The Breaking Time

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.

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?

Hierarchy has its place

Sometimes, this is actually the right way to go

Megan Erickson has a great Jacobin piece defending the concept of public education against the "unschooling" fads. While it's full of great points, it also has some interesting bits on hierarchy, like this:

Why shouldn’t kids be asked to put away their crayons and go to lunch at the same time? Why do we assume that clear boundaries, a schedule, and a sense of hierarchy are so threatening to students? Why must the individual’s vision be so carefully and serenely sheltered from other people, who are experienced in this framework as interruptions? There is value in being pulled out of a daydream. There is value in learning to cope with a little coercion, in knowing what it means to cooperate on a daily basis with someone who doesn’t love you, someone who’s not your family member.

Yes, yes, and yes. This doesn't get said nearly enough, and along with her point about the difference between privilege and authority, it takes this from a good essay to a great one.

While Erickson's piece is focused on education, the same assumptions behind "unschooling" — extreme suspicion of any power structure — underlie a whole slew of other movements, from open source to consensus protest groups.

Sometimes, in some arenas, this approach works just fine (with information especially) but in many it doesn't. Sometimes hierarchy is exactly what's needed.

"There's a meeting:" MLK mixes the grand with the practical

There will be many good tributes to Martin Luther King, Jr. today, and in previous years here I've noted his forgotten side and quest for balance. 

But there's something else worth highlighting, and the speech above is a really good example. It's the end of "We Shall Overcome," an incredibly powerful few minutes. Almost lost in the applause, you can hear King giving the rapturous crowd instructions.

He's telling them to attend a meeting. After the heights of this speech, it seems an absolutely mundane thing to do. "That's why we're fighting for a more moral universe against all odds. Meet me in the fellowship hall in 10 minutes." Not a call to find themselves, not pulling them towards vague evolution, King wanted a concrete, immediate action. The rhetoric's important, but it's that combination that made the civil rights movement work.

Open Notes: Tech giants, North Korea, and convenient dystopias

Your next iPhone, made in sunny North Korea

• Google Exec Eric Schmidt recently returned from North Korea. While ostensibly a humanitarian and diplomatic mission, it's hard not to see in the wary welcomes for Kim Jong-Un's "knowledge-based economy" and the broaching of an end to sanctions as the beginning of North Korea becoming a China-style source of cheap labor for the tech industry. In fact, it's already being discussed.

• It's not that tech companies can't make good money if they pay their workers well and don't use Dickensian sweat shops; plenty do. But to make really whopping Apple-level amounts of cash requires really cheap labor, and that's easier in places where people are desperate and don't have any political power. Hence FoxConn.

• China's getting more prosperous and more restive, so the cost of doing business there might well go up, especially given growing labor unrest. Sooner, rather than later, escape hatches will be needed.

• The extreme irony of Stalinist states and the chic business sector finding that they need each other.

• Google's little-discussed yellow badge workers. While hardly laboring under North Korean conditions, it definitely points to a willingness to have an underclass even closer to home. Companies, whatever the ideals of their founders, are a structure set up for making money, and over time everything else becomes secondary.

• Combined with the slow collapse of the social safety net and real wages, give these trends a few decades and you could see more tech companies having large numbers low-wage employees closer to home, especially as the original founders age and they become more established institutions.

• William Gibson's line about the future not being evenly distributed applies to the future's nightmares as well (ask a Somali). It turns out the shining tech-fueled tomorrow might not just coexist with industrial dystopia, but require it.

The Red Umbrella Fund and financing social change

 

So here's an interesting initiative:

"Save us from saviours" is the piercing refrain of a growing human rights movement demanding that sex workers be recognised as more than victims to be rescued or strategic populations to be targeted for public health campaigns. It's likely to strike a nerve among some in the traditional aid and development industry, often criticised for top-down, paternalistic projects.

"Sex workers are discriminated against and their human rights unrecognised around the world, even where sex work isn't illegal," says Nadia van der Linde, co-ordinator of the Red Umbrella Fund, the first global grant-making mechanism set up to give sex workers more control of projects that directly concern them. "Even when they stand up for themselves, it's very hard for them to find support."

The fund, which was launched in April 2012, and will announce this month who will receive its first grants, grew out of a multi-year collaboration between sex worker organisations and interested donors, who first met five years ago to discuss campaigns to curb human trafficking.

Embracing a philosophy of "nothing for us without us", the innovative fund is governed by sex workers, who sit alongside donor representatives on the committees that oversee and manage its work.

More of this, please. When I've mentioned that movements for social change often flounder because of a lack of attention to infrastructure, the lack of things like the Red Umbrella Fund are exactly what I mean. Movements need resources, but that's traditionally an area that would-be activists don't think about. Witness Occupy, for example, which often had no idea to handle the funds it received, and ended up with horrors like meth fiends in control of finance.

That's what happens when an organization, whatever its philosophy, doesn't think about, well, organization. Shepherding resources carefully is even more important for the causes of the poor or ignored, because they're less likely to have patrons capable of just shoving them suitcases full of cash. A lot of worthy causes flounder because no one pays attention to the details.

Furthermore, structuring the organization carefully around access to those resources — instead of treating them like an afterthought — helps to increase the power of the populations who most need them. This looks like a promising model, and I hope to see more of it.

Idea Scavenge: have a stranger run your government

A gilded cage for an invited ruler. The square of Sienna's Palazzo Pubblico.

I stumbled upon an interesting idea recently while researching medieval social organization. While the topic may sound dry, it's actually fascinating stuff. A welter of communal, democratic and mercantile structures all co-existed. These are essentially the building blocks of the modern nation-state and corporation, along with many alternatives to those options.

I've already written about the peasant revenge gang that was the commune. The idea of a podesta is also pretty fascinating. While they started simply as foreign governors, they became much more interesting. From chronicler Leander Albertus:

The citizens, seeing that there often arose among them quarrels and altercations, whether from favoritism or friendship, from envy or hatred that one had against another, by which their republic suffered great harm, loss and detriment; therefore, they decided, after much deliberation, to provide against these disorders. And thus they began to create a man of foreign birth their chief magistrate, giving him every power, authority and jurisdiction over the city, as well over criminal as over civil causes, and in times of war as well as in times of peace, calling him praetor as being above the others, or podestà., as having every authority and power over the city."

There's a lot of factional strife in the modern era, after all, and some of the reasons for a figure like a podesta are still there. A capable outsider, mutually respected by most of the factions, might be a really good way to run a really fractious place and mediate disputes. Notably, the podesta's powers were later scaled back to mostly judicial functions, and they were intentionally isolated within their palaces to prevent any one group from having control

This idea seems like it could be really useful right now, especially for areas with a lot of distrust and political divisions. I could easily see something like a podesta being great for running a city-state or particular enclave. Outside perspective has its advantages, especially in dispute resolution. Local councils or military leaders still had plenty of power in cities with a podesta, but the respected stranger offered some check on local ambitions and provided a handy long-term perspective.

Importantly, in its most successful days, the podesta was chosen by locals, not imposed from the outside. Otherwise, they would end up terrible at settling disputes and would likely get thrown out by rebellion in the process.