Restoring Deliberative Democray
1. Trim Tab
2. We Are Not Fossils
3. Left and Right, sorted out.
Trim tab, people.
Large tankers and cruise ships would snap their rudders in minutes if they tried to steer with rudders alone. They shift the trim tab first, get a new tendency going, THEN engage the full rudder.
8 months. What in the wide world of sports did we expect to be accomplished in 8 months? I completely sympathize with the frustration; I too hope for a stealth progressive who can overcome congressional timidity, the 60-year-old military-industrial stranglehold, the superstitious American public, the debasing of reason and critical thinking, the entrenched interests of Big Pharma/Insurance, the K street pirates, etc, etc, etc.
Sure. 8 months. Why didn't he beat back all these guys by now? Uh-huh. Imagine Whirled Peas.
Ours is a very complex, entwined thatch of societies. The US is the most complex "empire" the world has ever seen. NO ONE can force it, not even W, and he had no scruples about rights or the truth.
I love the passion here on OS for progressive causes. I share it. But to escalate outrage to din and insult here, delivered with a flip pretense, a veneer, of sober analysis and critical parsing? It cheapens the reasoning and makes childish the outrage.
Waving our hands angrily at these colossal problems doesn't work, blaming one person for failing to solve them in 8 months is inane, and loading up pictures of dead children in your posts to "prove" your point is a cheap gesture. Invoking hegemony and colonialism and the primacy of libertarian individualism does nothing but add to the bilge.
Understand me: it's not that corporate empires don't control our fates, or that post-colonial abandonment isn't a factor, or that libertarian ideas of privacy and personal liberty aren't valid.
It's just that brandishing phrases and clever tropes, festooned with insults, with In or Out, Us or Them ultimatums, is pointless. If you're going to do it, don't pretend your spleen covers the waterfront, that your rant is true and real and constructive and blistering and incantatory, all at once. "Network" was a movie, written for effect.
Positive Change doesn't work that way in the real world. It's waaay more boring. I happen to think that modern banking has become the most successful criminal enterprise ever devised. And I know this: to fix banking will require more than hollering. It will take painstaking investigation and legislation, decades of trust-busting, rootin' tootin' oversight, one 3" thick document after another, by gimlet-eyed accountants.
If you want to be a part of the solution, either learn how to run the engine, man a bucket, read the GPS manual -- or else sit down. Stop yelling at everyone.
And all this nasty invective? It's low rent. Our teachers were right, way back when: vitriol and foul are the sign of poor thinking and too many shortcuts. Self-righteous rage stinks of gasoline, and ALWAYS indicates that you should check yourself. If you feel self-satisfied with your ragin' correctitude, you are doing something wrong.
Lovingkindness is the thing. Be fierce with your thinking, not with each other. Say your thing, then peacefully withdraw. The sun will come up again. Really.
We are monkeys hooting at shadows across the ravine, fearful at the threat to our banana tree. Flinging poo is natural to us. Talking, reasoning, takes skill, and is hard work. Flingers take the easy way, while swelling their chests with imaginary Glory.
Flingers have no business at the helm. Our ship will go aground while we scream at each other, friend and foe alike. When things are this bad? It's time to be even more precise with our anger, to identify things accurately, to understand the Other Side. To allow for ALL who struggle for balance, our own Precious and Correct and Beloved, and yes, even the Wrong and Awful and Hated.
I want the conservatives who join OS to stay. I want us to engage and deliberate together. I am sick to death of cheap accusations of Evil.
I know from this. I've done it, too often; I know how good it feels to pull out the straight-razor phrase, and know how hard it is to stop. The sirens in the rocks, they are.
But what use are words and ideas and passion, if they don't serve us, if they don't ease suffering?
I want the open water, the blue horizon. I am willing to tie and untie the knots, and to tack -- with tact -- to get there.
_____
"It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all.
So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it's going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go.
So I said, call me Trim Tab."
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Norwonk
O'Really?
Melissa Miles McCarter
Diary of a Hopeful Starving Student
Mark Pritchard
thebloggess
Salon.com
Comments
thanks so much.
"...it's not that corporate empires don't control our fates, or that post-colonial abandonment isn't a factor, or that libertarian ideas of privacy and personal liberty aren't valid."
This, and that the banks and greed must go, should be the middle-ground for polite discussion. I agree that ranting about issues like "change" and health care is stupid because the big money will always win, save a revolution. But millions of common folk on the other side--who still support the big money--are anti-rational, stupid and should not be allowed to breed.
How do you convince anyone that she is flat out stupid. How do you talk to someone who believes that man and dinosaurs lived together? How do you talk to people who watch FOX News?
Well written, civilized and original.
