The End of Politics

Note: I wrote this piece in April 2012, six months after the death of my father.

Heroes
Cyrano De Bergerac was probably, at least in part, a political animal. He was fictional, obviously, at least as we know him, but one didn’t live as he did—able to navigate among fellow aristocrats—unless one was a creature with some political instincts.

When I was a child, I loved the movie of Cyrano starring Jose Ferrer, and I memorized huge chunks of the play (the Brian Hooker translation), a paperback of which I carried around far too frequently. I memorized lots of things back then, including all of the non-sports-related Trivial Pursuit questions (I’ve never been able to retain information about sports), Carroll’s nonsense poem Jabberwocky, the cast and crew of every movie that played on HBO (back when HBO only played movies at night), and heaven knows what else. I have forgotten the sorts of things that I used to remember.

It occurs to me, now that I think about it, that no one remembers Cyrano for his ability to articulate his position vis-à-vis royalty, taxation, and whatever else might have been the topics du jour in mid-seventeenth century France. People remember him because he had a huge nose. And he wrote poems and loved with a perfect mixture of heroism, valor, and absurdity.

Love is never complete without absurdity. End the refrain. Thrust home.

What about other childhood heroes and favorites? A random sample: Jim Henson, Batman, James Dean, Stephen King, Maxfield Parrish, Han Solo, James Kirk, Bugs Bunny, Andre-Michel Schub, Mozart, Beethoven, Billy Joel, Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Michelangelo, C.S. Lewis, Steve McQueen, every character in The Great Escape except for the Gestapo SOBs, The Shadow, the artists who made the Dreamery comic books, Berkeley Breathed, P.J. O’Rourke, Hunter S. Thompson, Roger Dean, Yes, The Grateful Dead, The Beatles, Superstoe by William Borden, Ray Charles (first concert), the Indigo Girls (second concert), Rolling Stone (before it became a cross between the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition and Tiger Beat), The Rolling Stones, Charles Schultz, and John Belushi. Most of my adult relatives.

There are a few political people and things in there, but by and large, it’s just stuff that I liked because I liked it. When I think of things that I disliked, a lot of them were political. A great example is Doonesbury. Its subtitle should be “Predictable, rehashed, unfunny crap since 1970” or “Here for the same reason as Rex Morgan, MD. We make Ziggy seem worthwhile.” I think that I liked the idea of the comic briefly when I found out that Uncle Duke was based on Hunter S. Thompson, but then I read a few panels and returned to my stance of disdain.

An Essay In Search of a Raison d'être
So what’s the point of all of this? There are at least two: 1) This is a blog, so it must occasionally turn to self-involved navel-gazing for inspiration. 2) I think that I’ve reached the end of politics, at least for now.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to say that I don’t read the news and have opinions—often strong ones—about issues that have a political component, but I have reached a point where I no longer care to let political positions define me or determine the nature of my relationships.

Political banter is tedious and tiresome, more often than not, and the political evangelist is the modern equivalent of a chattering door-to-door salesman who makes his living irritating people and convincing them to buy his space-wasting widgets, to make him go away if for no other reason.

A person’s political beliefs say something about him, just as his religious beliefs do, but they don’t define him. A lot of Americans take political issues—things over which each individual has virtually no control—and use them as crayons to draw childish outlines of who people are.

I think that this is a mistake.

Imagine someone believes that, say, blacks or Mexicans or Jews or gays (or members of whatever group) are inferior due to their [fill in the blank]. This can translate into a set of weird political beliefs or a preference for a certain type of fringe political candidate, but it’s not their political extremism that makes them so bizarre and discomfiting. It’s their crazy, abhorrent beliefs that do, and this drives their politics as well as their other choices. I’ve known a few people like that, and it’s easy to point out a dozen reasons why they’re assholes. Politics are usually present, but they’re not required.

Self-Involved Narrative 201: Intense Navel-Gazing
You can see, sort of flipping backward through the essays on this site, that I was playing with various things and trying to deal with current events with humor and even-handedness as I shifted from ill-defined liberalism, for lack of a better word, to a sort of Burkean conservatism. I was trying to figure out how and where I fit into everything around me, and I’m not going to go into all of the reasons why, because some things are personal.

A year and a half ago, my head swollen from the positive reception given to a few of the things I’d written, I was ready to get involved in politics. The idea was to establish a name for myself in the conservative blogosphere and try to turn it into a book deal or something. Eventually I showed up at a precinct organization meeting and was recruited to be the Republican chairman for my precinct (I had switched my political affiliation to Republican in order to get involved). I would also be a delegate to the county convention and, if I wanted to go, to the state one.

