When Worlds Collide: Hillary and the Anti-Cosmos

On October 9, The Daily Show featured an interview with Republican strategist Noelle Nikpour who argued that Obamacare is really unconstitutional except for the fact that the Supreme Court has declared it constitutional. 

That Ms. Nikpour could regard the Affordable Care Act (i.e., Obamacare) constitutional and unconstitutional at the same time may seem irrational, but perhaps if we can understand this pattern of thinking – a pattern that seems to embody two parallel and incompatible universes - it may throw light not just Ms. Nikpour's mentality, but on the right wing of the GOP in general.

For example, conservative Republicans have described Obamacare as BOTH an unprecedented disaster that threatens to lead us into a Nazi-like slave society AND as something voters will like so much that they will never want to see it repealed.

Two parallel, yet contradictory, universes.

In one universe - let’s call it “the Real World” - Supreme Court decisions routinely render laws constitutional, and popular programs like Social Security and Medicare tend to improve people’s lives.

But, in “the Anti-Cosmos,” the parallel universe where Ms. Nikpour spends much of her time, the Supreme Court needs to butt out of constitutionality issues.  And in the Anti-Cosmos, giving people access to affordable health care is equivalent to dragging them into hellish concentration camps.

A fascinating study by Democracy Corps, based on interviews with members of the Republican Party, helps explain why so many in that party seem to hold on to impossibly contradictory ideas.  The study reveals that Republicans, when asked what words they associate with Barack Obama, overwhelmingly replied, “Liar.”  The following were also prominently mentioned: Lies, Lie, Crook, Worst, Overrated, Liberal, and President. 

“Communist/socialist” and “hypocrite” also made the list.

Naturally, if Republicans automatically assume that President Obama is a lying, liberal, socialist crook, they need not pay any attention to what he says.   I’m guessing that other prominent Democrats, like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, get no more of a hearing from these people than Obama does. 

So, when the president says he’s concerned about millions of Americans lacking insurance and he therefore wants to help them with his Affordable Care Act, non-Republicans may say, “Great, let’s do it.”  But right-wing Republicans are more likely to disregard the president's rationale and say, “What is that lying crook up to now?  He probably wants to take away our guns and mind-control us with electronic implants.”  And nothing that Obama or any other Democrat can say will alter their thinking, because dark, distrustful ideas dominate the Anti-Cosmos where they spend much of their lives.
 

We should note that since 9-11 our government has set up a vast security system that is gathering oceans of data about us, much of it without our knowledge or approval, and this does not help Obama where issues of trust are concerned.  Of course, this surveillance is not merely an Obama undertaking, but for people who start from the premise that he’s a lying socialist bent on enslaving us, blaming him for it just feels right.

It turns out that many conservative Republicans distrust the American public education system almost as much as they distrust Democrats.  They also reject some of the findings of science.  As the report says, “Evangelicals and Tea Party Republicans [the two main conservative GOP factions -- editor's note] share and are consumed by skepticism about climate science—to the point where they mistrust scientists before they begin to speak.”

So, if scientists talk about evidence that human activities are causing global warming, right-wing Republicans can simply disregard this input.  The scientists, they believe, are part of the Obama conspiracy.

Who do the right-wing Republicans trust?  Fox News, for one.  Astonishingly, many of them do not regard Fox as conservative, but see it as a middle-of-the-road news source.  According to one respondent, it’s the only network “in the middle.”  Another claimed that it is about the only source that gives you both sides.  [Holy Shit!! – editor’s note]

The survey distinguishes between the motivations of the Evangelicals and the Tea Party conservatives.  The former believe that their world, which is white, traditional and Christian, is under assault and losing ground.  They do not accept gay marriage or abortion rights and don’t want to offer undocumented aliens a path to citizenship.

