Non-consecutive

 Grass was enjoying himself for the first time all evening. He was not simply saying, “You really don’t have so much to worry about.” He was indulging his sense of the absurd. He was saying: “You American intellectuals — you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!”
 He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.
—Tom Wolfe, “The Intelligent Co-ed’s Guide to America,” Harper’s Magazine, July 1976

Here’s me raising my head out of my bunker, blinking in the daylight, and asking, “Is the election over yet?”

Asking that right now in Ireland amounts to a mean trick. No sooner are we finally past the interminable season of American electoral politics, but an election is called here in the republic. Mercifully, the campaigning here lasts a mere three weeks, and the votes will be cast by the end of the month. Not that politicians and pundits haven’t been angling for years—or that the media have not been publishing regular polling outcomes—with an eye on the next electoral go-round, but law and custom restricts Irish politics from doing much overt politicking and campaigning outside of these few weeks. That just feels civilized.

There are many contrasts and comparisons to be made between U.S. elections and European ones generally (and Irish ones specifically), and I expect to do that one of these days, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, what to say about the American result? Clearly, the public’s emotional and intellectual reactions are every bit as polarized as their debating and pontificating were during the long campaign. Nothing feels settled. As with every election, one side now has the ascendancy, and the other has serious processing to do about what went wrong and how to go forward. That’s even more true than usual this time around, as the result was pretty darn decisive, belying how narrowly divided we kept being told the voters’ intentions were.

Out of curiosity, I went back and re-read what I wrote at this point eight years ago, the first time Donald Trump was elected. What stood out was the sense of utter surprise. I suppose that marks some kind of progress that this time around, while journalists were unable (nor should they have been able) to tell us who would win, the public were not misled about what to expect as much as they were eight years ago. That doesn’t mean some of the public reactions in social and other media haven’t been every bit as extreme as that other time, nobody seems to have been blindsided by anything other than their own heartfelt hopes.

Back then, I observed that Republicans benefited electorally from a nomination process that enabled an unruly, messy, sometimes angry grassroots. Democrats had a more top-down process that made the eventual nominee seem inevitable from the beginning. Of course, that would have been normal enough this time, given that the party had an incumbent president determined to be reelected. Circumstances, however, resulted instead in a nominee that did not participate in a single primary in the 2024 cycle. The miracle is, given that situation, that Kamala Harris did as well as she did.

Should I feel prescient that I also pointed out that the Republican field of primary candidates back then actually seemed more diverse than the Democratic one? Yes, America has once again missed its chance for its first female president (and one of color), but I just heard someone on ABC News point out that this time one out of three people “of color” (whatever that means exactly) voted for Trump. Democrats did themselves no favors presuming that certain demographic groups owed them their votes.

In my eight-year-old post, I also offered what I called “a silver lining” to those fearing an impending dark cloud of a Trump presidency. I probably should have foreseen that it would only annoy those it was meant to comfort, but I feel vindicated.

“If you believe that there is way too much money in politics and that deep pockets are determinative,” I wrote, “then you should take comfort that the candidate who set an all-time record for the most money collected and spent lost and that the candidate who set a new benchmark for low campaign spending won.”

Democrats used to talk about campaign finance reform all the time. Not so much anymore. Now they are the party of big political money. Their presidential candidate outspent the winner by three to one, yet lost the popular tally by more than 3 million votes. No matter how you feel about that result, you have to take encouragement from this proof that money is not necessarily determinative in elections.

By contrast, my tongue-in-cheek suggestion that people determined to escape their Trump nightmare by emigrating might be happier in Canada than in Europe may not have aged as well. Eight years later, Justin Trudeau is still Canada’s prime minister but may not be much longer. A BBC piece last week reported he’s under intense pressure to step down, as his Liberals have been trailing the Conservatives in polling by a wide margin for months. It compared his troubles to those of Vice-President Harris in terms of a majority population feeling their country is moving in the wrong direction.

So, is Europe a better destination? Well, that’s a long story. As I said, stay tuned.

Beyond Reason

Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.
 —Jonathan Swift, A Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately Enter’d Into Holy Orders by a Person of Quality, 1721

How do you form your political opinions? How do any of us?

Depending on where you are on your life’s journey, you may be struggling to work out the right and wrong of every political issue or, if you are older, your positions may well be be encased in concrete.

My sense is that most, if not all, of us like to think we arrive at our opinions sensibly and logically. That we take in all the evidence and arguments and then arrive the right view through reason while applying self-evident moral standards.

Over time, though, when our conclusions repeatedly land in the same place in agreeing with certain friends, politicians and/or a political party (call them your politics peer group), it might become easy to simplify the political judgment process by simply following the lead of those people you’ve come to trust for their political judgment. Or more likely, you may have found news sources that you have come to trust and it so happens that you and your politics peer group usually, if not invariably, have the same reactions to each fresh news report.

What I’ve just described, however, amounts to choosing a side. And once you’ve chosen a side, your reasoning is no longer deductive. It has become inductive. In other words, rather than examining the evidence neutrally and seeing where it leads, you are starting with a conclusion and looking for information to back it up. When it comes to modern politics, there are plenty of news sources and opinion makers to provide that selective information to you—also known as talking points.

Is it even possible to look at political issues neutrally? Probably not. The best we can likely do is to be as aware as possible of our own core values and to use them rigorously as a yardstick against each issue that comes along. The risk in that, though, is that occasionally your conclusions might not perfectly match your politics peer group. In fact, people who are very individualistic and committed to deductive reason will find that they have no ideological home. You may occasionally find yourself disagreeing with people you admire and respect or on the same side as people you don’t like very much.

It can be kind of lonely. People who are very hard-core about their politics—the kind who have litmus tests for friendships—won’t trust you. Worse, reality may trip you up. You will eventually come up against the fact that the question of right and wrong in the real world is often not as clear as we would like.

When I was younger and more idealistic, my position on capital punishment was unyielding. Taking a life was wrong. That is an eminently satisfying position when it came to innocent people on death row purely because of their social and racial circumstances. It’s a bit harder to muster enthusiasm for pushing that position energetically when the person in question is a monster like Ted Bundy or Timothy McVeigh. Things get muddier still when we realize that society makes decisions about human life and death all the time, albeit usually in a more indirect way. And then there’s the flipside to the capital punishment question: abortion. If you accept that a viable fetus (i.e. which would likely survive if prematurely delivered) in the womb is some sort of human life, many if not most people would judge that it can be reasonably sacrificed for any number of reasons, especially if it is to save the mother’s life.

In other words, the position that human life cannot be considered absolutely sacrosanct without exception is not tenable in the real world. Reality requires society to make choices with winners and losers. Once you accept that, things get messy indeed.

Perhaps that is why it is easier for us to concentrate on who we would rather have as winners and losers instead of adhering strictly to moral principles. That won’t stop us, however, from framing our arguments as being based on morality even if they’re really about partisanship.

Past and Present

This was given to me by one of these guys, right here. He was a hell of a rugby player. He beat the hell out of the Black and Tans.
 —President Biden speaking of his distant cousin Rob Kearney and confusing the New Zealand rugby team, the All Blacks, with a brutal British military force of a century ago, in Dundalk on April 12

In Belfast this past week, there was a reunion of major figures commemorating the quarter-century anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement (called the Belfast Agreement by Unionists). The hosts were Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, by virtue of being head of government of the United Kingdom of which Northern Ireland is part, and Hillary Clinton, as chancellor of Queen’s University, which hosted the event.

Prominent attendees included former U.S., British and Irish heads of government, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, who were key participants in negotiating the agreement credited with ending Northern Ireland’s violent period known as the Troubles. Also on hand was Gerry Adams, whose pivotal role had been to bring the insurgent Provisional Irish Republican Army on board even while ostensibly denying that he had any connection to them.

Tributes and testimonials were paid to key figures no longer with us, including Nobel Peace Prize winners John Hume and David Trimble, major Nationalist and Unionist political leaders of the time who risked everything for peace and whose political parties subsequently paid the price of perpetual exile in the electoral wilderness. Ironically, political benefit was reaped instead by more extreme parties led by Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, both of whom are also no longer with us.

Particularly inspirational among the guests was former U.S. Senator George Mitchell who, at 89 and in poor health, made the journey to Belfast. He did more than any other outsider to bring the various parties together for the historic accord.

The anniversary exercise was in turns moving, nostalgic, edifying and educational, particularly for a generation that has come of age since those days. It is once again a tricky time in the North—it’s always a tricky time in the North—as the main products of the Good Friday Agreement, the Northern Ireland Assembly and its meticulous power-sharing arrangement, have not functioned for 31 months since it was brought down by the Democratic Unionist Party over unhappiness over the UK implementation of Brexit. Elections were held nearly a year ago which saw, for the first time, saw Sinn Féin overtake the DUP as the largest party, putting Michelle O’Neill in line to become the North’s first ever First Minister.

Despite a new agreement negotiated by Sunak between the UK and the European Union that goes as far as the DUP could realistically hope for, the unionists still refuse to go back into government. Nationalists suspect, not unreasonably, that unionists simply don’t want to go back into a government they would no longer be in charge of.

Many hoped that the DUP would feel pressure to revive the assembly amid all the attention brought about the Good Friday anniversary. Frankly, though, the DUP didn’t get where it is by paying attention to opinions and attitudes outside its own community.

