Americans, in particular, embrace a conceit that the United States is special because it has, if you will, “a government of the people, by the people, for the people,” and they tend to believe that the United States is unusual and almost unique in that regard as being the first modern nation to embrace that ideal without transitioning from a monarchy.

And I have to admit that I semi-consciously bought into that general feeling, that is, until I began to read The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, a massive and quite scholarly tome that in the first 400 pages [which is how far I’ve read to date] effectively disassembles factually so many myths about human history. As the authors document, there have been quite a few societies, some of them powers in their own time, that were not ruled by kings, monarchs, oligarchs, emperors, or other authoritarian systems of governance. The book also shows examples of cultures run by sophisticated and intelligent people who chose societal structures based on a need to maximize individual freedom. From what I can determine, none of those cultures survived contact with more aggressive cultures, possibly because maximizing personal freedom minimizes the cooperative sacrifice of freedom necessary to fight off aggression.

There are several points implied by these analyses (and I’m making the implications, because I haven’t finished the book). The first one that struck me was that egalitarian societies tend to be more vulnerable because they reject or minimize physical coercion for societal ends, while authoritarian societies can more easily and readily mobilize and employ force on a massive scale. The second is that, effectively, money in a culture with a banking system is a means of storing and wielding power. Without a banking system, the value of tokens, i.e., money, rests on either the value of the token itself or voluntary acceptance of the value of those tokens, which allows a would-be recipient to refuse the tokens. Some earlier societies consciously rejected the use of money because they believe it concentrated power in too few individuals.

One of the basic points hammered into me in economic history was the fact that a society cannot develop much in the way of tools and technology without an agricultural surplus, that is, that those growing or hunting the food have to produce considerably more than they consume. There are effectively only two ways to get that result: either pay the growers more or compel them to do so.

From these basics, it seems to me, certain results are almost inevitable. Because the creation and maintenance of higher technology requires concentration of wealth/power, and of individuals with specific skills, higher tech societies must either bribe or force workers. If bribery (the free market way) is employed, those with skills deemed less valuable or useful are going to be less and less satisfied.

If the examples cited in The Dawn of Everything are accurate, and they seem to be, authoritarian societies persist in some form or another until they’re destroyed by a more successful authoritarian regime, or very seldom, by a successful and popular egalitarian movement, while more egalitarian societies are destroyed by greed and dissatisfaction or by conquest because the culture cannot or will not sacrifice enough to be able to defend itself.

Over the weekend, both Bill Maher and The New York Times made essentially the same observation – that large U.S. corporations are engaging in wide-scale self-censorship with regard to China. Movies are being censored as they’re being made to remove any subject matter, no matter how small, that might offend Chinese authorities – like removing the flag patch of Taiwan from the Tom Cruise’s flight jacket in the next “Top Gun” movie.

It doesn’t matter to corporations that the Chinese government is an autocratic surveillance police state that is operating concentration camps against minorities within its own borders or that Chinese corporations are the largest-scale thieves of intellectual property. All that matters is the bucks to be made by access to the Chinese domestic market.

“Bucks above all” isn’t limited to corporations, of course. The International Olympic Committee has continually turned a blind eye to the rampant Russian doping scandals, and allowed the fiction of the “Russian Olympic Committee” to send athletes to the Winter Games, clearly for financial reasons.

This kind of behavior by corporations also isn’t new in the United States, either. Even before the U.S. entered WWII, both General Motors and Ford allowed conversion of their German plants to military production at a time when U.S. government documents showed they were still resisting calls by the Roosevelt administration to step up military production in their U.S. plants. Ford’s German subsidiary, Ford-Werke, even used slave labor from a concentration camp to produce military materiel.

IBM supplied the punch card technology that allowed the German government to identify and track “undesirables,” such as Jews and Gypsies, so they could be exterminated by the Nazis. Even after it was apparent that the system was being used for the Holocaust, IBM continued to supply Germany with machines. IBM subsidiaries in Europe still delivered punch cards to Nazi Germany, and IBM executives directed operations through neutral Switzerland.

Until the US officially entered WWII, Standard Oil re-registered its oil tankers under the flag of Panama, enabling the ships to carry oil to Nazi Germany, and also provided tetraethyl lead to Japan.

The bottom line is fairly simple. For far too many large U.S. corporations, the opportunity to make more bucks transcends U.S. national interests, environmental stability, basic morality, and truth. And that hasn’t changed in over a hundred years, which is why corporations need strong federal oversight… and why the corporate sector fights such oversight. They want the freedom to maximize their bucks, regardless of the impact on everyone else… and the world.

Over the past several years, there have been considerable furor, claims, and counter-claims over political statements by prominent candidates that have in fact been proven not to be accurate in the slightest. Those statements are usually justified under the general concept of “freedom of speech.”

As many have said, and I’m among them, you’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts, meaning that you shouldn’t be allowed to present false or untrue facts, at least not publicly. Yet politicians, especially those such as Donald Trump, repeatedly reiterated proven untruths.

Despite assertions that all speech should be free, the Supreme Court and other courts have held that certain forms of speech are not protected by the First Amendment. In general terms, there are nine categories of unprotected speech: obscenity, fighting words, defamation (including libel and slander), child pornography, perjury, blackmail, incitement to imminent lawless action, true threats, and solicitations to commit crimes. So it’s legally clear that not all forms of speech are protected.

