Saturday, January 15, 2022

Danger From the Right

 

There are danger signals from a new poll from Hill Research Consultants indicating that a majority of Americans believe the country needs a “strong leader” to restore “traditional American values.”

A significant number would support throwing out democracy and installing Trump as that autocratic leader by armed force if necessary. But only a third believe that the election was “stolen.”

The problem our democracy faces is much deeper than the 2020 election outcome.

Ton Hogan, the author of an article summarizing the poll, draws the following additional conclusions:

  • Republican-controlled legislatures are working to disenfranchise as many of their opponents as they can. The Nazis never won a majority of the popular vote in an election, either, but once in office, they quickly solidified their power.

  • “Every autocrat needs an enemy of the people. For Hitler, it was the Jews, even though they were less than 1% of Germany's population. For Trump it starts with Muslims and Mexicans (even though the latter are nearly all Christians). Then there is the deep state and RINOs.”

  • “We have seen death threats against public officials and local school boards. All that is needed is the murder of one local official or school board member for the pool of candidates to go dry.”

  • “The right-wing obsession with school curricula, especially Critical Race Theory, which isn't actually taught in high school, is a clear indication of how they want to control education to breed the next generation of right-wing activists and voters.”

This is just the latest warning sign that our democracy is in danger. Every concerned citizen needs to pay attention to these disturbing trends and join efforts to combat them.

Thanks to Hans Siegel for alerting me to the above item.

***

A fascinating read is Oxford Academic’s article in (GIGA)Science about how well Wikipedia has covered the scientific aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic. The crowd-sourced encyclopedia successfully warded off the waves of misinformation prevalent early in the crisis and provided well-sourced assessments.

Ever since I worked as a consultant years ago for the non-profit parent organization, Wikimedia Foundation, I’ve insisted to people that the volunteer community of editors does an amazing job of accurately portraying complex subjects like Covid.

This is further affirmation of that about one of the most controvetsial topics of our time.

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Friday, January 14, 2022

Negative/Positive

Like many other households, Covid has reared its ugly head in ours again. With one among us home-testing positive and two exhibiting possible symptoms, all six of us are in lockdown for the first time in a long time.

We are aged 8-74, and although I won’t disclose where I fall on that spectrum it is definitely true that I am not the youngest.

I also tested negative yesterday for the seventh or so time I’ve been tested during the pandemic, so Covid remains an elusive enemy, always out there somewhere but never within, so far as our testing methodologies can tell.

The coronavirus is of course as much a mental illness at this point as a physical one. It strikes fear in the hearts of millions who increasingly cannot clearly remember life before Covid.

So as we huddled inside, I worked with my ten-year-old granddaughter on math, in this case long-form division. It was like we had reverted to the earliest days of the pandemic, back in March 2020, when this was a novelty. Nobody can come and nobody can go.

By now it’s all worn thin, except the homework part. I actually love working with kids on math and have done so over many many decades with many many kids.

The logical beauty of numbers fitting together into patterns is like poetry to me. Without consciously trying to, I often multiply and divide numbers reflexively. It’a like whistling a tune, which my father used to do, but I can’t. 

I can whistle numbers silently, however — or out loud if you ask me what I am thinking about at the right moment.

For example, soon it will be baseball season here in the U.S. and I love baseball. The regular season is made up of 162 games, which to me means nine equal segments of 18 games each.

The synchronicity of this appeals to me, as there are nine innings to a game, or 18 separate times a batting order gets the chance to hit. There are nine players in each lineup, meaning 18 actively in the game at any one time.

See? 9-18-162.

That, of course, will also be today’s date sometime far in the future — on September 18, 2162 to be precise, some one hundred and forty years hence. I will no longer be around, but perhaps someone somewhere will read these words then — and poof!

By the magic of numbers we will have been connected.

***

From time to time I mention movies I like. One is “Carrie Pilby” (2017), in which English actress Bel Powley plays a young prodigy who graduated from Harvard as a teenager with no friends. Her therapist advises her to change that.