There were hopes that the logjam might be broken during a mid-April visit by President Biden, ostensibly also to commemorate the Good Friday accord. It quickly became apparent, however, that the chief purpose of Biden’s trip was to indulge in a nostalgic plastic-paddy victory lap. He spent the briefest amount of time possible in Northern Ireland, giving a perfunctory speech at Ulster University’s new campus, before heading to the republic for several days of visits to his ancestral homes in Louth and Mayo, bringing along a huge delegation of U.S. government officials and family members, including his sister Valerie and his son Hunter.

At each stop, including an address to the two houses of the Irish parliament (Oireachtas), he gave a variation of the same emotional, rambling speech. There were the obligatory platitudes about peace and the future and doing the right thing, but mostly it was about himself. How much he loved Ireland. How much he missed his mother and wished she could be there. How at home he felt—at least until the last night when he said he couldn’t wait to get back to Delaware.

Everywhere he went, he ran late, partially because of necessary rest breaks but also because he seemed determined to shake every last hand in the country, kiss every baby and pose for every selfie. The fact is, for all his professed love of Ireland, he can’t hold to a candle to what his contemporary Senator Mitchell accomplished 25 years ago when it really mattered.

At one point in his Oireachtas speech, he became somber, saying, “I’m at the end of my career, not the beginning,” adding, “The only thing I bring to this career—and you can see, how old I am—is a little bit of wisdom.”

Biden didn’t sound like someone getting ready for another presidential campaign. By the time he finished the tour in the Mayo town of Ballina, however, with a speech that followed an impressive array of Irish musical talent, he seemed newly energized. Yes, it was more or less the same speech we had heard a couple times before on this trip, but it had more pep this time.

The over-excited Irish press speculated he might actually announce his reelection bid in Ballina. It was amusing to see the country collectively go all fanboy crazy for yet another Irish-American presidential visit. On the ground, though, real people were a bit more measured. They marveled at the vast expense to bring so many people from the U.S. for what amounted to a personal holiday. Even in our own corner of the countryside, we did not escape the roar of the presidential tour in the form of overlying Chinook helicopters.

Perhaps the best example of Mayo practicality came from radio presenter/podcaster Laurita Blewitt, one of the president’s many distant cousins here. Her husband, a well known sports pundit, recounted her exchange with Biden during a banquet in Dublin Castle.

In his usual impulsive manner, the unfailingly affable president said to her, “Laurita, you guys have gotta come with us to Knock [Roman Catholic pilgrimage site in Mayo] on Air Force One tomorrow.”

Her reply: “I can’t. I have to get my hair done in Foxford at 11 am.”

Another son of the auld sod

After 15 Grueling House Speaker Votes, America’s Long National Nightmare Can Finally Begin
 —Headline on the satirical news website The Babylon Bee, January 7

It may have taken 15 votes, but Kevin McCarthy finally did become Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. His road to this position was long and not always promising. He first got elected to Congress during the Bush 43 Administration as part of the Republican class of 2006 in which he was one of the so-called Young Guns, along with Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor. Those two are long gone, but McCarthy somehow managed to adapt, survive and hang on through the Tea Party, the Freedom Caucus and the winds of change that elected Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

There is much to ponder about the constitutionally prescribed process that resulted in so many ballots for Speaker becoming necessary. Much of the press coverage focused on the fact that such a number was unprecedented—unless you went back a century. There were suggestions that this was symptomatic of fundamental disarray in the Republican Party, if not in the entire U.S. political system. Perhaps it is, but such wrangling after national legislative elections is not unusual in other countries.

For example, here in Ireland, as I wrote three years ago, the 2020 general election resulted in three different political parties having a theoretical shot at forming a government but only after a complicated negotiation for a coalition. Voters went to the polls on February 8, and though the results were quickly known, it was not until June 27 that Micheál Martin was sworn in as Taoiseach, roughly equivalent to Speaker of the House in the U.S. system. The following year, the Netherlands took nearly 10 months of negotiations to form a government after its parliamentary elections.

In other words, protracted post-election negotiations are often the norm in many countries. Usually in the U.S., though, because there are only two viable national parties, such negotiations tend to happen mostly out of the glare of intense press coverage. After the 2020 U.S. elections, Democrats had a similarly thin margin in the House, but they managed to make all their intra-party deals before the official vote for Speaker. Is that better than how the Republicans did it? Is it preferable to keep political messiness more out of the voters’ view or is there some value in having the in-fighting in public view?

As it happens, I have a couple of strange connections to the new Speaker of the House, and not just deriving from the fact he and I were both born in Bakersfield, California.

I do not know the man and have never met him, but with a name like Kevin McCarthy he obviously has an Irish connection, and I have a way of running into those. Back in 1998—before McCarthy was first to elected to office (to a seat on the Kern County Community College District Board of Trustees in 2000)—he was in charge of Bakersfield’s annual St. Patrick’s Day parade. That was the one for which my bride of three days was drafted to be the queen. She was given no choice in the matter by an Irish-American family friend from my home town, who had a penchant for latching onto any visiting Irish people. He had previously secured the parade queen’s crown for the visiting niece of our town’s Irish priest, who hailed from Donegal.

Once McCarthy’s struggle to be elected Speaker began dominating the worldwide airwaves, it was inevitable that local Irish genealogists would go to work. American presidents’ Irish connections have been a fascination here since John F. Kennedy’s election in 1960, followed by his sentimental and celebrated visit to Ireland a mere five months before his tragic death. No other U.S. president has had as close a connection to Ireland, but a surprising number of them have at least had Irish in their DNA. Subsequent visits here have been made by Richard Nixon (Quaker roots in Kildare), Ronald Reagan (Antrim, Tipperary), both presidents Bush (Down) and Barack Obama, whose maternal ancestors were traced to the village of Moneygall on the Offaly-Tipperary border. Obama’s visit, in particular, caused great excitement here and to this day is commemorated by an elaborate service station complex called Barack Obama Plaza near Moneygall on the Dublin-to-Limerick motorway.

Nixon’s 1970 visit is of particular interest in this house. It included a visit by First Lady Pat Nixon (born Thelma Catherine Ryan) to meet distant cousins in the South Mayo town of Ballinrobe and to see her “home place” very near where my wife is from. The local story is that the land owner, on short notice, had to locate a likely structure (a mucky old shed as it happened) and quickly clean it up and make it presentable for the visit. Mayo is also home to cousins of President Biden, who (not unlike the man who made my wife a queen) delights in his Irish connections, which also includes cousins in County Louth.

So what have the genealogists come up with for Speaker McCarthy? An article in a local newspaper informs us that his great-grandfather was Jeremiah McCarthy from Cork. It turns out that Jeremiah married a fellow Irish immigrant named Mary Heskin. A 24-year-old widow, she was from a family with 15 children in a South Mayo village. In other words, she was from just down the road from us.

Jeremiah and Mary were married in the Kern County town of Tehachapi, 40 miles from Bakersfield. For some reason our local paper spells the town’s name Tihachiopia.

History and Context

Our weapons are not weapons with which cities and countries may be destroyed, walls and gates broken down, and human blood shed in torrents like water. But they are weapons with which the spiritual kingdom of the devil is destroyed.
 —Influential Anabaptist religious leader Menno Simons (1496-1561), whose followers were known as Mennonites

Many words have flowed on the war in Ukraine. Given the going price of talk (cheap), allow me to throw in mine for what they’re worth (two cents).

Since my main gig is film blogging, I can begin by recommending two movies. When Russia invaded Ukraine last month, I was at a film festival, specifically the Dublin International Film Festival. By complete coincidence, one of the films I saw there was Elie Grappe’s Olga, a fictional story about a teenage gymnast forced into exile during Ukraine’s Euromaidan protests and Revolution of Dignity during 2013-14. In the movie we see Kyiv as the modern, glistening city it was and, hopefully, will be again. We also get a crash course in how Ukrainians rose up against a corrupt, pro-Russian government and chased it from power. It’s a useful reminder that the current war has a context and that Ukraine has a history that didn’t begin only when the country started showing up daily in our newscasts.

The other movie is one I saw three years ago at the Galway Film Fleadh and which I recently rewatched. It was directed by Oscar-nominated Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland and is based on the true story of Welsh journalist Gareth Jones. It is called Mr. Jones after the film’s central character and also after a George Orwell character that may have been inspired by him. The film recounts his journey to Moscow in 1933 where he was determined to learn how Stalin was funding the Soviet Union’s military buildup. On a visit to Ukraine (then part of the USSR), he slipped away from his handlers to see firsthand the devastating famine caused by Stalin’s policy of wheat exports. Such an atrocity was seen as impossible in the minds of other western journalists, who idealistically saw the Soviet Union as the way to the future and to modernity. The most egregious example was The New York Times’s Moscow bureau chief Walter Duranty, who actually won a Pulitzer Prize for articles debunking Jones’s famine accounts, which had appeared in The Times of London. Despite Duranty’s clear journalistic malpractice, his Pulitzer has never been revoked. Jones was kidnapped and murdered in Mongolia in 1935, presumably by the NKVD (Soviet secret police).

