The Glass Floor And Rich Idiots

Amusing article on Huffpost a while back, The 'Glass Floor' Is Keeping America's Richest Idiots At The Top by Michael Hobbes. In it, Hobbes looks at how family connections, special treatment, and pure money keeps the children of the wealthy outperforming the rest of us -- even if those wealthy young people are complete idiots.

Hobbes quotes Richard Reeves, a Brookings Institution researcher, who says that today’s moneyed families and their heirs, benefit from a “glass floor,” that keeps them from experiencing downward social mobility, even if they’re talentless or incompetent. The same floor keeps talented but poorer young people from rising. This means, says Hobbes, “Rather than sending our most brilliant minds up the income ladder, America is ensuring that the wealthy, no matter their mediocrity, retain their grip on the highest rung.”

True? False?  I can’t say for certain. But you must confess, if there is such a glass floor, then it would explain many recent events. And that boss you had who seemed like a privileged moron and you always wondered if he could really be that stupid?

Well, guess what, he really was.

And maybe more.

~~~

Want a free book? Check out With Luther, Tourists, and God in Santa Fe. It's partly a travel log and partly a meditation on people who actually make a difference in life.

Oh, and it is lavishly illustrated by yours truly.

It’s on Gumroad as a PDF about 52 pages long.

How to download: look at the image of the book and the text below. Scroll down until you see the words “Name A Fair Price.” In the blank space below that, type “0” — that is, a zero, because the book is free. Then click on the button below that which is marked “I want this!” After that, you should be given the option of either downloading the book and reading it at your leisure, or reading it on the Gumroad site. Either way, I hope you enjoy it!

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Michael Jay Tucker is a writer and journalist who has published material on topics ranging from the Jazz Age to computers. (Among his small claims to fame is that he interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Taxes Or Pitchforks?

So check out this op-ed piece in The Guardian, Millionaires like me should pay more taxes. Giving to charity is a fig leaf, by Chuck Collins. Collins is a big money guy. The article identifies him as “the great-grandson of the US meatpacker Oscar Mayer.”

But he is also very concerned about growing economic inequality in the west. He thinks that it is, in fact, actually destroying us. He writes, “This process of pulling apart, both within countries and between nations, will all but guarantee that the global community will further polarize and fail to adequately respond to the looming climate catastrophe. This will be disastrous for everyone, including the planet’s billionaires and millionaires.”

So, in the op-ed, he encourages the wealthy among his readers to pay their fair share -- that is, pay more taxes, and stop fighting so hard for some kind of libertarian society where any regulation of the economy (i.e., of their own wants) is anathema.

Honestly, it is a very compelling piece, and if I were a billionaire, I’d take it very seriously, particularly as Colins notes, “The choice is stark: do we want pitchforks or a working tax system?”

But there’s the rub. I’m not a billionaire. And neither are most of his readers.

So, will they...the 1%...heed his warning? Or will they just keep on doing what they’re doing, increasing their profits at the cost of everyone else, until one day they meet...

That pitchfork? 

~~~

Want a free book? Check out With Luther, Tourists, and God in Santa Fe. It's partly a travel log and partly a meditation on people who actually make a difference in life.

Oh, and it is lavishly illustrated by yours truly.

It’s on Gumroad as a PDF about 52 pages long.

How to download: look at the image of the book and the text below. Scroll down until you see the words “Name A Fair Price.” In the blank space below that, type “0” — that is, a zero, because the book is free. Then click on the button below that which is marked “I want this!” After that, you should be given the option of either downloading the book and reading it at your leisure, or reading it on the Gumroad site. Either way, I hope you enjoy it!

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***

Michael Jay Tucker is a writer and journalist who has published material on topics ranging from the Jazz Age to computers. (Among his small claims to fame is that he interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Me, Gumroad, And God

As you probably recall, I’ve been offering a free book on the web lately. Or, maybe booklet is more appropriate because it is only about 50 pages long. But it is heavily illustrated, so that counts for something…

Anyway, it is titled, With Lutherans, Tourists, and God In Santa Fe, and it details a trip I made last year to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to attend something called the “Lutheran Advocacy Ministry Bishop’s Luncheon and Issues Briefing.” I went, even though I’m not a Lutheran, nor particularly religious, because the Ministry does some rather important work, as in fighting hunger, protecting children, and generally advancing causes with which I agree.

I wrote the book as a kind of reflection on that…I mean, on the political side of it. You see, I am not sure what I think of the historical Jesus, but I have no doubts about the mission he gave to his followers — to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, and liberate the oppressed.

Too often, I fear, churches forget all that. Instead, they focus on things that Jesus did not seem to talk about much, or at all — like damnation, and the “right” way to worship God (plus the “wrong” way), and how or whether you have sex, and with whom, and why you should obey the dictates of Priests and Ministers. They focus, in other words, what is invisible.

And I have a hard time spending my energies on invisible things.


But I can see hunger, and want, and brutality, and evil. Those are real. Those you can know and measure and experience.

So, for me, a church which sets out into the world…the material world…as the real Jesus did…and attempts to change things for the better, that is a church I can admire…

Thus my little book on the Lutherans.