Rated.
to tack with tact--that's some heavy lifting. but rated & appreciated.
Cap;n: aye.
Just: thank you.
Thoth: Big money has been outflanked. Teddy Roosevelt, did it, so did FDR. Convincing one another, though, is nearly impossible.
Owl: hey, thanks.
Con!
Dolores: I almost said tack with tact, not attack, but didn't, for obvious reasons
One of the things I hope for in my reading - actually, that I long for in my reading - is to find writers who can engage and motivate without using the panoply of tools so readily available and specifically designed to foment the worst in us.
Much of the journalistic world has fallen prey to the belief that substituting provocation for thoughtful, informed, and respectful discourse is what works best. That might be true if train wrecks were as profitable for us to observe in our quest for maturity and growth as is listening to some master of a school of thought offering what they have learned to others.
I appreciate the tenor, the intent, and the discipline of your article very much. Thank you for offering a fine example, here in this piece, of what you are advocating.
Rated and appreciated with respect.
But you know that. Maybe now a few more of us will learn it and hold it close enough to put it to use the next time the urge to go flinging takes hold.
suzie: thanks. smart as I can manage to be. And monkey visuals r' us.
Jeremiah: in part this was inspired by you, your extended comment to BBE. a GREAT comment it was, and the civilized take down of the woo-woo candidate was ex-pert.
Lea: thank you. we share an attraction to the genteel among us, methinks.
Roy: Hmm. I am humbled by your triple hum award. A hum-dinger, as it were. A-hem: I want to thank all the little people...
Music to my ears. I appreciate this greatly.
I agree with you, at times like these we need to be precise in our anger. But to see Timothy Geitner put in charge of the treasury made me question just how committed President Obama was to the statements he made while campaigning. He said something to the effect of "the financial melt-down that happened cannot be allowed to happen again. We can't fix it by going back to business as usual on Wall Street." But Geitner's appointment practically assured just that.
I know that there will be hard choices to be made in the coming years. This kind of calamity isn't reversed in a year, it may take a decade. But we need to start taking back our country, working towards that hallowed phrase "a government of the people, by the people, and for the people".
We waited eight long years to get here, Greg. We can't afford to blow it now.
Still, I agree with your call for reasoned discourse. After all, we're supposed to be the top of the evolutionary ladder, aren't we? :-D
Rated. With thanks.
gwool: I appreciate too your efforts to navigate, with me, among the doctrinaire and frozen-fearful, to find the thoughtful and merely-fearful, left and right. Just think what the continental congress would have produced if the Becks and Chomskys were there. Dreadful thought, that.
scanner: right. If the US revolutionaries could manage to declare themselves with the Declaration and the Constitution, enshrining rights that change and improve the world even now, when an occupying power was literally living in their homes and blockading their harbors, why can't we engage in hot but smart, civil discourse without abandoning principles and those same hard-won rights? We are such babies, these days. As if civility and forbearance disallows eloquence and effectiveness. Sheesh.
Er, I mean, well done, Greg. Well-argued and excellently-written.
With perfervid civility.
Top of evo? I dunno. That suggests this all was meant to get us somewhere, or that there's an embedded "morality" to it. It's much harder than that: I think it's a random universe to which we bring meaning.
But such a beautiful home we have, in the reality-based world, and so awesome is the fruit of lovingkindness.
The skill of this piece provides an exquisite vehicle for meaning. It is mature, it is wise, and I intend to post it on FB and send it to other colleagues today. Thanks so much..
W and the coke-head teenyboppers he coddled destroyed us, by underwriting their brain-dead credit default and equity trading schemes, on inflated valuations and tomorrow-never-comes theories.
So now our valuations, the REAL engines of our economy, are anywhere from 8 to 30 times actual value, per market and commodity. We are made of air. China owns paper they can't foreclose on even if they want to, because they know bleeding us for trade concessions and interest payments is their only hope for getting even 10 cents on their dollar from us.
In 2009 Citigroup's top execs spent more time in Kuwait -- the current owner of the world, financially; China and Wall Street are their vassals -- than they did in NYC.
We need to bust these trusts.
John: thanks, and yes it is, "hopefully".
Gary: amazing honor you give me. Thank you.
I am most often hesitant to comment on most posts that present anything political because adult dialogue just doesn't seem to be much of a priority.
I also find myself writing defensively sometimes---just waiting for the attacks to come. Writing from fear always affects the writing. So I know the quality goes down.
But here's the problem that leaves me shrugging my shoulders in total bafflement and having no clue what to do.
I just looked at the popularity stats on this post for today. It said that there were 216 views. I paged down a bit and very quickly found an example of the name calling, screaming variety Greg speaks to here---and there were over 4,000 views.