Beyond film recommendations, I offer my own strange connection to Ukraine. As far as I know, I have no Ukrainian ancestry, but it so happens that four of my great-grandparents were born in the Zaporizhzhia Oblast region of Ukraine, which is currently under Russian occupation. Several earlier generations were also born there. They were farmers who did not mix much with people outside their own German-speaking community.

They began as a Dutch Anabaptist movement and fled persecution in the Low Countries in the early-to-mid-16th century for Poland’s Vistula Delta region where they were valued for their skill in building dykes. In the mid-to-late-18th century, they were invited by Catherine the Great to settle in what is now Ukraine. This was territory recently won by Russia in a war with the Turkish Ottoman Empire and which had been dubbed New Russia or South Russia. In return, the devoutly pacifist Mennonites were granted special status which, among other things, exempted them from military service. During the reign of Tsar Alexander II in the late 19th century, the government moved to strip the special status, prompting many of them to emigrate elsewhere. Families resettled all over the world, and that is how my maternal grandparents came to be born in Kansas, live for a time in Oklahoma and then finally settle in California’s San Joaquin Valley.

What my family history tells me is that, while Vladimir Putin insists Ukraine is an integral part of Russia, it is actually a conquered territory that Russia has used as a buffer against perceived threats and which Moscow has treated brutally for generations. No wonder so many Ukrainians (though not all, it should be noted) would prefer to be part of the democratic liberal community of Western Europe.

To much fanfare, the European Union has kicked off the long, bureaucratic process of admitting Ukraine as a member. Depending on how events on the ground develop, this could turn out to be farsighted, provocative or merely symbolic. The dilemma for Europeans is whether Ukraine will eventually be seen as a new and shining outpost of Western values or wind up as an unfortunate sacrifice to Russia’s paranoia about its security. Would such a sacrifice even satisfy Putin?

To put it another way, will Ukraine be Finland in 1940 or Hungary in 1956? Or more worryingly, Poland in 1939?

Running for the Exit

I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.
 —Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, writing about Joe Biden in his 2014 book Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War

[T]he likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.
 —President Biden, discussing Afghanistan in a press conference on July 8

This is a foreign policy catastrophe, the likes we haven’t seen in decades, I’m afraid, internationally
 —Irish foreign minister Simon Coveney, commenting on the Afghanistan situation in a radio interview on Monday

In the lead-up to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, there was much media speculation about how much it might, at the end, resemble the country’s chaotic retreat from Vietnam in 1975. As it happened, there were a lot of similarities. From panic at the U.S. embassy, among others, to desperate last-minute crowding at the capital’s airport, there was plenty of fodder for déjà vu for those of us who remember well the fall of Saigon.

For one thing, the endgame was set up by a peace treaty. In the earlier case, it was the Nixon Administration’s pact with North Vietnam, which resulted in a Nobel Peace Prize for Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho in 1973. In the current situation, it was the Trump Administration’s agreement with the Taliban a year and a half ago. In both cases, those pieces of paper were tossed aside once a subsequent U.S. administration pulled troops out suddenly. In 1975 it was the Ford Administration, which had little choice after Congress cut off all Vietnam funding. Today it is the Biden Administration, which announced four months ago the drawdown of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

One difference between the two situations is the reaction of America’s hard political left.

“Ho Chi Minh puts a lot of hope in our hearts,” declared a woman attending a spontaneous celebration in April 1975. “As we practice the philosophies we believe in we forget that there are other people who believe in the same thing but practice it differently because of their environment. The greater struggle lies ahead.”

Added a war veteran-turned-anti-war-activist, “It’d be so far out to be there right now.” He was referring to the capital of soon-to-be-absorbed South Vietnam, which had just been renamed Ho Chi Minh City.

The above quotes are from a 46-year-old event in Isla Vista, the densely populated student ghetto abutting the Santa Barbara campus of the University of California. They were chronicled in the student newspaper The Nexus, and yes, I was the hack scribe who reported them. A similar event had been held weeks earlier to mark Cambodia’s surrender to the Khmer Rouge.

Some of the people at the April event were there simply to express relief at the final end of the war and the U.S.’s involvement in the region. Others were wholeheartedly celebrating a U.S. defeat at the hands of Communists. For others, the celebratory mood may have been more about something more general: a former colony casting out a Western superpower.

I can’t imagine that very many on the political left today are celebrating the Taliban’s victory. I no longer have the contacts I did during my Seattle days, so I’m not really sure. If any are celebrating, though, it cannot be without mixed feelings. While the new rulers of Afghanistan have done their best to project a more presentable image as their return to power loomed, their track record and unabashed world view suggest their rule will be a disaster for anyone who cares about western liberal democratic values in general or the rights of women and minorities in particular. In my experience, though, the hard left tends to see such rights and social issues not as ends in themselves but mainly as issues to exploit tactically in their ultimate aim: to see the that right people end up in charge.

To be clear, when I talk about the “hard left,” I’m not talking about people who vote for Democrats. My experience with hard-core leftists is that they mainly vote for fringe candidates in protest or, more often, don’t vote at all. If they do vote for a Democrat, it’s usually grudgingly and/or tactically. They do, however, show up en masse at demonstrations and protests, which sometimes results in generating enthusiasm and motivation for Democratic-leaning voters.

While the hard left is definite minority in America, it’s hard not to notice that views once considered on the political fringe have infiltrated the mainstream. A sign of this is the ardent media coverage—both left and right—of the so-called “squad,” a half-dozen Representatives who, according to opinion polls anyway, are well to the left of most Democrats—let alone most Americans.

As for Afghanistan, those of us who have seen this movie before know pretty much what to expect. In North America and Europe there will be reflections and recriminations about how the occupation of the country began and why it turned out the way it did. In Southwest Asia there will be strife and misery and perhaps yet another refugee crisis. (For years after the fall of South Vietnam, waves of so-called “boat people” flooded out of the country.) There will be heartbreaking tales of people, mainly women, whose lives and opportunities will be set back to a previous century. One also has to ask if Taliban-controlled Afghanistan will go back to being a haven and base for international terrorists.

In the last presidential election, we were told a vote for Joe Biden was a vote for returning to normalcy, sanity and competency. Things are definitely back to what’s considered normal in Washington, and I suppose the capital is as sane as it’s ever been—for whatever that’s worth. Competency? Even if you think ending U.S. involvement in Afghanistan was a good idea, you still have to wonder if the terms of withdrawal couldn’t have been negotiated better and whether the actual exit could have been handled more competently.

Watching Biden on countless Sunday morning news programs in the 1990s and 2000s, it was always clear to me he considered himself a foreign policy maven. Yet, to anyone paying attention, it was also clear that his ideas—which were just that, since as a senator or even vice-president he had little discernible influence on actual policy—were always a little off from establishment foreign policy thinking. Whether it was his idea of splitting Iraq into three countries or advising President Obama not to pull the trigger on Osama bin Laden, he always seemed oddly contrarian.

Reportedly, Biden overruled his top military advisers in following through on the Trump Administration’s deal with the Taliban. You have to wonder what that says about his judgment as he faces upcoming crises with places like Iran and North Korea.

Biden’s real strength was always in domestic politics, and that probably tells us more about his handling of Afghanistan than all his years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Apparently, polls said that getting out of Afghanistan ranked as very popular among U.S. voters. If it remains popular after this fiasco—even after heart-wrenching footage of people clinging to taxiing aircraft in Kabul—then maybe the president will have succeeded on his own terms.

Personal Truth

Study Finds Connection Between Believing Russia Rigged 2016 Election and Believing 2020 Election Was Foolproof
 —Headline on the satirical newspaper web site The Babylon Bee, November 17

Ages ago during my thrifty student days in Europe, I found it beneficial to be open-minded and flexible when traveling.

Transportation was kept cheap by holding out my thumb on the side of a road. For a two-month period I used a Christmas gift from my parents, a Student Rail Pass, for both transportation and shelter by scheduling overnight train journeys whenever possible.

One thing I learned was that a free bed could be had for a night or two if I was willing to undergo a bit of proselytization. My diverse array of friends included young born-again Christians who were firmly convinced I belonged in their community. The problem was that I was raised with no religion and my analytical nature found it impossible to accept one religion over another (or atheism for that matter) without some sort of hard objective evidence. My friends’ response was to recommend various clergymen and lay people who might be able to help me sort out my thoughts. An extra enticement was that some of these people would kindly lodge truth-seekers for free.

I took advantage of a couple of these offers, and to be clear, I did so with a completely open and curious mind. One was an Anglican minister and his wife who had a lovely, large apartment in the city center of Paris between the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower. Another was a community called L’Abri which was operated out of the home of its founder, American-born theologian Francis Schaeffer, in a picturesque spot in the Swiss Alps southeast of Lake Geneva. I spent several days there, reading, discussing and asking all manner of questions.

In the end I did not have the life-changing breakthrough my friends were hoping for, but I did come away with a huge appreciation for the science of epistemology. That’s a branch of learning which poses the question, how can we actually know anything? When you start thinking about it deeply, you find it’s a lot harder than you’d think. A lot of what we “know” is really belief accepted on faith. A lot of self-described atheists like to attribute their rejection of religious doctrine to science, but one of the most profound insights I gained from my brief time at L’Abri was the realization that it takes every bit as much blind faith to believe there is no God as it does to believe God exists.