Tea Party Republicans, on the other hand, don’t care so much about abortion or gay marriage.  For them, Obama’s ultimate scheme is to make government so big that our freedom will be lost forever.  Oddly, though they see government as the Evil Enemy of Freedom, they regard the Constitution, the very document that breathes life into government, as Sacred and Good.  I think they must have a Real World understanding of the Constitution and an Anti-Cosmos attitude toward government.

One of the most interesting points to come out of the Democracy Corps study is that moderate Republicans, who make up about 25% of the GOP, feel isolated from their own party.  This is mainly because the Tea Party and Evangelicals make up more than 50% of the GOP and have been leading the party into a series of disasters including the recent government shutdown. 

The moderates believe in small government but they are not uniformly hostile to Obamacare and they respect science even to the point where some of them have concerns about global warming.  They sometimes refer to the conservative wing of the party with such unflattering terms as close-minded, wacky, full of crap, and unelectable.

The moderates prefer politicians who work for compromise and many of them reject Fox News, seeing it as not really a news source at all.  According to one moderate respondent, “It tells about as much truth as like Jerry Springer does now.”  In sum, the moderate Republicans disagree with Democrats on a number of points, but they don’t seem to be taking any of their cues from an unreal Anti-Cosmos.  They are ready to disagree and compromise with Democrats where this will help solve Real World problems.

This entire report is fascinating, at least to us political junkies, but perhaps the most interesting point of all is this: many moderate Republican women look with favor on the possibility of a Hillary Clinton run for the presidency.  According to the report, “Weighing the option of voting for Hillary Clinton versus a Republican male, the moderate Republican women in Raleigh chose Clinton, on balance.”

Hillary 2016?  How would the Anti-Cosmos deal with that?

Arun Gandhi: Lessons from My Grandfather

Last week, Rollins enjoyed a visit from Mr. Arun Gandhi, the grandson of Mohandas Gandhi, the man who made non-violent resistance world famous.  I’ve often thought that Mohandas Gandhi would have been a good candidate for a “man of the century” award, but, when I googled this phrase, I discovered that Time Magazine had named Albert Einstein the Man of the Century in 1999.  Einstein is also a worthy choice, but I was pleased to see that Gandhi was listed by Time as a runner-up.

Arun Gandhi keeps up the work of his influential grandfather though, as he is quick to point out, he does not maintain the ascetic lifestyle of the Mahatma.  He spoke to the campus on Wednesday evening in the Knowles Chapel.  The crowd who came to hear him filled the chapel such that a video feed had to be set up in the Tiedtke Auditorium to accommodate the spillover audience.

He had a number of interesting stories about his grandfather as well as about his grandmother who, it turns out, was near to being saintly in her own right, given the demands of the Mahatma’s austere and single-minded life.   

Gandhi used to sell his autograph for five dollars apiece as a way to raise money for his cause.  When he was about twelve, young Arun had made up his mind to get his grandfather’s autograph without paying the “fee.”  His struggle went on for months, and involved him interfering in his grandfather’s important meetings always with the hope that the Mahatma would give up and in exasperation offer a free autograph to his grandson just to end the nuisance.  It didn’t work.  And tellingly, Gandhi’s unyielding intransigence did not involve any sort of physical punishment or harsh verbal scolding.  The worst that happened to the boy was that when his grandfather was busy in a discussion with colleagues, if Arun showed up with his autograph book, the Mahatma would put his hand over the boy’s mouth and hold his head to his breast to keep him still.  But of free autographs, there were none, not even for beloved grandchildren.

At a later discussion, Mr. Gandhi recounted an incident when he talked Jawaharlal Nehru (who was destined to be India’s first prime minister) into making him an omelet by claiming that he ate eggs – something Mahatma Gandhi did not do.  When his grandfather found out, he questioned the boy’s parents about eating eggs.  “No,” they said, “we do not eat eggs in our household.”  So later when Gandhi was together with his son and grandson he asked, “Now which one of you is telling the truth? Arun, you told Mr. Nehru that you eat eggs, but your father says no eggs are eaten in your household.”

