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The Season of Ignorance

Posted on October 14, 2010
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When history books are written, John McCain’s may be remembered most for his role in catapulting Sarah Palin to the national stage.

The midterm election season is heading for the final stretch and what has disturbed me the most are the reports that seem to herald a race to the bottom that is appalling to say the least. Sarah Palin seems to be just one of a myriad of the people spewing ignorance and hate. Mostly women, all white and all Tea Party. Their trumpets of ignorance include stating that Muslim law is taking over parts of the US, masturbation is adultery, that the healthcare bill creates government death sqauds and a twisting of facts and spewing of hate (against Latinos, Muslims, gays, almost anyone not Christian and white), dehumanizing anyone not like them. It is as if Jerry Springer‘s cast is standing for election. And reason and critical thinking are scarce in this debate.

Are we living in the US in the 21st century or some country at the edge of the dark ages ? We laugh at Ahmadinejad and Holocaust deniers and tune in to Rush Limbaugh’s denials over Obama’s religion and birth (polls in August by the Time magazine and the Pew center show anywhere from one-third to almost half of the Republicans saying that they think Obama is a Muslim). Religion is at the forefront now more than ever and every year, the power of the religious right grows ever more. And to think that I used to laugh derisively at people in rural areas of India voting almost solely based on the caste of the candidate. Obama also seems to have brought out the latent racism in the country. No one talks about it as such, of course.

I worry about the declining lack of adherence to even the most basic of facts and the almost retarded level of reason and critical thinking. In a world that is changing so rapidly, resources depleting and conflicts rising, how can address the issues if people seem incapable of even uttering a coherent sentence ? I can understand people are angry about the economy, but are these angry people incapable of understanding how the very ideas they champion have been the cause of their state ? How can more deregulation fix the problems of Wall Street or the harm caused by companies such as BP ? How can they not see the designs of the people who are pouring money that is turning their fears into something that can only make matters worse ? How can they not see the link between the people who lied about the Iraq War and how it very costs are a big reason for the mess we’re in economically ?

Enough has been written about all of this that I don’t want to spend too much time writing about it. But, I worry about what the future holds for Maya and all our children in this country that is their home. This is how atrocities like the Holocaust or slavery or Native American genocide come to pass. Bit by bit, with people like me going about their daily lives with their worries cocooned by some personal well-being and an inability to act. Am I as deluded as they are in seeing the outcome of the slippery slope we’re sliding down ? A part of me says that all this is more media hype than anything else. After all, didn’t Bill Clinton, the man liberals loved for his intellectualism and charisma, fire the Surgeon General, Jocelyn Elders, for saying that masturbation was normal human behavior ?

Let me end with a link on a more humorous note, to a satirical take on the current season of madness:

“Man oh man, I’m mad. I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. Take what? I don’t know. And that makes me mad too.”

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Post-Election Blues

Posted on November 10, 2008
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History says, Don’t hope
on this side of the grave
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme. – Seamus Heaney

In the end, it was over sooner than I had expected, but just as I had hoped. Once Ohio was won and Pennsylvania hadn’t fallen into McCain’s hands, the battle was over. McCain conceded around 8:00 PM or so our time. He gave what is widely acknowledged as a gracious speech, a speech befitting the man who people knew before this election began, a man lost in the battle for the White House, a speech marred slighltly by his emphatic praise of Palin.  People who had firmly stated their opposition to Obama because he was black, ended up voting for him in the end. Bradley effect proved to be a non-factor.

NYT ran a story about such a group of people in a small town in Pennsylvania, looking to seek the reasons why they changed. One of them, a heating and air-conditioning technician said: “For a long time, I couldn’t ignore the fact that he was black, if you know what I mean. I’m not proud of that, but I was raised to think that there aren’t good black people out there.” He said that what turned his vote was McCain’s selection of Palin. I was touched that many Americans shared a similar view, that they didn’t see Palin as being good for the country. Another chief reason, according to a council official, was self-interest. She says, “They had to ask themselves if they wanted a really smart young black guy, or a stodgy old white guy from the same crowd who put us in this hole.”