A clear understanding of the limits of knowability is relevant these days when we have media outlets and pundits accusing others of willfully ignoring the truth. In fact, the manner in which some groups, parties or publications proclaim that they are delivering The Real Truth reminds me of nothing so much as the history of my ancestors in 16th-century Europe when the Christian church split into multiple sects, each certain unto death what the nature of God was and what He wanted. As I listen to what passes for political discussion today, I sometimes wonder if we are not in such a time again and if politics is not merely the modern equivalent of religion.

An article I read in The New York Times in February has become stuck in mind. It is a detailed piece requiring 14 minutes to read. It recounts an incident at Smith College in the summer of 2018 when a woman ate her lunch in a lounge of a deserted dormitory. A janitor noticed her in the dormitory, which was closed for the summer, and did as he had been instructed. He notified campus security that he had seen an unauthorized person there.

“A well-known [unarmed] older campus security officer drove over to the dorm,” continues the article. “He recognized Ms. Kanoute as a student and they had a brief and polite conversation, which she recorded. He apologized for bothering her and she spoke to him of her discomfort: ‘Stuff like this happens way too often, where people just feel, like, threatened.’”

The piece goes on to tell how the student, whose family had immigrated from Mali, subsequently made accusations of racism against the cafeteria worker who had provided her with lunch, even though the cafeteria was only supposed to be serving students in a summer camp program at the time; the janitor who had called security; another janitor who whose shift had not yet begun at the time; and the security guard.

After a lengthy investigation the college president “released a 35-page report from a law firm with a specialty in discrimination investigations. The report cleared Ms. Blair [the cafeteria worker] altogether and found no sufficient evidence of discrimination by anyone else involved, including the janitor who called campus police.” The janitor who had made the call had been put on leave for three months. The other one left his job after his photograph was circulated widely on social media. The cafeteria worker was later furloughed because of the coronavirus pandemic and found that notoriety over the incident hindered her search for a new job. Accusations of racism against her continued to be posted by visitors to Smith College’s Facebook page.

The incident is clearly unfortunate for all involved. What struck me was this paragraph from the Times article: “This is a tale of how race, class and power collided at the elite 145-year-old liberal arts college, where tuition, room and board top $78,000 a year and where the employees who keep the school running often come from working-class enclaves beyond the school’s elegant wrought iron gates. The story highlights the tensions between a student’s deeply felt sense of personal truth and facts that are at odds with it.”

Personal truth? I do not judge or question what went through the student’s mind and heart when confronted alone by a man in uniform, but isn’t there a logical disconnect in speaking of “truth” together with “facts that are at odds with it”? If the facts are at odds with it, in what sense is it truth? If something feels deeply and personally true to someone, does that qualify as truth?

These questions are important if, as a society, we are going to get the shared understanding of reality that is necessary to coexist and work out our differences. If The New York Times accepts that something deeply felt is a form of truth, then what are we to say to the 47 percent of voters who told Rasmussen in December that “it’s likely that Democrats stole voters or destroyed pro-Trump ballots in several states to ensure that Joe Biden would win” and, in particular, the 36 percent who said that voter fraud was “very likely.”

Doesn’t that highlight the tension between millions of people’s deeply felt sense of personal truth and facts that may be at odds with it?

The more our politics is based on diverging tenets of blind faith, the sooner we are likely to find ourselves in a new epoch of religious wars.

Broadcasters in a State

RTÉ Documentary Makes Public Really Sad About Homelessness For A Whole Hour
 —Headline on the Irish satirical newspaper website Waterford Whispers News, January 19

In my previous post I vented my frustration with the increasingly polarized and fragmented media landscape when it comes to broadcast journalism. I was speaking specifically about the United States, but what about other countries? I attributed the U.S.’s partisan environment to the sheer size of the country combined with technology that rewards narrowcasting. Surely, those would not be such prominent factors in other countries?

What is distinctive about the States as a country, besides its size, is that it has no dominant national broadcaster. That’s an institution pretty much ubiquitous throughout the rest of the world. Canada has the CBC, the United Kingdom has the BBC, France has France Télévisions, Russia has RT, and Ireland has RTÉ. Many countries also, unlike the U.S. and Canada, exact a household license fee for the purpose of subsidizing the national broadcaster. In Britain, for example, this means BBC viewers do not have to watch commercials—apart from the BBC’s own adverts touting BBC programs. Ireland has the worst of both worlds with viewers (and actually non-viewers as well) required to pay the annual license fee but still having to sit through commercial advertisements. Despite its hybrid viewer/corporate revenue stream, RTÉ has long been unable to balance a budget, although it has just been announced that it finally does have a surplus—thanks to the fact that for the past year people were literally forced to stay at home with little else to do but watch telly.

Technically, the U.S. does have a national broadcaster through the taxpayer-funded non-profit Corporation for Public Broadcasting which supports the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR) networks, but these do not have anywhere near the dominance in America that other countries’ public broadcasters have. Also, because PBS’s and NPR’s taxpayer funding meets only a small part of their budgets, they rely largely on voluntary viewer contributions and corporate underwriting. In fact, one could make the argument that, due to their heavy reliance on corporate underwriting, PBS and NPR actually constitute one more facet of the U.S. corporate media landscape, albeit one with a very specific educated and affluent viewer demographic.

Shouldn’t the national broadcaster be the answer to polarized political reporting? Shouldn’t a public or semi-public entity with a mandate to serve the entire nation and, ideally, independent or semi-independent from corporate money be an antidote to all the partisan stuff? Maybe in theory, but not in my experience.

This is where I again get to mention my Master of Arts degree in journalism from Ohio State University. I did my studies in that fine institution back when the idea of a journalism school in college, particularly at the graduate level, was a new one. Most of my teachers had gotten their professorships bestowed on them honorarily in recognition of many years of working in the profession rather than through any academic qualifications. They were mostly well up in years because the teaching gig was basically their semi-retirement. These were old-school guys—and yes, they were mostly, if not exclusively, male—who experienced journalism as a blue-collar profession, pounding city streets and banging on manual typewriters, and who at the end of a workday unwound in smoky bars. They had a hard-nosed, practical and yet refreshingly idealistic idea of what journalism was. You were supposed to keep digging until you got the story, and you never took sides. In writing a story, you assumed nothing and took no one’s word at face value. Skepticism was the watchword.

If your mother says she loves you, went the rule, check it out!

I would love to find my old professors now—if any of them have lungs and livers that have survived this long—to find out what they think of the current state of journalism. I think I kind of know. They were basically newspaper guys, and even way back in the 1970s they looked down their noses at television. Of course, the internet was not even a thing yet. One principle they were clear on was that the government should have no role in the news business except as something to be covered aggressively. In many countries, one needs a license or an institutional qualification to practice journalism. In the U.S., by contrast, the First Amendment has always meant that every citizen is born a journalist. The government cannot pick and choose who is qualified to do the job.

My old professors’ main concern about state media in general was that it could not be objective when covering politicians who approved their budget and paid their salaries. Ironically, after a couple of decades of getting my television and radio news from state broadcasters, I find that the problem is nearly the opposite. Safeguards are in place in countries like the UK and Ireland to insulate state news organizations from government pressure. Significant public funding also tends to insulate them from advertiser pressure. That sounds like a good thing—until you cop on to the fact political and corporate pressure are often actually extensions of general public sentiment.

In practice, I find, state news organizations tend to become detached from the general public they are meant to be serving, not unlike the way political reporting at student-run college radio stations often goes off in its own idealistic direction. On top of that, state broadcasters are de facto gatekeepers of information in the way that the three big corporate network news organizations in the U.S. once styled themselves. In RTÉ’s world, if it determines something is not worthy or salutary for public consumption, it simply does not get reported. Yes, there is a much smaller commercial rival TV broadcaster here as well as several newspapers, but by practical necessity most people have to rely on RTÉ for their daily news.

Those who don’t find the state broadcaster reflecting their own personal reality inevitably look for alternative sources of information. Traditionally, stories have gotten passed around informally by word of mouth. Of course, these days finding alternative news sources is easier than it’s ever been, and there are no geographical limits.

Is there anything corporate broadcasters (in the U.S.) or state broadcasters (elsewhere) could do to better meet the needs of news consumers?

The reality may be that there is no perfect model for broadcast journalism and that the current state of information churn is the best we can hope for.

On one hand, after years of listening to measured, modulated and controlled news broadcasts from state broadcasters, the blaring and breathless style of U.S. cable news operations—with their all-too-frequent commercial interruptions—grates.

On the other hand, I often find myself wishing I could switch to a different Irish channel (sorry, Virgin Media, you’re not it) for a contrasting perspective or just to fill in the information gaps.

Searching for Truth

Everyone Who Was Completely Wrong About Election Day Ready to Explain What Happens Next
 —Headline on the satirical newspaper website The Babylon Bee, November 5

Commentators sometimes like wax nostalgic about the good old days when everyone in America got their daily news from a handful of television network news operations which were generally trusted to supply accurate and unbiased information. Why can’t it be like that now? Why have so many news outfits picked a particular political world view and decided to cater to that view’s particular audience—instead of treating the whole country as its audience?

If you think about it, that question more or less answers itself, doesn’t it? Don’t all news consumers with favorite information sources think that theirs is the fair and objective one? It’s the other ones that are biased, right?

