The Republicans have tried to make an issue out of the idea that the country will be better off if former President Trump is NOT convicted of inciting the January 6th demonstration and riot that resulted in five deaths to date and injuries, many of them severe, to 140 police officers.

Tell me again how the country would be better off when a rich, white, powerful politician is acquitted of inciting a riot that damaged the nation’s capitol, had lawmakers fearing for their lives, and caused deaths and widespread injuries, when thousands of minorities have been jailed merely for taking part in peaceful demonstrations in attempts to obtain fair and equal enforcement of the law.

Acquitting Trump would be yet another example of white privilege carried to the extreme… and the Republicans think the nation would be better off as a result?

This is a man who had non-violent protesters tear-gassed so that he could use a church for a photo-op, a man who has consistently supported and praised white-supremacist groups, a man who spent over two months trying to discredit the most-fraud free election in U.S. history, and who attempted what would have been called a coup, had it occurred in any other country.

And the Republicans think an acquittal will cause the divisions in the United States caused by centuries of inequality in justice, in income, and in civil rights to go away? Or even improve the situation?

An acquittal would declare to the nation and the world that not only do most Republican senators have neither ethics nor courage, but that the Republican Party fears that it cannot win elections without the support of white supremacists and that Republicans have no intention of ever addressing the real problems facing the nation.

Republicans are always talking about law and order, and how they respect police officers and other law enforcement personnel.

During the attempted Trump coup of January 6th, police officers put their bodies and lives on the line to protect the members of he House and Senate, and, as a result, three officers are dead, and at least a hundred forty were injured, often severely. So how are Republicans in the House and Senate respecting those police officers?

They’re insisting that January 6th attack on the “just happened,” and that Trump had little or nothing to do with it, and that impeachment is a meaningless, empty gesture, and a “waste of time.”

I can’t even think of another recent event or incident that killed or maimed so many law enforcement personnel, not since 9/11, and in the case of 9/11, we went to war trying to bring those responsible to justice. Yet right now, in the self-interest of personal political gain, the Republicans are doing everything possible NOT to bring to justice the man responsible for the death and injuries to more than a hundred and forty police officers.

Just what does this say about how highly Republican House and Senate members “respect” law enforcement officials?

To me, it says that what they say about respecting police officers is just more empty rhetoric, just as what they say about “working Americans” is also empty rhetoric.

But so far, most grassroots Republicans don’t see it… and that’s largely why the Republicans in the House and Senate continue to get away with what amount to hypocritical actions and actual disrespect.

The latest Republican lie is that trying an impeached former president for offenses he committed while in office is unconstitutional. The vast majority of legal scholars who have opined on the subject declare that the trial is indeed constitutional, especially since Trump was impeached the second time before he left office.

Saying he cannot be tried is akin to declaring an embezzler who was charged can’t be tried because he’s no longer employed by the company he stole from. Furthermore, there have been two prior cases of federal civil government employees who were impeached and tried after leaving government service.

The lie that it’s unconstitutional to try former President Trump since he’s no longer in office is merely another Republican excuse not to hold Trump accountable for instigating and inciting the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol that resulted in five deaths [to date] and the often severe injuries to 140 police officers. While it is likely that the majority of Republican Senators have neither the ethics nor the courage to convict Trump, to hide behind a legally unsustainable lie is just another form of cowardice.

Five deaths and 140 injured police officers! If a sitting President had told a Black Lives Matter demonstration to attack the Capitol, and that demonstration resulted in equivalent deaths, injuries and damage, does any thinking individual have any doubt that such a President would be impeached and convicted, whether or not he was still in office?

As I’ve written before, Republicans can vote to impeach a Democrat president for lying about an affair with an intern, but they appear all too willing to refuse to convict a president for actions that many of them have publicly deplored, for various reasons, giving a range of reasons unfounded in fact or law.

Why? The only answer I can find is that they care more about being re-elected than they care about doing what is ethical… or about their country… no matter how they protest to the contrary. And what’s more, all too many of their constituents agree.

In a secret ballot, the majority of the U.S. House Republican Caucus voted not to remove Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney from her position as House Republican Conference Chair, in effect supporting her right to vote her conscience in supporting the House vote to again impeach Donald Trump. The vote was 145 House Democrats voting not to remove, 61 to remove. That secret ballot allowed Republicans to vote their conscience – or beliefs – without political backlash.

On the other hand, the Republican conference refused to sanction the QAnon spouting, hate-mongering Marjorie Taylor Greene, who had also earlier threatened Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, and Barrack Obama. To top matters off, House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy claimed he was unfamiliar with the QAnon extremists – except he seemed to forget that he denounced QAnon months ago.

Before joining Congress, Greene posted videos questioning whether the 9-11 terrorist attacks ever happened, stalking and taunting a teen survivor of the deadly Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, as well as suggesting that space lasers owned by wealthy Jews were causing deadly wildfires in California. She claimed school shootings were staged by Democrats to promote gun control laws and that “the stage was being set” to hang former President Barack Obama and former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Even Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell denounced Greene’s views as a “cancer” on the Republican Party and on the country.

When the Republicans refused to discipline Greene, the Democrats pushed through a bill to strip Greene of her committee assignments. One hundred ninety-nine Republicans voted against the bill, in effect publicly supporting the ultra-right-wing, hate-mongering Greene. Only eleven House Republicans wanted her to be sanctioned for her actions.