*

Now, as I say, I’m giving it away at the moment. I have it on Gumroad, which is described on Wikipedia as “an online platform that enables creators to sell products directly to consumers.” I’ve used it before, back in the days when I was working with a little publishing company. Chiefly, we used it for “pay what you want” interactions. That is, you download a book and then, if you like it, you “tip” the author with a few dollars or whatever on the site.

Gumroad gives you the option of giving away your digital products. So, I figured I’d set up With Lutherans, Tourists, and God In Santa Fe on Gumroad and offer it there.

But, things got weird. Sixty some people visited the site (according to Gumroad’s metrics) but none of them downloaded the book. I was most annoyed by that. Why were they coming, but not taking the book with them when they left? Particularly since it was free?

Then, I took a long look at the Gumroad page where my book is hosted. You can see it below, by the way.

Now, look at it for moment. It is obvious how you are supposed to get the book? I would submit that it isn’t easy to see. What button do you click? How do you know what you download is free? Or will you be billed later on? Bluntly, you have to have used Gumroad before to know how it works. There’s a problem there, I think.

So, now, when I post a link to the book, I also include instructions about how to use the site. Here is what I’m telling people, “How to download: look at the image of the book and the text below. Scroll down until you see the words “Name A Fair Price.” In the blank space below that, type “0” — that is, a zero, because the book is free. Then click on the button below that which is marked “I want this!” After that, you should be given the option of either downloading the book and reading it at your leisure, or reading it on the Gumroad site. Either way, I hope you enjoy it!”


Will this increase the number of people who actually download the book? I don’t know. Maybe the problem had nothing to do with Gumroad’s interface. Maybe it was simply that nobody wanted the book.

Which would be annoying. But at least I’d know that it was my fault, and not the fault of the channel of distribution.


*


But, there is a question I’m avoiding. To wit, why am I writing about Progressive Christianity at all?

Well, I’m a little concerned by something. Lately, I’ve been following posts on various liberal and left of center webpages and social media. I see a lot of vituperative postings about Christianity. I don’t just mean those Churches which are uniquely anti-progressive — the “God Hates Fags” sort, or the “evangelical” madness of too slick preachers in their mega-churches. I mean Christianity as a whole, as though the entire faith is indistinguishable from its most awful incarnations.

Further, the logical extension of that is a rejection of any sort of co-operation with Churches or faith-based organizations. Frankly, that is incredibly stupid. We are now at a moment of crisis. The Left needs every vote it can get, and every friend it can find.

To announce that you are too fine and noble to accept the friendship and co-operation of progressive Christians (or anyone, for that matter), is fantastically self-destructive.

And if you do such a thing, if you reject such potential allies and divide the Left, I have to wonder…

Whose side are you really on?

~~~

Want a free book? Check out With Luther, Tourists, and God in Santa Fe. It's partly a travel log and partly a meditation on people who actually make a difference in life.

Oh, and it is lavishly illustrated by yours truly.

It’s on Gumroad as a PDF about 52 pages long.

How to download: look at the image of the book and the text below. Scroll down until you see the words “Name A Fair Price.” In the blank space below that, type “0” — that is, a zero, because the book is free. Then click on the button below that which is marked “I want this!” After that, you should be given the option of either downloading the book and reading it at your leisure, or reading it on the Gumroad site. Either way, I hope you enjoy it!

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***

Michael Jay Tucker is a writer and journalist who has published material on topics ranging from the Jazz Age to computers. (Among his small claims to fame is that he interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Bolton's Thunderbolt

Interesting article in the Washington Post the other day, Blumenthal calls Bolton book manuscript ‘a thunderbolt’ by Mike DeBonis. It seems that Senator Richard Blumenthal (a Democrat from Connecticut) has seen a report of what’s in John Bolton’s upcoming book. He claims that tit will shake the Trump presidency right down to it foundations.

The specific quote from Blumenthal which interests me the most is, “It simply dramatizes that eventually a lot of truth is going to come out, and my Republican colleagues are going to be held accountable for blocking it from this trial...It is a bombshell that really has seismic reverberations for any Republican who cares about their place in history.”

I am enough of a cynic to not quite believe that. Or, rather, I believe that Bolton’s book could, indeed, be a “thunderbolt” (Blumenthal’s term), but I’m not sure it would make any difference. Trump’s Senate and Trump’s supporters will behave pretty much as they have all along, in spite of anything they might learn from Bolton’s texts.

Still, we can hope that Bolton’s book will at least reveal more dreadful stuff about the Trump Administration, and maybe nudge a few of Trump’s voters into the Blue camp.

In which case, Bolton, whose time in government both before and during Trump’s administration was rather a disaster, may actually do something of value.

That would be a nice change, don’t you think?

~~~

Want a free book? Check out With Luther, Tourists, and God in Santa Fe. It's partly a travel log and partly a meditation on people who actually make a difference in life.

Oh, and it is lavishly illustrated by yours truly.

It’s on Gumroad as a PDF about 52 pages long.

How to download: look at the image of the book and the text below. Scroll down until you see the words “Name A Fair Price.” In the blank space below that, type “0” — that is, a zero, because the book is free. Then click on the button below that which is marked “I want this!” After that, you should be given the option of either downloading the book and reading it at your leisure, or reading it on the Gumroad site. Either way, I hope you enjoy it!

