We're fired

This is basically who we are
about to elect President

Conspiracy theories seldom convince me.  Although interesting, I’m generally pretty skeptical when it comes to the idea that large groups of humans are not only capable of staying super organized, but they can do so secretly over the course of many, many years.  This skepticism is not based on any real data, it’s just a hunch mostly inspired by the sad fact that my wife and I cannot even organize our own refrigerator.  Considering we sometimes end up with exactly zero gallons of milk while also owning seven bottles of ranch dressing,  I guess it’s just hard for me to wrap my mind around the theory that the Denver International Airport is ground zero for a new world order, for example, or that the moon landing was a hoax.

This skepticism is on the wane, however, due mostly to one Donald J. Trump. 

Before elaborating on my own conspiracy theories, let’s pause and examine how we made it to this point.   For some reason I can’t help but feel that we are all living in the south-end of a computerized, political climate model that’s been going on for 20 years.  I imagine a couple of grad students back in 1996, throwing around ideas and punching hypotheticals into a software program designed to predict future election results.

“OK, how ‘bout we make one for two decades out?   Put a sex scandal in.  Make it gross.”

“Got it.”

“OK, now put in a national calamity, the rise of Islamist terrorism, and a misguided foreign invasion.”

“Want country?”

“Who cares?  One of the ‘I’s.  Now, add a failed immigration policy, amp up the partisan bickering, and then throw in the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression.”

“Wow, someone’s grumpy.”

“Just shut up and type.  OK, now, let’s see.  How about we add back-to-back, unpopular yet multi-term Presidents, skyrocketing deficit spending, cable news networks designed to validate shallow thinking, and social media designed to give that shallow thinking a very broad forum.”

“What’s social media?”

“Don’t worry about it.  Just push ‘enter.’”

Because that’s the thing about Donald Trump.  On the surface it seems unbelievable that he’s winning, like we really are living in a poorly written graphic novel.  The guy’s a bully, he’s a bigot, and many of his ideas don’t even make sense.  How is this happening if not for some unquantifiable rip in the space time continuum? 

However, it is happening, so how do we explain it?

For starters, we need to acknowledge that some of his supporters like him because they are like him.  They themselves are turds with limited empathy for anyone not them.  Many of his supporters, though, are actually decent people who are just tired.  They are tired of the system, tired of special interests, tired of the status quo, and there has been no candidate in recent memory more unconventional than Mr. Trump.

In essence, these voters are the fed up parents driving their two arguing teenagers to soccer practice and have basically run out of ideas.

“You two want to argue?  You two want to rack up the credit card bills like crazy people?  OK.  How about this?  How about I drive this flippin’ truck into a telephone pole!  You like that?  How about I drive this baby into the lake!  You two want to argue?  Guess what?  There’s one life jacket back there.  Argue about that!”

Granted, there’s no good reason why there’s a life jacket in the back of this analogy.  I know that’s absurd, but my point is that electing Donald Trump as President is a bad idea and we should not do it.

America is not a computer simulation.  This is not a video game.  This is real life.  We are a democratic republic with an awesome track record.  We invent things and stop dictators and what not.  People move to this country on purpose, sometimes at tremendous risk to their lives. 

And yet, despite all this, we’re close to electing a guy with the manners of a bruised ape.  So, the question is, what does all this have to do with conspiracy theories?

Here are three to consider. 

Trump is a spoiler.  Hilary Clinton knows that she and the Democrats are too unpopular to win a third presidential election in a row against any reasonable Republican contender.  Trump, then, is a loud, angry hand grenade thrown into the GOP barracks designed to do one of two things:  split the ticket if he is not the Republican nominee, thus assuring her victory, or, riskier for her, win the nomination and generate so much ‘Anti-Trump’ anger that people who normally do not vote come to the polls just to keep him out of office.

If that sounds outlandish, consider this theory. 

Trump is a mole.  Kim Jong-un knows that he and the rest of Earth’s super villains are too weak to defeat the United States from the outside.  Trump, then, is a loud, angry double agent thrown into the executive branch designed to do one of two things:  declare war on all the countries in the world all at once, or, risker for Kim, fire everyone in the U.S. government because they won’t call him boss.

