Across the Great Divide

Drinking with the Enemy.

The other day I poked some double fun at the upcoming happy hour "hosted" by MN Publius and MDE.

As someone who founded his blog on the premise of figuring out how people who disagree can still build a decent world, I owe the organizers an explanation of why I look on this opportunity with little excitement.

Yes, I know there are differences between this happy hour and meeting of heads of state, but the question is still pertinent. Why would I or any progressive attend a branded event that seems calculated to create a veneer of bipartisanship for perhaps the most partisan attack blog in the state?

Mitch Berg makes one pass at a reason, reminiscing about a happy hour of yore:

[I]t was just a tiny bit harder to flame on people that I’d met in person.  That I’d actually met as humans, rather than as mere brain-damaged big-government-coddling tax-and-spend liberal drones.  And a few of them wrote as well, saying they could maybe be a little more tolerant of uncaring, selfish conservatives now that they’d actually met some of us — something they didn’t do much of in real life.

It made an impression.

Oh, it only lasted so long, of course. 

And his commenters swoop in to prove the point.

I do agree that such face-to-face contact can encourage civility, but I don't need to bike to St. Paul for a beer to learn its virtues. And I have no interest at all in fake civility that does nothing more than help Michael Brodkorb go back next week and slag more Democrats with more utter B.S.

Real community and real civility — civitas — come about when antagonists find something important they truly want in common. Something they cannot have without respecting the other's perspective, values and rights.

Jonathan Thompson, of High Country News, edits a publication that attempts to bring an environmental audience face-to-face with the complex realities of the American West. They write about inevitable collisions involving die-hard opponents. In the process, they have learned a thing or two about how people who've fought bitterly for years can move on to something better.

The magazine's current issue has a story about how native tribes and farmers along the Klamath River had one fundamental thing in common:

They rely on the river for their food and their livelihoods. While those needs have competed with one another in the past, they are also what kept these guys at the bargaining table until an agreement came together.

It wasn’t easy. Before the farmers and tribes could hold hands, they both had to endure a lot of pain — massive fish kills, dried-up fields and the tedium of the negotiations themselves.

Perhaps that’s the lesson here: Unlikely alliances don’t happen by magic, they take work. Sometimes the situation needs to become so dire that the two sides have no other choice but to get along. Then they can find a bit of common ground, and their reverence for and reliance upon the land will finally win out over age-old animosities. And then they will discover that their alliance was never that unlikely after all.

I'm conflicted about attending. What do you think?

The Trouble With Libertarians.

I was going to post this as a response to Jeff Dege's comment on my earlier reaction to Craig Westover's "The problem with progressives," but it was starting to edge into full post territory, so it's here instead.

Jeff, whose contrary comments here I do appreciate because he's civil and often raises provocative questions, said:

"A “progressive” is someone who acts on the belief that life can be improved."

No. A progressive is someone who believes that people can be improved. That the only reason that we don't live in a utopian society is that we haven't yet remade man in the right way.

The progressives collectivist dreams of how society is organized have always faltered on the discord between how they believe people should interact and how they always have interacted.

And they always will.

To quote Lileks:

"The other day I was talking with a Democrat friend about the election. She'd remarked, with equal amounts of sarcasm and good-natured ribbing, that the GOP had two years to build utopia. I thought about that later while walking Jasper around the block, and thought, no; they're not about building utopia. Personally, I'm interested in keeping other people from building Utopia, because the more you believe you can create heaven on earth the more likely you are to set up guillotines in the public square to hasten the process."

See, that's the trouble with libertarians. They pretend to get the irony employed by us self-appointed elites and then turn around and accuse us of being humorless executioners behind our backs.

However, since we lost Mussolini as our glorious leader, the progressive record on public executions has been rather slim. (And you really can't count Hillary Clinton dropping the hammer on Vince Foster.) We really lack the experience to carry out that aspect of our plan for total world domination.

Jeff may be right, that as a progressive I believe life can be improved is by helping people improve. Otherwise, I'd be mostly limited to planting trees, pulling plastic bags out of ponds and eating three balanced meals a day.