She does. 

I like the movie for many reasons, but particularly because if one thinks of oneself as smarter than others, one might just end up with no friends at all. Wouldn’t that imply that one was not in fact quite so smart after all? There’s nothing smart, as it were, about loneliness. 

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Thursday, January 13, 2022

Brighter News Interlude

 One of the unforeseen consequences of digging up stories about what is wrong with the world over the course of a long career is the desire, every now and again, to celebrate what is right. Or at least what isn’t outright wrong.

Maybe it’s a natural corrective mechanism in our brains, some sort of a serotonin-induced urge to bring our overall story-telling function back into balance.

I often think of this like a brake job on a car. When you feel the thing pulling too much to the right or the left when you press down the brake pedal, you know it’s time to get an adjustment.

Same with our stories? Maybe so.

In any event, I was in just such a mood one evening in 2011 when I attended an anniversary party celebrating the tenth year of publication for San Francisco’s 7x7 magazine.

As the magazine’s founding editor, albeit long-departed, I was reuniting with my former colleagues that night and agreed on impulse to write a short piece recalling our launch back in September 2001. It would have to be a bittersweet sort of story, of course, because we launched to great local fanfare just one week before the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

That the magazine subsequently survived the total loss of advertising income that resulted in the collapse of San Francisco’s tourist industry is remarkable, although one of the casualties of the extended economic downturn was my job.

I had to leave 7x7 after a year (without pay) but the magazine persisted, thanks to the efforts of a determined team that survived until the economy bounced back. Now, ten years later, they asked me if besides the retrospective, I’d also be willing to write blog posts for the magazine about some of the Web 2.0 startups then springing up all over town.

Yes.

Thus I wrote pieces about Lyft, Uber, Airbnb, Nextdoor, TaskRabbit and dozens of others in the early days of their existence. Most of them hired boutique PR firms to get publicity, so once my name was on their lists, my inbox filled up with dozens of invitations to meet their founders.

And meet them I did — scores of mostly young entrepreneurs armed with their founding myths and dreams of changing the way we live our lives. Almost all of them came to me. We’d set a time and I’d walk around the corner, past the little markets where my kids bought candy, past the guys hanging out, past the restaurants where we’d sometimes order takeout, to one of the coffee houses nearby.

Most of the founders were idealistic, articulate young people and I found them easy to like. My job, as 7x7 and I envisioned it, was essentially promotional. I wanted to celebrate San Francisco as the new center of Silicon Valley. The original dot.com boom had been headquartered south on the peninsula, more in the vicinity of Palo Alto and San Jose than its more famous neighbor to the north.

But Wed 2.0 was different.

It may seem strange that an old investigative reporter would agree to write mostly positive profiles of these startups, and I suppose I have no good excuse, other than it felt good to finally be telling some happy stories for a change.

(In my defense, I also published some mini-investigations, such as the fact that none of the five largest social media companies yet had a woman on their boards of directors. That was zero women among 44 men.)

Not all of the companies would survive, of course, let alone thrive, but the strongest among them did. One can reasonably argue about whether those that survived have made things better or worse in the world. But all of that was pretty much beside the point for me, the story-teller. I just remember enjoying the walk around the corner to Atlas Cafe or another familiar venue, meeting new people, sipping coffee for an hour or so, and hearing stories they were excited to tell.

And then going back home to write up my version of how somebody’s dream might just — this time — come true. 

At this point, a decade later, I guess all I can hope is that my old muckraker friends will forgive me.

They can blame it on the serotonin.

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Wednesday, January 12, 2022

Watching, Waiting

 When it comes to the stakes in the seemingly slow-motion U.S. domestic political crisis, it’s necessary to keep an eye overseas as well. Not only are the fissures that threaten to crack apart our society appearing in many other places around the globe, over half of the world’s population already lives under authoritarian regimes.

Less than a fifth live in what are deemed by human rights organizations as “fully free” societies, including the U.S. (for now).