“Well,” replied Arun, “we eat cakes in our house, and I don’t believe you can make cakes without eggs.”  At this the Mahatma laughed and said, “Yes, you will make a fine lawyer someday.”

I had the honor of driving Mr. Gandhi to the airport at the conclusion of his visit.  On the way there he talked about Gandhi’s idea that people should not have enemies.  “As soon as you see someone as an enemy,” said Arun, “you dehumanize them.”

I was also interested to hear him talk about the rivalry between north Indians and south Indians that even finds expression in communities here in the United States.  North Indians prefer statues of deities made of white marble, while south Indians prefer black marble.  In fact, there is no religious reason to prefer one over the other, but sometimes communities break apart over this issue and set up separate Hindu temples just because they’re being “cussed.”

I loved hearing Mr. Gandhi use the word “cussed,” which I don’t believe I’ve known anyone to utter since about 1958.

When I asked him about Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi, he said that he thought it did a very good job of portraying his grandfather’s philosophy and personality.  Some people criticized the film, he said, because it didn’t give adequate credit to Mr. Nehru and other leaders who worked alongside Mahatma Gandhi for the independence of India.  But, after all, he added, it was a film about Gandhi, so this kind of distortion is to be expected.

When I asked if he and his grandfather appreciated satire, Arun said, yes, if it was appropriately aimed and not too bitter.  His grandfather, he insisted, had a terrific sense of humor. 

When I finally said good-bye to him at the airport, I encouraged him to come back and spend more time at Rollins, and I was glad to see that his response suggested that he just might. 

The following morning, I bragged a little to my class about having had the honor of taking Mr. Gandhi to the airport.  They were duly impressed.  Then I told them that we got into an argument over my driving that resulted in fisticuffs, at which they laughed.  They knew I was joking; not even I could be that cussed.

    With Mr. Arun Gandhi at the Knowles Chapel

Bookaholic

My librarian friend Jonathan, who likes to disrupt things, once suggested that books might be about to follow scrolls and parchment onto the ash heap of history.  Could well be true, but this leaves me with the question of what I should do with the 2,653 books that now line the shelves of my office.  Not to mention the approximately equal number we have at home.

For some of us, buying books is a kind of addiction.  I’m not sure how this affliction works with other people, but for me it reflects a lifetime delusion that when I own a book I have thereby mastered its contents.  Blalocks’ Social Statistics has been squatting fat, black and heavy on my corner shelf since graduate student days, therefore I must have absorbed something of its contents.  Or so some corner of my mind seems to believe.

At least with Blalock I can say I did once read a couple of its chapters.  But what about the books I haven’t got around to reading at all?  Occasionally a visitor to my office will look at my crowded shelves and ask incredulously, “Have you read all these?”  I sometimes answer by pointing to a specific item and say, “I haven’t read that yellow one yet.”  Which is true, if not entirely forthcoming.

The truth is that I haven’t read about a third of them at all.  But maybe I will someday, right?

This, Dear Reader, is the anguished cry of the bookaholic.

Certainly it would be more economical to rely on the library, since my collection and that of our trusty Olin Library broadly overlap.  In fact, I confess that I have more than once checked out a book from Olin that I already own, because I couldn’t quickly locate the needed volume on my shelf.  But what about that feeling that by owning a book I have mastered it?  Yes, I realize this is a delusion.  But it is not delusional to say that owning a book does allow me to write in the margins.  That is worth something I should think.

Another delusion under which I have long suffered is that every book is as interesting as its title.  Not true.  I recently bought a book called Dark Tongues: The Art of Rogues and Riddlers.  This title is totally cool and so might have justified my purchase in itself.  Beyond this, the book was described as plumbing the depths of offbeat and marginalized speech communities, one of my favorite topics.  But the author, as it turned out, though certainly authoritative, wrote in a manner that lulled me to sleep, dwelling on trivia that couldn’t hold my interest and didn’t answer any of my questions about slang and badass language.   Sigh.  Twenty dollars and seventy-one cents, down the drain.