Believing — and acting on the belief— that people can improve is still not the same thing as thinking I can perfect humanity or that government should enforce all manner of human relations. But Jeff and Lileks and Westover won't grant me any moderation or incremental progress.  Once I start believing that society is better off if it sets goals to reduce poverty or pollution, for example, it's only a matter of time before I'm driving the black van that hauls off Family Lileks to Twins Stadium for a little publicly funded entertainment.

I guess if you see the world in absolutes, it's hard not to believe people who talk about "progress" are really  trying to trick you into the oven if you dare want to bake your own cookies.

Though personal and political change is one premise of this blog, one only needs to read Jonah Goldberg and Craig Westover to see how deluded I am about humanity. And I am not just talking about their arguments.

Still, no one has even asked me to help put them in Guantanamo or Camp Wellstone Two. Some "collective!"

No, instead of worrying about everyone having the same leg kick in the May Day parade, the progressives I know are concerned about all kids getting educated, courts that work fairly and efficiently, good jobs, good government, and maybe once every four years, bringing the Republican National Convention to a complete, anarchic standstill.

Compared to doing that good work every day, I can't imagine wanting to live in a heaven on earth. Progressives like having something to look forward to.

Holiday Weekend Snips and Snipes.

Posting may be lighter and less fluent from here in the coming weeks, More like this...

*****

I noted the blog of Johnny Northside shortly after it launched. He's a grad student who bought a bargain/abandoned/abused property in North Minneapolis and has been very active in trying to help turn the neighborhood around. Naturally, I thought of him when I read this Star Tribune story about evictions at a problem building and figured he'd have a somewhat different point of view. He did.

Liberals (it's the system) and conservatives (it's criminals) alike could use a more nuanced and granular view of issues involved in Northside living. Johnny delivers, with stories like this.

*****

Mississippifarian metaphorically looks down an aisle of Wal-Mart, and doesn't see the same benign effect of cheap consumer goods that Steven "Freakanomics" Leavitt claims helps moderate the growing income gap between rich and poor.

*****

I keep hoping to see a Minneapolis cop riding one of those neeto-keeno T3 personal mobility vehicles that the Strib announced with a rewritten product datasheet. Jalopnik has the more appropriate
story, I think.

We've seen the T3 Motion before, and the law enforcement version may look cool in this video, but we assure you it's impossible to not look like a dork on one. So if you live in Minneapolis and are a police officer, prepare to look like a dork. Sure you'll be able to drive up to 25 MPH and run all day on just 11 cents of juice, tower over crowds, and get into tight spots a cruiser never could, but even bike cops will laugh at you. Plus it costs the city $10,000 so you're even going to out-nerd the Segway drivers.

If you want to be cool, fast and intimidating, bag the chariot and keep the horses.

*****

Charles R. Black Jr., the senior adviser to Republican John McCain whose work for foreign dictators has led Democrats to call for his ouster, is not the only lobbyist in the family volunteering on the senator from Arizona's presidential campaign.

His wife, Judy Black, is a national co-chair of the fundraising group "Women for McCain," and she has a vibrant lobbying practice that includes a foreign client and several companies with business before the Senate Commerce Committee, where McCain is a senior member.

— Washington Post

Judy Bergman Black was a high school classmate of mine. She and Charlie came to our 40th reunion last year. We didn't get a chance to talk, as they only attended the dinner and hung at the back while I announced a newly discovered set of class prophecies that had projected 40 years in the future.

Black, who was named Biggest Brown-noser by the Class of 1967, was "predicted" to hold the same honor in 2007. In some quarters, I guess that could also be interpreted as Most Likely to Succeed.

And, no, I wasn't forecast as Most Likely to be an Asshole.

*****

And the New York Times soothes my fevered brain.

When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong.

Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit.

*****

Finally, here's a workout video for candidates who need to disavow knowledge of inconvenient associations with lobbyists and their clients.

 

Narcissism and the Commons.

Last week, Shankar Vedantam wrote a Washington Post column titled, "Clinton, Obama and the Narcissist's Tale." It appeared yesterday under a different Star Tribune headline, "Democrats face a classic 'tragedy of the commons.'" One emphasizes the self-absorption required of politicians; the other highlights its effects.

