Everything We Need to Know We Learned In The 21st Century Kinder Garden

April Showers brought May Flowers followed by June Rats and Pestilence

Yeah you could say I’m in a mood, but it’s way more than me.

We entered the 21st century at a time of abundance and promise. The internet allowed an interconnectedness between many peoples across the globe that bypassed the strictures and corsets of governments bent on limiting access to information. In closed societies, rays of light could creep in, exposing the freedoms and opportunities of advanced societies to peoples that dictators had locked into windowless rooms. And in open societies, fresh cross-cultural understandings could bloom, joint research initiatives could be kindled and networks could be built at supersonic speeds.

Heady times. Fresh discoveries of genius and beauty were everywhere.

Nobody was expecting the Spinnish Inquisition. But boyoboy, the spinning went full throttle licketysplit, led of course, by that longtime nemesis, old time religion.

You know exactly which religion I mean…

The one promoting extreme selfishness: the Holy Church of Power and Greed.

In the world’s biggest casino, the US stockmarket, the 1990s brought extreme speculation as high tech became its latest tulip craze. In 1999, had someone created a start-up called dogshit.com, its stock would’ve gone vertical. For awhile.

That extreme speculation crashed to earth beginning in March 2000, but it didn’t take long for extreme speculators to get their mojo back. So many bubbles were created that I dubbed Fed Reserve chief Alan Greenspan as Sir Bubbles. Global markets could rise and fall on a positive or negative word from the Randian Believer. And I still remain mystified that when the biggest bubble brought the housing collapse, Sir Bubbles admitted he didn’t see it coming.

Some guru, that. The housing bubble was more visible than a fart joke on a middle school bus and Ayn Rand’s most enamored acolyte didn’t catch a single whiff.

The middle and working classes took that one on the chin while the realtors and developers got off scot free. As well as the bankers. That unholy trinity broke rules, regulations and laws with Olympian impunity, giving rise to a populist backlash across the political spectrum.

And, oh yeah, there was more that spawned that backlash, too. Like a war our president started on Iraq because, well, because he thought he could beat a guy who never attacked us except verbally, plus a lot of bad data from previously discredited sources. That war was planned months before we got attacked by that Bin Laden fanatic and his band of Saudis and Egyptians.

That war mushroomed into others in Libya and Syria and elsewhere and never should we think any of it had anything to do with Big Old Fat Oil drillers that the Bush fam has been cozy with for generations.

So endless wars plus a housing bubble bust and a bailout of criminal bankers kinda had lots of Americans completely fed up with business as oozifull. Not to mention the Brooks Brothers riot in 2000, the one actual stolen election that put Cheney in charge of the White House and Rumsfeld in charge of the Pentagon.

So on the left, first we elected Obama, though his Chicago School of Economics background was right of center. He promised an expansion of affordable healthcare and delivered, but the GOP hated it so much they made elebenty million efforts to kill it for years afterward. That it was mostly modelled on a plan introduced by Republican Mitt Romney didn’t matter. It was no more left than LBJ and FDR were but the GOP acted like it came from a Russian commie.

Then old time social Democrat Bernie led the charge from the left while the GOP voters - outraged that a Black guy could be president - decided to go with the rudest loudmouth drunk they could find at the bar. And their true colors showed: white and whiter, plus a Krylon orange spraypaint tan. So long as DJ Trump delivered a massive tax break for the top one percent, the wealthiest were willing to overlook his ties to white nationalism, Naziism, and money laundering for ex-commies.

Not that I intend to belabor a lot of too fresh history but the point is connecting all these dots makes it clear that most everything that’s occurred in the past 3 decades demonstrated that most everything before was impractical to believe in. Manners, comity, compromise, fairness, hard won human rights, logic, facts, scientific inquiry became quaint memories of an undesired yesteryear.

For a significant minority of American voters. The majority stands in objection and always has. But what the majority wants is becomng increasingly irrelevant.

The minority longs for a USA that’s great again which by now appears to be a desire for absolute originalism, with only landowning white males voting and possessing all the human rights, and no income tax. Or social security. Or science. Or history.