This situation was made possible by 1) the size and diversity of the United States and 2) the proliferation of news sources thanks to breakthroughs in technology. The latter cause is key. There was a time not that many years ago when “narrowcasting” to relatively small and geographically scattered audiences was economically impractical. Now, thanks to satellites and the internet, it’s a cinch. Arguably, a politically splintered society is good for corporate business. More than ever before, politics has become a team sport, and we all know how profitable professional sports teams are. Cable news networks even have an advantage that sports broadcasters don’t. In televised politics, when you pick your own channel, your team is always winning—at least the argument if not the election.

Still, people have a basic desire to think the information they’re getting is accurate. This would explain why, after the election of Donald Trump four years ago, The New York Times had an advertising campaign proclaiming simply and emphatically “The Truth,” and The Washington Post introduced the chilling slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” In the media generally there was much bandying of words like “truth” and “facts,” largely in response to questionable assertions by the new president but also as not-so-subtle digs at rival news organizations. Despite all this focus on truth, though, the country is nowhere near a consensus on what is “true” when it comes any major issue.

Here is what seems true to me. If Republicans generally think they are getting the truth—or at least more of it—from Fox News and if Democrats feel similarly about CNN, MSNBC and/or PBS, they can’t both be right. Whatever news you listen to will occasionally omit stories that get played on the other side. Stories reported by both will get different spins and emphases. The only way to make sure you don’t miss something or don’t get misled is to try listening to everything.

That’s time-consuming, though. If you’re busy but still want to be informed, wouldn’t it be nice if, to get back to the lament with which I began, there were one or more news sources that simply reported the major news of the day with some kind of balance and fairness you could trust? Such a news provider might annoy Democrats sometimes, but it would also annoy Republicans sometimes. Is there a market for such a thing?

There are actually people out there who see that gap and are trying to fill it. One that I came across a while back is called Ground News, and it takes an interesting approach. Available through its website or its app, it delivers a stream of news items but also includes information on what other media are carrying the same item. Furthermore it breaks down the other media sources according to where they fall on the political spectrum and gives you a liberal/conservative percentage breakdown on each article’s overall media distribution. If nothing else, it tells you whether the stories you find interesting are mainly being seen by most people or by mainly conservatives or by liberals. They even offer a browser extension that pops up if you’re reading another news site, e.g. The New York Times, and gives you the same media breakdown about the article you are reading there.

The goal is not to eliminate bias but to clearly identify it and label it so that you know where your news falls on the political spectrum. News sources are rated on a scale from the far left (e.g. Palmer Report) to the far right (e.g. The Gateway Pundit). Sources it considers in the center include the Associated Press, Reuters, the BBC and France24. Obviously, not everyone is going to agree on these classifications, but at least it’s some kind of yardstick. The Ground News website is freely accessible, but if you want to support them or get more features, there are a couple of subscription levels. You can also get their weekly “Blindspot Report” email which highlights legitimate news stories missed by sources on both the left and right.

Ground News is based in Canada, which is also the location of another source of serious balanced discussion, the charitable-foundation-run Munk Debates. Originally staged as live events in Toronto, the debates—as well as dialogs and interviews—are now accessible as streams and through a podcast. They highlight topical issues argued by prominent speakers on opposite sides in a congenial environment. Recent topics have included “Be it resolved: Go Green! Go Nuclear!” with University of Michigan professor Todd Allen and former U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission chair Gregory Jackzko and “Be it resolved: The GameStop frenzy is good for investors and good for financial markets” with market traders Tom Sosnoff and Danny Moses. It is a nice change of pace from the usual stacked-deck panel discussions that proliferate cable news.

Another source I came across recently is the five-days-a-week email newsletter Tangle by journalist Isaac Saul whose main job is with the positive-news-focused digital media company A Plus. A 10-to-15-minute read, Tangle concentrates on the major DC political issue of the day—as well as a few briefer items—giving a meticulous examination of the positions on both partisan sides, as well as Saul’s own (generally middle-of-the-road) take. It is pretty balanced, although your own mileage could vary. Tangle is subscription-supported on the Substack platform—an increasingly interesting source of informed commentary for people willing to pay for it—but it can generally be read four days a week for free.

The funny thing about consuming reasonable, balanced and fair news sources, though, is that there always seems to be something missing. Human nature, especially when we are younger, craves the passion of being committed and involved on the right side of a grand ideological struggle. People used to satisfy that craving with religion. Nowadays they fill it with politics. In the current heightened environment, objective reporting can feel strangely bland.

Also, if you’re paranoid—and shouldn’t we all be?—there is the concern that these self-branded objective sources may be trojan horses that are trying to subtly and with sophistication nudge those in the political middle toward one side or the other under the guise of supposed neutrality. After all, can any individual or organization be truly neutral? Short answer: no.

In the end, that is the risk you run in trying to be informed. You might end up having your mind changed.

Corporate Masters?

‘Skynet Is A Private Company, They Can Do What They Want,’ Says Man Getting Curb-Stomped By Terminator
 —Headline on the satirical newspaper web site The Babylon Bee, January 18

So which is it? Does democracy work because society has some kind of collective wisdom that leads it, over time, to elect good leaders who mostly rise to meet the challenges of the time? Or are citizens basically sheep who are led by slick charismatic politicians and campaigns with manipulative marketing techniques?

This question has been turning over in my mind since viewing the fascinating 2012 Chilean film No by Pablo Larraín. (That movie has already been fodder for my other two blogs, so why not a third go?) A fictionalized account of the 1988 referendum campaign that ultimately turned Augusto Pinochet out of power, the film tells its story from the point of view of a mostly apolitical advertising executive. It caused some controversy in Chile because it implied that the No side won mainly because of its slick campaign messaging, that a sober and serious debate of the issues was not sufficient to sway sufficient voters. Critics pointed out that the movie downplayed—if not outright ignored—the major voter registration drive organized by the political opposition.

Usually, it is the losing side in an election making the argument that voters are easily led and manipulated by campaigns with big budgets. When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, many of his opponents sought to explain the inexplicable by blaming his victory on disinformation disseminated on social media, mainly Facebook. Internet bots and strategic Russian advertising buys had swayed politically unsophisticated voters, they suggested. As a result of reporting on Russian election meddling, a lot of Americans were actually under the impression that the voting was or may have been tampered with and that the results were not completely legitimate.

With Joe Biden’s victory in November, the tables were turned. Trump insisted stubbornly—without producing any actual proof—that he was the victim of some kind of massive fraud and that he had actually won. The more rational among his supporters made a more cogent argument. They insisted that the election was essentially unfair because of media suppression of negative stories about Biden and social media companies’ newly aggressive approach to “fake news.” Exhibit A in their argument was suspension of the New York Post’s Twitter account just as it published a front-page article about information found on Hunter Biden’s laptop. The rationale was that the story was unverified and possibly Russian disinformation. Only after the election did the FBI validate the Post’s reporting. (That was in accordance with longstanding FBI policy, something it had disregarded four years earlier in James Comey’s pre-election discussion of Hillary Clinton’s email server.)

Did bias in the establishment media and among social media companies sway the election for Biden? While I think those players did show amazingly extreme bias, I doubt their favoritism tipped the balance. After all, details about Hunter Biden’s dealings with Ukraine and China were well known to anyone who was interested. They were a key revelation out of last year’s impeachment trial. I think voters just didn’t care about the younger Biden’s corrupt but apparently legal dealings—just as they didn’t care about all the salacious revelations about Trump’s dealings in business and with women four years earlier. Still, it was kind of jaw-dropping when a post-election survey showed that significant numbers of voters claimed to be ignorant of the Hunter Biden story and said it might have made a difference in their electoral decision-making.

If the people who believe that citizens are easily manipulated by the media are correct, that presents a huge problem for democracy—especially in a country as large and diverse as the United States. It would give a huge advantage to the side with the most money. In the 2020 election, Democrats (who once campaigned on election finance reform but never talk about it anymore) outspent Republicans by $6.9 billion to $3.8 billion. And those numbers do not include what many Republicans consider a virtual “in kind” donation—biased coverage by all the major corporate-owned media outlets (with the obvious exception of Fox News).

Is the lopsided coverage of the 2020 election an anomaly caused by the unprecedented nature of the Trump presidency? Maybe, but Republicans have been complaining of biased coverage for many, many election cycles. If you are a Democrat, of course, you do not see it as bias. It’s just that reality has a liberal bias, as some people like to say. Still, if big corporations have definitely picked a side and that side has a permanent significant funding advantage, what does that portend for democracy?

It means that we better hope that money and the power of corporate media are not completely determinative in election outcomes. Yes, you may have been quite happy with the outcome of the most recent election, but what about future elections when corporate interests and deep pockets go against what you think is right? Let’s hope that well-reasoned arguments and grassroots organizing still work. Let’s hope that corporate whims cannot silence your voice summarily.

After all, if the president of the United States can be banned from Twitter for all time, what does mean for you when your beliefs are not consistent with the agenda of major corporations?

Expert Advice

“Sorry, Only Seeing This Now…” Government Finally Text NPHET Back After Recommending Level 5 Restrictions 2 Weeks Ago
 —Headline on the Irish satirical newspaper web site Waterford Whispers, October 19

If you watched the original Star Trek series when you were a kid, as I did, then you may have wondered, as I did, why Mr. Spock was not the ship’s captain instead of James T. Kirk.