And what do all these votes illustrate? That the majority of Republican national office-holders are either scared to death of the extremists in their political or base or that they think they can’t get elected without pandering to those extremists… if not both.

And, by the way, Greene says that she’s raised almost $2 million from small donors in the past week or so.

The assault on the U.S. Capitol and all of the right-wing rhetoric about individual freedoms got me to thinking about some other related aspects of American culture. In the United States, there coexist two “schools” of how matters get accomplished.

The longer-standing one is an outgrowth of the myth of the rugged individualist, and today we see that modeled in the business world by entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, and in earlier years of the Republic by others such as Thomas Edison, John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, etc. All of them built supporting organizations, but those organizations initially existed to further the dreams and aims of the founder.

The other model has also been around for a time, but those following it tended to emphasize “team-work” or cooperation.

In fact, in the end, in terms of function, the organizational structures didn’t turn out all that differently, for a very simple reason. No large organization can be effective and survive without cooperation and teamwork.

What’s so often overlooked is a key element in success of organizations. That key element is the person or persons who hold everything together – call them “glue.” But “glue,” whether in holding furniture or physical objects together or in holding organizations together, seldom gets its due.

In any business, government entity, non-profit, or other organization with more than a handful of people, I’ve never seen much recognition of such individuals. I have seen great hoopla over a single achievement of an individual, who may never replicate that, but who continues to be rewarded, recognized, and promoted, often years after that single “flash in the pan,” but seldom much recognition of those whose quiet efforts produce more over time and who hold things together.

I’ve also seen continued quiet achievements of various individuals minimized, even when their combined results far exceed the single one-time brilliant accomplishment of another, far more highly recognized and paid, individual (individuals whom I personally mentally tab as “flashes”).

So why does glue so seldom get its due?

The Republicans who voted to impeach Bill Clinton because he once lied about screwing around with an intern can’t be bothered to even consider impeaching a President who spouted lies about non-existent voting fraud for over two months and then topped it off by inciting a mob attack on the Capitol to stop the certification of those votes… and apparently followed that up by plotting to remove the acting attorney general in order to allow a junior political appointee to try to void the election. Nor do Republicans appear to consider that Trump has had lawsuits filed against him for rape.

Even AFTER the attack on the Capitol, most Congressional Republicans still voted against certifying the results of a free and fair election.

They complain about non-existent election fraud after spending decades supporting various voter suppression schemes all across the nation.

These same Republicans insist on the right to carry firearms everywhere, but won’t allow women the freedom to determine what goes on with their own body.

They also cite the need for fiscal restraint and decry welfare to poor people, many of whom can’t get jobs or who work full-time and still make wages below the poverty level while enacting tax cuts for the wealthiest of Americans and supporting massive subsidies to American big business… and while refusing to support a living minimum wage.

They suppress largely peaceful marches and demonstrations by people seeking equal treatment under law with massive arrests and tear gas, but fail to use the same level of suppression and arrests against white supremacist mobs… and they support a former President who calls white supremacists “good people” and who has said he “loves” them.

For years, the FBI has warned that the highest levels of violence and greatest danger comes from the far-right, but Republicans continue to ignore that danger and blame the far left for all forms of violence, even falsely claiming in some cases that the far-left was behind far-right violence.

The question isn’t just how craven, ignorant, unethical and self-centered these Republicans are; it’s also about how ignorant, unethical, and self-centered those who elect them are as well.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the majority of Republicans in the U.S. House and Senate do not want to convict former President Trump in an impeachment trial, despite his months of efforts to overthrow an election that even all Republican state election officials said was without fraud and despite his successfully inciting a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol while Congress was in joint session to certify the results.

These Republicans offer a number of excuses, ranging from the barely plausible to ones far worse. The barely plausible one is that the U.S. needs “to heal.” Who do they think they’re kidding? The only ones who need “healing” are the far-right and their supporters, and they’re not interested in being “healed.” They’re still plotting to overthrow any democratically-elected government that doesn’t support them and their goals.

The next excuse is that it’s unconstitutional. Bullshit! First, legal precedent has already been established in the case of federal officials previously impeached after they left office. Second, as a practical matter, do we let embezzlers off the hook just because they’ve left the company they looted? Or teachers who’ve been abusive because they’re no longer teachers?

The third excuse is that Trump really didn’t do anything wrong. He just got carried away. Really? Plotting and pressuring officials to overturn election results for over two months and, apparently, even after the assault on the Capitol, from recent reports from the Justice Department.

The fourth excuse is that it will get in the way of the new Administration. This one is incredibly hypocritical. Already the Republicans are signifying opposition to many of the Biden administration’s proposed policies.

The fifth excuse is that it’s just better to let Trump fade away, as if he’ll EVER willingly fade way. Not the man who treated the White House like the set for a TV reality show.

The sixth excuse is that Trump was the only one addressing the needs of the “forgotten workers.” Just because he told those workers he identified with them shouldn’t give him a free pass. Besides, as far as the neglected workers go (those pushed out of the workforce by technological and economic change), Biden’s far more likely to address their problems in a meaningful way than Trump — or most Republicans — ever would.