Hell, this rough, tough, proud, oathkeeping oafmeal crowd wants everything handed to them and them alone, and if anybody objects and makes them feel bad or the teensy bit guilty, then it’s off with the heads of the meany majority.

And let’s be 100% clear on one highly visible fact: they will lie, cheat, steal and use any violence necessary to make it so.

So yeah, there’s been a ton for each of us to process, learn and unlearn. Including all the nonsense spewed about the pandemic, Q-Anon, Tiki-bearing Nazis to insurrectionists and their elected enablers.

How far back till we’re great again? We’ve got a new Cold War with DT Trump siding with the bad guys. Do we really have to do another Civil War, but a kinder, gentler one where we can’t hurt their fee-fees while they’re shooting us?

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I had some positive answers and have been working on some of them (which has kept me offline more). Meanwhile several things kept nagging at me. The deaths of Christopher Locke, a madcap genius who co-authored the visionary Cluetrain Manifesto. Chris died around last Christmas. Others eulogized him far better than I, as he was only an internet friend to me. And Wikipedia enlightened me more than I’d been while he lived. It was Christopher who inspired me to start blogging more than 20 years ago, so he’s technically my Blogfather.

Then Eric Boehlert, one of the 4 best media analysts going, was cycling when struck by a train on April 4th. His last efforts were dedicated to a newsletter called Press Run, which you can sample here. Another brilliant guy gone too soon, at 56.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson discussed his death and his final newsletter published the day he died… which is also worth your read.

Dahlia Lithwick picked up the media critique yesterday, spurred by the words at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Her take:

”The first error was that Russian journalists are not free and Americans are really free. Of course, American journalists are more readily able to write words and ask questions, but it is also manifestly true that U.S. journalists are far less free today than people like to believe we are. The fact is that media freedom around the world has been in swift decline, hastened by both COVID and growing illiberalism, and that the American press freedom index has been neither chart-topping nor record-breaking in recent years. According to Reporters Without Borders, the United States ranks 44th in the world in press freedom, barely in the C-plus range if you’re giving the country a letter grade. Even a cursory look at the Press Freedom Tracker for the United States shows that gag orders, prosecutions of journalists, and physical attacks and equipment damage are all on the rise, and access for journalism to courthouses and statehouses is a persistent challenge. Add to that mix the facts that social media is almost wholly controlled by a handful of white billionaires, that news consolidation threatens press freedom on a daily basis, and that journalism itself is slowly asphyxiating, with a more democracy-promoting alternative yet to materialize, and yeah we aren’t really living the halcyon days.

All of which leads us to the second category error. It’s not merely that the American free press is not quite as free as we’d prefer to believe, but also that American democracy itself is not nearly as free as Noah implied. And while Noah and his colleagues in the ballroom have quite creditably reported on that fact—on election suppression, and entrenched minority rule, and speech restraints, and the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and the continuing consequences of the lack of accountability for those things—the truth is that none of that news is terribly sticky or new or exciting as a story. In fact, the U.S. media pays stunningly little sustained attention to the possible looming death of freedom and democracy in the U.S. because it’s vastly easier to seek to entertain than to document abstract creeping illiberalism at home.”

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And as many of you know, I still haven’t fully processed the deaths of family and friends in the past 17 months, especially Marlene, my ultimate compadre. She saved my life during the pandemic and I still haven’t forgiven myself for my inability to save hers. My real eulogy for her keeps getting closer.

The bombshell news last night about the imminent demise of Roe v Wade really isn’t surprising. But the leak of the news has no precedent. It is one more sign of our disappearing democracy. The majority of the US is women and this won’t come close to ending abortion. It will just be a way to force poor women to take legal risks or to raise unwanted babies, including those conceived by rape and incest.

So yeah, I’m bummed. I won’t let our democracy die without a serious fight and if you care, you shouldn’t either.

The final weight? One of my kids was attacked last night by a crazy lady while entering a building. Whiplash and a concussion. This for no reason at all.

DON’T GIVE UP HOPE. EVER.