If that sounds ridiculous, consider this last idea.

Trump is, ironically enough, a space alien.   This theory actually needs no elaboration.

In conclusion, I am cautiously optimistic about the upcoming election, even if Mr. Trump does win.  This republic is designed to withstand a multitude of threats, even the threat of deceitful, spiteful, unimaginative megalomania.  After all, it would’t be the first time.

"Long before that..." Re-Post from May, 2015

Harper Lee turned 89 this past Tuesday.  Because we read her classic, To Kill a Mockingbird, in sophomore English, many of us celebrated by eating too much sugar and dressing up as some of her characters.  I wore a rather old suit jacket, in fact, trying to invoke a Depression-era, Alabama lawyer but, in truth, probably looking more like Reagan-era, Miami Vice. 

In between snacks we watched a documentary on Miss Lee’s life.  A number of authors, many of them fellow southerners, read passages from her tome, offering commentary on particular phrases that touched them personally.  One such writer, journalist and memoirist Rick Bragg, read from that succinct opening paragraph in which Scout, our narrator, ruminates on how best to begin her story.

“When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them,” Scout begins, referring to her brother’s football injury, “we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem…said it started long before that.”

 “In the south,” Bragg suggested, “all of our stories begin, ‘Long before that.’”

It did seem a bit weird, celebrating the birthday of a woman who, more than half a century ago, wrote perhaps the most important novel of the Civil Rights era, while Baltimore remained on curfew.  We could also ask the question today, “When did the chaos in Baltimore truly begin?  After the funeral?  In the days leading up to it?  Right after Mr. Gray’s death?  Right after he was arrested?”

1729?

I have tried to write about American race relations before, and I will not be insulted if you put this column down or click on a different link, because, to be honest with you, I agree.  It is getting old.  It is a topic much discussed, much debated, a story that truly did begin “long before that.” 

I have also used the following analogy before, but it’s the best I have, so I’ll use it again.  I believe that slavery did brain damage to our collective American psyche.  Like an all-star quarterback clobbered by a three hundred pound lineman, America is still groggy, still throwing interceptions with blurred vision.

Granted, we have our moments, of course.  We do things like elect black Presidents and then we hear voices from the sidelines say things like, “See, it’s all better now.  That concussion don’t even bother him at all, anymore.”

Nor am I suggesting that the criminal mobs looting and burning their own city are somehow justified in their actions.  In fact, if I may borrow another phrase out of the novel, this one by Scout’s father, Atticus Finch,

“A mob’s always made up of people, no matter what…Every mob in every little Southern town is always made up of people you know—doesn’t say much for them, does it?”

No it does not.  Mr. Finch, of course, was referring to the mob who had gathered to lynch the accused black man and Finch’s client, Tom Robinson. Historically speaking, though, an angry mob is an angry mob, composed of individuals no longer thoughtful enough to stand alone.

As many of you remember, Tom was accused of raping a white woman, a capital offense.  After the jury of his white peers found him guilty of a crime he did not commit, the accused did not wait for “justice” to be handed down from the state.  Instead, less than a week after the trial, Tom tried to escape and was instead shot to death by prison guards. 

Despite Atticus’ insistence that they had a good chance with an appeal, despite leaving his family behind, Tom sprinted to his death in a fit of self-destructive hopelessness.

Self-destructive hopelessness, as we have found out in very recent history, can lead to a great deal of bad behavior.  It can lead to being shot seventeen times by prison guards, for example, or burning down your own neighborhood.

In closing, I am most likely not the right guy to pen a column about race relations in 21^st century America.  With my background, what real experience do I even have? 

What I do know, though, is that Harper Lee is a great writer.  When she was in her 30s, she wrote a tremendous story that changed the dialogue about race in this country.  She changed the conversation in a profound and positive way.

However, in less than a year she will be ninety years old, and something tells me we will still be talking about old football injuries.

Bees

Bees have no idea how important they are.  How could they?  They’re bees.  Their brains are little and their lives are short.  According to a bee-keeping buddy of mine, the average honey bee lives for just a few short months and will only produce about one twelfth a teaspoon of honey during its entire life.

The real magic of bees, then, is not really in the honey at all.  Honey is delicious, of course, but nothing fundamental about our way of life would change without it.  The real trick bees pull off, along with other such creatures, is what they do on the side. 

