where I compare and contrast multiple opinions. Some of you think I do that well enough that I should be doing it for a living; I can say that when I was well enough to work in an office environment, much of my most highly praised work was in documentation. But this isn’t going to be a documentation piece. I want to try to do something here that I’m constitutionally very, very bad at: express strong emotion. Because I keep getting chills about US Airways flight 1549, the same way I kept getting chills for days after Hurricane Katrina, only for the opposite reason. I do not remember the last time I was so proud of so many people at once. It probably hasn’t been since I found out about the nothing less than brilliantly designed, brilliantly executed management plan that the survivors at the abandoned, forgotten overflow shelter at the New Orleans Convention Center organized themselves and ran their own shelter by that I have felt this proud of so many people at one time.
And unlike Katrina, I keep wanting to freak out over the things that really should have or could have gone wrong and didn’t. For example, not being a New Yorker and not being intimately familiar with the Hudson River at that point, it wasn’t until I saw tonight’s Rachel Maddow Show that I realized that while trying to fly an unpowered jetliner at the minimum stall speed, Captain Sullenberger had to deal with the teensy little obstacle that the optimum glide path would have crashed him and his passengers into the crowded George Washington Bridge. We’ll know when we see the FTSB report, but my guess based on the physics is that he must have managed to dive for speed before getting to it and then use that speed to climb above it … so smoothly that the passengers described it as “going over a speed bump.”
But flight 1549 has something else in common with Hurricane Katrina for me. I keep getting enraged at some politicians and spokesmen for some of the genuinely awful, genuinely stupid, actually malevolently evil things that they’re saying about it. And none of them has so far affected me so strongly as New York governor David Patterson’s oft-reported description of this as “a miracle.” And yes, I know he’s not the only one who’s calling it that. So let me try to find the under-used, or perhaps over-used, vocabulary to try to explain something very, very important to me. This was no mother fucking “miracle.” This was a job. Praise one or more gods on your own time. The real reason that 155 people lived through this is that dozens, maybe hundreds of ordinary men and women with jobs to do were well-trained for those jobs, and when the time came to do so they did their jobs, and they did them right and did them well. Most of them even did the exact right thing on the first try; those that didn’t, fixed their mistakes correctly in plenty of time.
Perhaps you misunderstand why this is so important to me, so let me be pedantically clear about it. This is not about religion, not about the majority religion, not about my feelings about my religion, their religion, or religion in general. It is about something much more important than that, or at least, something much more important to me than God, whether “He” exists or not, or the gods I worship, or anything else in the world for that matter, and that is this. If we believe that survival during a disaster is “miraculous”? If we believe that it is entirely up to God who lives or who dies when something goes wrong? Then far too many of us will leave it up to God to save people.
Sully Sullenberger didn’t leave it up to God whether his passengers were going to live or die. He spent a large percentage of his professional life taking time out to practice in simulation how to land a commercial jetliner without engines. When he decided that wasn’t enough, he then went on to make a professional study, on his own time, of commercial aviation safety, so much so that telling other people what he learned from studying it turned into a second job for him. And (more goosebumps again) he decided, years ago?, that that wasn’t enough margin for safety for him, so he went on to learn to become a certified glider pilot. Nor should you call it a “miracle” that US Airways flight 1549 had someone like Sully Sullenberger at the helm, because that’s what commercial aviation is like. If you look at the records of every civil aviation disaster in history, you see the same thing in the story of the pilot at the helm of all of them: the same fierce lifelong determination to be prepared for disaster in any form, and the same calm professionalism on the rare occasions that disaster strikes. Yeah, 99.99% of the day to day job is being a glorified bus driver stuck in traffic. But the other 0.01% of the job is part of the job too, and the history of commercial aviation is chock-full of people who did it.
The National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration have never believed in leaving it up to God whether or not the passengers are going to live through an accident. Since deregulation of the industry, airlines have gone so far as to eliminate pillows to reduce weight in their airliners in order to save weight and reduce fuel costs: you think they were crazy about carrying gigantic self-inflating rafts, or life jackets for all passengers? If those seem like no-brainers to you, let me point out that in the news over the last several months there was a discussion, initiated by we don’t know whom just yet, clearly intended to eliminate just those things. The argument went that almost never do airliners land in water. And when they do, they have to crash into the water at a minimum speed of about 140 miles per hour so the plane is going to break up and everybody is going to die anyway, it will be “up to God” who lives and who dies. But people at the NTSB and the FAA were having none of it, and you know why? Sooner or later, some airline pilot was going to have to do what Captain Sullenberg had to do the other day, and they weren’t going to leave it up to God; screw the cost, those airliners were going to have rafts and life jackets. That decision saved 155 lives.