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***

Michael Jay Tucker is a writer and journalist who has published material on topics ranging from the Jazz Age to computers. (Among his small claims to fame is that he interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Shameless Self Promotion

Here's a short video I did to promote my Free book(let), With Luther, Tourists, and God In Santa Fe. It ain't Oscar-winning material, but what the heck, you might enjoy it.

Actually, if you want to download the book (it's on Gumroad at the moment), you might want to do so soon. I may move it to Amazon soon. 

Anyway, the video follows.

cheers
mjt

Davos In The Dock

A while back,  I wrote about how the Davos attendees say they want the world to be a better place, but that they might not do a thing about it. However, I did give them the benefit of a doubt.

Robert Reich, a wiser man than I, is having none of that.  In an op-ed piece in The Guardian, “Trump is on trial for abuse of power – the Davos elites should be in the dock too,” he presents us with a capitalist elite that should be held accountable for very serious crimes against humanity. He writes, “Trump is charged with abusing his power. Capitalism’s global elite is under assault for abusing its power as well: fueling inequality, fostering corruption and doing squat about climate change.”

He also thinks that things will get no better. The CEOs and hedge fund managers who chatter about “stakeholder capitalism” in Switzerland, will simply keep on doing what they’ve always done, i.e., bankrupting the rest of us to make themselves even more obscenely rich. “Nothing will be achieved in the Swiss Alps,” he says, “because the growing global discontent has yet to affect the bottom lines of the corporations and financial institutions whose leaders are assembling to congratulate themselves on their wealth, influence and benevolence.”

Is he right? Well, I’ve got to confess, he’s been right a lot in the past. And I haven’t seen a whole lot from Davosoids suggesting he’s wrong now.

So...if that’s the case...what do we need to do “to affect the bottom lines of he corporations and financial institutions?” And make them change their ways?

Before, that is, they destroy capitalism, life on earth, our futures, and...yes...even themselves?


***


Want a free book? Check out With Luther, Tourists, and God in Santa Fe. It's partly a travel log and partly a meditation on people who actually make a difference in life. Oh, and it is lavishly illustrated by yours truly. It’s on Gumroad as a PDF about 52 pages long. So give it glance!

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*** 

Michael Jay Tucker is a writer and journalist who has published material on topics ranging from the Jazz Age to computers. (Among his small claims to fame is that he interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Drones and Death: The New Normal

So I saw the other day that (to quote the South China Post) “At least 75 soldiers [were] killed in [a] drone attack on [a] mosque in Yemen, as fighting intensifies.” According to the article, the soldiers were killed by drones launched by Houthi rebels.

Now, I mention this because it isn’t the first time the Houthi rebels have used drones in their war against the Yemeni central government (such as it is). In fact, you’ll recall that back in September, the Houthi managed to hit Saudi oil facilities with drones, and did them considerable damage.

Why do I mention this? Because not that long ago we thought of drone strikes as kind of a Western thing. We thought we had a monopoly on that sort of weapon. Only, very quickly, everyone from China to Iran copied us, and passed killer drones to all their proxies and friends.

And now they seem to be the normal stuff of war, as unremarkable as an AK-47 or an IED.

Which frightens me very much. I sincerely hope that the people who are in charge, somewhere, are thinking about how one fights such devices.

For I fear that, sometime, even where I am now, in the heart of the American continent, thousands of miles away from war...

Someday...out of the azure and cloudless Texas skies...seemingly so peaceful...

Death will come.

And we’ll never see it coming.

***

Want a free book? Check out With Luther, Tourists, and God in Santa Fe. It's partly a travel log and partly a meditation on people who actually make a difference in life. Oh, and it is lavishly illustrated by yours truly. It’s on Gumroad as a PDF about 52 pages long. So give it glance! 

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Michael Jay Tucker is a writer and journalist who has published material on topics ranging from the Jazz Age to computers. (Among his small claims to fame is that he interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The Population Collapse

Are we running out of people? Maybe. It turns out countries with postindustrial economies (i.e., just about the whole West) are surprisingly infertile. People just stop having children. Why is not clear. But the fact that people work 24/7, and have no time (and maybe not the money) to have children are probably among the more important factors.

Business Insider recently ran an article by Chris Weller, 7 countries at risk of becoming 'demographic time bombs’, which notes that already Hong Kong, Singapore, China, South Korea, Spain, Italy, and our own United States face potentially serious problems with replacing their aging populations. In the US, the situation has been made worse in recent years by our ever more stringent restrictions on immigration. We used to be able to import workers and residents. Now, that’s less true.

Thus there is a certain irony. We either need to raise salaries and provide subsidized child care so that young people can have families, or we need more immigrants. But politics prevents the latter. And corporations, always eager to extract more work from employees who are already over-stressed, will frustrate the former.

Yet, we cannot continue as we are now, or else the day will come when there is no one left to feed us when we cannot any longer lift a spoon...

Or even to empty the bedpans afterwards.

***

Want a free book? Check out With Luther, Tourists, and God in Santa Fe. It's partly a travel log and partly a meditation on people who actually make a difference in life. Oh, and it is lavishly illustrated by yours truly. It’s on Gumroad as a PDF about 52 pages long. So give it glance! 

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Michael Jay Tucker is a writer and journalist who has published material on topics ranging from the Jazz Age to computers. (Among his small claims to fame is that he interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

AI Is A Bigot When It Comes To Hiring

Increasingly, who gets interviewed for what job is determined by algorithm. Before your resume is seen, or even glanced it, by a human, it is first vetted by some mechanized system. The problem? Algorithms are not people, they are not particularly flexible, and they may...according to some observers...be biased.