So far, at least, under current law and legal precedents, politicians and those running for office cannot be prosecuted for statements that are untrue or misleading.

What I find both interesting and appalling is that while various state and federal laws prohibit false or misleading advertising about products, there’s no restriction on untrue or misleading statements by politicians.

What the Supreme Court either ignored or dismissed in the Citizens United decision is that political speech conveyed by any media, whether print or electronic, is not just speech, but an advertisement for what is actually a commodity – the services which a politician or would-be politician promises to undertake for his or her constituents if elected.

When someone expresses an opinion or even wrong or false facts in conversation, they aren’t selling a product, but when they do it in public arenas and/or through the media in pursuit of a political goal, they’re trying to sell a commodity… and the claims for that commodity should be regulated and legally penalized for blatant falsehoods, just as corporate advertising is, at least theoretically.

From what I’ve read lately, the Republican Party is now proposing the very thing that it finds objectionable in certain segments of the Democratic Party – censorship by the extreme minority.

Now, what the GOP has proposed doesn’t sound like that, at first glance, because the proposal is to make every bit of every teachers’ curriculum publicly available, apparently online. It sounds so eminently reasonable, and it feeds into another Republican line of attack that surfaced in the last election – the idea that parents should control what their children are taught.

Part of this belief comes from the idea that, if we’ve been to school, we know what should be taught and how. If we’ve played a sport, we know as much as the professional coach, etc. But the plain fact is that most people don’t know as much as the teacher does about the subject being taught, nor do they know as much as the professional coach. They’re entitled to their opinions, but, unless they have equivalent professional experience, their views shouldn’t override the professionals in professional matters.

Years ago, some family members were discussing music with my wife the professor, who’s sung opera and art song internationally and taught and directed opera at the university level for over fifty years. They asked some questions about her views of the comparative excellence of various works, then decided that their beliefs were superior to hers, despite the fact that none of them, despite their advanced degrees in other fields, had any academic training or professional experience in music. But they were still quietly totally convinced of their “expertise,” as are too many parents who have little to rely on but their own personal experience.

Then there are the practical downsides to this latest Republican proposal, one that might as well be termed “educational populism.”

To begin with, such a proposal will add an enormous workload to teachers, many of whom are already burning out and leaving the field. And given that most teachers and curricula are already heavily scrutinized, generally the only parents who will peruse such data are those who already object, which, in effect, becomes a form of censorship by the minority.

If something like this becomes law, wherever it does the result will be to further dumb down the curriculum, because the teachers who need to keep their jobs will avoid controversy at all costs and more of the teachers who are trying to get children to think for themselves will leave or be driven out.

But the Republicans are politically astute in capitalizing on the innate belief that parents know more about what their children should be taught than the teachers do. And this “astuteness” is likely to result in even greater damage to public education in the United States.

Over the past year, banning books in U.S. libraries, both public and school, has reached an all-time high. Now, to be frank, trying to ban books in the United States has a long and odious history that dates back to the arrival of the first “colonists,” or if we’re being perfectly truthful, the first European invaders, but, all too often, truth is one of the reasons why people want to ban books, because, if it’s not their truth, or it contradicts or shows flaws in their truth, they don’t want a contrary truth out there, especially where their children might encounter it.

The books banned somewhere in the United States are too numerous even to list them all, but among those banned are titles that are classics of one sort or another: To Kill a Mockingbird, The Lord of the Rings, The Jungle, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Slaughterhouse Five, Gone with the Wind, A Farewell to Arms, Animal Farm, Brave New World, Catch-22, Of Mice and Men, A Clockwork Orange, 1984, Beloved, Ulysses [James Joyce], The Color Purple, The Grapes of Wrath [also an older book, released in 1939 by Nobel Prize winning author John Steinbeck], The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, Invisible Man [Ralph Ellison], Song of Solomon [Toni Morrison, another Nobel Prize winner], and Native Son [Richard Wright]

The vast majority of books being banned currently deal with race or racial identity, gender issues, and systemic injustice, and the majority of the current bans are by schools and public libraries.

In 2020, the latest year for which statistics have been compiled, the most challenged book was George, a novel about the life of a transgender fourth grader. The other nine books that made the 2020 top 10 banned list were Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You; All American Boys; Speak; The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian; Something Happened in Our Town: A Child’s Story About Racial Injustice; To Kill a Mockingbird [some 60 years after it was first published]; Of Mice and Men; The Bluest Eye [Toni Morrison]; and The Hate U Give.

The latest high profile attack by the book banners is Maus, a serialized comic book published as a graphic novel in 1992 [and the only graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize] by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman, who channeled his Polish-Jewish, Holocaust-surviving parents’ experiences into the semi-autobiographical masterpiece in which Jews are represented as mice and Germans as cats.

From what I can see, the book banners all share one common trait – they want to decide what published work they, their friends, and their children can even see on the bookshelves, and they’re angry and afraid that views contrary to their own will pollute or contaminate people, or heaven forbid, make them think and change their views. In short, the book banners want control.