This seems to run counter to psychological studies that have been published in the past that suggest that people vote more in line with their feelings about a candidate than factual information. So the studies predicted that people would vote for McCain because of the latent racism (and strongly triggered xenophobia by Palin) against Obama. But in the end, the economic disaster and Obama’s success in making McCain seem more like Bush helped push him to victory, it seems. A friend told me that had it not been for the economic disaster, the unpopularity of the Iraq war and his significantly larger funding, Obama would not have won. In the end, it was “Its the economy, stupid” all over again.

Obama’s victory has been greeted the world over with euphoria and hope. Many warmed up to America as they had in the past, saying that by electing a black to the highest post in the country, America was showing itself again to be a beacon of democracy. I heard a program on NPR, the public radio station, in which leaders and people from outside the US spoke with words and tone that were richly pregnant with hope at the possibility of a new dawn in the history of the US and the possibility of its beneficial impact on the world. “Can you imagine the burden Obama must be feeling at this outpouring of hope and goodwill ?” asked the host of the show. Even the Iranian president sent a letter congratulating Obama, the first since the revolution that deposed the Shah. Obama greeted it coolly, saying that reciprocating the good wishes of an enemy required some thought as to what was said and what was meant.

The honeymoon was over even before the shouting was. Markets tanked the day after the election. Obama decided to put a man widely considered to be partisan as his chief of staff. He’s considering Lawrence Summers for the post of Treasury Secretary, the same man who once said: “Just between you and me, shouldn’t the world bank be  encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs (less developed countries) ? … I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waster in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that…I’ve always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted…Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electricity generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.” More recently, he was forced to resign from Harvard University for commenting that the reason there were fewer women in science and math was because men was genetically better endowed to excel in those fields. Many of the potential candidates were part of the Clinton presidency. After an election based on the promise of change seemed to indicate only a change from Bush’s policies, not the dawn of a new, different America. Left-of-center opinion makers pointed out that Obama faced a tough choice in bringing forward a completely fresh team because of the enormity of the challenges that he faced. Right wing opinion makers blamed the post-election stock market decline on Obama.

But even before this, the victory was bitter-sweet. Proposition 8, the referendum to define marriage as only between heterosexuals, passed, striking a blow against gay marriage. I was shocked at its passage in California, one of the most liberal states in the country, especially after it looked like it was going to lose quite easily. LA Times and The Nation suggested that supporters of the proposition were successful in making the issue about being more than marriage, that if the proposition failed, churches would be forced to recognize and perform gay marriages and that schools would be forced to teach about gay marriage. Another trump card, specifically targeting black voters, was a video of Obama saying that he wasn’t in favor of gay marriage, though the truth was that he was emphatically against Prop 8. Curiously, Obama didn’t do as well as his predecessor Democrat for President, John Kerry, only among people older than 65 and homosexuals.

The exit polls showed that African-Americans overwhelmingly voted in favor of the proposition. The bigotry upset me. One of the blacks who was interviewed said that it had been a difficult decision for him. He said that he had “a deep and personal reverence for civil rights”, but being a Pentecostal Christian trumped eventually. That religion had been used to condone slavery seems to have been forgotten by most blacks. There is a poignant, intelligent and mature movie, Far From Heaven, that deals with this sort of bigotry. Set in the 50s, when homosexuality was considered a disease and civil rights was still a decade or more away, it tells the story of a married couple, considered the model American family in a small town community, but the husband is gay and she, lonely, seeks comfort in the company of her black gardener, a well read, intelligent man. But she cannot condone her husband’s gayness while he finds her friendship with a black man, appalling. The bigotry so movingly depicted in the movie has stuck with me for a long time.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
between stars — on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
to scare myself with my own desert places. – Robert Frost

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Will We Make History Today ?

Posted on November 4, 2008
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The day is finally here. As early as 3 PM my local time today, we’ll get the first inkling of what is to follow. Indiana, a battleground state, will be among the first to close polls today and we’ll start getting results of exit polls pretty soon after that. In 2004, Kerry lost Indiana by a worse than expected 20 points. Indiana has voted Republican since 1964, but Obama looks like he could take it this year. If he does, some predict that it’ll be a landslide in his favor while if he loses by more than 4 points, it could be a long night.