There’s an interesting article on this very topic in a recent issue of Business Insider, “Here's why an AI expert says job recruiting sites promote employment discrimination” by Tyler Sonnemaker. In it, Sonnemaker interviews data science consultant Cathy O'Neil and she says that “discrimination in hiring starts with job advertising sites like LinkedIn, Monster.com, Facebook, and ZipRecruiter.”

In particular, she notes, job advertising sites are looking chiefly at demographic data. That means that people who fall out of fairly narrow confines of age and ethnic group may be rejected out of hand.

Now, full disclosure follows. I have myself -- I think-- been subjected to just exactly such automated bias. I’m a white male, so I’m privileged, but I’m also over sixty years old, and my background is rather odd--I’ve got multiple liberal arts degrees but my job experience is in journalism. This is kind of hard to explain when you’re filling out little forms online.

So, while I can’t prove it, I think I have been rejected for jobs by algorithms which took one look at my age and another at my tangled employment history, and just deleted my application without ever passing it to an actual human.

This is not a good thing, I think, and not just for me. Corporations need to let real people decide who they want to hire and work with, and to make hiring decisions based on human interactions.

Otherwise they may miss important talents, while rushing forward to hire only the most bland, the most processed, and the most mediocre employees.

***

Want a free book? Check out With Luther, Tourists, and God in Santa Fe. It's partly a travel log and partly a meditation on people who actually make a difference in life. Oh, and it is lavishly illustrated by yours truly. It’s on Gumroad as a PDF about 52 pages long. So give it glance! 

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Michael Jay Tucker is a writer and journalist who has published material on topics ranging from the Jazz Age to computers. (Among his small claims to fame is that he interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Davos And Dread

Interesting piece in the Washington Post recently, “Sanders, Warren are hot discussion topics as global elites gather in Davos” by Heather Long. According to Ms. Long, the billionaires and other elites meeting in Switzerland are--shall we say? Concerned that the world’s young people are turning increasingly to the Left, embracing socialism (or something like it), and demanding action on climate change. The Davosoids are even more concerned, it seems, with the possibility of a President Warren or Sanders.

To give them their due, the Davos attendees are aware that things have gone horribly wrong on their watch, and that they need to do something to address climate change and the ever growing inequality of the rich and everyone else. They even seem to be thinking about ways to fix the problems. Long writes, “At Davos, the buzzword this year is ‘stakeholder capitalism,’ the idea that companies have a responsibility to the environment and society to do more than maximize profits.”

Which is good. But several things worry me. First, of course, will the attendees do more than talk? It’s all very well to admit that something is a problem. It is quite another to do anything about it.

But, second, and maybe more importantly, even if they act, are the Davos attendees the people who are the most dangerous? Let’s face it. CEOs and the managers of giant hedge funds aren’t stupid. And they tend to be pragmatists who do what is necessary to survive. If that means accommodating activist governments and environmental regulation, they will do it. They may not like it. But they’ll do it.

However, there is another class of the rich and powerful...people who are less pragmatic and more driven by ideology. The Koch Brothers (now down to one Brother) and RupertMurdoch are not moved just by greed or even self-interest, though heaven knows those are big on their agenda. Rather, their motives include a deep, abiding, and almost religious belief in the divine holiness of their own wills. What they want is sacred, and any attempt to limit them in any way is profane beyond measure.

For such people,  the good intentions of Davos will seem, at best, irrelevant, and at worst, high treason to the cause.

***

Want a free book? Check out With Luther, Tourists, and God in Santa Fe. It's partly a travel log and partly a meditation on people who actually make a difference in life. Oh, and it is lavishly illustrated by yours truly. It’s on Gumroad as a PDF about 52 pages long. So give it glance! 
 

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Michael Jay Tucker is a writer and journalist who has published material on topics ranging from the Jazz Age to computers. (Among his small claims to fame is that he interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Biden Today? Progressives Tomorrow?

We’re getting close to the primaries now. In a few months, we may even have a clear idea of who the Democrat’s candidate will be. I hope it is someone we can get behind. But I do worry. What if we want as progressives is not what the voters want?

I keep flashing back to an article in the Washington Post way back in July of last year, “Dear Democrats: I’ll vote for any of you. But please nominate someone who can actually win” by Megan McArdle. In it, she appeals to the Democrats to pick someone who can woo Moderates and even conservatives in particularly contested races. Or, to put it another way, I suppose she’s basically saying Vote For Biden.

Is she right? Should we do that? I honestly don’t know. Personally, I kind of think that Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren could pull it off.

Yet...yet...I do worry.

Could it be that we need to have a Biden in 2020, so that we can get a Progressive in 2024?

***

Want a free book? Check out With Luther, Tourists, and God in Santa Fe. It's partly a travel log and partly a meditation on people who actually make a difference in life. Oh, and it is lavishly illustrated by yours truly. It’s on Gumroad as a PDF about 52 pages long. So give it glance! 
 

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***  

Michael Jay Tucker is a writer and journalist who has published material on topics ranging from the Jazz Age to computers. (Among his small claims to fame is that he interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Putin The Prude

So I don’t really know if this is true or not, but I heard the other day that Imagefap has been blocked in Russia.