Spock was invariably cool, calm and in total control of his emotions. He was a brilliant scientist—in fact he was the Enterprise’s science officer—and a rigorous practitioner of logic. While Kirk was frequently distracted by some bit of intergalactic skirt or otherwise being led by his emotions, Spock was completely dedicated to his work and mission. Whenever Kirk had to absent himself and would tell Spock to “take the com,” things always seemed to run much more efficiently, and the leadership decisions were more consistent and clear.

There is an obvious reason why Kirk was the captain and not Spock. It made for better stories. Efficiently run organizations are not inherently watchable from an entertainment point of view. The show’s writers did actually come up with a justification for the Enterprise’s command structure. In the sixteenth episode of the first season (“The Galileo Seven”), Mr. Spock is in a position of command on an away mission. After an emergency landing on the planet Taurus II, Spock’s manner annoys and frustrates his subordinates no end. A desperate attempt is made to escape the planet, but the shuttle cannot escape the planet’s gravity. In an apparent act of desperation, Spock dumps the craft’s precious remaining fuel and ignites it. This seems pointless and foolhardy, but the flare is spotted by the Enterprise crew, which is then able to save the shuttle passengers by transporter beam in the few remaining seconds.

Kirk—and perhaps the writers—think Spock has learned a lesson in leadership because he acted emotionally rather than logically, but wasn’t Spock’s desperate act actually logical? After all, it succeeded. In a last-ditch situation, trying anything, even with near-zero probability of success, is surely more logical than doing nothing. Still, Kirk’s larger point stands. Leadership is more than just technical expertise.

In times when people get frustrated with their political leaders, you often hear voices arguing that governmental decisions should be made by technocrats or “experts” rather than individuals whose strongest ability is climbing to the top of the political ladder. You particularly hear this nowadays as countries struggle with a long-term emergency medical situation. President Trump has been roundly criticized for being dismissive of Anthony Fauci, a lead member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, and other medical advisers. Joe Biden, who looks likely to replace Trump in January, says repeatedly that, as president, he would “follow medical experts’ advice.”

For months Irish politicians smugly compared themselves to Trump and congratulated themselves on following the experts. The self-congratulation stopped abruptly four Sundays ago when the press learned that the country’s chief medical officer, on behalf of the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET), had written the government advising that the Republic of Ireland move to Level 5, i.e. the most restrictive set of measures currently available. The following evening, in a television interview, Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) Leo Varadkar defended the government’s decision to go to a lower-than-recommended level of restrictions, saying the medical advice had come “out of the blue” and was “not thought through.” Sixteen days later, under continuing media criticism and deteriorating case numbers, the government went to Level 5.

In his original defense of the government’s hesitation to tighten restrictions, Varadkar pointed out that the government must take into account all manner of economic and social repercussions, while the medical experts’ brief is limited to the spread of the virus. They have the luxury, if you want to call it that, to strive for minimal risk in their recommendations. The government faces serious risk no matter what it decides. The government’s defenders declared that, while NPHET should be heeded, it is not the government.

One of the strongest arguments I have read for not turning experts into autocrats comes not from some right-wing sheet but from an article two years ago in the left-of-center Guardian. In the piece David Runciman of Cambridge University argued against “epistocracy: the rule of the knowers.” It is a detailed and thoughtful article and well worth reading. Here is the nub of his argument:

Epistocracy is flawed because of the second part of the word rather than the first—this is about power (kratos) as much as it is about knowledge (episteme). Fixing power to knowledge risks creating a monster that can’t be deflected from its course, even when it goes wrong—which it will, since no one and nothing is infallible. Not knowing the right answer is a great defence against people who believe that their knowledge makes them superior.

The nature of science is exemplified by experimentation, debate, revision and skepticism. Ironically, many people, usually not scientists themselves, invoke Science as some immutable ultimate authority, not unlike the way religious fundamentalists would try to shut down arguments by invoking the Old Testament.

Such people would have you believe that there is near-unanimity among scientists on a range of critical issues. Worse, they seem at times to believe the anointed experts are infallible. Certainly, following the prevailing scientific opinion in a crisis is the smart thing to do, but it should never be treated uncritically as received truth. Unanimity of opinion is the virtual antithesis of science. You only have to read the October 4 Great Barrington Declaration by professors from Stanford, Harvard and Oxford or a recent letter to the Irish government signed by fifteen doctors, including those on the frontlines, to realize that there is a healthy debate going on about the best way to deal with pandemic.

By all means, you want Mr. Spock on the ship’s deck for his technical expertise and his advice. The captain, though, will want to hear from him and other crew members and then draw upon his or her own judgment before heading out into the great unknown.

Spy Games

“Updated Patriot Act Finally Legalizes 80% Of Current FBI Operations”
  —Headline in The Onion, May 14

Sometimes I think I live in a completely different reality than everyone else. Or maybe I’m the only one who doesn’t have amnesia. Or maybe it’s just that everyone working in the news media is a child with no perspective going back further than his or her recent high school graduation.

The latest thing that has set me off is the reporting on the “unmasking” that has been going on in U.S. government agencies. There are lots of examples of what I am talking about, but let’s pick on an article that appeared in The Washington Post last week. Here is the lead paragraph: “Three Republican senators on Wednesday made public a declassified list of U.S. officials, including former vice president Joe Biden, who made requests that would ultimately ‘unmask’ Trump adviser Michael Flynn in intelligence documents in late 2016 and early 2017—a common government practice but one that some conservatives have seized on to imply wrongdoing.”

Did I miss something? I certainly accept the Post’s assertion that unmasking is “a common government practice,” but when did that happen? More importantly, when did it become an unnoteworthy circumstance in the Post’s journalistic estimation?

Were none of the four reporters credited with working on the article old enough to remember—or at least read about—the huge debate we had over the Patriot Act?

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, there was understandably a huge spike in the volume of surveillance applications under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). As the possible terrorists being monitored were not U.S. citizens, they did not get protections under the U.S. Constitution, but there was concern about the U.S. citizens (incidental capture, as it was termed) that monitored foreigners might be talking to. What about their rights? The solution to this problem was to mask the names of any U.S. citizens that might be picked up. Extremely senior U.S. government officials, however, could unmask those names if there was a demonstrable security concern. In other words, don’t worry, civil libertarians, Americans’ privacy rights are being looked after. Nothing to be paranoid about.

“In 2019,” our Post correspondents inform us nonchalantly in the final paragraph of their article, “the NSA unmasked just over 10,000 U.S. individuals’ identities, a substantial decrease from the previous year, but still more than in the final year of the Obama administration, according to government records.”

Uh, okay. Maybe it’s just me, but that kind of seems like a lot. Remember, they are supposed to be surveilling only non-Americans. There is a whole different process involved when you actually want to surveil U.S. citizens. You’re supposed to get a warrant from a judge.

The Post’s journalistic nonchalance is presumably because this isn’t an article about American civil liberties. It is an article reassuring us not to be concerned about the unmasking that was occurring during the Obama Administration. Nothing to worry about, folks. This stuff happens all the time.

The thing is, even if we accept that, yes, lots of foreigners’ conversations get monitored by our intelligence services, and yes, a lot of Americans get caught up in that monitoring, and sure, thousands of those Americans have their identities revealed even though they are supposed to have constitutional protections from that kind of fishing-expedition type monitoring, someone still needs to explain to me something else.

You see, because there is nothing I can possibly do about it, I pretty much have to accept that my country’s government is doing all this electronic monitoring and is frequently using a back-door to the Constitution to listen in on Americans without keeping it anonymous. All I can do is hope that this is mostly being done by intelligence professionals whose overriding priority is the country’s security. Should I be concerned that, in the final hours of the Obama Administration, no fewer than 39 officials—including Vice-President Joe Biden and political appointees John Brennan, James Clapper, Samantha Power and Denis McDonough—took the trouble of requesting the unmasking of the incoming National Security Advisor of the newly-elected administration?

Maybe they had a good reason. We now know, thanks to an email that for some reason outgoing National Security Advisor Susan Rice sent to herself on her last day on the job, that FBI director James Comey had concerns about Flynn’s phone calls with the Russian ambassador. He must have also had concerns about incoming President Trump as well because he did not do want you would expect him to do in that situation, i.e. advise his new boss that there were concerns about the new National Security Advisor. In fact, he deliberately kept this information from the new president.

If Michael Flynn had subsequently been revealed to be a double agent, Comey would now be a hero and his surveillance might appeared to have been justified. Instead, a subsequent two-year special counsel investigation—despite catching various individuals in process crimes and an assortment of generally unrelated violations—found absolutely no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign/administration and Russia.

What about Comey’s concerns about Flynn then? What exactly did Robert Mueller’s final report tell us about Flynn’s phone calls with Ambassador Kislyak? To the extent the report talks about them, they seem pretty innocuous. Here is Mueller’s summary of what is considered the most “incriminating” one:

Immediately after speaking with McFarland, Flynn called and spoke with Kislyak. Flynn discussed multiple topics with Kislyak, including the sanctions, scheduling a video teleconference between President-Elect Trump and Putin, an upcoming terrorism conference, and Russia’s views about the Middle East. With respect to the sanctions, Flynn requested that Russia not escalate the situation, not get into a “tit for tat,” and only respond to the sanctions in a reciprocal manner.

