The Breaking Time

Breaking Sparta

Epaminondas kicking ass. Illustration by W. Rainey.

Back in Greece, there was one city state, a militaristic slave society, hated and feared above all others. At the start of the 4th century B.C., Sparta ran the neighborhood, setting up and toppling governments, generally acting like bastards to everyone else.

Their main rival broken, they seemed invincible. The newly democratic Thebes, one of the only cities left standing with a chance of stopping them, especially hated them.

Despite the torrent of crap about their merits in recent years, especially all fictions about the stand of the 300, the Spartans were hands-down the villains of this era. In Thebes' case they'd once been allies, but the Spartans betrayed them, took over their capital and put in a government they despised, propped up by occupying soldiers.

A few years later, the Thebans took back their city and reasserted their rights. Sure enough, the second they start gaining serious power again, the Spartans send out an army to remind them who's boss.

So in 371 B.C., the Thebans turned to Epaminondas, a now nigh-forgotten leader who had some experience as a soldier but more of a reputation for philosophy and integrity. But sometimes the best people for war aren't warriors; this was one of those times.

Forget Thermopylae for a moment, because this story is way more relevant, and more interesting. Epaminondas was about to do the impossible: break Sparta.

JFK: people see what they want to see

American Tabula Rasa

Fifty years ago yesterday, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was killed, a brutal tragedy that threw the country into mourning and spawned a heap of conspiracy theories, along with speculation that continues to the present.

Predictably, there was live-tweeting of the events, memorials, appreciations and, of course, the procession of the devotees of the above conspiracies and the counter-demonstrations of the debunkers.

But what interests me, and what might be one of Kennedy's most enduring legacies is his role as American politics' tabula rasa; people see in him exactly what they want to see. Not just Americans, either. Kennedy had the charisma and luck to pull off some of that whole "leader of the free world" schtick at a time when people still believed it (the above picture is from Ireland). Even for detractors of the current American state, Kennedy's end makes for an appealing might-have-been; the point where America could have actually lived up to its ideals, tragically cut short.

The reality is, as always, more complicated. JFK was a relatively mainstream, even belligerent, Cold War politician. He was great on space, decent on labor, tepid on civil rights, ruthlessly ambitious, a hawk who talked pretty to doves, and "operating a damn Murder Incorporated in the Caribbean."

Ironically LBJ, in many conspiracies the reactionary benefactor of a Dallas coup d'etat, was farther left than Kennedy domestically with the Civil Rights Act and the Great Society, and even took a warier approach in places like Cuba.

But the vicissitudes of the 60s and 70s make more sense to the national pysche with a slain golden boy. It fits some powerful myths about America: for once, we were on the right track, and a noble leader was going to lay bare the darkness at the heart of the republic.

Then he's slain by nefarious forces (a shabby maniac simply won't do). So people invent quotes or turn political dodges into evidence that a brighter day was snatched from us.

They're helped by the fact that most people don't understand the grab-bag nature of the Democratic Party of the time. During Kennedy's day the coalition ostensibly included everyone from social democrats to segregationists. By 1968 it would fall apart, but in the early '60s it still held in its rickety way; JFK was partly in Texas to mediate disputes between liberal and conservative Democratic factions.

Kennedy did what any politician does; he tried to give each faction what they wanted to hear, including the ones represented in his inner circle. That's made it easy even for people who actually knew the man to make sweeping predictions about what he might have done, many of them tied to avoiding mistakes like Vietnam. The natural appeal of the myth carries things the rest of the way. Believe in a political creed that got short shrift? On Nov. 21, 1963, JFK agreed with you and was about to do something about it. Really.

Which beliefs would he have actually followed? We don't know, because he died.

In 1963, Kennedy probably didn't know either. Our savior/villain b.s. with presidents runs deep, but they're plenty susceptible to pressure and circumstance. War or peace from JFK might have depended on something as banal as which Democratic faction fared best in the 1964 elections or how South Vietnamese intrigue shook out that week.

In another world, it's possible to imagine a graying Kennedy cracking down on protesters shouting about a Latin American quagmire or a Civil Rights Act he never gets around to.

But instead we're in this world, where it comforts the afflicted to think that at some point, we actually had the leader we deserved.

What's expendable?

"The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices." - C.S. Lewis

Yesterday morning, I was annoying my Twitter followers by exposing them to a concentrated dose of the Every Gentrifier account. It's hilarious stuff, and Asheville in particular can use a good, hard shot of it occasionally. 