The real reason is that those Republicans care more about getting re-elected than they do about morality, about law, and about the Constitution. They’re either self-interested cravens or too ignorant about law and ethics to be a U.S. Representative or Senator [not that ignorance is any barrier whatsoever], and they’re still afraid that Trump will strike back at them.

All the rhetoric and all the excuses to the contrary, they won’t oppose Trump because they’re either too unethical themselves, too stupid, or too cowardly to do their ethical duty…if not all three.

The other day, I happened to see on the satellite directory The American President, a favorite movie of mine, despite it’s being dated, its political inaccuracies, and its hokey ending. One of the reasons I like it is that it offers hope – that and the line that the President (played by Michael Douglas) levels at his ultra-conservative political opponent about the ACLU, words to the effect that, if you’re so big on the Constitution, why are you so opposed to people exercising their Constitutional rights.

But… as I was thinking about the movie, I realized that, in one very crucial way, almost all political movies are dated because they embody the idea that a candidate can change people’s minds by speaking, campaigning, or even outlining absolutely accurate and verifiable facts in an equally accurate context.

Today, most people don’t listen very much, and very few listen to anything that might change their opinion. As events in Washington, D.C., demonstrated last week, that becomes a serious problem for society as a whole when people believe in events that did not happen based on inaccurate or non-existent facts and do not listen to anything outside their “bubble.”

This problem isn’t just in the political sphere. It’s everywhere. Almost all the teachers I know report that one of the biggest problems they face is that students don’t listen well, and that even when they try, they have a hard time retaining facts and information. Part of this, I suspect, is because they want to be entertained and spoon-fed answers and resist any instruction that requires more effort on their part. This wouldn’t be such an enormous problem if it weren’t for the fact that fewer and fewer of them read, and less and less reading is required in most school systems.

“Personalized” news just magnifies the problem, as has the isolation resulting from the Covid pandemic, because people tend to stay within their personal comfort zone.

Will people ever get back to listening?

I’m generally an optimist, but this is one area that challenges that optimism.

One of the catch phrases used often recently by conservatives and especially the far right extremists is that they’re upset, or they’re demonstrating and attacking the Capitol, because they’re losing freedoms. But what exactly do they mean?

Cliven Bundy, who provoked an armed standoff between the BLM and armed militia types several years ago, raised that claim again this past week. What freedoms did Bundy fear losing? The BLM attempted to confiscate his cattle because Bundy had over a million dollars in unpaid grazing fees over 21 years. Bundy clearly wants the “freedom” to graze his cattle on federal land without paying for it. And the Trump Administration has continued to allow Bundy to graze federal lands without payment while claims and counter-claims clog the courts. So the taxpayers continue to fund Bundy’s grazing. No wonder he doesn’t want to lose that “freedom.”

Trump recently pardoned Phil Lyman, who wanted the freedom to ride his ATV anywhere he wanted, including in roadless areas and protected fragile archeological sites. Lyman was sentenced to jail and fined over $90,000 for the damage caused by the “protest” ATV ride he personally led. He was also subsequently elected to the state legislature, which indicates he has a number of constituents who favor those kinds of “freedom.”

The white supremacists are another group protesting the “loss of freedoms,” presumably, from their pronouncements and actions, the freedom to discriminate against minorities, immigrants, and women.

Quite a number of businesses, large and small, protest against government regulations because such regulations restrict their freedom to operate. Yes, they do. Environmental regulations restrict the ability to pollute air, water, and ground, and they do so because pollution restricts the freedom of the rest of the nation to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and to live on land not filled with toxic chemicals. OSHA rules restrict the “freedom” of businesses to engage in practices that endanger employees and the public. The FDA restricts the “freedom” of food suppliers/producers to sell cheaper foods that could be harmful to consumers.

And, of course, Trump insists on the freedom to incite others to violence and to support throwing out the results of an honest election.

All too often, such “freedoms” are the ability to oppress or injure others, and those who support them are disingenuous or hypocritical… if not both, a fact that far too many Republicans ignore in one way or another.

Or possibly the socio-economic multi-megaton explosive device.

The other day the very conservative but very intelligent Peggy Noonan wrote an essay deploring the behavior of Trump, Cruz, and Hawley, but the aspect of the essay that was far more important will likely be largely overlooked… and that’s the underlying reason for what happened at the Capitol, a reason Noonan hinted at, but failed to pursue.

She made the very valid point that true conservatives, not demagogue conservatives, are conservative because they understand that the veneer of civilization in society can be very thin, and can be easily disrupted, and that such conservatives are leery of change for that very reason, because change always creates disruption. What she didn’t say is what follows.

Just as conservatives feel that any change may be for the worse, liberals have a tendency to believe that any change is for the better. In that respect, they’re both wrong, but that’s not the point.

The first point is that change, any change, is disruptive. The second point is that technology magnifies the pressure for change, and I don’t think many people truly understand how these factors have energized and angered the Trumpists and red-state conservatives.

For the last ten thousand years or so most human cultures have been based, if sometimes loosely, on the “agricultural model” which put a premium on brute strength. The result of that model has been a range of societies based on two factors: male supremacy and the alienation of the “other” so that those of other race, color, creed, ethnicity, etc., were either minimized, enslaved, subjected to genocide, or various other repressive measures. And, as part of male supremacy, women were also minimized as individuals and maximized as broodmares.