I'm more interested the commons metaphor and how it relates beyond the current presidential race because I think it helps define the great dividing line of our time. Parties and candidates have clustered at the poles of the real divisions among us — whether to value the big picture over the short run and place collective interest on at least a par with self-interest.

Vedantam invokes the tragedy of the commons to explain the dangerous trap of this "fault line" between individual and collective interest:

Individuals embroiled in similar dilemmas find them impossible to solve on their own, because they are confronted by a Hobson's Choice: Act selfishly and cause collective disaster, or act altruistically and aid someone else who is acting selfishly. Either way, selfishness wins.

"The way the system is set up, the more-selfish person has a higher probability of winning," social psychologist W. Keith Campbell said of the Democratic primary. "You end up with the more narcissistic, belligerent candidate."

He cites an experiment by Campbell in which volunteers were tasked as timber companies to manage a forest in perpetuity.

[Since] the volunteers did not know whether their kindness would be reciprocated by others or exploited by competitors, people raced to cut as much timber as they could and quickly razed the forests to the ground. Groups with volunteers more willing to think about the collective good preserved their forests longer. But selfish people within these groups had a field day exploiting the altruists — and the forests perished anyway.

Much of the conflict in the public domain mirrors this dynamic. Free market vs. government regulation. Energy development vs. conservation. The individual or family vs. the collective. The castle vs. the commons.

Government and other social institutions, especially religion, have developed to regulate or redirect behavior from the destructive effects of selfishness. But Reaganism has led an all-out assault on the notion of "the commons," associating it with failed socialist states instead of with managing, in Jedediah Purdy's* phrase,  "the things that we cannot avoid having in common and whose maintenance or neglect implicates us all." That is, the legal system, the economy, public health and the natural world to name a few.

The attack on the commons has been prosecuted against and through those very institutions charged with keeping it — school boards, churches, local governments and federal agencies — abetted by think tanks, pundits and pollsters who retail to the public simpleminded formulations of complex problems and then pretend to discover them as the will of the people.

Public opinion, Purdy says, "has become shorthand for uninformed attitudes dignified by statistical aggregation." And the "Public,"  he says, is increasingly defined in Libertarian terms to be whatever government provides to people who are too lazy or weak to get a share of the "Private."

Although unregulated behavior can be modeled and the consequences predicted, before they will act, cultures of heightened self-interest demand proof, which practically means collapse of fisheries or financial systems. In Garrett Hardin's term, "intrinsic responsibility" can be clearly grasped when an act is straightforward and the consequences are immediate. But those who most loudly espouse personal responsibility and accountability for actions rarely see their own complicity in causing harm when the effects are indirect — through consumption, financial manipulation, disinvestment or discrimination.

We cannot and should not legislate away self-interest, but neither can we blithely continue to grow population, consume energy and amass wealth as if we were the planet's sole occupants — or, alternatively, as if we all have our own personal savior waiting in the wings.

Until we learn to see the systems we live within, we contribute to their ruin. And even then...

_______

* I could've sworn I'd written before about Jedediah Purdy's book, For Common Things, but apparently not. (Naturally, libertarians didn't like it; nor did  Caleb Crain. But here's another view that there are worse sins than being privileged, earnest and young.)

Parting Shot.

This shot of the table in the Palisade Brewery men's room nearly says it all about this country.

More Studies Prove I'm Right.

Nicholas Kristof writes about research into how our biases filter the information we will accept as authoritative.

[Farhad Manjoo, Salon staff writer and author of True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society] cites a more recent study by Stanford University psychologists of students who either favored or opposed capital punishment. The students were shown the same two studies: one suggested that executions have a deterrent effect that reduces subsequent murders, and the other doubted that.

Whatever their stance, the students found the study that supported their position to be well-conducted and persuasive and the other one to be profoundly flawed.

“That led to a funny result,” Mr. Manjoo writes. “People in the study became polarized.”