Here’s another example. Almost all airline air crew employees retire without ever being in an aviation disaster. You could argue that it makes no sense to waste time training them for one, time that would be better served having them just do their job. But over the decades, people have studied the heck out of the disasters that did happen, and as a result we know an awful lot about disaster survival. We know that there are two things that, more than anything else, more even than good equipment and good preparation and good training, decide whether or not a group of people in a disaster together stay alive: someone in a recognized position of chain of command, even if it’s just a stewardess in a cheap imitation of a World War II Air Force women’s officer uniform, must be clearly seen to be in charge, that person must be relaying good and useful information, and most importantly, that person must remain calm and prioritize keeping everybody else calm. So even though almost no stewards or stewardesses will ever need to know how to do that, we not only train them on how to keep passengers calm during an evacuation, we drill them on it. And because they’re not at the top of the chain of command, we put even more training, drill, and intense socio-cultural pressure on pilots, the commanders of the airplanes, to remain entirely calm no matter what goes wrong, and to (if anything) quietly understate the threat. Call it American fighter-pilot macho, call it British military stiff upper lip; call it whatever you like, but that calm professionalism saves lives. Not just in this disaster, but in any disaster. Captain Sullenberger, and his flight crew, are only the most recent vivid example of this in action.
(How well did they do it? According to an interview with literally the last passenger to get off of the sinking airliner, the flight attendants managed to keep things calm and orderly while they and the passengers evacuated a passenger with two broken legs through waist-deep 36°F water, water cold enough to kill you in five minutes. And a woman carrying a newborn infant, too, but it’s the passenger with the broken legs that weirds even me out. I would dread having to do that through narrow airliner aisles on flat, dry ground; having to do it on a wet, slippery, slanted floor in water deep enough and dark enough that you can’t even see where you’re putting your feet? I’d dread that job even if there were no other passengers on the plane; whoever managed that can be proud of having had an extraordinarily good day at work.)
Nor were they the only ones prepared. New York isn’t a city with a harbor, it’s a harbor with a city, and has been since colonial times. New York’s many harbors and riverways are why they built a city there in the first place. And part of waterfront culture in New York City, as in any reasonably well-functioning port city, is the “man overboard” drill. It’s another disaster that seldom happens, and almost never during weather where it’d be a seriously life-threatening problem. So what? Practice it anyway. And so even though it was just an ordinary ferry boat captain who first pulled up to the hatch on flight 1549, “man overboard” drills are part of his job. This was just an unusually large “man overboard” drill: 155 people in water that will kill them in five minutes. So? Do it just like you did it every time it didn’t matter: use the tools we make the boat carry and the training we make you practice all the time to get life jackets and life preserver rings and hooks and ropes and slings down to anybody in the water, and pull them up. It’s just another day at work. If you know what you’re doing, if you’re any good at your job, you can even show random strangers how to do it. And that is exactly what happened. Real professionals had to do the really scary, really hard parts, like diving into the water in cold-water diving gear to rescue legitimately panicky people who’d drifted away from the floating wreck and from the rafts and who were legitimately about to drown. Being a real harbor run by real professionals who have no intention of waiting for a miracle to save those people, New York harbor has people to do that, and they got there barely in time. But by the time they’d gotten there, virtually everybody else had been rescued … not just by the Coast Guard and the Transit Authority and the Harbor Patrol, but by dozens or hundreds of ordinary people who saw a job to do and did it.
And contrary to what some deeply sociopathic people in positions of intolerably high visibility and/or authority would tell you, that so many people did their jobs when it mattered is no “miracle of God,” either. That’s what ordinary people do, every day at work, by the untold billions: they do their job, as best as they can, and when the fit hits the shan, they try to salvage whatever they can. Every job has potential disasters, from tornado strikes to building fires, to mining disasters or other industrial accidents, to random crime on the premises. And in workplace after workplace, whenever there is a disaster, real ordinary working people do what they need to do. They do it calmly, and professionally, and with a little bit of quiet pride in their work afterwards. I do not begrudge anybody the feeling that no matter how bad something went, “that could have been a little worse; I think I did good today.” No, what I begrudge is the professional sociopath, of either party and of any religion, who would rob the people who trained and prepared them of their credit, and rob the working people who did the job of their credit, to give “glory to God.” God doesn’t need the glory; he, she, it or they will be just fine without it. Pay attention to the people who did things right. Thank them, not God. And learn from their example, in case it’s ever your turn to be the hero.