Around the same time, I was asked to help with MeckFUTURE, a grassroots political movement that put pressure on county commissioners to keep property tax rates flat. Soon thereafter, a friend ran for political office and wanted my help.

During all of this, my wife became pregnant with twins. The pregnancy was complicated, and she was on bed rest starting around the sixth week of the pregnancy until the babies were born. This meant that I had to do all of the errand-running, cooking, taking the other eight kids where they needed to be, and everything else in the household, plus work. A few other things were happening too. Suffice it to say, I had plenty going on and a lot to think about.

I had to prioritize, and naturally, I chose my family over everything else. I missed most of the MeckFUTURE meetings, never was able to help my friend’s campaign, missed every convention where I was a delegate.

At the same time, I became increasingly uneasy with the GOP because it was talking about social issues, which are almost totally irrelevant (at least from the perspective of what the government should be doing). Worse yet, some prominent Republicans have gone beyond irrelevance and said downright idiotic things about birth control, abortion, human papillomavirus and the cervix-saving vaccine that prevents it, homosexuality, and books that should be banned. I can't verify that last one, but there was probably at least one boneheaded elected official in the GOP pushing to prevent kids from being infected with Hogwarts. Fortunately, there is no vaccine for that.

The economy was crashing, the national debt was ballooning faster than my waistline when I stopped dieting a couple of years ago, and politicians (including a jackass also-ran who lost re-election to the US Senate by 17 points) were debating whether birth control makes angels cry. Ridiculous.

The NC GOP, which had a governing majority in the legislative branch for the first time since Reconstruction, did some good things like increase the number of charter schools. At the same time, they introduced an amendment that, if passed, will write prohibition of gay marriage into the NC constitution. For the love of God. I just can’t attach that label to my name.

By the end of the summer, I had decided that politics weren’t really that exciting anymore. When I thought about getting more involved, I just felt, well, unpleasant and kind of dirty. So I went back to being unaffiliated.

When In Doubt, Quote Songs or Movies
If not politics, then what? What makes the battle worth the fighting? What makes the mountain worth the climb? What makes the questions worth the asking? The reason worth the rhyme?

Six months ago—to be more precise, six months, twelve hours, and fifty or so minutes before I started writing this tonight—my father died because his heart had become too big to fit in his body. That probably has something to do with the whole business. I’ve been looking at things in a different way since then, trying to focus on doing things that matter.

I’d never lost someone before, at least not someone to whom I was so close. We were different in some ways, especially on the surface. I have a corporate job, and he was a self-employed intellectual bedouin of sorts. Beneath the surface, though, we were simpatico. I miss being able to call him and just talk about nonsense. I think that a lot of my political writing was for him. I liked the idea of being able to make my Dad smile. We enjoyed talking about politics and agreed on most things.

But I don’t love my Dad because of his politics. I love him because he’s my Dad. Or was my Dad. I still haven’t figured out how to use tenses correctly where he is concerned. He was born under a wandering star and became friends with people in every town that he called home. He made beautiful paintings and lived with a perfect mixture of heroism, valor, and absurdity.

And that’s when everything falls into place. The chunk of rhymes that I quoted above is one that I know by heart and recall without trying. If I close my eyes and think very hard, I can hear Dick Van Dyke’s voice. It’s not from Mary Poppins. I pause. It’s from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It’s from the song “You Two,” which Caracatus Potts sings to his children. And that’s what really matters to me in the end. That’s my raison d'être: My family.


When listing out the things that matter most—God, family, country, honor, hard work—politics don’t even deserve a thought, much less a place.

My aunt Mary wrote a lovely piece about my father after his death, and a particular line has stuck with me: “He had strong opinions but managed to keep friendships with those with whom he disagreed.”

That’s how I want to be. That’s who I want to be: a bit gentler, a bit funnier, a lot more humble, and never willing to harm a relationship over a difference in opinion, especially political opinion. In the end, politics are just things that will get settled in a back room, bedroom, statehouse, courthouse, or battlefield.

For years, I had this sort of belligerent attitude of, “Gotta stand for something, or you’ll fall for anything.” I want something different now. Fortunately, Bebo Norman captured this something in his song “Here Goes”, and so I’ll borrow from him instead of trying to describe it myself: “Gotta reach for something, or you’ll fall for anything.”



The End of Politics
This is not the end of “The Joy of Reason.” I stopped writing on this site during the crises last year. This is the longest piece of non-fiction I’ve written since my wife went on bed rest, I think.