Other experiments demonstrated how people seek out information that confirms their prejudices and resist information that doesn't fit their beliefs — certainly not news in the blogosphere. Kristof says the blinkering "afflicts both liberals and conservatives, but a raft of studies shows that it is a particular problem with conservatives."

Well, of course! I say, as the conservatives start googling "liberal bias."

It takes conscious work to overcome these perceptual habits and, I will confess as someone who has taken this up as my semi-sacred duty, it is work not consistently undertaken here. One reason, aside from the cognitive stuff, is when the opposition doesn't play that way, you concede a point or enlarge your understanding at the expense of appearing weak or getting run over.

Do not mistake my equanimity and quest for personal enlightenment as Buddhist detachment. I still don't accept people trying to run me off the road — especially if it's someone who can't accept the Truth!

Signs of Emotion.

I've had bullets on the brain, so the other day, we took a long hike to get away from the news, the blogs and discussions of the Second Amendment. Heading up Coal Canyon, we thought we might get to see some of the wild mustangs living there, but mostly we saw where horses had been.

You could walk for hundreds of yards, and then there would be a pile of horse flop. Often, it represented the work of several horses over a period of time. On previous trips, we'd seen the mustangs let loose on an existing deposit, like a dog marking a tree, but without the sniffing.

The only horses we saw was a pair far down valley, spotted near the end of our hike.

Of course, this being rural America, I couldn't totally escape bullet thoughts. Even the trail head sign that mapped the area's many trails was scarred with high caliber bullet holes.

Since I've been working on how to get past gun-owner and gun-restricter stereotypes, the blasted signs naturally brought me to this thought: What are the archetypal images — both positive and negative — that reinforce attitudes about guns?

My riddled signs can evoke one view, that boys with guns are reckless and irresponsible, with no respect for others and a strong dislike for anything that might restrain their personal enjoyment.

Here's a pair of posters from Oleg Volk who has an extensive gallery of gun photography and propaganda images putting forward the idea we've been discussing here — that guns are tools of empowerment and responsibility.

On the left is the face meant to reassure the rest of the world "we're just normal Americans looking out for ourselves." On the right is a typical appeal to logic (predators exist and the shepherd can't be everywhere) and emotion (you don't want to be a defenseless sheep like those anti-gun nuts).

 

There's a whole other category of propaganda aimed at reinforcing beliefs of the gun faithful that it's stupid to be a voluntary victim, while to a non-gun owner, these images might seem over-wrought and even paranoid. The image on the right bridges from personal safety to personal freedom, an important theme, since the feared armed intruders are not just criminals, they are a powerful and coercive government.

Volk is careful to avoid racial stereotyping when representing intruders, and most focus on the defender, allowing to viewer to conjure up their own threat. Other images reach out specifically to minorities who are disproportionately victims of violent crime. Images of family and cultural traditions, especially hunting, are other common themes.

Viewing these and the many more in Volk's gallery, I think to when I steered my conversation with Joel Rosenberg toward the emotional aspects of the gun control debate and met with impatience over talking about "feelings." It's impossible to look at the images employed to support the gun rights side and believe emotion has nothing to do with it. And while the visual propaganda may not be as prolific on the other side, it's there, too.

What Obama Said to Me.

The week Barack Obama made The Speech About Race, I've been working on another conversation America needs to have. Nominally, it is about guns and the right to self-defense, but the larger topic is Obama's.

How do Americans with differences form a more perfect union?

My discussion with Joel Rosenberg is ongoing. For some, my side of it has been too general and naive, as Obama has been accused of being. Some others might mistake Joel's desire for clarity and doggedness about change as bellicosity, but committed struggle, too, was something Obama endorsed.

As two verbal and opinionated bloggers, we could easily have fallen to skewering each other in comment threads and planting unanswerable tarbombs in our posts.  That can happen when you don't do hard time in conversation and jump right into the fight. When you fill in the other's words for them. When you stick with your tribe and brand Them as embodying all your fears.

Instead, we've tried to have a conversation and actually listen to each other. Sometimes, it's gotten rocky or we've wandered off the tracks we'd each hoped to follow. At times, I've risked coming across as weak by simply letting Joel say his piece instead of standing up to every utterance with which I might have some difference.