I woke up today and as has been my wont for the past couple of weeks, checked the poll aggregators, pollster.com and fivethirtyeight.com. Pollster had already removed Ohio from strongly leaning towards Obama to a battleground state, Obama was down from 311 to 294. Even though 294 seats is enough to win him the White House, I heart stopped for an instant. Even before the race has begun, we’re losing seats, I thought to myself. A Reuters headline said that Obama was leading McCain in five of the eight battleground states. I took some comfort in that. NYT is running a page which asks you to describe how you feel in a single word, you can come up with one of your own or select from one already chosen by some of the others. I picked jittery, though anxious and apprehensive would probably have been more precise.

US is one of the few countries in the world which has some form of direct democracy, allowing the voter to vote on locally relevant issues rather than just for one or more representatives. Some examples of the kinds of issues placed on the ballot include a statute to reduce the suffering of farm animals, a referendum to declare marriage as only between opposite sexes and putting an upper bound on the year-over-year property tax increases to prevent making it unaffordable for very old residents. An issue is packaged as an initiative, a referendum or a recall. Recalls are typically issued to recall a publicly elected official before his/her term is over. For example, in 2003, California recalled then Governor Gray Davis on grounds of mismanagement and elected Arnold Schwarzenegger in his place. In the US, the modern form of initiative and referendum first originated in the state of South Dakota from where it spread to Oregon whose format is now the one practiced in much of the remaining states. Initiatives and referendums are issues initiated by the citizenry and when larger than a specified number of registered voters petition to have the issue placed on the year’s ballot. The initiative may force an amendment to the State constitution or merely require the executive and legislative bodies to seriously consider the results of the initiative in creating a new law. One recently famous example of an initiative passed in Oregon is the one allowing doctor assisted suicides. In California this year, probably the most important referendum is  Proposition 8, a yes vote for which forces a state constitutional amendment to explicitly define marriage as between people of opposite sexes only. Overwhelmingly opposed by the valley companies such as Google and Apple, the measure looked like it was heading for a sound defeat, but has since picked up much momentum and now it appears to be a very close race.

Many ballot measures are requests to issue bonds to finance various projects. This year, in California, there are about 12 ballot proposals of which six are bond measures for proposals such as a high speed rail system between LA and San Francisco and money for children’s hospitals to money for encouraging alternative fuels. On top of this, we also have local county (similar to a district) measures such as a bond for extending a commuter rail line from East Bay to South Bay. So, as a voter I got two booklets totaling about 160 pages which included the entire text of each proposal, arguments for and against the proposal and some assessment of the impact of the proposal. Understanding all of this to vote in a sensible, educated manner is quite a lot of work. The list of proposals are presented in limerick form each time by some of the local educational groups, though they’re not entirely without bias. For example, here is the limerick for Proposition 8, the measure to ban gay marriage:

A San Francisco Mayor created some bedlam
When he stood before gay couples to wed ‘em
Although fundees scream “unclean!”
“Gay marriage is obscene!”
It’s the state’s job to register couples, not judge ‘em

And here is the one on the high speed rail bond:

In the mythical land of Califairia
The people evinced an unusual hysteria
They voted for prodigious debt
In a lunatic bet
That they could somehow live beyond their salaria

Sometimes the issues are so obscure that it is hard to understand the rationale behind the proposal. I picked a few that I thought that I understood and had a position on. The rest I voted based on the axiom of always reject bonds and copying the suggestions from a suggestion list that I got in the mail that matched my ideas on the ones that I cared about.

A body called IDEA (Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance) provides a lot of information about all the different issues and methods that underlie a democracy. For example, they have a detailed breakdown by country of where compulsory voting is practiced and the specific practices of compulsory voting in the country, they cover the very important issue of gender and democracy, the study voter turnout in different parts of the world and report their findings (there is no link between literacy and voter turnout, for example). They state that direct democracy is becoming popular the world over. A site worth checking out for a wealth of information.