And that kind of control is antithetical to the First Amendment, pure and simple.

If a parent can’t instill basic human values in his, her, or their children before they start really reading, banning books isn’t going to help. In fact, banning a book might even spur greater interest in the banned book. Apparently, after the attack on Maus, the book moved back onto the bestseller list.

What book banners all have in common is a dislike of something depicted in the book they wish banned, and these dislikes spring from both ends of the political spectrum, and rarely from those with more moderate views.

Like all true believers, the book banners are firmly convinced that they, and only they, should control the books their children and others in their community can even see on the library shelves or be taught in school, regardless of whether they’re literary classics or present an accurate depiction of events or beliefs that have created harm to others.

But then, while there just might be a connection between people who don’t want their children to have open minds and those who insist that an honest and fair election was stolen because they didn’t like the results, there are also those at the other end of the political spectrum who also don’t want facts, presentations, and views contrary to their beliefs represented on the shelves.

Censorship is censorship, regardless of political, social, or economic views.

Particularly with regard to COVID, there’s been a huge debate over “freedom.” As I pointed out earlier, a society that is densely populated or one that has densely populated urban areas that make up the majority of its population will, by necessity, need to restrict the freedoms of its citizens, if it doesn’t want its society to drown in chaos, anarchy, and violence.

I’m scarcely the first person to note this. Theodore Roosevelt observed, “Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive.”

The historian Will Durant put it another way, “When liberty destroys order, the hunger for order will destroy liberty.”

The United States has a unique demographic problem. It contains vast areas of land with extremely low population density, but most of its population [86%, according to the 2020 Census] lives in urban or suburban areas with much denser population. Yet the 14% of the population that lives in non-urban/non-suburban areas occupies 72% of the land area of the U.S.

In Utah, where I live, 82% of the population lives in five counties, which hold only 15% of the land in the state, for a rough population density of roughly 203 people per square mile in those five counties. The population density in the rest of the state averages 8 people per square mile, but many counties have far less dense populations. On average, Daggett County has 1.4 people per square mile. And Utah is a low-density state.

New York City averages 26,403 people per square mile, while San Francisco has 26,403 people per square mile and Los Angeles 8,485 people per square mile. Yet even in states with densely populated cities, there are often large areas with low population densities.

What does this have to do with “freedom’? Damned near everything. People in rural Utah, or rural anywhere, don’t think they need as much government and regulation because not everything they do impacts thousands of people.

But there are two problems with that. First, those people in the more densely populated areas do need such regulation to keep order and maintain a reasonable level of safety. Admittedly, there are urban areas suffering excessive and unnecessary regulation, i.e., California, but some of California’s bigger problems, like the explosion of homelessness, might well be tied to not only the lack of affordable housing, but also to the lack of regulation of where people can live and under what conditions. Perhaps their “freedom” to squat or erect tent cities in public parks and thoroughfares is a bit excessive, but talking about that is has become political suicide.

Second, like it or not, lack of regulation and order in rural areas has adverse impacts not only on those areas, but on everyone, because everything is connected to everything else.

COVID, for example, while often late in coming, still hit rural counties and almost always had a more devastating effect because those counties don’t usually have strong health care infrastructure. In addition, most of those who have died disproportionately of COVID in rural counties were people who didn’t get vaccinated, largely because they didn’t want the federal government infringing on their freedoms. But now they’re demanding far more federal and state health care and support than they’re paying for.

While rural counties tend to be conservative and anti-government, they also benefit disproportionately from a wide range of federal government programs, even while their inhabitants complain about the government that provides those services. Counties like Daggett County would have difficulty even maintaining roads without financial aid from the state and federal government.

The other associated problem is that too often under-regulated companies operating in rural locales not only ruin the local environment, but far more. For example, in 1972, in Buffalo Creek, West Virginia, Pittston Coal’s sludge dams collapsed,sending hundreds of millions of gallons of black polluted water down the valley, killing 125, injuring 1,100, destroying 16 communities, 1000 homes, and in the end, the company paid little more than a million dollars, despite all that, as well as polluting all the drinking water for years in a large section of West Virginia for years.

PG&E in California has been found legally responsible for massive groundwater pollution, fatal natural gas pipe explosions, and, most lately, for massive wildfires, almost all of which have occurred in rural areas where the company faced less intense regulatory scrutiny.

The bottom line is pretty simple. The less populated areas get a disproportionate share of federal resources, but they don’t want to operate under any laws that they see as unnecessary, even when those laws are for everyone’s benefit. Yet they want the funding from those higher density areas to fund services they want and can’t afford without outside government assistance. What’s worse is that all too many of the local politicians in such areas either don’t know or won’t admit that they receive such subsidies.

The vast majority of fast food restaurants here in Cedar City have gone to drive-by service because they can’t hire enough people. I see “now hiring” signs where I never saw them before. It took almost two months to get my snow blower repaired, partly because of COVID and partly because the power equipment dealership couldn’t find qualified mechanics.

Record numbers of people are quitting their jobs, especially in hospitality, retail, and healthcare. There have been articles in several periodicals lately about people quitting jobs or not wanting to work at “shit jobs.” I have to wonder what world they’re living in. All jobs have shit components – even writing – and historically most jobs haven’t been all that easy. There’s a reason why the term “job” is synonymous with “work.”