So full democracy is a comparative rarity and a genuinely endangered species at this point around the world.

Authoritarian leaders everywhere have been paying very close attention to Trump’s ascendance and ongoing support in the U.S. and that is one reason the Biden administration is beset with challenges from Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, the entire Middle East, and other parts of Africa, Asia and South America.

Any sign of domestic weakness automatically leads to an uptick in international challenges to U.S. supremacy. Foreign and domestic affairs are inextricably linked, more so now in this age of globalization than ever before in history.

The interlinked planetary economy is every bit as vulnerable to the abuses of monopoly power as our political systems. Too much power centralized in any one entity is a formula for widespread disaster.

And in too many ways we are living in the Age of Monopolies. Nowhere is this more evident than in the highly centralized tech sector, where five massive companies dominate all areas of activity that generate profits.

But here we have a contradiction. The Big Tech firms are not necessarily in league with political authoritarians — a strong streak of libertarianism has long characterized tech culture and still does. And technology is neutral when it comes to politics — it’s not left wing or right wing, liberal or conservative.

The developers hard at work creating web.3 are only the latest example of a group of idealists trying to create a more decentralized and accountable digital world, but unfortunately their work remains veiled behind a vague use of language and the arrogance that also reigns throughout Silicon Valley developer circles. 

Therefore, what hope a more democratic digital landscape might hold to combat authoritarianism at this point in our history is highly questionable.

The blunt truth is that rapidly growing disparities in wealth and power are the true enemies of democracy. And that, my friends, is only the bottom line that matters.

***

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Tuesday, January 11, 2022

It Can Happen Here

Although I rarely recommend television news programs, Fareed Zakaria’s recent documentary, “The Fight to Save American Democracy,” is the real deal. The parallels with what is going on politically in the U.S. with Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 Germany are striking.

One point Zaharia makes effectively is Hitler didn’t have to seize power; Germany’s establishment handed it to him.

While what we are witnessing in 2022 America differs in the specifics, it could have a similar result. Republicans who should know better are going along with Trump’s lies about the 2020 election in order to regain the upper hand in Congress in this year’s midterm elections and perhaps also win the White House in 2024.

Should they do that, and install Trump in the Presidency two years from now by manipulating the electoral process in key states, U.S. democracy will have failed. Our system is vulnerable — 2020 showed that.

Only a small number of ethical Republican state and county officials in a handful of swing states held the line against Trumps’ pressure to overturn the legitimate victory by Joe Biden.

Democracy held, but barely.

Now many of those ethical officials are gone, replaced by people who believe in Trump’s Big Lie that Biden stole the election. I can not over-emphasize how dangerous this lie is to our hopes for a future free of authoritarianism. 

In fact, our defenses against having an election actually stolen by Trump are eroded to the point we may not be able to prevent it from happening in 2024.

This stuff is not something dreamt up by a spy novelist. This is actually happening in a statehouse or county building near you. And the nightmare will come true unless the rest of us start paying attention and figure out how to stop it.

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Monday, January 10, 2022

Follow Me Home

 

After my father retired in his sixties, he pursued a number of hobbies, one of which was wood-working. On my window sill, sit a few of the candlesticks he made in his workshop in Florida.

These few pieces currently make my unfinished room in California feel more like a home.

So what is “home” anyway? Anyone who’s moved around a lot in their life knows what I’ve come to believe, which is that home is a place that summons your memories. For some people that can be almost anyplace, actually.

In the near future, I hope to hang some paintings in here as well. Some were made by my daughters and there’s plenty of wall space to accommodate them.

Whether the huge lithograph that hung in my living room in San Francisco for many years will fit here is unknown. It’s a giant print of the cover of Rolling Stone from the 1975 edition of “The Inside Story” of Patty Hearst and the SLA by Howard Kohn and David Weir.

That story has followed me around for over 45 years, wherever I go or whatever I do. When you produce something like that early in your career, you can never quite get over it, beyond it, or away from it, for better or worse.