On a completely separate note, I just finished reading Simon Schama's superb Citizens, a history of the French Revolution. It's one of the best explanations of the post-Revolution fratricide that ended up with blood literally running in the streets. I've seen this portrayed as a tragedy of division; a singular will of the people sadly falling apart in petty factionalism.

But Schama shows that the division happened because other than some very general matters, the revolutionaries didn't agree from the start. Refomers wanted a British-style neutered monarchy, radicals a popular republic (with a dead king), liberals craved a free market, the sans-cullotes economic protections. When things got an inch past statements of "liberty, equality, fraternity" and a vague agreement to curb the king, those differences mattered a whole hell of a lot.

Both tweets and Schama's tome point to something that I often feel is worth a bit of explanation. It's easy to imagine that politics is a showdown between different worldviews, with malevolence in one corner. Certainly the "this is a movie with a climax and ending" view helps indulge the illusion that everything can be reconciled for everyone if only the bad guys would get out of the way.

From my perspective however, I've seen the most damage done by blithe, well-meaning people who simply view large swaths of their society as expendable. It's not (usually) conscious. But when they think of "community" they just happen to leave out most of the people with less money or power than themselves. When they imagine where something must be built (or stopped) or where tax dollars should go, it's their own cloistered world reflected back at them. This feat of mental fortification accomplished, it's easier to dump the inconvenient sharp edges of a given decision elsewhere, where they won't see it too often.

And this is really where the rubber meets the road. Forget rhetoric: people will say they support all kinds of things in theory, often simultaneously. Politicians are known for being two-faced partly because at some point they drop one of the goals they once said they supported

But here's the thing, their supporters do the same. It's easy for people to say they like low taxes and well-funded schools, density and perfectly-preserved "neighborhood character." Since politics requires numbers, who wouldn't tell them they share their concerns?

Sure, hybrid idea are great and sometimes possible in political situations, but the fact is not everyone is going to get what they want. So eventually, something happens to change the equation.

When someone proposes that an affordable housing complex goes in next door that blocks a local's view or offends their sense of place, which priority gets ditched? The proof of what really matters in someone's politics isn't what they support, but what they'll sacrifice. Or, more importantly, whom.

This is why much prejudice doesn't manifest blatantly. While that remains a real issue, the more devastating racist isn't the idiot at the Klan rally, it's the planner who doesn't think twice about plowing an overpass through an already-reeling black neighborhood. Unequal pay for women is more harshly enforced by managers who just simply don't think of them as leadership material than any '50s throwback.

To reverse it, anyone who wants to change the world for the better needs to have a clear view of the consequences. Every possible social arrangement has its costs. As everyone's not going to get what they want, what constituencies are you ok with paying more of the bill? Why? What division of power (and it is always about power) do you want to see?

Who gets told "deal with it" and "you'll live"? What's expendable?

Building a phyle

Though, let's face it, the Neo-Victorians wouldn't cut it.

This blog (when I can post) frequently focuses on social organization and the ways people are trying to adapt to changing times, especially as the nation-state and other traditional institutions lose their old sway. 

So I'm overdue to delve into one that's stuck with me for some time: the phyles from Neil Stephenson's fascinating (though massively flawed on several levels) novel The Diamond Age. Phyles are cultural groupings powerful enough to largely replace nation-states. Despite being in an ostensibly post-national era, the Phyles largely break down on old lines (China, India, Japan), with some throwbacks like Maoists or Stephenson's BFFs, the Neo-Victorians.

Naturally enough, the actual workings of the phyles are largely in the background (this is a novel, after all, not a social treatise, and is usually awful when it stumbles in that direction), but as shorthand for "socioeconomic group that could supplant aspects of nations" it's useful for the following thought exercise.

How would a phyle actually work?

Hating someone else's Congress

In every district but yours...

Interesting poll from Gallup last week confirmed something I'd suspected for awhile. Congress is unpopular. Really unpopular. Communism, lice, root canals, and Genghis Khan are more popular.

That's not news. So why aren't people actually throwing the bums out instead of talking about it?

Because people hate "Congress," the abstract legislative body, instead of their particular Congresscritter. On average 46 percent like their particular representative. That's hardly overwhelming support, but it's at least getting close to electable territory. 

Gerrymandering plays a big role in this, certainly, but this is also a classic bell the cat problem: people want great upheaval, as long as it's starting somewhere else.

Is generational identity dead?