People want others to do unpleasant jobs, but there aren’t enough American citizens who want to do the jobs for the wages offered. Yet far too many of those who want the goods and services provided by low-paying jobs don’t want to pay for what it would cost to hire people. Nor do they want to allow immigrants who would do those jobs at current pay rates into the United States.

We have housing shortages and rapidly rising housing prices in the U.S. In nearby St. George, the price of a median-priced home has almost doubled to $500,000 over the last six years, with almost a 30% increase in the past year alone. In all too many cities, Americans with median incomes can’t afford rent, let alone mortgage payments. Yet it gets harder and harder to build a house every year, and harder and harder for builders to find qualified workers.

Students complain about the high cost of college, yet, at the same time, every year, my wife the professor has students who complain about not having enough money, but who don’t do assignments and papers and don’t show up for classes – and end up losing full-tuition scholarships because they flunk out.

Republicans complain about government ignoring the average person, but they continue to elect predominantly politicians who either graduated from expensive elite colleges or who are rich, if not both. And even though the Republicans are against everything except barring immigrants and lowering taxes at a time of massive deficits, their supporters still think they’re good for the working man, especially white males with limited skills and education.

Democrats say they’re for the working people, but they’re having a hard time reaching agreement among themselves because of the so-called progressives who are pushing so many policies with regulations and price tags even most Democrats find excessive. And a likely result is that they’ll get too little done before the mid-term elections and will wonder why they lost seats in Congress.

The first basic point about freedom is that absolute freedom does not exist and never has. Every object and/or entity is constrained by its environment and by other entities.

The second point is that, above the forager/near subsistence level of human culture, material improvement is linked to population density and the production of an agricultural/food surplus, i.e., those producing food need to produce more than they consume to feed others who design and produce tools that make life above the subsistence level possible. All technological improvements come from communities, not isolated individuals. Virtually all major advances in human technology have been developed and been implemented in urban centers and cultures, or financially and technically supported by those centers.

Third, increasingly urban areas and areas with high population density cannot continue to exist without restrictions on human behavior, either through manners and custom, through laws, or through some combination of both. Moreover, the greater the density, the greater the need for more restrictions on the excesses of human behavior.

At least so far, every advancement of human technology has created more toxic waste products, and the need to manage such wastes requires enforceable rules. If such wastes aren’t managed, then substantial segments of the population have their freedom to a healthy life restricted by the freedom of those benefitting from the sale and use of those goods.

The bottom line is very simple. Functioning societies need restrictions on “freedom.” To remain functional over time, a high-tech, high consuming society needs more restrictions than a decentralized low-tech society.

Who enacts such restrictions and upon whom? In an autocratic state the ruler does. In a state that has some form of popular government, those elected to govern do.

The greatest problem for either form of government is understanding that everything affects everything else and that simplistic maxims don’t work well in practice. In essence, the struggle over the direction of U.S. government has been the conflict between two “principles.”

That government is best that governs least.

The government is best that strives for the maximum good for the maximum number.

The first is, at best, in effect a defense of the status quo, and at worst a maximization the power of those with power, wealth, and skills that can be easily monetized or turned into wealth and/or power.

The second, at best, puts the determination of “good” totally in the hands of government, and at its extreme, becomes a socialism that disproportionately rewards those of lesser ability and determination.

A government that governs least is highly unlikely to restrict the abuse of personal freedoms. A government determined to obtain maximum good for the maximum number is just as likely to crush innovation and excellence, and in doing so, bring about its own eventual downfall.

Neither extreme position works, or not for long, yet the Americans who control the two political parties, at least lately, are polarizing to the extremes, while the majority of Americans in the middle bemoan the lack of middle ground even as they largely vote for the most extreme politician on “their” side, and then attack the few in the middle who try to work out compromises.

As many pundits and non-pundits have pointed out, freedom isn’t free. And most people would agree. But what is seldom discussed are the costs of various freedoms.

Freedom of speech, for example, means that I get deluged with unwanted and unordered advertising mail. It means that political demagogues can assert that falsehoods are true. It means I have to spend money in court to stop someone from falsely libeling me, or at the least pay an attorney.

But there’s a new form of “freedom” being extolled that’s also far more costly, especially on others. And that’s the so-called freedom not to obey public health mandates, currently being pushed by anti-vaxxers, particularly COVID-anti-vaxxers. Since vaccinations reduce the chance of being hospitalized for COVID by close to 90%, those who don’t get vaccinated place enormous costs and strain on the health care system and those who staff it, as well as additional costs on their own families and neighbors.

A study by the Peterson-KFF Health System calculated that the additional hospital health care costs created by unvaccinated individuals being treated for COVID, just for the period from July 1, 2021 to November 30, 2021, was almost $14 billion. The cost for hospital treatment of COVID patients can range from around $11,000 to well over $300,000, but comes out to average between $20,000 to $25,000 per patient, according to various studies. Other reputable studies peg the average costs more in the $40,000 per patient range. These figures don’t include follow-up visits or the costs associated with long COVID. In addition, unvaccinated individuals hospitalized with COVID had a 10% higher rate of complications, which increased their costs of treatment.