What’s Imagefap, you ask? It’s a popular porn sharing site. Yes, I’ve been there. No, I’m not a regular guest. I’m not an enormous fan of pornography, but let’s face it, I enjoy looking at pretty pictures of naked women. I’m a heterosexual guy. That’s what heterosexual guys do. It’s the way we’re built.

But I find it interesting that Putin’s Russia has elected to block Imagefap. Argue that porn is bad...argue that it is good...argue that it is indifferent to human behavior...no matter. It is always going to be around. And my guess is that Russia’s current attempt at moralizing censorship will be pretty much ineffective. Russian men, and more women than you might think, will find their way around the Russian Cyberwall, or, more likely Russia’s own entrepreneurs will dash to fill the gap. (Please, no jokes here.)

It is particularly mystifying given that Putin’s own public persona is so based on his being a hyper-masculine male, always ready for a bout of martial arts or a midnight trip around Moscow with the Night Wolves motorcycle gang (on his three-wheeled motorcycle of course). One would think that a little porn would be just the thing for such a regime. What kind of guy doesn’t look at porn? I mean, really?

So why, then, would Russia block Imagefap? My guess is that two things are in play. First, part of Putin’s support comes from depressed rural areas, or from the un-privileged parts of cities--in effect, people who are somewhat like Trump’s deplorables. And these people, even if they themselves privately consume as much erotica as anyone, find the public acceptance of it disturbing and alien...i.e., foreign, i.e., Western, i.e. American.

Ergo, it is probably worth Putin’s while to play to that audience, and say, Look, I’m stamping out that degenerate filth...no more pornography...even while rumors about what actually happens behind the Kremlin’s doors are vivid and detailed.

But, there’s more. I think there’s a second reason for Putin’s sudden prissiness. Specifically, I think that Orwell had it right, and that dictatorships really do hate sex...except, of course, as an act of aggression. You see, there is a moment in sex...at least if it is consensual...when your mind is wholly occupied. When it is not thinking, in short, of Higher Ideals, or The Nation, or Victory Over The Enemy, or Obeying The Will Of God (whose will, curiously, is always revealed to us by other humans, and is so frequently identical to the wants of Our Leaders in this moral world).

And it is that moment of utter freedom, however fleeting, which they hate...

Maybe I’m being mystic here. But, whether I’m right or wrong on this, I’m willing to bet that in the long run, or even the short, it will not work. In the long run, there will be as much pornography in Putin’s Russia as there is everywhere else. It may be a little harder to get, but it will be there. Human biology is not so easily overcome.

Thus, in the end, Putin, and his censors, will enter history along with our own Anthony Comstock, who enjoyed in his time vast power, and publicly boasted of the number of people he’d driven to suicide and of the number of books he’d burned...

But when he died, he was just as dead as any of us ...

And as for his legacy...nothing.

Except the reputation of a villain and a fool, and, almost certainly, a latent “pervert,” utterly incapable of accepting who he really was...deep down...below the belt...

Even as he rode his version of a three-wheeled motorcycle, with his version of the Night Wolves...

In all their leathery glory.


***

Want a free book? Check out With Luther, Tourists, and God in Santa Fe. It's partly a travel log and partly a meditation on people who actually make a difference in life. Oh, and it is lavishly illustrated by yours truly. It’s on Gumroad as a PDF about 52 pages long. So give it glance!

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Trump: generals are “dopes and babies”

Are you about to get drafted and sent off to die on some radioactive battlefield while terminator robots hunt your derrier across the landscape? This story in The Washington Post isn’t exactly reassuring.

In “‘You’re a bunch of dopes and babies’: Inside Trump’s stunning tirade against generals,” Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker give us a chilling look at Trump’s relationship with the officers and experts who tried to convince him of the value of a cautious and thoughtful approach to world affairs. According to the authors, the military men and women began to explain the country’s long-term strategy to the president at a Pentagon meeting, only to have the President reject everything they said. He finally snapped at them “You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.”

Given that the world is a very complicated place, full of ambiguity, this is not a good thing.

Also interesting in the piece are hints that Trump seems to think that the American military should be rented out to the highest bidder, like mercenaries, rather than being reserved for our nation’s own interests and employed only in the most pressing of circumstances.

This, too, is not a good thing.

Anyway, give the article a glance when you have a chance. It’s is also an excerpt from a larger book which might be worth looking at.

After you’ve seen them, feel free to worry.

A lot.

 ***

Want a free book? Check out With Luther, Tourists, and God in Santa Fe. It's partly a travel log and partly a meditation on people who actually make a difference in life. Oh, and it is lavishly illustrated by yours truly. It’s on Gumroad as a PDF about 52 pages long. So give it glance!

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Michael Jay Tucker is a writer and journalist who has published material on topics ranging from the Jazz Age to computers. (Among his small claims to fame is that he interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Want a free book? Check it out!

Just published this lavishly illustrated short book as a PDF on Gumroad. It's part travel log (all about Santa Fe, New Mexico) and part essay on activist Christians.

Give it a glance! And download if you like. It's free for the moment.