Forget this crap. (Also, if someone knows the photographer for this one, tell me)

Something interesting emerged in this discussion over at NSFWCorp about millenials' generational identity (it's locked for subscribers, but it's also $3 a month, so you should totally remedy that). 

Simply put, with a few notable exceptions — socially liberal, used to the internet, economically precarious — I feel largely removed from the popular story about millenials that's developed. No one in my social circle lives with their parents. They all have a ridiculous work ethic and pull long hours at whatever jobs they can find. Rather than delusionally entitled, they're realistic to the point of bleak cynicism.

All generational identities are massive generalizations to begin with, riddled with exceptions. But something has shifted, perhaps to the point where a Baby Boomer-style common culture is impossible.

Previous sweeping "generations" — the Lost, the Greatest, the Silent, the Boomers — came of age in eras of less inequality, broader social institutions, and a more cohesive mass media. Today, generational identity as we know it is probably dead.

This isn't to say that almost everyone 18-30 isn't shaped by some similar experiences, but it's easier to have a common perspective when there are three television channels, a tycoon's son still has to go for a draft physical, or when the entire country goes to war. That world is gone.

Hell, in 1930 12 percent of American men were part of the Freemasons; it's impossible to imagine any single organization today commanding that kind of influence.

Instead, the media environment keeps fragmenting, meaning parts of the same age group are exposed to widely varying cultures depending on their own interests. The increasing class divide further segregates the scions of the better-off into their own universes. The wealthy have always led different lives, of course, but the chasm has widened to the point their young are divorced from the experiences of others.

I've hoped for a strong millenial identity, partly as a counter to the get-thee-to-a-fracking field scoldings we often receive. But maybe the landscape is far too fragmented now for that to ever occur. The cultures that emerge won't have a common identity in any but the broadest sense.

Instead, they will be different shards, adapting to the world facing them in a thousand ways, or heading to hell purely by their own compass.

Prison gangs and the breakdown of the justice system

Photo by Mark Allen Johnson

Back in March, two local prosecutors in Kaufman County, Texas, were killed, probably by members of the Texas Aryan Brotherhood. They were targeted for supporting a federal investigation. The prosecutor promptly withdrew "for security reasons."

About a month later, a sweeping indictment charged that the Black Guerilla Family, also a prison gang, had corrupted 13 prison guards and turned the whole Baltimore jail into a stronghold.

Despite their ideological origins, both are more traditional syndicates now, dedicated to running extensive drug and crime empires. This piece, by an ex-con familiar with the Aryan Brotherhood, illuminates some key points about how they operate on the ground level.

But what's missing from the discussion is exactly how dire a breakdown of the justice system the power of prison gangs represents.

While the mafia, and every other bit of organized crime humans have come up with, had connections within prisons and was prepared for its members to do time, the entire structure relied on most of the members being out on the street most of the time. 

Not so with prison gangs. They started with most of their members behind bars. Traditional ways of breaking up criminal power structures (isolating members in different prisons, big racketeering cases), just helped them to grow.

So what can the state use against them? Round them up and send them to prison? They're just going back home. Solitary confinement? Their leadership is used to it, and can still communicate just fine. Their power's enough that they can even outright attack the state in a way the mafia never dared to (the Five Families actually killed those who went after prosecutors).

A more ruthless government might see the simplest solution as executing the prison gangs' leadership: it has them imprisoned, after all. But given the brutishly corrupt nature of much of the existing prison system, that would probably just open the door to even more human rights abuses, including to prisoners who aren't even part of the gangs. If the corruption's deep enough, like at the Baltimore jail, it might even give the gangs another tool to consolidate their power by eliminating their rivals.

And that's not even getting into the existence of pockets like Mountain Home that serve as out-of-prison bases and no-go zones for law enforcement. That bodes well.

Amazingly, we've managed to create a system that fails at both punishment and rehabilitation.

Cash isn't going to disappear

Cash isn't going to disappear. Not now. Not as electronic currencies get more advanced. Not when your mother starts using Bitcoin. Human beings will continue to use currency for a long, long damn time to come.

There are simply too many niches in an economy that using physical, anonymous objects to represent economic value fills for it to fade entirely. 

I bring this up because every once in awhile someone suggests that cash is on the way out, or outright encourages it. With Bitcoins' recent price surge, even as governments look at ways to regulate those that use it, there's more talk about how close we are to a cyberpunk cashless society.

Yes, potentially, if enough large sectors of the economy agreed all at once, the transition could go a long way to squeezing cash out in favor of say, Bitcoin or one of its eventual descendants.