Maybe I’m thick, but that doesn’t sound like treason to me.

We now also know, thanks to FBI notes that have been declassified, that the FBI had basically ended its probe of Flynn in the Russian matter by the early days of the Trump Administration but was then told by upper management to keep the investigation open. In the early, chaotic days of the new administration, two agents (one of whom would later be fired over anti-Trump text messages) met with Flynn in what was meant to be an informal, friendly conversation. Their declassified notes tell us their intention was to catch him in a lie (he did not know he had been under surveillance) or threaten him with a violation of the Logan Act, a two-century-old law that had never been used to prosecute anybody and certainly was never meant to apply to incoming government officials. We have also known for some time that Flynn pled guilty to the charge of lying to the FBI under the threat of his son being prosecuted in an unrelated matter.

So does this make Flynn some sort of hero? Not particularly, since he was largely the victim of his own bad judgments, but he was also very unlucky. Let us remember that Flynn, a Democrat, served in the military more than thirty years and was Obama’s Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency for two years until he was forced out, apparently over policy disagreements, although his management style was the main reason cited.

Former President Obama is still preoccupied with his former DIA director. Two weeks ago in an online talk to the Obama Alumni Association, he railed against the Justice Department decision (after an independent review of the case by an outside prosecutor) to drop the charges against Flynn.

“[T]here is no precedent that anybody can find,” said Obama, “for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free. That’s the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic—not just institutional norms—but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk.”

It is hard to believe that Obama would confuse perjury with the different crime of lying to the FBI, but it is easy to understand why he might do so deliberately in this case. Some of us can remember all the way back to January 2017 when, in his final days in office, he pardoned retired General James E. Cartwright, former vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for—guess what—the crime of lying to the FBI (about discussions with reporters about Iran’s nuclear program).

Let us note that the FBI’s surveillance of Michael Flynn was not illegal. Nor were the unmasking requests for Michael Flynn’s name. (The fact that this information was leaked days later to The Washington Post, however, was indeed a crime and may be one of the things covered in an ongoing investigation by U.S. Attorney John Durham. Should be interesting since the suspect list is pretty short.) No, it is not any breaking of the law that worries me. It is the fact that this is all not only legal but apparently common.

Some things just never change. If you give politicians the legal means to spy on their political opponents, few will be able to resist the temptation. And even when the spying turns up no dirt, these days all you need to cause trouble is just the innuendo caused by the fact the spying was taking place.

Virtual Government

“Teacher Can’t Wait To Use ‘Calculated Grades’ To F*** Over Prick Student He Hates”
  —Headline (slightly edited) on the Irish satirical newspaper website Waterford Whispers, May 8

Here are a couple of questions that come to mind as the pandemic persists. Is Ireland turning into Singapore? Are governments even necessary?

The first question is prompted by the inevitable police-state-style trappings that accompany emergency situations like quarantines and lockdowns. Of course, in typical Irish fashion, when Taoiseach Leo Varadkar addressed the country via television on March 24, he described a lockdown while at the same time saying he preferred not to use the word lockdown. In other words, we aren’t forcing you to stay home; it’s just a helpful suggestion. With time, though, the shutdown has become more stringently enforced. TV news footage on a bank holiday weekend showed traffic jams on major roads as officers of the Garda Síochána stopped cars at checkpoints to decide on a case-by-case basis whether each car’s travel was essential. Reasonable people certainly support law enforcement breaking up large gatherings and people crowding into public spaces, but anecdotal word-of-mouth accounts have also described gardaí stopping people walking alone on beaches and in uncrowded parks and inspecting people’s groceries to determine if their shopping was essential.

There may be a law-and-order silver lining to all this. Newspapers recount incidences of gardaí catching smugglers of drugs and illegal weapons because of the lockdown-enforcing checkpoints. Another silver lining may be—depending on your point of view—the cancellation of the Leaving Certification, the battery of state exams that graduating secondary school students endure for the sake of college placement. Instead students will be awarded “predictive” points based on past performance and evaluations by their teachers and principals. One hopes this system will work better than predictive text when typing on one’s mobile phone.

Of course, it is only reasonable to expect to have your liberty and economic well-being curtailed in a life-or-death emergency. Previous civilian generations have sacrificed much more in wartime and in the wake of natural disasters. What makes it a bit unreal in the current situation, though, is that the emergency has a strangely virtual quality to it. We mainly know how bad things are because of statistics flashed on a screen or printed in a newspaper. In the visible world around us, nothing seems to have changed except for the way everyone is behaving.

Adding to the Singapore effect here is the fact that the dominant source of news is the state broadcaster. RTÉ is in the tricky dual role of official dispenser of government information and journalistic enterprise. Hosts of all public affairs programs on the TV and radio are clearly expected to be generally supportive of the government’s measures and by extension the medical opinions underlying them. After a while—especially to someone used to the clashing ideological news sources in the US media landscape—it starts to feel a bit Big-Brother-ish.

A further complication is that there is currently no government here. By an accident of timing, the pandemic happened at the same moment as an inconclusive general election. Given the results, forming a new government was always going to be a challenge. Because of the emergency, negotiations are competing with even more serious distractions than normal. So Varadkar continues as a caretaker head of government along with his outgoing ministers, some of whom actually lost their seats in the election. In a Catch-22-like situation, the caretaker government cannot pass legislation because that requires a full Senate, and there won’t be a full Senate until there is a new Taoiseach because only the new Taoiseach can complete the Senate with his own appointments, and there won’t be a new Taoiseach until a new government is formed. I wonder if all those politicians who once talked about reforming or abolishing the Senate wish they had actually done something about it when they had they chance.

As of this writing, the two major parties which have always run the country are in what seem to be final negotiations with the Green Party, which appears riven by the prospect of another go as a minority coalition partner. Not only does a sizeable portion of the Greens look to be alienated by the likely result, so will be a big chunk of voters who gave the major-change party Sinn Féin a plurality of the popular vote.

Reassuringly, the lack of a government has not stopped the caretaker ministers and professional civil service from dealing with the pandemic. Whatever they need to do, they just do—whether by written orders or edict or fiat or whatever. They are also spending (actually, borrowing) a ton of money to get through the crisis. You can’t really blame them. After all, what other choice do they realistically have?

It is, however, what prompts the question I asked above. Are elected governments even necessary?

My concern is for when Sinn Féin eventually finds itself in the position of being able to answer that question.

Life in Lockdown

“As well-armed as the Parliamentary forces were, their deadliest weapon may have been the one they brought inadvertently. People in the town were now dying of a plague that had traveled with the English. Memories were all too fresh of the 1649 plague that had killed well over 3,000.”
   —Excerpt from the 2019 novel The Curse of Septimus Bridge

The above quote is a handy reminder that 1) plagues, endemics and pandemics have always been with us and 2) I actually wrote a novel called The Curse of Septimus Bridge. (For more information on that, as well as an update on my upcoming novel, see my book blog.)

History tells us that armies, explorers, conquistadores, holidaymakers and business travelers have, at various points in time, have helped spread virulent diseases from one territory to another. What is amazing is that, in this age of globalism and cheap-and-easy international travel, such outbreaks do not happen more often. Instead we appear to be going through a once-in-a-century phenomenon with the current crisis evoking mostly recollections of the 1918-1920 so-called Spanish flu pandemic.

That flu is estimated to have infected a third of the world’s population and killed, in the most liberal guesses, as many as 100 million. Then the world was much more defenseless than now. The ventilator would not be invented until several years later, and flu vaccines were decades away.

As the experts remind us, Covid-18 is not an influenza strain and so does not behave like one. That is what makes it scary. We are only learning as time goes on exactly how it behaves and just how dangerous it truly is.

There are signs of optimism if you want to look for them. For those of us in the majority who (as far as we know anyway) have not experienced it, the danger is more theoretical than real. For those who have had a mild or even asymptomatic case, the main concern is for others rather than for oneself. Perhaps the most optimistic sign is that many people’s nerves have relaxed enough that they have already moved past the old-wartime-style-let’s-all-pull-together mentality right to using the crisis as one more political football. I don’t spend much time listening to the White House daily briefings, but based on what I have heard they seem to contain a lot of useful and/or interesting information from government and health officials. When it comes to cable news, the president and his twitter account, though, he and the press corps seem more than content to just carry on the same noisy and distracting game in which they have engaged since the 2016 election.

Here in Ireland the we’re-all-in-this-together spirit still mostly prevails. A lot of that has to do with the fact that news coverage here is led by a dominant state broadcaster that has little space for unsanctioned views or contrarian attitudes at a time like this. There is much collective self-back-patting at the Irish response, frequently drawing meaningless, self-flattering comparisons to other (much larger) countries, particular the UK and the US.

Having said that, there is a growing criticism, or at least collective regret, that the authorities were blindsided by the number of fatalities in nursing homes. With the benefit of hindsight it now seems clear that, while citizens in general were told to hunker down in their homes, not enough attention was given to the vulnerable elder population residing in clusters. This is probably because the planners were watching what was going on hotspots like China and Italy where living and family arrangements are more traditional than here. Ireland has become more like America in that the old folks are more likely to be sent off to a home.