And you know what? If you take nothing else away from this essay, this: Be ashamed of yourself if you think that ordinary acts of heroism are somehow unlikely enough or unusual enough to be considered “miraculous.”
Oh, and by the way, the first ten minutes of Friday’s Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC were about just this topic, too. Because of their fierce determination to pay for the bandwidth by making you watch the maximum amount of commercial time first, I’m not sure my link to the actual story will work, but I think this is it: Rachel Maddow (with Stephen Flynn), “When Infrastructure Works,” The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC TV, 1/16/09. (I tried embedding the video, but LiveJournal doesn’t play well with MSNBC TV’s webpage. I’ll edit in a link to the transcript when it goes up on their web page Monday.) If you do find the video, be patient with the first minute or two, she’s having to “tease” or set up all the rest of the news stories of the evening. Give it especially until about the minute and a half mark, where she brings on former Coast Guard commander Stephen Flynn to talk about what real professionals do to prepare for disaster, and what we should learn from them. After hearing him, I rushed out and ordered his book, The Edge of Disaster: Rebuilding a Resiliant Nation.
Weimar America?
24 March 2009Sick as I’ve been these last couple of months, I did get one thing done that I’d been meaning to do. Quite a while back I asked my “brain trust” to recommend a good overview text on the Weimar Republic period in German history, and everybody agreed on Richard Evans The Coming of the Third Reich, volume 1 of his trilogy on the rise, rule, and fall of the Nazis. I finished it a while back, and I have to agree with the many reviews that I’ve seen that this is the essential book to start with, the one that made sense out of everything else I’ve read about Weimar Germany before and since, by supplying useful historical context. Many thanks for the recommendation, those of you who suggested it.
Now, here’s why I cared. I came by my fascination with the subject of economics when I had a teacher who was at least as good at explaining complex topics as I am, my Economics and Political Science teacher at the fundamentalist pseudo-prep private high school I was sent to against my will. The year was 1975, and especially for conservatives, the word “Weimar” was in the air, a lot. The US was still being hammered by economic sanctions from Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Our ability to do anything about it was crippled entirely by the hammering our military took in Vietnam, and the hammering our budget took under the Johnson and Nixon administrations’ “Guns and Butter” refusal to raise taxes, sell war bonds, or cut any other governmental expenses to pay for that losing war; they instead maxed-out our national ability to borrow, from anywhere, and left the resulting mess to Presidents Ford and Carter to clean up, neither of them shining examples of economic or political competence. The net result was double-digit unemployment, even by the heavily politicized, massively under-counted official rate, plus double-digit inflation and a Dow Jones Industrial Average in the low to mid 3 digits, and both political parties’ leading candidates were telling us that things were going to get a lot worse before they got better. And because the combination of high inflation and high unemployment is rare, the comparison that economists were nervously talking about was not to the Great Depression, but the far more sinister comparison to the Great Inflation that most experts cite as the most important cause of the rise of fascism and the end of democracy in Germany. The question was being very seriously asked, when I first started studying economics in the mid to late 1970s: were we heading towards Weimar America?
Here’s the story my social-conservative Moral Majority charter member economics teacher, and other right wing economists of the time, were telling us to help us understand what they were afraid of. Weimar Germany, they told us, was hampered from the start by strong labor unions and a Socialist majority in their parliament. Those bad socialist economic policies, combined with the years of crushing and intolerably high reparations they were being forced to pay after World War I, combined with a total collapse of family values and a rise in public displays of sexual perversion not seen since the Roman Empire, so wrecked the Germany economy that the currency became worthless, people stopped working, and eventually people turned to Hitler in hopes of freeing the government from having to listen to labor unions, to free Germany from reparations, and to crush the sexual deviants that were destroying the Germany family and the German worker’s ability to work. Yep. That’s what I was told. But over the years, I’ve learned that there wasn’t a single word of truth in that whole account. Labor unions were no stronger in Germany than anywhere else, and weaker than they were in Britain in the same time period, and they didn’t collapse into fascism. Sexual “immorality” was no more blatant in Germany than it was in Paris, and barely more than it was in New York City, and neither France nor the US suspended democracy in a fascist revolution. And, and here was the big eye opener for me, Germany never paid the reparations, except for one token payment; the rest were funded via direct financial aid from, or open-ended loans by, the USA, which had opposed reparations from the beginning. So knowing those things, you can understand my curiosity when I wanted to find out: how, then, did the Great Inflation happen in Germany? How, then, did democracy die in Germany? And could those same conditions, that same situation, happen the same way here?