Bees pollinate, and without pollination, much of modern agriculture would collapse.  Civilization as we know it is dependent on a readily available food supply, and much of this food supply relies on pollination.

We depend on bees in a way they cannot possibly imagine.  Bees simply do what they are designed to do, utterly oblivious to what is going on beyond their very limited existence.  Their greater purpose on earth plays itself out in a reality they cannot know. 

Strangely enough, this idea actually leads me to the very real reality surrounding my daughter’s recent birth.

About seven months ago, my wife called me after a doctor’s appointment.

“There’s something wrong with the baby.”

It’s rough, to hear those words and be unable to do anything about it.  The “something wrong” could not be diagnosed locally, and so my wife and I soon travelled up to Champaign.  After many hours’ worth of tests, we were told that our daughter would most likely be born with at least two birth defects:  an omphalocele and an aortic coarctation.

To put it briefly, an omphalocele means that part of the baby’s insides are forming on the outside.  An aortic coarcation means that part of the blood vessel leading from the heart is too narrow to move blood the way it should.  Both of these conditions are fixable under the right circumstances, but they are both sometimes related to life-threatening abnormalities.  Thanks to modern medicine, neither of these conditions are generally fatal in and of themselves, but they both often require multiple surgeries followed by a lifetime of observation.

During the next few months our appointments continued.  We met doctors at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, where she was to be delivered, and also at Children’s Hospital next door, where she would live until she was well enough to come home.  Some of those doctor’s appointments were comforting, but many of them were not.  The reality was, though, that until she was born, no amount of doctor visits would be able to tell us what we desperately wanted to know:  would she be OK?

            There was a point in my life, not that long ago, when this news would have been kept “in house,” so to speak.  We would have told an inner circle of people and that would be that.  We would have buckled down and gone about our lives and wait until Christmas to find out.

            Something made that kind of approach entirely inappropriate, however.  This was not bad news about a job or a mortgage.  This was our daughter.  She was being formed as we breathed, knitted together within her mother’s womb.  Waiting around for the due date just seemed a little passive.

            So we told people. We told many, many people: friends, relatives, colleagues and church family members.  We told people and asked them to pray.  Hundreds of people over the course of weeks and months took time out of their day to pray for a little girl they had not met. 

            On December 18^th our daughter arrived.  As expected, she had an omphalocele, but it was so small surgeons were able to repair it a few days after delivery.  More importantly, the heart condition that multiple doctors—examining multiple months’ worth of tests—told us would require surgery, never showed up.  Her heart was fine.  A recent follow-up appointment a month later solidified their post-natal diagnosis:  her heart was about as normal as any other five-week old baby. 

            Now, for many readers, this is simply a very comforting story that strengthens an already solid faith.  After all, the Bible clearly tells us to pray about such matters, and it is full of stories of healing.  For others, though, this is simply a story of a family who got off lucky.  After all, prenatal screening is not an exact science, and, like any science, it’s susceptible to human error and technical malfunction. 

            To be honest, though, this column is not really designed with either of those groups in mind.

This column is actually geared toward the “middle-of-the-roaders.”  Those readers, who, like me at one time, absolutely believe in a God capable of creating the universe and everything in it, but are not quite comfortable with the idea of human prayer influencing human events in a tangible way.  After all, such a situation brings with it a host of profound theological implications, such as, “Why do some prayers seem to work and some don’t?” or, “If God is omniscient, then why in the world would a human prayer have any influence on a divinely-sanctioned reality?”  These are very important questions that I simply do not have the newspaper space or the intellect to discuss in depth.

However, consider for a moment that the same God who created bees to make honey also made you to do whatever is it that you do in your day.  Also consider that the God who designed a world in which bees pollinate also put it in your heart to pray.    

Bees do not try to pollinate, they just pollinate.  It’s a byproduct of their natural behavior.  They affect the world around them without knowing it.

If a person believes that this natural behavior was designed by God, then how much of a stretch is it, really, to consider that human prayer can influence human events in a way we cannot truly comprehend? 

This is a question that many of us will ponder at some point in our lives.  As for me and my house, however, that question is answered.