I was checking some of the sites to see if any early results were available and found that pollster.com and fivethirtyeight.com had a message saying that early results would not be forthcoming and also put up a FAQ on why exit polls are bad predictors of the eventual outcome. Sigh. Guess I have to continue my teeth gnashing for a little longer.

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Why I Won’t Be Voting For McCain

Posted on October 7, 2008
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I came across a passage about an American POW who was tortured for five years by the Vietcong. Imprisoned in a small, narrow bamboo cage, he was immersed every day in a rat-infested water upto his waist from dawn till dusk. The man survived a breakdown by building a five-star hotel in his mind, brick by brick, with complete details such as the quality of the sheets, the color of the walls, the cabling and other intricate details that go into the real life construction of such a building. John McCain was a POW and was allegedly tortured and kept in horrific conditions. He carries the physical reminders of the injuries that he sustained during that time, his inability to raise his arms above his head.

When McCain fought George Bush for the presidential nomination in 2000, an anonymous smear campaign (how can they be anonymous, I wonder) caused him much grief. According to the NYT: “A smear campaign during the primary in February 2000 here had many in South Carolina falsely believing that Mr. McCain’s wife, Cindy, was a drug addict and that the couple’s adopted daughter, Bridget, was the product of an illicit union. Mr. McCain’s patriotism, mental well-being and sexuality were also viciously called into question”. Bush won in South Carolina. McCain would say of the rumor spreaders, “I believe that there is a special place in hell for people like those.” According to one report, the South Carolina experience left him in a “very dark place.” When McCain campaigned in South Carolina in 2008, many people reportedly came upto him and his wife and apologized for the behavior in 2000.

I expect a president to learn and to empathize. To remember how bad it felt when he was at the receiving end, and make sure that he uses his power to spare those who followed, what he suffered. To never put another human being in that horrific condition called “war”, especially an unjust and unnecessary war. What did McCain do when Bush and his cohorts decided to attack Iraq ? Said “You’re doing one heckuva job, George” and supported him whole heartedly, differing only in wanting a greater number of US troops sent to Iraq. What is he doing now that the polls indicate that he’s largely trailing Obama ? Turn on negative ads. His VP nominee, Sarah Palin, is quoted in papers as saying: “There is a time when it’s necessary to take the gloves off and that time is right now”. Even before this, he endorsed several negative ads and his campaign has already been attributed as being abysmal in its usage of negative, false advertisements.

The nadir, for me, came when he selected Sarah Palin as his VP nominee, hoping to win the support of Hilary Clinton’s supporters. In the short span since that time, Sarah Palin has demonstrated that not only is she inexperienced and ignorant, but willing to go after personalities when she lacks the ideas to debate issues. She seeks to activate primal fears with fear, uncertainty and doubt instead of cogently discussing issues. For example, in Florida, she is quoted as having said:”I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America”. The subtext of race raised in a Southern state is abhorring. In the much anticipated VP debate, it looked she was running for American Idol, not the vice presidency of the United States. Instead of lambasting her performance and her attitude, the right wing sopped it up, demanding more. Further, she combats her ignorance with a fierce determinism and certainty, driven in large part by her Christian faith. A very dangerous combination given the past eight years, especially in a world where the rules are changing so fast. For a man who professes his love for his country, to put a person like her the next in line is feckless. And it is not a very unlikely scenario, her becoming the president, since McCain is “older than dirt”, as he likes to think of himself.

I came across a quote from Thomas Pynchon’s acclaimed novel, Gravity’s Rainbow: “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.” By forcing race into the issue, by forcing personality into the discussion, by questioning his judgement, his name, his religion, his very being, McCain and Palin are trying to force the voters into not thinking about the issues, issues they answer with increasingly unrealistic ideologies.

A colleague at work hangs a sign at his desk: “Great minds discuss ideas, mediocre minds discuss events and small minds discuss people”. I’m fearful that this country will bring to power these incredibly small minds, based largely on race and fear. I will not be voting for such small minds.

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