Let me massively speed up and oversimplify Evans’ well-documented, definitively researched conclusions. Even with economic support from the US, Versailles Treaty reparations were enough of a drag on the Germany economy that there was pretty substantial inflation. Nothing unprecedented, and not all that much higher than elsewhere on the continent, but somewhat high nonetheless. Well, when they were dictating the terms of Germany’s surrender, France insisted on a guarantee that they wouldn’t be paid back in devaluated currency; they reserved the right to claim very nearly all of Germany’s pre-war level of annual coal production. In 1923, they demanded the reparations be paid in coal. But the German mining industry had not yet recovered to pre-war levels; if nothing else, far too many workers were dead or still crippled from the war. Rather than accept that excuse, the French raised a foreign legion of black soldiers from French Algeria and invaded and conquered the German coal-mining and industrial states of the Ruhr river valley, and ordered their African troops to round up every able-bodied man, woman, or child and force them at gunpoint to mine coal until the reparations were paid, shooting anybody who refused to work, and anybody who spoke out against the invasion. The German people responded with a general strike, and this time, the level of national outrage was high enough that it stuck.
But a general strike in the Ruhr was no small deal. Over the preceding decades, Germany had basically dismantled most of its farm economy, retooling their whole economy around fabled German engineering and German manufacturing efficiency, exporting fine tools and heavy machinery to the US and to eastern Europe in exchange for food and to the Middle East in exchange for oil. With the Ruhr valley shut down, unemployment in Germany jumped instantly to over 50%, and German exports dropped to very nearly zero. As the last bits of food in the country were bid on by increasingly desperate people, the mark became essentially worthless; what good is paper money if it can’t buy food? By the end of the six month general strike, by the time the US bullied France into withdrawing, only two things were keeping anybody alive in Germany: remittances from German expatriates in the US, and sexual tourism. Everybody who had family elsewhere begged them for cash. If you didn’t have family outside the country to do that for you, then one or more of your family members had no choice but to head to a tourist city outside the Ruhr and compete with other equally desperate people for a share in the foreign sex-tourism business, children and pregnant women and mother/daughter acts and straight men competing with each other for the privilege of having sex with Arab oil sheiks or French “sophisticates” or British “gentlemen.” Remittances and prostitution brought in hard currency that could be traded to black marketeers, who smuggled that money out of the country and food in, so if a family member suddenly and mysteriously had food, you didn’t ask questions. You just quietly hoped that they’d gotten money from a friend overseas in the mail, and pretended not to think about any other ways they might have gotten it.
How bad did it get? We don’t know. That’s not a hand-wave, that’s a sentence that should shock you to the core: the Germans were so shell-shocked by starvation that they, of all people, stopped keeping records. Towards the end of the general strike, German newspapers were estimating the combined death toll from starvation, suicide, and murder by Algerian troops at 140,000. That’s very probably an inflated figure, a propaganda claim aimed at garnering US sympathy. Evans argues, somewhat uncertainly, that the few personal daily diaries we have from that year don’t show people going to as many funerals as that high of a death toll would suggest. But on the other hand, he also admits, none of those diaries are from the Ruhr valley area, where the suffering would have been the worst. What we do know from those diaries is that long, long before the French occupation and the general strike were over, your average German was eating maybe one meal every other day, was too starved to think and almost too starved to move, counting themselves lucky every time they did eat, and feeling degraded at being that happy for so little. Once the general strike and the occupation were over, the government zeroed out the currency, issued new currency, put people back to work, and far faster than you would think possible, things returned to normal.