And these costs don’t just fall on the unvaccinated individuals. Some costs fall on insurers, who will cover those costs by raising premiums on everyone. Other costs will fall on family members because insurance and government programs don’t cover all COVID medical expenses. The costs of treating uninsured or underinsured unvaccinated individuals will require increased fees on others or funding from government sources… or in some cases, closure of the health facility.

Then, when hospitals are filled with largely unvaccinated COVID patients, those hospitals won’t have enough space or staff to treat urgent non-COVID patients, or not to treat them as quickly or effectively.

The increasing number of unvaccinated COVID patients is also taking a toll on doctors and skilled nursing staff, with a workload and stress level that makes them more vulnerable to breakthrough COVID and other opportunistic infections. In turn, over time, that reduces the level of care for all patients, which means that those comparative few vaccinated COVID patients, usually older people or immune-compromised individuals have to suffer more as a result of the “freedom” of the unvaccinated not to be vaccinated.

So…for those of you “freedom-loving” anti-vaxxers, your so-called freedom isn’t free. You’re just imposing the costs on everyone else… and, in my book, that’s called “freeloading,” not freedom.

I’ve lived in Cedar City for close to thirty years, but I’ve almost been hit by drivers blatantly running red lights three times in the last month, compared to once in all the years before. Red lights, not yellow lights that turned red. I’ve also seen four drivers running stop signs, not slowing instead of stopping and then speeding up, but running them full speed… and not in the middle of the night when no one was around. I know of at least two recent accidents where a driver ignored a red light and caused an accident, one of which resulted in the death of a motorcyclist.

The Utah State Highway patrol has also reported that highway speeds, accidents, and deaths are up dramatically in the past year – the average speeds appearing to the fastest ever, even though speed limits haven’t changed. I’ve been passed on Main Street, when driving the speed limit [25-45 mph, depending on locale] by drivers who had to be going close to sixty, and frequently, not just occasionally. On the interstate, while going 82 mph in an 80 mph area, I found that to avoid causing a traffic back-up I had to move up to 85 mph, and people were still passing me, going at least 90 mph.

But this isn’t confined to Utah, either. Neighboring Colorado registered the highest number highway deaths in twenty years in 2021. And late in 2021, the federal government reported that road fatalities spiked the first half of 2021, the largest increase ever recorded in its reporting system’s history during a six-month period, nearly a twenty percent increase from the same period in 2020. Incidents of speeding and not using seatbelts were also found to be higher than before the pandemic.

Then there’s this pandemic, where statistics demonstrate rather conclusively that being vaccinated and wearing a mask reduces your chance of being hospitalized and/or dying. Data from New York shows that of those recently hospitalized for COVID, the unvaccinated were more than 32 times likely to be hospitalized than those who were vaccinated and even more likely than that to die and/or suffer long-term complications.

I just wonder if all those people speeding and running red lights are the same ones who aren’t getting vaccinated, especially here in Cedar City, where only 47% of the eligible population is vaccinated.

One of my readers made a telling comment last week – that Republicans believe the election was “stolen” because they cannot believe they’re in the minority.

The first reaction of those who aren’t Republicans is likely disbelief. How can they believe something that’s so manifestly not so?

The answer to that lies in a simple observation. Given any choice in the matter, people tend to surround themselves or join with people who are like themselves, and they also tend to buy houses in places where they feel comfortable. Add to this the combination of the growth of cell phones, the internet, and a range of news services that all allow people to wall out anyone or any news they don’t want to believe in. So they instinctively come to believe that “most people are like me.”

This has almost inexorably led to a mindset whereby they believe that people like themselves are the only ones who count, and, in the case of Republicans, that mindset can be justified by the past, where all those who mattered were essentially white males. Since Republicans find it difficult to believe that there can be large numbers of women and minorities with money and political power, they attack specific individuals, particularly women, as “outliers” and unrepresentative, claiming that these individuals don’t represent “true” American values.

This leads to the dual fallacy that not only are Republicans really in the majority but also that those who don’t believe as they do aren’t truly “real Americans.”

So, if those who aren’t real Americans aren’t in the majority, they must have stolen the election from real Americans.

Of course, that line of thinking ignores the fact that the only real Americans are American Indians, because they were here first, and the ancestors of the Republicans’ “real Americans” stole the United States from those American Indians.

More than 200 years ago, Edmund Burke made the following observation:

“Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are
what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us… They give their whole form and color to our lives. According to their quality, they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them.”

Admittedly, the law touches each of us a great deal more now than in Burke’s time, but the essential truth of his observation remains, simply because law cannot encompass everything in social interaction, business practices, government, and personal life – and when it tries, it fails on some and often many levels, even in the most authoritarian states.

All functioning societies have a shared culture, or at times, more than one culture, each shared by a significant fraction of the population, and each culture embodies a standard of manners. Much of what has been historically manifested in the operation of the government of the United States was never codified into law. It was based on manners and custom. Losing candidates accepted their loss, sometimes grudgingly, but they accepted it. Except for Andrew Jackson, Presidents generally accepted Supreme Court rulings they didn’t like, as did Congress.