Obama talked about that, too.

We may not move the other very far from where we started, but that's not the main point. It's to show how such a respectful conversation can take place, and then another, and then another, until we find that common thread that will lead to a better solution than the one we have.

I'm not a lawyer or a politician, so the modes of debate and fierce advocacy don't speak to me. As a career creative problem-solver, I've dedicated myself to discovering new ideas and reinvigorating old ones. I don't think good creative solutions come from fighting — or from compromise. But a new idea almost always brings together opposites in a new way.

If you were my client, I wouldn't show you all this work in process, because I'd want to dazzle you with my solution later. But here, I'm willing to show how messy and difficult this business can be, so that you won't be discouraged when your own efforts at reaching across the divide don't produce anything right away.

I don't know exactly how this will conclude, but I am full of hope.

Why Didn't the Founding Fathers Finish the Job?

On a hike this week, I spotted a rare antiquity in the sagebrush, thought about picking it up, then let it lie. I should've taken a picture, at least, but I guess the surprise of finding it so close to the trail threw me off.

Out here, you don't often see a rusty tin can with no bullet holes.

Just outside the boundaries of a golf course, light sparkles from shattered bottles at the bases of badlands buttes that provided backstops for boys with their guns. Now the fancy houses are too close and covenants prohibit shooting, so the glass deposits are being left farther out. A former gun club between here and town is now silent, though cars show up at the well-maintained club house on occasion for mysterious purposes.

When I grew up out here, gun racks were a fixture in pickup rear windows. If not for gun laws, the meth addicts would've put an end to that practice, anyway. But there is still an ease with guns that crosses liberal and conservative lines.

Somewhere back in Minnesota's legislative committees, dueling gun proposals appear to be buried beneath more pressing matters, like how to come up with a billion bucks. One would extend background checks to buyers acquiring guns from private parties or at gun shows. The other would make it easier to shoot someone in self-defense.

Although the background checks bill would require buyers to pay a fee and make a visit to a gun dealer to file paperwork, it seems hardly more onerous that the requirement that private parties register the transfer of a used car when it's sold. On the other hand, it's hard to see what the measure would accomplish, since by my reading, tracing weapon ownership rarely results in solving a crime.

The shoot-the-teenager-stealing-beer-from-the-garage bill, to paraphrase Dakota County Attorney James Backstrom, also seems like a pointless exercise — one of those periodic forays designed by the NRA to stir up conservative voters.

Whether they're intended to tweak the opposition or let supporters sleep better, both bills deserve to die.

I blame the founding fathers, of course. We could have avoided all this nonsense if they'd put a little more effort into defining the right to bear arms. One definitive clause stuck in one ambiguous sentence as the Second Amendment into the Bill of Rights certainly didn't cut it. They should've passed a separate Bill of Gun Rights to clear up all the confusion.

Why, off the top of my head, I can think of nine more visionary amendments that could have better enumerated our rights for us.

1. A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
2. A boiled squirrel, being necessary to the avoidance of hunger, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
3. Indians, being in the way, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
4. Honor, being necessary to the full enjoyment and expression of manhood, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
5. Passenger pigeons, being a blot upon the skies, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
6. Slaves, being prone to run away the first chance they get, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
7. Rabid dogs and skunks, being too dangerous to drown in a sack, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
8. Freedom from fear, being necessary to the pursuit of happiness, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
9. Cowboy movies, being as yet not invented but essential to perpetuating useful myths of independence for later generations, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
10. Dominion over the Middle East, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

You Know I'm Right.

Welcome home. Your troubles are over now.

Step inside. Put all your anxieties to rest.

How does it feel? How does if feel to be off your own, a complete, a known?

Now we are ready to rock & roll. We know who's on our side and who's not.

Who is legal. Who is innocent. Who is evil. Who is against us.

Simple.

Beware of those  on the outside, especially those who stand totally apart.

They cannot be trusted.

They hate our way of life.

They leave us with no alternative.

You know what I mean?