Interestingly, democracy in Germany didn’t die of the Great Inflation. It lasted for another ten years. And in Berlin, in particular, the legacy of of a summer of rampant prostitution wasn’t crippling shame, but a fairly widespread tolerance for sexual themes in art, theater, and music that had been unthinkably obscene before the Great Inflation. Many Berliners alive during that time remembered the 10 years from 1924 to 1933 as almost a golden age. No, the irony is that it wasn’t the Great Inflation that killed democracy in Germany; it was the Great Depression in the US, which wiped out German savings that were invested in US stock market scams and which eliminated American banks’ ability to lend money still needed for reconstruction to the Germans, that ended freedom and democracy in Germany. Even though the effects were far lighter the second time, the German people could withstand one such shock, but not two of them.
So, could it happen here? It’s hard to imagine a collapse so thorough that unemployment reached 50% and US exports hit zero. It’s theoretically possible, but really incredibly unlikely. If it did happen, we would have one advantage Germany didn’t have. We’ve shut down an awful lot of agriculture over the last couple of decades to import cheaper vegetables and beef from Latin America, but even so, we’re still very nearly self-sufficient in food. Or would we? American agriculture is entirely dependent on oil, and not only are we not self-sufficient in oil (obviously), but, no matter what lies the American oil industry tells you, there is no way we could produce enough oil in this country to fuel even just the agriculture industry and the shipping of food from farm to table. No matter how stable the US dollar has historically been, if food and fuel run out because our exports stop completely, Weimar-like levels of hyperinflation are far from impossible.
As I mentioned a while back, the last time unemployment got above 20% in the US, we faced three semi-credible attempts to overthrow the government. On the other hand, those attempts all failed, and that’s perhaps less surprising than it could be. America’s supreme Founding Father and Germany’s supreme Founding Father were very different people, and they left us with radically different traditions. George Washington made all his army officers swear the Oath of Cincinattus. He sent them home immediately after the Revolutionary War, committing us as a nation to always demobilize our army between wars. Just as importantly, he intentionally stepped down while still popular, after two terms, to cure us of any temptation to elect a strong man for life. Otto von Bismark, on the other hand, elevated the King of Prussia to the Kaiser, the Caesar, of a new Holy Roman Empire, emperor for life, and set him up with a large and permanent army as the permanently most prestigious and most powerful branch of the new government. On the other hand, over General (then President) Eisenhower’s objections and fervent warnings, we trampled all over one half of George Washington’s legacy; as with Germany under the Kaisers, our army is now our largest permanent branch of government, too. But we don’t remember a military dictatorship under a hereditary strong man as our golden age (quite), and we do retain our tradition of regular change of executive.
In the first years after World War I, the Germans also did something else that I don’t think that we’d do, and it was very bad for democracy. Unemployment was high, veterans benefits were inadequate to the number of crippled and shell-shocked vets trickling back from POW camps, and the police were not back to anything like full numbers. So, to address all of those problems, all seven or eight of Germany’s political parties set up their own private militias, paying veterans’ paychecks out of party member dues: first to protect their campaign rallies, then to protect neighborhoods in which their party held the majority, and then ultimately to fight in the streets in several small civil wars. Somehow, even if the Democrats do split between the Reform Democrats and the Blue Dog Democrats, even if the Republicans split between the Evangelical Republicans and the Conservative Republicans, I just can’t see all of them plus the smaller political parties going so far as to create their own uniformed armies, nor can I see the American people or their police, however strained and underfunded, letting them descend into armed factional warfare. Also, while racism is alive in America, but I can’t even imagine Mexicans being scapegoated the way that Jews were leading up to and during the Third Reich; even Lou Dobbs and Glen Beck can’t whip us up into the kind of murderous hunger for Mexican blood that several German political parties were able to excite against the Jews. At least, I don’t think they can. And remember, when democracy died in Germany, it was less than 20 years old, not more than 200.
So, in conclusion, American democracy has safeguards, cultural and historical and political, that the Germans prior to American occupation and reconstruction never had. My impression is that, contrary to all the warnings I was given back in the 1970s and contrary to the casual way some people (myself included) throw around the term “Weimar America” all too loosely, we can probably remain pretty confident that it won’t get that bad and that, being Americans, even if it did get that bad it wouldn’t necessarily, or even likely, turn out the way it did in Germany a decade after the Great Inflation. However bad it gets, I remain more convinced than ever: it’s not going to get that bad.
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