Our twins were born five days after my father’s death. Now that we have figured out how to manage a house with two more people in it, I’ve started focusing my creative energy on writing fiction instead of political nonsense. I’m currently trying to shop the book, a young adult fantasy novel entitled Children of Midgard, to agents. So far, I have not had any success.

I don’t know what I’m going to use this site for in the future. I have the idea for an adult novel called The Joy of Reason, and hopefully I’ll work out the plot enough to write it someday. I already know the last line, which helps.

Until then, check back once in a while, and I might surprise you by spewing my opinion on current events. I don’t shill for a party anymore, though, and while I do and will vote, I will not seek to change the way that you do.

I don’t know if you’ve been able to read this, Dad, but if so, I hope that you’ve enjoyed it.

Who Was That Masked Man?

Remember remember the fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder, treason
Should ever be forgot
But follow the calendar twenty-score years
And if you hold shy lady irony dear
Then you'll laugh as the free wear the mask of a man
Who would murder so king and the Pope should hold hands
Liberty is but a sweet breath of air
Tyranny's rule has been man's lot to share
Back when Rome fell, famine savaged the land
A thousand dark years strangled woman and man
As radicals cry, Equal Outcome, We need it
Know the past well, or you're doomed to repeat it

Logic and a Recent Charlotte Observer Editorial or: Navigating the Unknown

Earlier this week, the Charlotte Observer ran an editorial entitled “There Should Be Nothing Sneaky About a Tax Hike” excoriating Mecklenburg Board of County Commission (BOCC) Chair Jennifer Roberts.

Monday night (4/4/11), in a meeting with a group of CMS parents organized by the grassroots MeckFUTURE campaign, Roberts said that keeping tax rates flat when property values increase is not the same thing as raising taxes. The Observer parried: It’s raising taxes and doing so sneakily because it’s, um, not cutting property tax rates.

Wait, that didn’t come out right. Let me rephrase. Between 2003 and 2011, property values in Mecklenburg County increased by 7% or so, on average. The county knows that because they just did a revaluation, which happens every eight years, statutorily. Because the value of real estate has increased, overall tax receipts will increase if the county keeps the property tax rate flat. Keeping tax rates flat is the very definition of a tax increase, you see. Yeah.

If this happens, then it will be a tax hike that is absolutely inconceivable. And the BOCC is sneaky, because the tax hike will opaque. Opaque? Yes, I say, opaque! As in the opposite of transparent! It’s obviously...What? You require an explanation? Okay, people can investigate how their property was revalued, and the county discloses the rate and how it comes to that decision, but other than that, the megahugegigantic tax EXPLOSION is dastardly and underhanded and secretive and ¡“sneaky”!

Sneaky!!!!!!



Sneaky.

I have read the editorial all the way through enough times (i.e. at least once) to absorb its crystalline logic, and as far as I can tell, the Observer’s considered editorial position is due to sophistry, fatuity, or just plain intellectual laziness.

Note that at this point, I’m not addressing the merits and demerits of increased tax receipts, simply whether Commissioner Roberts was being “misleading”. From what I understand, she was alluding to a 2005 article by John Hood of the conservative John Locke Foundation: “A failure to enact a revenue-neutral tax rate after property revaluation does not constitute a tax increase.”

Zeno’s Paradox Revisited or: Your Vote Doesn’t Count, but It Can

Your Vote Does Not Count
Your vote does not count. You are one of hundreds of millions of people in the United States, and there is no way that your single vote actually makes a difference. Don’t vote. It’s a waste of time. There’s not that much difference between the two parties anyway.

A few months ago, as my libertarian leanings sputtered to a halt and I found myself comfortable in the more concrete world of mainstream conservatism, I read an article in The Freeman that really got on my nerves, because it advanced the idea above, and I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it, but I knew intuitively that it wasn’t quite right.

Think of voting as sort of like the lottery, except that the ticket price is your time spent, and if your ticket is the winner (i.e. your vote is a tiebreaker), your grand prize isn’t a brand new car or a bazillion dollars. (By entering this contest, each entrant releases and discharges the State and any other party associated with the development or administration of this contest from any and all liability whatsoever in connection with said election lottery, including without limitation legal claims, costs, injuries, losses or damages, demands or actions of any kind. Prize to be rewarded in monthly installments of increasingly lower value, unless and until State declares bankruptcy or decides to change the rules. By accepting this prize, the winner grants to State the right to use the winners name, address and/or likeness for advertising and trade purposes without further compensation to or permission from the winner.)

No. Instead you get a lousy politician who is (if you’re lucky) marginally less bad than the alternative. Congratulations. Break out the bubbly, hire a stripper, and pretend that what happens in Vegas won’t follow you home like a cheap vodka hangover, a bad tattoo, and a raging case of the clap (actually, I don’t think that a metaphor is necessarily necessary here, so take that as literally as you like).