Technology has rendered the agricultural model obsolete, at least in developed societies, because brain-power has largely replaced brawn-power, but it hasn’t significantly changed the underlying societal “assumptions” of male supremacy and the alienation of the other.

What is now happening in the U.S. is that minorities and women, as well as those who don’t fit into gender stereotypes, are gaining real power and pushing for true equality… and they’re tired of waiting, and are pushing for what they believe they deserve… and, in the U.S., what laws also state that they deserve [largely, anyway]. Now that better education and training are more and more available to all these groups, more and more of them can compete in the workplace and professions with, in the U.S., white males.

No matter what anyone says, there are only so many good paying positions in any society, and in a world competitive economy, those better educated and trained women and minorities are beginning to advance over white (or the dominant ethnic) men of lesser ability… and, guess what, after 10,000 odd years of male superiority over women and the “others,” the less competent “dominant” males don’t like it. They really don’t like it. Put in the vernacular, they don’t like losing their “privilege.”

What U.S. politicians and policymakers seem unable to grasp is that this isn’t just a teeny-weeny reaction by a comparative handful of over-privileged and under-qualified white males. It’s the leading edge of a total societal makeover – a change which will be massive, if it occurs, and a cataclysm that could literally tear apart societies and result in massive oppression if it fails.

The Trumpists who briefly took the capital are losers, in more than one way. They’re people who are losing their position in society, a position they believe was sacred and ordained by history, and they cannot and may not ever see that their position was based upon the oppression and/or minimization of others.

Too many of the liberals who have opposed the Trumpist followers merely consider them ill-educated and prejudiced white supremacists, or possibly just misguided conservatives. Such a dismissive view fails to understand the true magnitude and costs of what this societal change will entail. The entire image of sexual/gender/ethnicity roles will be recast, along with the associated economic factors and costs. And as such changes become more apparent, tens of millions of people will resist such change, because the very basis of society will have to change.

If it doesn’t, of course, what follows will make the gulags of the USSR seem mild, because oppressors really don’t like to be threatened. Just remember the Capitol… and consider that it was disorganized and poorly planned. Other such events might not be.

The direct cause of the Q-Anon/Far Right assault on the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday is not in dispute, at least not to anyone who can think and is in command of his or her faculties and who understands facts. That direct and proximate cause was Donald J. Trump, who planned a rally for that morning and who incited fanatical supporters to march on the Capitol and to disrupt the certification of the results of November’s Presidential election, a certification that is largely ceremonial, given that the states control the vote count and the electors.

That mass assault occurred and succeeded in overwhelming the Capitol Police Force for a very different reason. Trump and other extremist groups – largely but not exclusively right wing – have succeeded in effectively brain-washing 25%-35% of the American public because public education has largely failed the majority of students in U.S. schools. The result is that far too many people cannot or will not think and will accept whatever ideology they feel comfortable with… even if every fact behind it is incorrect or flat wrong.

Trump has filled his followers with four years of falsehoods and lies… and those in that mob swallowed them whole and without thinking… and attacked the Capitol.

The Capitol Police failed to prepare for the descent of the mob on the Capitol for much the same reason. They’ve been conditioned to think of BLM movements or even women equality protesters as “dangerous,” but not alt-right white supremacists – even though the FBI has been pointing out that the most dangerous extremists are white supremacists. In short, the leadership of the Capitol Police didn’t think or prepare, even though Trump made no secret of the rally.

And one of the reasons for these occurrences is, put bluntly, that the majority of students don’t know how to think, to analyze, or even to read effectively. They believe that knowing facts is irrelevant and that they can “Google” any fact they need to know… and this is true of college students as well. There are a number of factors behind this development, but one of the most important is the turn of education away from learning “facts.” Now, I’m the last person who would support mere memorization of facts as education – that’s a waste of brainpower and time – but there are certain core bases of knowledge that citizens need to absolutely “know” in their mind and hearts, and the same is true of all professionals in their field, whether that field is electrical work, plumbing, landscaping, law, medicine, engineering, or politics.

One of the reasons why two Boeing 737 Max aircraft crashed was Boeing’s failure to install multiple sensors for airspeed, but the other was the failure to understand that emergency procedures cannot just be put on paper. They have to be not only understood, but practiced – a lot. There weren’t just the two crashes that made the headlines. There were several other instances where sensor malfunctions caused the autopilot to override the pilot, but in those other instances, highly trained pilots knew what to do. One of the FAA requirements for the return of the 737 Max is more pilot training on those systems.

Right now, at least half of all Americans don’t understand the Constitution and how our government works [or is supposed to work]… but they think they do, and they’re absolutely convinced that their understanding is correct. Why? Because they never really learned the facts and the systems, largely because public education never really insisted on that. “It’s just history, and it’s old stuff that students don’t have to learn.” Most of the young women that my wife teaches honestly don’t know, for example, that U.S. women have only had the right to vote for a century… or that women still only make on average 60-80% [depending on the state] of what men do for the same position and hours worked. Many of those young women unfortunately, not only don’t know, but don’t care, even though statistics show that more than 60% of them will be the primary breadwinner at some point in their lives.

The mob that descended on the U.S. Capitol had literally no understanding of why there couldn’t have been vote fraud on the scale they were told and believed. They didn’t understand that elections are run on a state and local basis, and that roughly two-thirds of the states are currently controlled by Republicans, and at present, fairly conservative Republicans at that, and that Republicans aren’t about to allow Democrats to get away with voter fraud.