All this was based on a mannered acceptance of authority.

Then came the 1960s and 1970s and what amounted to a combination of an assault on manners as phony and hypocritical, the Civil Rights movement, which was a slow-burning explosion against the cultural, legal, and long-standing physical repression of black Americans, and the feminist movement, another slow-burning explosion against thousands of years of male dominance. Over the years that followed, these led to significant but delayed changes in the legal system.

But what revolutionaries and reformers have too often failed to understand is that while laws can, immediately after enactment and enforcement, require different requirements of behavior and conduct, when such laws are enacted, they’re often in conflict with cultural beliefs and behavior. And cultural beliefs and manners are highly resistant to change, particularly when those in power have a vested interest in resisting change.

We’ve seen this around the world in often futile attempts to change social structures and cultures into societies that are more “democratic” and egalitarian.

Yet we’ve failed to notice that we have the same problem here in the United States. We’ve also failed to notice that since the European invasion of North America [a phrase studiously avoided by almost all politicians and historians], the forms and control of culture, business, political and governing structures have been and continue to be dominated by white males, but with legal changes over the last generation or so that complete dominance is no longer assured.

And because so much of the American political and social system has been based on cultural acceptance, when the impact of profound legal changes has truly begun to change the political, social, and economic power structure of the United States, those believing themselves to be disadvantaged by those changes, and who feel they’re the ones being discriminated against by their relative loss of power and influence, have effectively decided to reject the traditional mannered acceptance of popular political change, since it no longer benefits them. Given that, it appears, unfortunately, that more unrest and violence are likely.

I can understand that Republicans feel Democrats spend too much and want to spend even more. I can understand that they feel the “wild left” is pushing gender/sexual politics beyond the law. I can understand why they want more spending on police, rather than less. I can understand their concerns about immigration, concerns that many Democrats share but refuse to acknowledge publicly. I can understand their concerns about excessive government regulation. I can understand, even if I disagree violently, their feelings about abortion. I can even understand [although it’s incredibly difficult] that they want Trump back as President.

Issues such as these, whether we like it or not, are the sort of issues to be decided by Congress, the courts, and the President through Constitutional procedures, not by a mob smashing its way into the U.S. Capitol and not by an authoritarian government.

What I find impossible to accept from Republicans is their belief that the last election was “stolen,” and their failure to accept that the January insurrection was just that – an attempt to overthrow the results of an election that even Republican state officials claim was fair, particularly at a time when Republicans controlled the majority of state governments.

To me, such Republican stances are the precursors of yet another attempt to force their will upon others, even on issues where over two-thirds of the population opposes the Republican position.

In his Gettysburg Address Abraham Lincoln said that the Civil War was fought so “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.”

Today, it’s more than a little clear that the Republicans firmly no longer believe that, but instead will deny facts and ignore the will of all the people in order to create government of Republicans, by Republicans, and for Republicans, and the hell with anyone else, even though Republicans are in fact a minority of Americans.

Lately, especially over the last few years, there’s been a great deal of rhetoric from largely conservative sources about the need to stop “the war on Christian America,” a “war” supposedly being waged by “the left.”

Those making such charges claim that liberals and the left want to replace “Christian values” with big government, but those making the charges conveniently ignore history and the Constitution. At the time the Constitution was drafted, Europe had endured hundreds of years of war over which creed and what “Christian values” were to be the law of what land. That was why the Founding Fathers stated in the First Amendment to the Constitution that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

So… by the words of the Constitution itself, the United States is not legally and should never be a “Christian nation.” Nor should explicitly religious beliefs and practices be enshrined in law. Yet when individuals and groups use the law to protest local and state laws establishing or promoting religious values, Republicans and many evangelicals paint those individuals as leftist radicals trying to destroy the United States.

What’s ironic about the efforts of the Republicans and evangelicals to paint the left as the enemies of Christianity is that Republicans and too many evangelicals are attempting, through changes in statutory law, especially on the state level, but increasingly on the federal level, to impose mandatory “Christian values” on everyone, whether Christian or not. Currently, a wide range of studies and surveys indicate that roughly 35% of Americans are not Christians. Most of that 35% are either non-believers, atheists, or agnostics.

There’s a clear difference between freedom to practice one’s own faith and enacting laws to force one’s beliefs on others through law, and that difference is ignored more and more, largely, but not exclusively, by Republicans and the far right, not that there’s much difference any more.

We have a long-standing Christmas tradition. Actually, we have quite a few, and I suspect all couples who’ve been married (or together) thirty years have long-standing holiday traditions. But the tradition under discussion is an extensive display of outside Christmas lights – white icicle lights on the gutters on the front and rear of the house, twinkling white lights on artificial garlands affixed to long rear deck railing, some lighted figures on the front lawn, and various strings of lights on the fitzer hedge flanking the front walk and in the side yard.

Needless to say, a number of hours are required for installation, usually taking much of the weekend after Thanksgiving. The labor is necessary for the enjoyment the lights provide us, occasional visiting family members, and the neighbors – and, of course, the power company, which surely enjoys the increased revenues.