For the average news consumer it is difficult to gauge exactly how bad things are in general. On one hand we see disturbing images of pine coffins stacked on top of each other in a trench on New York’s Hart Island as well as similar photos from Spain and Italy. On the other hand, there is the article in today’s Wall Street Journal about results of hundreds of blood tests taken in Los Angeles. Echoing similar stories from Europe, the emerging picture is that a lot more people than expected have antibodies for Covid-19, suggesting the rate of serious illness and fatalities among those exposed is actually quite a bit lower than previously thought.

I guess that’s a perverse kind of optimism. Another example is the fact that some people are emboldened to go out—against health expert advice—and protest restrictions imposed by authorities. People have marched or found other ways of protesting in such far-flung places as Michigan, Washington, Texas, France, Germany, India and Chile. Others have more cautiously done their protesting online. These are clearly signs of pent-up frustration at the personal and economic restrictions as well as local-issue-fueled discontent. The protestors are willing to test the assertion they risk spreading the disease more widely. In the process, they have become a political litmus test in the debate between those who want everyone to heed government/expert advice/diktats and those who subscribe to the spirit, which was big in the 1960s, of “question authority.”

The other night, protesting fishermen in Dingle, County Kerry, prevented the docking of Spanish-owned trawler for fear of introducing more virus cases. Were they perhaps thinking back a whole century to the Spanish flu?

In the Political Swing of Things

“Bailey has stuck to her guns by claiming that the swing at the Dean Hotel was unsafe and therefore she was entitled to make her compensation claim, despite being laughed at for a long period of time by the Dean Hotel, the opposition, her own party and indeed the country at large… but is she right? Not seeing any other way to put this issue to bed, WWN got shitfaced and headed to some local swings to see just how dangerous these things are…”
 —“Are Swings Dangerous? We Get Locked & Find Out,” the satirical Irish web site Waterford Whispers News, June 24

Irish beer lovers and teutonophiles were disappointed on Wednesday when it was announced this year’s Dublin Oktoberfest has been canceled. The reason given was the rising cost of insurance. For the past several years the autumn festival has drawn festive crowds to George’s Dock in the capital.

A statement from the organizers read, in part, “In Germany we are not used to the claim culture that has developed in Ireland and therefore we have decided to take a break this year. The belief that putting in an insurance claim doesn’t hurt anyone except the insurance company is incorrect, consequently great fun events like ours find it hard to go ahead when suspect insurance claims from a small minority of people can ruin it for everybody.”

There is some dispute over how much the rapid increases in insurance premiums are owed to fraudulent claims as opposed to industry greed, but nobody who lives in the republic has escaped the ample anecdotal evidence of the so-called “compo culture.” And then there is this little factoid. Researchers at the National University of Ireland (NUI) Galway examined all reported instances of whiplash patients seen by spinal specialists between 1996 and 2011. How many of those patients went on to initiate legal action? All of them. How many of them continued visits to the specialists after the legal action was concluded? None of them.

For our own anecdotal purposes, let’s look at one random case that was reported in the papers in May. In 2015 while on a night out with friends in Dublin, a woman from Dún Laoghaire sat on a swing in the bar of a Harcourt Street hotel. She held things in both hands, at least one of which was a drink, but later said she had not actually imbibed. She fell off the swing and went to a hospital the next day. She subsequently sued the hotel on the grounds that the swing was “unsupervised.” Furthermore, her complaint said that she could not engage in her hobby of running “at all” for three months after the accident. When this is eventually reported in the papers, there was ridicule and outrage, not least because a national newspaper reported she took part in a The Bay 10k run just weeks after the incident.

You might wonder why this particular case received so much press attention. It is probably because the woman in question (Maria Bailey) was a county councilor at the time and, a couple of weeks after her accident, was nominated and (subsequently elected) by the Fine Gael party to be a TD (member of the Irish parliament). Making things more awkward, Fine Gael, which is currently in charge of the government, has made an issue of reform of the legal compensation system. Even more awkwardly, this all hit the papers and airwaves around the time of local and European elections in which Fine Gael generally underperformed. Many members of the public emailed Taoiseach (prime minister) Leo Varadkar saying they would not vote Fine Gael because of the Maria Bailey incident. Shortly after the election, Bailey dropped her legal claim.

Fine Gael conducted an internal review of the matter, but the resulting report will not be made public. As a result though, Bailey has been removed as chair of a parliamentary committee but has not been suspended as a party member.

Given the current dissatisfaction with Fine Gael (yes, people are actually calling it SwingGate) and the fact that the party currently polls second to the main opposition party, Fianna Fáil, you might expect opposition leader Micheál Martin to terminate the “confidence and supply” agreement which keeps the minority government propped up and trigger parliamentary elections. After all, Varadkar has been Taoiseach for more than two years now but has never actually faced voters as the Fine Gael leader. But Martin shows no interest in doing so. The narrative for three years now has been that the next election should be delayed until the Brexit “emergency” is over.

In other words, voters, there’s no hurry in calling you back to the polls. Don’t worry your pretty little heads about all this government stuff for now.

Apparently this current status quo suits the political class just fine. Everyone has their Dáil salaries and perks and look forward to their generous government pensions. It’s not like there is a life-and-death political struggle going on or anything that needs to be settled. Heck, blow-ins like myself can’t even figure out what the philosophical difference is between the two main parties—beyond whose great-grandfather fought on which side in the Civil War.

Yes, everything is just fine—at least until someone gets a bit greedy and ill-advisedly runs to the claims courts.

Choosing Sides

“Political Scientists Trace American Democracy’s Severe Polarization to F***ing Idiots on Other Side of Aisle”
 —Headline in The Onion, October 31

The actor Liam Neeson found himself in hot water in February while being interviewed for his latest movie. Cold Pursuit was, by many accounts, a pointless remake of a cleverer Norwegian film called In Order of Disappearance, but it was consistent with the vigilante-action-hero persona that has been the Irish actor’s bread and butter the past few years. Perhaps that is why he thought an anecdote about his own misguided flirtation with street revenge might stir interest among his fans.

Neeson was nothing but contrite and self-critical as he explained to The Independent of London how years earlier, after a friend of his had been raped by a black man, he had gone “up and down areas with a cosh, hoping I’d be approached by somebody—I’m ashamed to say that. And I did it for maybe a week, hoping some ‘black bastard’ would come out of a pub and have a go at me about something, you know? So that I could… kill him.” Subsequently on the Good Morning America program, he said his reaction “shocked me and it hurt me. I did seek help. I went to a priest, I aired my confession, I was reared a Catholic. I had two very, very good friends that I talked to. And believe it or not, power-walking helped me. Two hours every day, to get rid of this. I’m not racist. This was nearly 40 years ago.”

Public reaction in the media, both traditional and social, was brutal. Not only was he widely excoriated for having had those feelings four decades earlier, he was roundly criticized for talking about them in the present. Few seemed inclined to give him credit for honesty in speaking about an extremely emotional reaction to a terrible event in his youth and having learned from it.

My own personal reaction, as usual, was different from the ones I kept hearing and reading about. What Neeson described did not sound to me like racism—at least as I have always understood the word. Here is the Oxford dictionary definition: “Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior.” It does not sound as though the actor went looking to get into a fight with a black man because he thought black men were racially inferior. He wanted revenge for a crime and was apparently seized by the notion that, because a black man was the alleged perpetrator, all black men were therefore guilty. That would be tribalism, not racism.

As a native of County Antrim, Leeson should understand the concept of tribalism better than most of us. The six counties of Northern Ireland have been convulsed for generations by antagonism between those who identify as British and those who see themselves as Irish. The latest sad example of these old hatreds was the pointless death last month of activist/journalist/author Lyra McKee, who was struck down by a stray bullet fired by a teenaged member of the New IRA during civil disturbances in Derry. The intended target was presumably the police officers on the scene. Amid the shock and grief that followed, there were hopeful murmurings that perhaps this might be the senseless tragedy that would finally bring people to their senses. If only. My memories are all too vivid of people saying the same thing in 1998 after a bomb killed 18 Catholics and 11 Protestants (including a woman pregnant with twins) in the County Tyrone town of Omagh. The bomb was planted by yet another republican splinter group, the Real IRA.

People who commit such atrocities justify them with notions like justice, revenge, and sovereignty. They are harder to justify when described as what they actually are: murders committed because of hatred for someone else’s tribe.

These days in the U.S. I see a lot of what seems to me to be tribal thinking. Some of it breaks down along racial lines, and I think it is useful to see those divisions for what they are—the tribalistic mindset of us versus them.

What concerns me these days mostly, though, is the country’s political division. It does not seem enough anymore merely to demonize politicians. Their supporters and voters must also be designated as beyond the pale—even evil. You rarely hear officeholders or commentators give their ideological opponents the benefit of the doubt and at least having good intentions. The worst is always assumed.

The other day House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was reported as saying that she does not “automatically trust” President Trump to respect the 2020 election result “short of an overwhelming defeat.” Of course, the president’s response would be that many Democrats have yet to accept the 2016 election result and that they have never stopped trying to undo it.

Let us hope that talk like this stays in the realm of partisan rhetoric. When political parties in a democracy become reluctant to hand over power after an election because they do not trust the other party’s intentions or character, we run the risk of finding ourselves on the slippery slope to to overt tribalism. Sadly, there are all too many historical examples of where this leads.