That mob also didn’t understand or care that Republican lawmakers who were contesting the validity of the Presidential vote weren’t contesting the validity of the election as far as their own re-election went, which, I submit, is a considerable failure in thinking things through.

No… those in the mob haven’t been forced to think, because our society no longer requires it, and there’s a growing culture that believes that whatever news and information appears that appeals to them must be correct… because it feels “right.”

True thinking and learning requires confronting the uncomfortable, testing one’s own beliefs against hard verified facts, and learning to discern what comfortable beliefs may in fact be wrong or not based in reality and what beliefs need modifying.

And U.S. education, for the most part, is failing in getting students to understand the importance of and the relation between facts and thinking… which was demonstrated by how many in that mob were comparatively young.

For some reason, the way too many people are acting during this pandemic reminds me of some of Yogi Berra’s sayings. Yogi Berra – the Hall of Fame catcher for the N.Y. Yankees and later a major league manager – NOT the cartoon character Yogi Bear (who appeared in 1958, more than a decade after Berra began his baseball career and whose name was suspiciously like Berra, although Hanna-Barbera claimed the similarity was “coincidental”).

The saying of the real Yogi that struck me when I heard the news this morning was: “It’s like déjà vu all over again.” That’s because too many Americans are denying the deadliness of Covid-19 and are being stupid all over again. The highest amount of air travel in a year this past weekend? At a time when Los Angeles has issued a directive to ration oxygen to patients and for EMTs not to bring terminally ill patients to hospitals because there aren’t any beds.

Or as Yogi also said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.” Exactly! This pandemic isn’t going to be over until mask-wearing, social distancing, and vaccination are actually implemented by most Americans… and if they aren’t, we well might see a million deaths before it’s truly over, if it ever is.

Why is it so bad? As Yogi also said, “We made too many wrong mistakes.” Like having unrelated individuals to parties that shouldn’t have been held. Like going to church and compounding the mistake by not wearing a mask. Like holding crowded political rallies that never really mentioned Covid-19. Or saying that the virus would be gone by last April (when it won’t even be gone by this coming April).

But people don’t seem to listen or take in what’s going on around them. As Yogi also said, “You can observe a lot by just watching.”

One other thing he said that’s also applicable to the U.S. Covid-19 mess. “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there.” And, in that light, way too many Americans haven’t been careful at all.

Which is why, as the sage of baseball and life also said, “The future ain’t what it used to be.”

Trump’s latest actions, and the Congressional reaction, show, again, the need for greater responsibility, and reform, in Congress.

Trump went off to sulk and play golf, addressing the possible government shut-down and the Covid relief bill, at almost the last possible moment, after a great deal of rhetoric and no action for weeks, a lack of action that harmed a great number of Americans. Then there was his rash of pardons, largely not for people punished unjustly, but for individuals justly convicted, often of offenses committed in getting him elected in 2016, to which Congress offered no reaction.

Now… Congress in fact should have recognized that leaving matters not to just the last minutes, but effectively the last seconds, of this session has put both the Congress and the American people in an incredibly difficult position. A major part of the problem also lies with the American people, most of whom have willingly and often enthusiastically sorted themselves into separate tribes, each of which fervently believes that only it is correct and that the other tribe is knowingly pursuing an evil course.

Polarizations this violent have too often escalated into violence and bloody war, as in the cases of the American Civil War and the conflict between the followers of Martin Luther and those who backed the Catholic Church – a conflict that killed almost a third of the population of Germany over the course of a century or so. Both these conflicts, as well as others, resulted from the unyielding anger and polarization of beliefs on each side.

While sometimes there is indeed true evil in a belief, as in Nazism, the one thing I am certain of is that no group, religion, or political party represents unalloyed good. In the case of U.S. politics, I’ve been around long enough and involved enough in politics to have seen that neither party is that “good” or that “evil.” Both occasionally have good ideas, and both more often try to carry matters to extremes, sure of their own virtue, and neither recognizes that extremes and absolutes are never virtuous… and that their own extreme “virtues” can often be as bad as the other parties “evils.”

And, so far, neither one has been able to recognize that. That recognition is long overdue, and if it does not occur, matters will escalate into greater and greater social unrest and violence.

When Ben Bova died a few weeks ago, I got to thinking about my various interactions with Ben, as I suspect many of us do when we lose someone who made a difference in our lives. Ben was my editor for two different publications, one being ANALOG, but the other being Omni online, which, as I recall, only lasted as an online publication for a little over a year roughly in the 1995-97 time period, at least as I recall.

When Ben was editor of the online version, he reached out to me, not for stories, but for several columns dealing with future economics and politics. One was on the economics of interstellar trade. But I have no idea what I wrote because, right after the online Omni shut down, a victim of being established far too early when the market wasn’t ready for an online magazine, my writing computer fried itself. Now, I’d backed up all of my fiction, but not those columns. I’d gotten paid for them, but I didn’t even have a subscription to the publication, and, in fact, I actually have no idea whether all or any of the columns (two or three) were even published, only that I got paid. If I printed out those columns, the print copies have long since vanished or have been swallowed up in my back papers.