Virgins, Psychics, Carnivores, and Conspiracies

Virgins, Psychics, Carnivores, and Conspiracies: confirmation bias and you

“It is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives.” -Francis Bacon

You and I share something with one another, with President Obama, with Rush Limbaugh, with the Dalai Lama, with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with Sarah Palin, with Angela Merkel, and with every musician, movie star, plumber, prostitute, stamp collector, sergeant-at-arms, and unemployed underwater basket weaver in the world.

We all able to ascertain patterns, draw conclusions, and make predictions.

This pattern-finding ability is one of the distinguishing marks of humanity. Homo sapiens is man the thinker; perhaps we are, more accurately, Homo exemplum cupitor, man the pattern-seeker. (I am assuming that my decades-unused high school Latin skills are at least slightly accurate. If not, corrections are welcome.)

Pattern-seeking is one of the behaviors that makes humans, as a species, so successful, and it leads to the victories and the quirks that we, as individuals, manifest. It leads to the soaring success of some cultures and the unfortunate decline of others.

In this piece, I will be examining something called confirmation bias, which has given us protection from predators (and the corollary ability to be good ones), virgin sacrifices, psychics and spiritualists, conspiracy theories, and much more.

A Necessary Good, or Leaving Lazy Libertarianism

”[When] men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them...there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” - Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

For years, I identified myself as a libertarian. I was even a Libertarian for a while. That is to say, I was a registered member of the Libertarian Party for about six months (Here is their platform). I’m not a Libertarian anymore, though, and I’m not really a libertarian either.

In the past, I’ve said that government should function, essentially, as a shell for society, arguing that things from medical research to local parks are a misuse of taxpayer money. I still advocate for limited, constitutional government, but there is a difference between the limits placed on the federal government by the Constitution and the limits placed on government at every level by libertarian ideology. Government, especially at a federal level, has the capacity to be destructive, but I think that there are many things that the government can provide better than anyone else and, for the sake of the civil society and healthy communities, should do so. (Parks, again, are the obvious example.)

At this point, there is a distinct possibility that you are groaning internally, because this may seem like a self-indulgent piece of philosophico-political puffery. For one thing, it is about libertarianism, a notoriously self-indulgent subject. For another, its author used a capital letter to distinguish between libertarianism and Libertarianism--in the first paragraph.

I hope that you’ll read on, however, if you’re interested in why I no longer buy into libertarianism or its ill-conceived, majuscular manifestations.

Libertarianism is an idiosyncratic and relatively new movement (between 40 and 60 years old, depending on where you start). It is based on the ideas of Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman (a hero of mine), F.A. Hayek (whom I admire), Leonard Read (author of the brilliant essay “I, Pencil”), Rose Wilder Lane (Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter and possibly the author of the Little House books), and a few others. Most of the thinkers whose ideas form the backbone of libertarianism were radicals of one stripe of another, and this may explain why it is likely to remain a fringe movement, except when its palatable, realistic ideas can be integrated into the Republican Party platform.

Earmarks and codpieces: Symbols matter

Earmarks
Yesterday, U.S. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell announced his support for a two-year moratorium on earmarks, a form of appropriating money that is deeply unpopular with the Republican base, particularly those who associate themselves with the Tea Party movement.

The amount of money that goes to earmarks is large, as far as my family’s budget is concerned (about 15 or 16 billion dollars), but as a percentage of the federal budget, it’s quite small. It’s around 0.4% of the total budget and 1% or so of the discretionary budget(1).

In many ways, banning earmarks is a symbol, and if Congress can figure out how to use different tricks during the appropriations process, tracking this money could theoretically be more difficult under a no-earmarks rule than the current system, which is why I applaud the move, but with realistic expectations and a hefty dose of skepticism.

If you’re a no-earmarks person and this is your big issue, go ahead and break out the party hats, hang some streamers, and maybe have a few slices of layer cake. But don’t swallow too much champagne, and for the love of God, keep away from the mixed drinks at the bar (It may look like an open bar, but you’ll get the bill later). Considering the history that we (and by “we”, I mean the human race) have with politicians, we’ll need to stay sober and clear-headed to deal with whatever accounting/appropriations tricks they may invent the days ahead.

Codpieces
Thanks to the tireless efforts of the Transportation Security Administration(TSA), if you’ve ever wanted to be on a reality show, all you have to do is travel, and you can be the star of Who Wants To Be the Next Unpaid Nude Model?!