But realistically companies start accepting Bitcoins out of convenience, and will accept their regulation for the same reason: no one wants to be the sacrificial lamb to the government. If you don't believe me, ask Wikileaks who won after national governments started leaning on the companies it relied upon.

Even as anonymous online currencies become more advanced (and potentially more appealing to some sectors of the grey market), hard cash occupies too much of an easy route to fade entirely.

Put it this way: it takes serious, ongoing technological innovation to try and keep an electronic currency one step ahead of the state, while it take serious, ongoing resources from governments just to feebly track the existing under-the-table cash markets. They're probably not in too big a hurry to turn over every stone, either, as the black market helped bail out the legal one during the last financial crisis.

It's hard to beat the basic fact that you can hand a wad of faded paper to someone and they'll give you something in return. Hell, if you really want to get innovative, you can even use dish detergent.

Why revolutions crush rebellions

The revolutionaries already look like Cossacks.

On an unusually cold March morning 92 years ago, thousands of Red Army soldiers left solid ground and charged across five miles of heavy ice to the fortress city of Kronstadt. 

The citadel was held by the rebellious sailors of the Baltic Fleet, formerly the shock troop zealots of the revolution. During the 1917 uprisings, they'd executed their officers en masse and remained one of the Bolshevik's most reliable military forces.

But as Lenin and his crew centralized their power and became increasingly repressive, the sailors turned against them. They seized the fleet and issued their own manifestoes, declaring that "the hammer and sickle – has been replaced by the bayonet and the barred window."

The sailors were experienced fighters in a formidable position: they cut the Red Army down. Over 10,000 soldiers died during 10 days of fighting. But in the end, the government crushed the uprising. They finished devastating Kronstadt just in time to mark the 50th anniversary of the Paris Commune, destroyed by the troops of the fledgling French Third Republic.

In 1794, the leaders of the American Revolution called up their forces once again, this time to end a guerilla rebellion rather than start one. Western farmers had taken up arms rather than pay the whiskey tax that was part of Alexander Hamilton's plan to get the nascent national economy up and running without pissing off his mercantile allies too much. So President George Washington marched west at the head of 13,000 soldiers. There was no major bloodshed, but the message was completely clear: rise up and we'll destroy you.

Then there's the Irish Civil War, 13 Vendémiaire, the Satsuma Rebellion, the Hyderabad campaign, the Cultural Revolution, the 1993 shelling of Russia's parliament. It's a long, bloody list. Hell, in 1848 even Victor Hugo enthusiastically led troops to put down the same riotous Parisians who were his allies a few months before.

There's a mythology around popular revolution, one that informs what kind of politics we revere, that even determines what we consider possible in our wildest dreams.

This is its uncomfortable catalogue of heresies, an alternate timeline running parallel to the shinier canon of July 4, the storming of the Bastille, the Fall of the Iron Curtain. The same process happens across cultures, after violent revolutions and peaceful ones, perpetrated by regimes both tyrannical and democratic. Every time the troops crest the barricades, it poses a dirty little question: why do revolutions, based on the principle that rebellion is justified, end up ruthlessly ending rebellions?

Ending rape culture: less apologies, more consequences

An apology would be good. Firing all three would be far better.

In the wake of the Steubenville rape verdict and the despicable reactions of CNN's commentators, there's a petition demanding a public apology from CNN.

That's laudable, but I think the approach leaves something to be desired. Rape culture's incredibly deeply embedded in many different parts of society, depressingly so. A big part of decreasing that is education and changing cultural norms. But consequences are also vital, and they don't get as much attention. While the military has an epidemic rape problem, for example, Helen Benedict's groundbreaking reporting found that "if a commander won’t tolerate the mistreatment of women, it will not happen." Something about the prospect of life in Leavenworth tends to focus the mind.

So whether organizations like CNN help spread this nonsense or not has far less to do with how apologetic they personally feel and far more to do with how scared they are of public backlash. Public figures stopped spouting as much racist tripe when it became clear it would ruin their careers and their social lives.

Likewise, vital as education is, rape culture will start truly crumbling when anchors, administrators, managers, and bosses that ignore or actively encourage it get fired or turned into social pariahs. It will take another hit when sentences for rapists are measured in decades instead of months, when police devote actual resources to catching them, and when prosecutors hand out less lenient plea bargains.

Deterrence and changing the power dynamic can, hell must, play a role in social progress if it's to have any lasting impact. Next time, the push should focus less on statements of repentance, and more on measurable consequences to show some change is actually taking place.