With a bit of diligence I did find the table of contents of all of the print copies of Omni, but nothing relating to the online version. This, I suspect, is going to be more and more of a problem in years to come. With paper copies, there’s at least a chance of tracking down something, but purely electronic data can be incredibly ephemeral, even when it’s theoretically “saved,” especially if there’s no documentation or no devices left to “read” that data.

On the one hand, I’d like to dig those old columns up, or at least the record of their existence, but on the other… do I really want to know what I spouted forth in economic terms some 25 years ago?

Last weekend, in the third quarter of a game where his team was losing 28-7, a fifth year senior quarterback [third string, because the second stringer was out with an injury] took over for the touted first-string quarterback of the University of Utah. The replacement quarterback, who had been a walk-on, several years earlier, had never taken a single snap in a game. It was his last college game, and in a calm and collected way, he turned the game around and led the Utes to thirty-eight unanswered points and victory. He didn’t make any truly sensational passes; he just ran a good team professionally and successfully, unlike the first string quarterback, who has completed an incredibly uneven year, combining miraculous throws with bonehead decisions.

Why didn’t anyone give the third-stringer a chance any earlier?

I don’t know, but I’d guess it’s because he doesn’t have a cannon for an arm, isn’t a sprinter, and he wasn’t “hyped” in high school. Mostly that he wasn’t hyped.

This problem isn’t limited to college football. It happens in many fields, where all the attention focuses on someone with charisma, or some flashy special skill, and others, who are far more capable, overall, tend to be overlooked.

Every week I read about new authors who are supposed to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, or the next great genius of the written word, and yet, by next year, most have vanished or are slowly fading, to disappear several years hence when their third book cannot earn out, while other authors, ignored by the hypesters, produce works that continue to sell. I’ve also been in the field long enough to observe that almost none of the works of those hyped and vanished authors ever turn up as “forgotten masterpieces.” Yet, James Oliver Rigney, Jr., more popularly known as Robert Jordan, who created the Wheel of Time series [which has sold more than 14 million copies and redefined fantasy in the process] won no major awards in the field, except one, that one seven years after his death.

This is nothing new. Vincent Van Gogh sold exactly one painting in his lifetime, but today his works are worth millions, while the “big names” of that time, such as Ludwig Knaus or Eduardo Zabala, have faded from view and their works don’t even sell, or sell for a few hundred dollars. Very few people even knew of Franz Kafka until after he died, and Edgar Allan Poe never made enough money to support himself.

Then, and now, it’s often all about hype, but hype is overrated all too many times and seldom has staying power.

Sociologists classify the population in a society in various ways, including by income level, class, or education level. But I’d like to suggest another system of classification, by competence. Over the years, I’ve observed that only a small percentage of individuals are highly competent in their field, followed by a larger percentage that are moderately competent, with the next grouping being marginally competent, followed by those who are incompetent, and, finally, those who are actively and dangerously incompetent.

While such a classification might be idealistically pleasing, in practice, it’s impossible to implement. Where does one place the brilliant surgeon who is incompetent in human relations? Or the politician who is extraordinary in gathering votes, and a total disaster in governing? And why is it that so many people are a mixture of various levels of competences in different areas?

One of the problems that humans have is that all too many people who are very successful, and competent, in one area think they’re equally competent in everything, that they are, quoting someone known to all, “stable geniuses” in everything. There are people like Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin who excel in more than one field, but even Jefferson was totally incompetent in managing his money.

Add to that the fact that studies have shown, time after time, that people overestimate their own competence, and what’s worse is that, in general, the less competent people are, the more likely they are to overestimate their competence.

I think I’m pretty well-rounded, but no one should ever let me mess with the inside of any engine, or any form of plumbing besides, possibly, the inside of a toilet tank. Nor do I know squat about computer coding, but at least time has made it clear to me that I have definite limitations. Yet we’ve all seen doctors and scientists who are competent, if not excellent, in their fields, carry that assumption of excellence to fields where they know far less, usually with poor results.

Then, there are the people who are incompetent because they really don’t care, like the medical technicians who lose messages or scramble records, the bank employees who take forever to process simple deposits, the education administrators who are more interested in test results and appearances than actual student accomplishment, the tree surgeons who never show up for appointments, the supervisors who change long-scheduled assignments or meetings for their convenience, thereby disrupting dozens of other professionals’ schedules and work… (and that list is far too long for a blog).

There are also those who suffer spells of drastic incompetence because they don’t pay attention to what they’re supposed to be doing, like the driver who was texting and drove into a transformer box and knocked out power for a third of the university, or the hundreds of driving texters who have killed or injured others, the train engineer who lost track of where his train was and entered a curve at too high a speed,

The other problem with competence, or lack thereof, is that we live in a fairly high-tech society, and technology magnifies everything, including incompetence. That’s one of the reasons why automobiles have ever more sophisticated safety-features. You can mess up enough to kill yourself in mishandling a horse, but it takes great effort to do more than that. On the other hand, a single small mistake at high-speed in a modern SUV can wipe out all your passengers, several other vehicles and block an interstate for hours, causing all sorts of subsidiary accidents and additional injuries.

All of which suggests that we’re doomed to endure incompetence in various forms, including our own

Over my lifetime, weather forecasts have, in general, reached the point where they are accurate enough that they actually can be useful – except all too often in Cedar City, Utah, which is where we live.