But from a strictly journalistic perspective, it was just another story, albeit a significant one as far as everyone else was concerned. To my partner and me, it was basically (please forgive this metaphor) an animal we hunted for an extended period.

It had left tracks; we followed the tracks and when it came into clear view we bagged it.

Lots of people today don’t like that way of describing investigative reporting. They prefer something more civilized, I suppose, but Howard and I grew up in the country and we were familiar with hunting from an early age.

All of this is a bit hard to translate to people who grew up in urban environments. And it sounds a lot more brutal than it actually was in practice.

But I’ve never stopped describing it that way, even though it cost me a job in academia once upon a time. (More on that in my memoir, if I ever write it.)

Throughout most of our history as a species, homo sapiens existed as a hunter-gatherer animal. Today almost nobody lives that way, but a few of the traditions, instincts and skills from that period of our evolution persist.

I suspect more than few of my fellow old investigative journalists agree with me.

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Sunday, January 09, 2022

Ho-Hum Variants

 

At this point, the news that a highly mutated variant of Covid-19 called IHU has been detected in France barely causes a ripple in our pandemic-weary consciousness.

So what? We’re still getting accustomed to omicron having displaced delta, and we get that SARS-CoV-2 will keep mutating as long as there are enough human hosts available, so we assume it’s going to be with us from now til eternity.

Plus its ability to surprise us is over.

If people want to restrict their activities and perpetuate living isolated lives of fear, they will do so, variants or no variants. Nothing the public health experts in government can say will matter much at this point — their credibility is shot.

The CDC, the FDA, even the once-impressive Dr. Fauci have all lost their sway during this pandemic. They are among its many victims. I don’t even bother citing the many stories that they are working on their messaging these days because what could be more obvious?

Anyway, most people stopped listening ages ago.

The virus has ruined more than what little faith in government institutions remained; it has accelerated the unraveling of a social fabric already frayed by political divisions and extremism.

When I first started publishing these daily essays at the beginning of the Covid crisis, one of my main observations was that dangerous conspiracy theories were proliferating, which worried me deeply.

It appeared that the coronavirus had not only taken root in our bodies but in the body politic at the very moment time when our local journalism institutions had all but disappeared from great swaths of the country.

In the vacuum, conspiracists and extremists flourished.

Those troubling trends have worsened over the past two years; there is little to be hopeful about in our political or our journalism worlds at this point. The best we can say is we have endured whatever Covid can throw at us to date, so if there is more to come, so be it.

On the other hand, Covid-19 could spawn a great novel someday. Long-time publishing exec Steve Wasserman of Heyday Books has a great piece in today’s San Francisco Examiner about many pf the classic works of literature dealing with past plagues. Steve reminds us that authors like Marquez and Defoe have dealt with plagues throughout our literary history and rereading them now may help us gain a sense of perspective.

Just such a perspective is what seems to be most lacking in the public square at present. But humanity has been here before — and survived. That is worth remembering.

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“Love Has No Pride”

Bonnie Raitt

Songwriters: Eric Kaz / Libby Titus

I've had bad dreams too many times,
To think that they don't mean much any more.
Fine times have gone and left my sad home,
Friends who once cared just walk out my door.

Love has no pride when I call out your name.
Love has no pride when there's no one left to blame.
I'd give anything to see you again.

I've been alone too many nights
To think that you could come back again.
But I've heard you talk: "she's crazy to stay."
But this love hurts me so, I don't care what you say.

Love has no pride when I call out your name.
Love has no pride when there's no one left to blame.
I'd give anything to see you again.

If I could buy your love, I'd truly try my friend.
And if I could pray, my prayer would never end.
But if you want me to beg, I'll fall down on my knees;
Asking for you to come back
I'd be pleading for you to come back
Beggin' for you to come back to me.

Love has no pride when I call out your name.
Love has no pride when there's no one left to blame.
I'd give anything to see you again.

Yes, I'd give anything to see you again.

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