I understand that we simply ignore the other kind of piece. I do that every day. And maybe I'm reading the numbers wrong?
But it appears that those of us who believe what Greg says so beautifully are a TINY minority.
Is that true? Am I missing something? And if I am---is it possible to create a place where this post of Greg's gets the 4,000 views?
dcvdickens: evolution to hysteria: i like that. devo, really, i guess.
Chicago: Well, at the risk of self-serving: yeah! and the last time I checked, one of the posts that inspired this had 74+ comments, whereas I am lucky if I crack 30 on ANY post. Whine. Complain.
But I am not alone: many here post generous and clearheaded posts, resist the nyanya reactionary commentary, and hover low in views rates and comments.
It just isn't sexy to say: Do the hard work. Give a little. Talk calm to enforce calm. Distrust that sizzle of zing.
It is fun to fling poo. Fun to watch others do it. For me and thee, it is fun. But grown-ups stop, wash up, and get to work. And learn that to stop others from flinging, you must stop flinging first. Suffer the stink of others for a bit.
The good news? I have practiced this here and it works. Persist at it, and it works.
I'm mostly disappointed in my party. Bill Maher called it right after the election when he predicted Democrats would now use better weapons for our circular firing squads.
"The last administration should have seen this coming a long time ago..."
Then he tries to convince me why some of the reforms being discussed won't work. I think it's a classy approach and I've tried to learn from it. At least we have a conversation this way.
Procopius: It is such a good place, OS. We have the keys to the nice car here. Salon built a brand, precariously, that values reason over sacred cows, yet remains progressive. Somehow, it attracts some earnest, articulate, not too disagreeable Conservatives. That's GREAT!
AtHome: Thanks
maryt! no, thank you!
jimmy! There you go. Is that really so hard? to frame things so we can share a personal space?What's the worst thing that could happen, that someone will say something alienating? If so, then what's the rational for pre-empting with early-and-often alienating crapoonu?
Makes no sense. If things go sour, confirm the points and retreat gracefully. But if by allowing the space to each other we form a connection, then maybe, just maybe, we become useful to each other. And to America, too.
However, in the arena of public discourse I believe that a large part of the reason why "center" now really means right of center is because the right has used every method in their arsenal to move political discourse to the right. The right says the most outrageous things imaginable in the loudest voice and they have been saying them for a very long time now.
I think Democrats/the left/progressives have always been more polite and more rational. I am all for rational but rational is not really winning the game. I just read that Glenn Beck won the ratings for I think the whole week, O'Reilly continues to have high ratings, Limbaugh continues to have his 20 million (they say, I dont believe it is that high) listeners/followers.
I think there is something to be said for being outraged and for not being polite and I am glad some people do it b/c I cant.
I am not against some OS posters being way out in Rantville in the far left field, or right for that matter. It seems to be their nature and I have aligned with them on some issues, like the question of torture, when I thought that without voices loudly crying in the wilderness the issue was going to be buried. Now, for the time being at least, it is buried, with or without the loud voices.
So I think ranting has its place but that civilized discourse should be the rule, not the exception.
Finally, I am reminded that we do not have to read the ugly rants. We know who those who do that are and we can avoid their posts. Likewise, when my posts are high jacked by some ranter or troll I do not hesitate to delete their comments. That irritates the hell out of some people but there is no "freedom of speech" being breached by maintaining your own standards on your own blog. They have a blog that they can post their positions on and do not have the right to use mine to rant and rage at this or that issue.
I guess I come down believing that civility should be the norm for OS and believe that most people here share that. As for the few that do not I think there are ways to deal with them: don't read and don't let them crap in your blog. That works for me.
Excellent post. Thanks for the reminder.
Monte
Ariana: Your response made me think hard. I wrote a new post, expanding the comment i stated here. Thank you.
dharma: Wow! now that's a compliment. Cool username, btw.
Monte: Thanks for finessing the aspects of when/wher/how it is appropriate to "let fly". I am not sure I agree with all of it, but support the topic, enthusiastically, And feel undertain about my own opinions, frankly. The "personal space" of our own blogs argument has credible features, but is perhaps undermined by the universal accessibility we grant to others. I think the issue is settled by personal responsibility. And I ask myself: "when my teen daughters are grown, will they respect this writing?" Did I speak out when someone else went too far, and did my comment reflect calm and rational? Was I just a cheerleader for whatever rant seemed most heartfelt? Do I have criteria? A moral center? Does my writing reflect it?
This part strongly speaks to me, "But what use are words and ideas and passion, if they don't serve us, if they don't ease suffering?"
To me, it's beyond civility. It's about being kind. I strive to live by the quote: "Nothing is so strong as gentleness. Nothing so gentle as real strength." Saint Francis de Sales
detaR