On Monday morning, the weather forecasts from the major networks said that the snowstorm that had hit northern Utah was moving out to the east and that no storms were forecast in southwest Utah for the next several days. Roughly, an hour passed before it began snowing. Four hours later, it was still snowing, and there were at least three inches of snow on the ground. The snow flurries that followed lasted until dark.

This was hardly an isolated occurrence.

Now, I don’t blame the forecasters. Cedar City is a college town of roughly 40,000 people and is scarcely a population center or a media market on which forecasters might focus more expertise. There’s also the fact that its geographical location makes accurate forecasting a bitch. The town is located twenty miles north of Black Ridge, and the south side of Black Ridge drops almost 3,000 feet in roughly four miles, and another 1,000 feet over the next twenty. The east side of town literally climbs partway up red hills and cliffs that are the lower part of mountains that rise another 4,000 feet.

Cedar City is also known for its winds – strong and frequent. There’s a local saying about the town – that the Mormon settlers only stopped here until the wind died down, only to discover it never did. I’ve personally seen, and weathered, winds here that ripped the shingles off houses, and in one case peeled the vinyl siding right off the west side of a dwelling. We’re not talking tornadoes or hurricanes, just wind, Cedar City style.

And the weather can be freakishly weird – like the fifteen inches of snow we got on Mother’s Day weekend six years ago – incidentally also unforecast. We’ve often gotten a foot of snow in early September, and then sweltered through 80 degree weather for a month afterward.

And that’s why, while forecasts are useful most of the time, here in Cedar City, you still have to be wary about the weather.

Or unprincipled, lying, and hypocritical? Or all five? In case you haven’t guessed, I’m referring to all the Republicans lining up behind Trump’s claims of victory and election fraud on the part of Democrats, although Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security announced that the election was the most secure ever, and state after state has affirmed the same.

One of the latest of the sixty-odd frivolous lawsuits was filed by the Texas State Attorney General (who, by the way, has been charged with securities fraud and just might be hoping for a Trump pardon in return for filing the lawsuit). The Texas lawsuit claimed that election law changes in four states — Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania — which allowed more alternative ways to vote, violated existing law by essentially making it easier for citizens to cast their ballots. The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously dismissed the lawsuit, and that dismissal vote included three justices appointed by Trump.

Not only did Republican attorneys general from 17 states sign on to the lawsuit, but so did 126 Republican members of the House of Representatives, which raises another question. How can a ballot be fraudulent at the top and not at the bottom? If Biden’s election was fraudulent because of the process, how can their election not also be fraudulent?

The Trumpist Republican Attorney General here in Utah signed onto the Texas lawsuit without consulting either the Republican Governor or Lieutenant Governor, both of whom immediately denounced his action. His action was also hypocritical because Utah has had universal mail-in voting for the last two elections, and there’s never been a problem with fraud.

While Trump is stirring up those voters, the fact is that they’re easy to stir up, and that’s why so many Republican politicians don’t want to stand up against Trump’s claims. Most of those Republicans who have stated that the process was fair and without fraud have been subjected to threats, often death threats. So have quite a few electors.

Depending on the poll and the wording, between sixty and seventy percent of Republican voters think the election was “illegitimate.” What this means is that Republicans don’t like democracy or democratic processes when they don’t win. This isn’t a supposition; it’s fact. For last decade, if not longer, Republicans have been working methodically on the state level to restrict voting access to people who are less likely to vote Republican, including reducing the number of polling places in minority districts and “purging” voter registration records in minority districts, even removing the names of people who voted in the previous election and who didn’t die or move.

The United States was founded on the idea of equal opportunity, limited at first just to white males, but over the more than two centuries since its founding, we’ve legally determined that the votes of everyone born here or naturalized as a citizen are equal. Now, because Trump lost the election, Trump has decided that the votes in just certain states or certain parts of those states shouldn’t be counted because he says there was fraud – fraud that no Republican, or anyone else, has been able to prove… or even come up with a shred of verifiable evidence.

That hasn’t stopped Trump or the majority of Republican federal office holders from trying to use the courts to change the election results, something that has never happened before in our history. Why do these Republicans support an attempt at a de facto coup?

Pure and simple, they’re putting their political survival above the national interest, and they seem certain that their supporters won’t call them on it. Unhappily, all the polls and most of the Republican reaction seems to indicate that an attempted coup is all right with the majority of Republicans.

What’s also so sad and amusing about it is that if they all said to Trump, “You lost,” Trump wouldn’t have any power at all because he’d exhaust both his funds and public patience if he tried to attack them all.

So… all of those Republican politicians and officeholders who refuse to tell Trump the truth are either indeed cowardly, stupid, self-centered, unprincipled, or hypocritical, if not all of those… and the voters who support them are at the least stupid or totally ignorant… and if they aren’t stupid or ignorant, then they’re self-centered, unprincipled, and hypocritical.

Unless, of course, that they honestly believe that a right-wing dictatorship is preferable to an elected moderate President.

As most of my readers know, as a writer I don’t quite fit into any stereotype. My books get published through the traditional system [otherwise considered as equivalent to the “evil empire” or the dark side by some “indie” authors], but what I write doesn’t quite fit into any neat pigeonhole, at least not if one reads it carefully. I don’t have an agent and never had. But I spent almost twenty years in jobs requiring suits, and sometimes three-piece suits at that.