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James Bond, Oz, A Strutting Fool

Something I find fascinating is how often, and (seemingly) how deliberately certain figures on the Right do their level best to look and act like Bond villains. I mean, consider #MoscowMitch. Here he is already about as attractive as a pocket-sized version of Gamera the killer turtle…and, if you ever get a chance, listen to him on Youtube or wherever while he cackles like the Wicked Witch Of Washington and clearly delights in being “the Grim Reaper,” killing off any bill introduced by a Democrat.

He comes off as diabolic as an underweight Professor Moriarty with a side-order of extra cheese and meanness.

In fact, let’s face it. Mitch is just an orbital laser cannon away from having his own Man From Uncle episode.


*

Don’t get the reference? Go to IMDB.com. Then say, with a sneer, Okay, Boomer.

Perfectly acceptable.

The Sinister Supervillain

Then there’s our friends in Australia. Consider their current Prime Minister, Scott Morrison. (I write this in January of 2020, so things could change by the time you see it).

Australia is now in the midst of perfectly horrible bushfires. Scenes that can only be described as apocalyptic have flashed onto screens around the world — blood red or orange skies, people in flight, homes reduced to ash, refugees in boats trying to make it out to safety and the sea. It all has the feel of the Bergman film Skammen, or, worse, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

And what has Morrison done? Pretty much nothing—other, that is, then deny that there’s any link between burning coal and global warming. You could almost forgive him for that, but the fact that he’s also done very, very little to assist the first responders and fire fighters saving lives from the flames is terrifying. I can’t imagine what his motivation could possibly be. Maybe it is some Libertarian or Neoliberal thing, a belief that any expenditure of resources by the government, for any cause whatsoever (except war, of course), is forbidden.

The result? He presents to the world a nearly perfect picture of elite indifference to the suffering of lesser humans. It is as though he sat down with his top advisers and said, “What can we do to present ourselves as horrible and hideous and a threat to human existence?”

And one of the advisors, maybe Angus Taylor, says, “I’ve got an idea! Let’s create a photo-op in which you stand in front of a burning country, and pretend that nothing is wrong, even as the flames consume animals, homes, and humans.”

“Perfect,” says the PM, and then goes on vacation to Hawaii.


*

Oh, and if you had any doubts, just the other day, the former Prime Minister of Australia, Tony Abbott, told an Israeli reporter that not only is global warming a myth, but that climate change activists are terribly dangerous. They are a cult, he said, to be equated with the Islamic and Chinese threats to Western Civilization.

It is so fascinating.

And do we recall that our own Rupert Murdoch is of the same class and community, a Right-Wing Australian, who came to the United States and founded Fox News?

Might be something there to consider.


*

All of which means that Morrison also has terrific potential to be a Bond villain. A cold and ruthless one. With no personal charisma or charm.

Say, in a way, Ernst Stavro Blofeld…

But with Vegemite.


*

But of all those currently on view in the Right, there is one who can never have a role, I fear, in an Ian Fleming novel or one of its imitators. He’ll never be up against Bond…whichever actor it is that will next play the man. (Or woman, thinking of Dr. Who).

I refer, of course, to Donald Trump.

Why not him? Well, consider, Bond villains may have very different characteristics. But, as a rule, they have a few things in common. For instance, they are quiet. They are sinister but silent. They speak in measured tones when they speak at all, and then usually just to impart instructions to their henchmen, or explanations to Bond himself (“Do you expect me to talk?” “No, I expect you to die.” All said without once raising his voice.)

Thus, the Bond villain may be quiet and thin, like Dr. No. Or quiet and fat, like Goldfinger. Or quiet and somewhere in the middle, like Emilio Largo from Thunderball.

But they are not loud.

Contrast that to Trump…

Who is nothing if not loud…nothing if not theatrical…nothing if not a mouth running at full tilt and a tongue wagging at both ends (and the middle) at the same time.

And thus…sadly, he cannot be a genuinely Miltonian villain, a true Lucifer, no matter how much he might aspire to be so. He won’t be a Dr. No or a Goldfinger or a Largo. He won’t even be a minor henchmen, an Oddjob or a Jaws.

He will never be great. Not even a great villain.

He will be, at best, a second rate vaudevillian, orange makeup on his face and a threadbare wig upon his balding head…strutting across a creaking stage before a thinning audience…

Until finally, like Shakespeare’s poor player, he is gone…and heard no more.

And not a moment too soon.

***

Please check out my new book, Padre: To The Island, a meditation on mortality, grief, and joy, based on the lives and deaths of two of the most amazing and unconventional people I ever met, my mother and father.

***

Michael Jay Tucker is a writer and journalist who has published material on topics ranging from the Jazz Age to computers. (Among his small claims to fame is that he interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Graduate School...A Waste Of Time (and money)?

Is graduate school worth the investment? That is, the investment in both time and money?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic asks that very question in a recent issue of the Harvard Business Review. His answer? Maybe. Maybe not. He lists reasons for doing so, including a higher starting salary and learning soft skills that could come in handy on the job. He also lists reasons for not going the graduate school. They include things like going into debt and the fact that potential employers may not care how many degrees you have on your resume, so long as you can do the job they want done.

His conclusion is, alas, that it’s up to you to measure the relative merits of going vs. not going, and then making up your own mind.

Okay, in interests of full disclosure, I should mention that I have three master’s degrees, one in English, and two in history. (I’d have a Ph.D. if I hadn’t gotten kicked out of one program. But I’m not angry. Just terribly, terribly hurt.)