We have, however, noticed a trend in terms of the lights themselves. When we first moved to the house we occupy some twenty-eight years ago, we bought six strands of white-wired white icicle lights for the rear of the house. We still have four strands remaining. On three of them every light still works. The fourth strand, alas, lost the lights in a three foot section this winter after two days of winds gusting to 50 mph, likely because several bulbs were smashed. Replacement lights for a 28 year-old strand are not available.

The trend we noted is that almost no set of lights manufactured in the last ten years lasts more than two or three years. The other interesting factor is that although my wife scrupulously saves all the spare bulbs, every strand of newly-purchased replacement lights has a slightly different bulb design, so that if you need more than two replacement bulbs, you essentially need to buy a new strand. And it’s worse than that, because it takes needle-nosed pliers, a surgeon’s touch, and the strength of Sampson to replace one of those bulbs.

Which is why, every January I end up tossing a strand or two of lights, and every late November I buy more, which invariably give out more quickly than their predecessors. I have the feeling that we’re on the way to one-season disposable Christmas lights, and that may be a reason why light displays are becoming limited to those of us who are slaves to our traditions.

In the previous post, I lamented the massive lack of honesty among Republicans, especially among elected office-holders, who are getting to the point where at least some of them will literally do almost anything to hang onto to power and position, whether legal or not.

So far, the Democrats are better, but not nearly as much better as they believe, and therein lies the problem.

The public “lying” problem isn’t new. It’s as old as civilization, but when it gets bad enough that most of the public in a country believes that no public official can be trusted, that country is on the brink of revolution or autocracy, if not both. The United States is coming perilously close to that benchmark, given that the majority of Republicans have effectively declared that they don’t believe the administration on factual matters of national importance.

So how did we get here?

It’s really pretty sadly simple. First, Americans have never liked unpleasant truths, and rather than face them, they prefer to blame others, usually the President in power. Second, while Americans have always had a weak understanding of politics and history, the current generations have an even weaker grasp and, moreover, don’t want to improve that understanding. Third, Americans have become slaves to instant gratification, and with that has come a failure to understand or accept that it takes time to fix things. That’s why the first President Bush lost re-election – because he made unpleasant and unpopular financial fixes – and why President Clinton reaped the benefits of those fixes because he didn’t have to make unpopular public policy choices.

Fourth, politicians of both parties have learned that telling unpleasant truths has the immediate consequence of unpopularity and losing the next election. This bleeds over into everything.

For example, although the official inflation rate for some time, until the last few months, has been below 2%, that methodology for calculating inflation isn’t the same as it was fifty years ago, because the impacts of housing, food, energy, and education are now significantly understated. This “adjustment” not only understated the “official” amount of inflation, but also allowed the government to keep down cost-of-living increases in Social Security, military pensions, and various other benefits and programs, which not only reduced federal outlays but effectively was a hidden tax on beneficiaries.

So… when these costs suddenly increase, and government economists are saying inflation is “transitory,” even people who aren’t economists definitely get the idea that their government is lying to them. And all those years of misinformation and statistical manipulation are coming home to roost in the form of more and more people losing trust in government… and asking, “What else aren’t they telling the truth about?”

Now, even when a public official is telling the truth, most people are skeptical.

And that’s very, very bad news at a time when there are no good quick fixes available.

According to recent polls, roughly 60% of registered Republicans and Republican office-holders have now endorsed the lie that Trump had the election stolen from him by fraud. In addition, the Republican leadership is effectively ostracizing any Republican office-holder who dares to tell the truth.

The real issue is no longer just about that lie. It’s about the fact that the majority of Republicans will not only blatantly lie, but will reject the facts and the truth in that instance, especially when Trump administration officials refuse to testify about what happened on January 6th and when Trump himself attempts to keep records secret which would reveal what happened behind the scenes.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, not when the vast majority of deaths from COVID are now among the unvaccinated [largely Republicans] who refuse to believe the cold hard statistics about who is dying and who is not. When people will die because they refuse the facts, why should I be surprised that they’ll accept another big lie about who really won the election.

Republicans claim that life is sacred, and that’s why they want to ban abortion. So why do they so strongly oppose aid to children born in poverty through no fault of their own? By their logic, children in both situations are faultless and need help, but apparently only the unborn deserve it…and only until they’re born, which is quite convenient for the Republican pocketbook.

And because abortion is still largely governed by state law, poor women in Republican-dominated states would be impacted far more than wealthy women, but, again, Republicans seem immune to the hypocrisy of their policies.

This sort of lying and hypocrisy is exemplified by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has steadfastly voted against disaster aid to other states on the grounds that such aid is not the role of the federal government, but who is now demanding aid for his home state since it’s been hit by massive tornadoes.

Republicans also theoretically believe in local political control, but only if it’s Republican. That’s why they split Salt Lake City, which is heavily Democratic, into four parts, each part being included and outvoted by heavily Republican suburban and rural interests. So although I live more than two hundred fifty miles from Salt Lake City, and Salt Lake City has very different needs from Cedar City, a part of Salt Lake City is in the second congressional district, and I can almost guarantee that the Republican incumbent’s attention is only marginally focused on the needs of his urban constituency.

I’m not saying that Democrats aren’t hypocritical, but today’s Republicans have taken lying and hypocrisy to an all-time low. Not only that, but they’re shameless about it.