Before that, after college, I started out as a conventional naval officer – technically, a line officer – but quickly decided that it wasn’t for me. So I qualified to be considered for either SEAL training [I figured more than ten years of competitive swimming couldn’t hurt] or flight duty. When I saw all the running that the SEALs did, however, and considered the fact that I have short legs and small feet and that they were always running through sand, I opted for flight training, in the middle of the Vietnam War, giving up relatively safe duty for something that was anything but safe. I ended up as a helicopter search and rescue pilot, flying off of carriers, and occasionally landing on tight places on cliff-tops.

Although I’d read science fiction from my early teens on, I didn’t even consider writing it until I was nearly thirty, after I’d spent fifteen years writing poetry that only got published in small literary magazines… when it got published at all. And it took twenty years after my first story was published before I could afford to become a full-time writer.

All of that is likely why I’m somewhat surprised by an attitude I’ve seen in a certain segment of F&SF writers, who quite vocally, or rather in print, are so disparaging of “traditional” publishing. Traditional publishing really shouldn’t be called that – it’s large-scale commercial publishing. So-called “traditional” publishers are interested in selling large numbers of copies of what they print. Given their systems and cost structures, they can’t afford to sell less than roughly 5,000 hardcovers of a novel [these figures may be out of date, but the basic point remains]. They may occasionally do so, for books that editors think are “special,” but that doesn’t happen often.

A generation ago, an author who couldn’t sell that many books had nowhere to go. Happily today, with the advent of small presses, print-on-demand, and even Amazon [ another evil empire], authors who sell below the unofficial cutoffs of traditional publishing can still publish and sell their work, always assuming that they have a body of readers. To make a decent living that way generally requires a great deal of work… and the ability to turn out several novels a year. Some authors, but not that many, I suspect, who publish this way do quite well. Every year a few are even “recruited” by traditional publishers. From what I’ve observed, some gladly accept, just as I’ve seen some traditionally published authors walk away because they found traditional publishing too confining.

Yet I see comment after comment talking about the evils of traditional publishing, and even forecasts of its coming collapse. I don’t see that happening. I do see an industry in the middle of massive change. The numbers of mass market paperbacks printed and sold, once the preferred reading material of F&SF readers, have shrunk to a fraction of former sales, largely replaced first by e-books, and more recently by audiobooks. Hardcover sales, on the other hand, so far seem to be holding up.

Some readers, of course, now bemoan the costs of e-books released by traditional publishers, which, after the first year of release, are priced roughly the same as mass market paperbacks. That bemoaning, I suspect, is because self-publishing “indie” authors offer their books at a lower price. That pricing gains them readers, but the author pays for it in another way. He or she also has to deal personally with the details for covers, publicity, editing, proofing, etc., or hire others to do so… or risk presenting a technically inferior package. In effect, those writers are trading off writing time for production time.

But unlike the evil empire of Star Wars, traditional publishing isn’t out to destroy “indie” or self-publishing authors. Those publishers, like everyone else, are trying to make money. For the author, it’s much more a question of which costs an author chooses or is forced to bear, the “tyranny” of the “evil empire” or the greed of the readers in the self-publishing market, but they do have an option besides traditional publishing, unlike writers of an earlier time.

As some readers of F&SF may have read, the Disney corporation is stiffing author Alan Dean Foster. According to Foster, Disney has not paid royalties since 2014 on Star Wars books that Foster wrote. Disney has not responded to his inquiries and claims, and, in fact, Disney’s attorneys won’t even discuss the matter with Foster unless he signs a non-disclosure agreement. Alan and his wife are in poor health, and it would certainly be helpful to have the royalty payments he’s owed.

All Disney has said is that they only bought the “properties,” but not any contractual liabilities associated with those properties. If this position is applied across the economy, any corporation could sell itself and all its holdings to another corporation and shed its liabilities, stiffing its creditors.

Now… from what I can determine, while corporation employees can at least bring payment problems to the Labor Department, the only recourse Foster or any author or independent contractor has for non-payment is a civil lawsuit. The problem with this “recourse” is that virtually all independent contractors lack the financial resources to afford the extensive legal costs required to sue a mega-corporation and, if they had the resources, it normally wouldn’t make sense financially to pursue such litigation.

The late Harlan Ellison pursued copyright violations with a vengeance, spending over $40,000, according to one report, just in going after internet pirates. He also sued publishers and CBS, among others, but most of those lawsuits were before media became mega-corporations. He once was hired by Disney as a writer, and was almost immediately fired by Roy Disney. Most writers and independent contractors have neither the time nor the funds to do the same… and they shouldn’t have to.

Equally to the point is that the legal precedents go far beyond Alan Dean Foster’s situation or the applicability to other authors. I certainly can’t find any federal criminal statute that applies to failure to pay independent contractors, and with the expansion of the “gig economy,” unless something is done legislatively, it’s quite possible that other mega-corporations will follow Disney’s example. In effect, corporations could fail to pay independent contractors, as Trump has done on more than a few occasions, or underpay them even more, almost with impunity. While I suspect this is already occurring in cases besides that of Alan Dean Foster, unless the law is changed, those occurrences are bound to increase… and it’s just another example of why government action is necessary to rein in the mega-corporations, because individuals can’t muster the power or the resources to obtain fair treatment.