Anyway, my experience is that I never once used my degrees on the job, or to get a job. Of course, they were liberal arts degrees, so that made a difference. But, still, no magazine I ever worked for (and I’ve worked for several) cared that I had an MFA in writing.

So, not a career builder, no.

But on the other hand, I really enjoyed earning the three master’s degree. (I’d have enjoyed the Ph.D., too. Insert much swearing and cursing here.) And, I guess, if I had it to do all over again, I take the same path.

After all, a job’s important...

But it isn’t everything.

Please check out my new book, Padre: To The Island, a meditation on mortality, grief, and joy, based on the lives and deaths of two of the most amazing and unconventional people I ever met, my mother and father.


***

Michael Jay Tucker is a writer and journalist who has published material on topics ranging from the Jazz Age to computers. (Among his small claims to fame is that he interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

A Most UnCivil War

Note: I originally did this way back in 2017. But, not much seems to have changed, so I thought I'd repost it now.


Haven’t we seen it all before?

I mean, not necessarily Trump. He may be sort of new. Though, I suppose, you could make an argument that Andrew Jackson was a bit like him. Jackson, like Trump, came to power by appealing to the lowest possible denominator. He gained, in other words, the votes of those below the usual threshold of American politics.

But, Jackson was (for better or worse) an intelligent man. And Trump…well, you know the status on that.

But the powers behind Trump, the men and women put up the cash, who provided the organization, the networks of “Dark Money,” (to quote Jane Mayer), the obscure associations of obscenely wealthy men and women who constructed the Radical Right bit by bit and bolt by bolt, like a monster on a slab...

Haven’t we seen them before? And only a hundred years ago? And then, as now, weren’t they were deadly, shameful, and redolent of treason?

Let me explain. I’m reading, right now, a couple of fascinating books. One is older, The Confederate Nation (1861-1865), by the eminent historian, Emory M. Thomas (1979). It is a classic work I gather, and can be found in the libraries of many a professor. The second is somewhat newer, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy, by Matthew Karp (2016). In it, as the title would suggest, Professor Karp looks at the goals and means of the slave owning elites who controlled American foreign relations for a major part of the nation’s history.

Normally, I don’t like Civil War history. It depresses me. I can’t read about the battles, no matter how stirring, and not think of all those young men, many of them poor or working class, who marched off to their destruction in the service of privileged aristocrats who never suffered so much as a scratch. Nor can I escape the memory of what happened to the civilians, particularly women and children, who found themselves at the mercy of their enemies.

But, I am interested in what happened just before the Civil War—in the mindsets of the people involved, whether they were Southern planters, Northern industrialists, radical Abolitionists, determined “fire-eaters,” (i.e., extreme Southern nationalists), factory workers, farmers, field hands, clergymen and churchwomen, and on and on. What, I wonder, was in their heads? What motivated them to support or oppose or remain indifferent to what became the most destructive war in our history?

To find out, I turn to experts like Thomas and Karp. The former looks at Southern Nationalism and its origins. Or, more specifically, he is concerned with the Antebellum South’s assumptions about life and how it should be lived. Thomas argues that many of those assumptions could be traced to a relatively small group of individuals, i.e., the great plantation owners who dominated the South’s economic and cultural scene.

Oh, yes, there were many other participants in the society of the Old South. The middle classes were growing, the small farmers who produced food rather than cotton were always important (even plantation owners need to eat), and there were ever-larger numbers of industrialists and factory workers (particularly in Virginia). Even the slaves are not to be discounted. Though oppressed, they found ways of influencing the world around them.

But, still, the major outlines the Southern ideology came from the plantation owners—from, in other words, large commercial farmers but whose economics were quite modern, based as they were on international enterprise. They were, in their way, among the first of America’s globalizing entrepreneurs.

Yet, somehow, they combined this modernity with a strange backwards glance. They affected the pose of feudal lords, noble and paternalistic. Thus, in their view, the perfect man (or woman) was almost a separate sovereignty…a monarch among many monarchs, complete with subjects, a capital, a castle, and, in a limited way, a military capacity.

Karp, in turn, looks at how those same plantation owners ran the national government in their interests for many long decades. In particular, he looks at how they managed the nation’s foreign policy. The planters, it seems, had a single overriding goal—the defense of slavery as an institution. To this end, they envisioned a permanent alliance between the United States (or, at least, their part of it), and the other booming slave-based economies of the Americas—Texas, then still an independent republic; Cuba, still a Spanish colony but making tons of money as a vast sugar plantation; and Brazil, where bond labor was very much in operation. Their shared enemy? Abolitionists, wherever they might rear their ugly heads.

In the process, says Karp, the plantation owners constructed a remarkable form of Federal government that was deliberately crippled at home. Within the nation’s borders, it was to be a weakling, almost an afterthought, a distant shadow of authority which did not intrude upon States’ rights, much less those of the individual citizen…at least if the citizen was rich and powerful.

But abroad, it was to be hugely powerful…so that it might protect the interests of Those Who Really Mattered. That is, themselves.


*

But what was it that motivated the great plantation owners? What was their ideology?

They did have one. And it boiled down to a single word: Freedom. Absolute personal and economic Freedom was what they required. Freedom, almost on a libertarian level, is what they demanded. And they would accept no substitutes.