I happen to like vests, but it’s clear that, except occasionally with three-piece suits, vests are not currently popular or fashionable in most parts of the United States. But what is fashionable today?

The definition of fashionable is “characteristic of, influenced by, or representing a current popular trend or style,” while stylish is usually defined as “fashionably elegant and sophisticated.”

Now, obviously, with my love of vests [tastefully flamboyant with matching tie when I’m making writing-related appearances, and quite conservative otherwise], dress shirts, and cowboy boots, I’m no slave to current fashion, but what I wear, according to more than a few people, is a style that suits me, in more ways than one. Because I have high arches, cowboy boots are one of the few forms of footwear that don’t destroy my feet, and all of my boots are either solid black or brown.

When I was younger, I sported longer hair and a mustache, partly because my first wife thought both were more fashionable This was in the 1970s, and 1970s fashions, especially in retrospect, didn’t benefit most people, and I was no exception. I look better with short hair [even if there’s not much of it left on top] and clean-shaven. I also feel better that way.

Any type of fashion trend generally tends to look better on people who are young and painfully thin. Most of us aren’t. And that means, if we want to look our best, we need to choose what looks good on us and what is also practical and comfortable.

What I don’t understand is why so many people, especially younger [defined loosely as those who are less than forty] people, particularly men, seem to go out of their way not to look good. Maybe I’m missing something, but when people I know are not poor, or even close to it, show up wearing ripped pants or cargo shorts, dirty shirts, and flip-flops in forty degree temperature weather, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Nor does wearing shorts that swallow you, or tank tops that show and exaggerate every extra pound.

If dressing like that is making a statement, what exactly is that statement?

I recently discovered that a number of readers have decided that my books fall into a category that I’d heard in passing over the last several years – “competence porn.”

I don’t have a problem with readers finding my protagonists competent – as well as even some of my villains. My problem lies with the category itself, possibly because I’m definitely old school, and while I can’t object to knowledgeable adults reading and viewing pornography, it’s definitely not my thing. As Marian Zimmer Bradley – who definitely knew pornography – once observed, pornography is mainly concerned with anatomical plumbing. Combining pornography with competence exalts the former and degrades the latter.

And I have a real problem with degrading competence, especially at a time in our history where everyday competence is getting rarer and when fewer and fewer young people can read or write competently. Classifying books with competent main characters as a type of pornography is the last sort of thing we need today.

Part of the idea behind the “competence porn” classification is a failure to understand that competent characters aren’t perfect. Even the most competent individuals make mistakes; it’s that they seldom make stupid mistakes in their own field, because competence requires knowing your field.

Another problem with the term “competence porn” is the current tendency of far too many readers to denigrate genres, subgenres, styles, and authors that they don’t like. I understand that many readers like and want fallible characters who get into messes because they’re not competent. Some readers want to root for such characters. That’s what they like. But that doesn’t mean that what they don’t like is bad. Sometimes it is; many times it’s just not to that reader’s taste.

I don’t have a problem with that. I do have a problem with anyone who denigrates books that feature excellence and competence. If an author doesn’t write competence well, one can fault the work, or the way it’s handled, but terming books that feature competent main characters as competence porn is a disservice to both the authors and to the ideal of competence.

This past semester, my wife, the voice and opera professor, has been faced with the most fragile and unprepared group of incoming students that she’s seen in more than fifty years of teaching, although for the past decade or so she’s found that incoming students have become increasingly fragile and less academically prepared.

Not only are the vast majority unable to write a coherent paragraph, but most of them have difficulty reading material that the majority of previous classes could handle. They also have difficulty following class discussions, in turning in assignments on time, and in being able to attend class regularly. And we’re not talking about minority students, but predominantly western USA whitebread students.

They consider writing a thousand word essay as a major and unnecessary trial and fifty pages of reading a week as excessive.

Every single faculty member in the music department is facing the same issues, as are faculty members in any department that is attempting to actually get students to study and to learn. According to a university staff psychologist, roughly forty percent of the incoming students in the university suffer from depression and/or have anxiety issues.

In the field of music, as in most fields, professional musicians and music teachers have to know the music, the techniques, and the history behind their studies, but these incoming students don’t know how to write or how to learn and memorize music. They’re under the illusion that they can Google everything, and they often get sullen or resentful when they find out that they can’t… and they also can’t be separated from their cellphones. Under university policy, while faculty can request students to put away cellphones, faculty can’t prohibit them in class. One student in another department even requested that the university director of ADA certify her cellphone as a psychological necessity after her professor asked her to stop using it incessantly in class.

Many of them break down in tears – and the males tend to be bigger babies than the women – when they discover that they actually have to work to pass a class.

Yet the administration pressures faculty members to do everything they can to keep students in school, even students who’ve missed weeks of classes because they’re too stressed out to attend classes.

Given the way the students are when they arrive at the university, there’s too much they’re not being taught in elementary and secondary schools, and they’re certainly not being taught true self-discipline or accountability. But everyone seems to think it’s the job of college faculty to undo all the damage caused by overindulgent parents and elementary and secondary school teachers bludgeoned into submission to the “self-esteem” requirements forced on them, largely by parents.