Ah, but there was the rub. By some wonderful twist of logic, that freedom included their right to own other people.

You have to stop and stare at that in wonder. How is such a thing possible? How could they not see the awful contradiction in that?  Yet, somehow, they didn’t.

Indeed, and incredibly, there is evidence that they understood that slavery wasn’t an optimal solution to their economic requirements. As the industrializing North, not to mention Europe, had already proved, free labor is cheaper than bound. Moreover, all the planters had to do to pull the abolitionists’ fangs was to make the transition to some sort of wage labor. Yes, there would have been disruptions at first, but in the long run, it would have been more effective.

Yet, even though they knew that, the plantation owners simply could not make the necessary adjustments. It seems, or so I’ve heard suggested, that their own sense of self-worth was so tied up in their ability to regard others as property that they simply could not contemplate the alternative. Not to own slaves would have been to suffer a kind of death of the ego.

And so…they marched off to war.

And suffered a death of ego greater than they could have possibly imagined in their most horrific dreams.


*

But what has all this to do with our situation today?

Well, what do we know about the people behind Trump, that Dark Network?

Not much, actually. They tend to stick to the shadows. A few, like the Koch brothers or Betsy DeVos, can be seen…but most are indistinct. Still, we can determine a few of their defining characteristics. First, while they are limited in number, they are very, very wealthy. They have vast power and influence.

Second, they have an ideology. These are not just people operating from gut instinct, reacting to events without forethought. No. They are working toward a plan and a goal…almost a utopian society.

They are anarcho-capitalists. That is, they regard the Federal government as (at best) a necessary evil. At home, it is to be kept feeble and sickly. Within our national borders, Washington’s role is to, mostly, just provide an internal security force to protect the property of Those Who Really.

Ah, but abroad, that is another matter. Beyond our shores, the Federal government would be mighty, indeed. It would not speak softly, but it would carry the biggest of big sticks. It would be a standing, permanent, militarized state, whose central (sole!) purpose is make the to world safe for the investment of the great and the powerful.

And that’s all. That’s all government would do. Everything else, at home and abroad, would be cut away. And in particular, the government’s other traditional role…what may be its most ancient role, and what is doubtlessly its most moral… that of shielding the poor and the middle classes from the rapacity of the powerful, would be abandoned entirely.

And does this not all sound terribly familiar? Is it not that same blind selfishness of the slaveholders? That same definition of Freedom as the right to own others?

Is there not the same utterly irrational inability to compromise… even slightly!... with the concept of the general welfare, the social contract, and the shared national destiny?

And, lastly, most frightening, is there not also the same danger that, in their inability to bend, they will plunge us all into horror and strife?

Rather than, even for a moment, consider that they might not, after all…

Be gods?

—Michael Jay Tucker

Please check out my new book, Padre: To The Island, a meditation on mortality, grief, and joy, based on the lives and deaths of two of the most amazing and unconventional people I ever met, my mother and father.

***

Michael Jay Tucker is a writer and journalist who has published material on topics ranging from the Jazz Age to computers. (Among his small claims to fame is that he interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Wait. What? It’s Really Trumpcare?

Okay, this one is wild. According to New York Magazine, “Trump Takes Credit For Obamacare, Says Democrats Want to Repeal It”

In a word, huh?

Wasn’t it just yesterday that Donald Trump was saying the Affordable Health Care Act was the worst thing to happen to American health since Bubonic Plague?

Well...now...hmmm...

Next up, the Emancipation Proclamation ...as signed by President Abraham Trump, when, of course, he had a spare moment after occupying airports and winning the American Revolution.

Please check out my new book, Padre: To The Island, a meditation on mortality, grief, and joy, based on the lives and deaths of two of the most amazing and unconventional people I ever met, my mother and father.

***

Michael Jay Tucker is a writer and journalist who has published material on topics ranging from the Jazz Age to computers. (Among his small claims to fame is that he interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Stop! Don't Go To College!

Interesting article in the Washington Post, “Is college still worth it? Read this study,” by Michelle Singletary. In it, Singletary presents data which strongly suggests that higher ed is not worth your time these days, at least not as an investment. There’s simply too much debt involved, and the supposed income bump you get from having a degree is increasingly mythical.

I must confess, I don’t buy it entirely. But, she’s got a point on the debt problem, and let’s face it, college isn’t for everyone--even if it were a guaranteed money-maker. Frankly, there is a lot be said for alternatives to the traditional four-year degree, like community college, two-year programs, and, increasingly, trade schools.

That said, I still believe everyone would benefit from having at least a touch of the liberal arts. People gain something from reading novels and poetry, and knowing a bit of history and politics, however little that something may be valued by corporate American.

So, maybe, we could look at a middle path. Yes, encourage young people to explore trade schools and other alternatives to college, but, also, do away with the crippling debt involved with higher ed. Make college, in other words, affordable once more.

Maybe then students can have the best of worlds--a marketable skill, and a hint of Milton’s angels and the Greeks and Romans of Mary Beard.

Peakpx

***

Please check out my new book, Padre: To The Island, a meditation on mortality, grief, and joy, based on the lives and deaths of two of the most amazing and unconventional people I ever met, my mother and father.

***

Michael Jay Tucker is a writer and journalist who has published material on topics ranging from the Jazz Age to computers. (Among his small claims to fame is that he interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.