I really do appreciate good books and I remember when I learned that good authors can write bad books.  It was when I bought a paperback copy of D. H. Lawrence’s Fantasia of the Unconscious just before I boarded ship for my summer stint with the Navy Reserve.  I had planned to read it in my off duty hours, but once I started it, I quickly realized that it was dreadful.  I lay in my bunk one evening complaining about how god-awful it was, even though it was written by Lawrence, but none of my fellow midshipmen seemed to grasp the depths of my disgust.  So, to illustrate my sentiments with a vividness that they could understand, I began to tear the little volume into shreds.  Then, throwing the scraps onto the deck, I stood up and began stomping on them spewing out blasphemies as I did so.  “Wow,” one of them finally said, “you really don’t like that book, do you?”  Exactly.

These days I make it a point to assign books in my classes that I think will stay with undergraduates for much of their lives.  I didn’t always do this.  When I first began teaching I made the mistake of assigning “the latest thing” to my students.  This allowed me to keep up with the anthropological literature, but was an injustice to my freshmen and sophomores who weren’t really ready for a debate over the abstruse virtues of cognitive vs. symbolic anthropology.

So now I assign books that are more likely to matter to them, like Gandhi: His Life and Message for the World by Louis Fischer and Hiroshima by John Hersey.

I came to Hiroshima via a minor guilt trip.  Some 10 or 15 years ago, my friend and colleague Twila had her students ask their professors what books they thought everyone should read.  When I received an email from one of Twila’s students asking me this, I started to answer “Hiroshima.”  Then, I realized that I hadn’t actually read Hiroshima; I had only read about it.  But I wanted to stick to my choice, so I instructed the student to tell Twila that “Professor Moore recommends Hiroshima even though the big, fat hypocrite hasn’t read it himself.”  Well, now I have.

Anyway, it’s probably better that my shelves be stuffed with books like Hiroshima rather than some trendy academic tome designed to win a contemporary anthropological debate.  But, in addition to the great works, some books are worthwhile simply because they are just irresistibly fun.  For me this category includes almost all the work of P. G. Wodehouse.  I was tickled to read in today’s New York Times that Sting also treasures his collection of Wodehouse.  That’s one section of shelf that I can’t see myself culling.

But when I retire, some few years from now, how will I manage to empty the shelves of my office library?  I keep trying to minimize, and in fact I have given away a couple hundred books over the past year, but this has made barely a dent.  And we can’t clear our home shelves because there also stand ranks of volumes too precious to give up.  I think there may be only one solution: our little bungalow is going to have to be augmented with a new wing.  Call it the addict’s library wing.  This does a raise a pertinent consideration though; namely, what are my chances of getting my wife to go along with this idea?

Loafers of the World, Unite!

Is this “working for a living” thing really necessary?  I’m prompted to ask this because now, at semester's end, I have to face a huge stack of papers-to-be-graded.  Bummer. 

Actually, it turns out that we are putting in too much time on the job.  As any expert on immediate-return hunting-gathering communities will tell you, people in these communities did not generally feel the pressure of time, as though everything they did was not enough to keep up with the economic demands of life. They did not, in other words, feel the way many of us in the work force routinely feel.

More of our time should, in true Stone Age fashion, be dedicated to socializing, singing, dancing, exchanging stories, and doing whatever the hell we want.  Which, no doubt, is why we generally feel both overworked, and unable to spend as much time as we would like hanging with our buddies.

Pertinent to all this, my friend Jonathan recently sent me an article on “bullshit jobs” written by anthropologist David Graeber.  Graeber’s piece begins thus:

“In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen.”

                                   Professor Graeber

From here, Graeber goes on to say that we (that is, all of us) don’t really have to work forty hours a week to maintain a comfortable standard of living, but, since our economy is controlled by a super-rich elite, most of us are harnessed into pointless bullshit jobs designed to facilitate the further enrichment of that elite.  Our energies are consumed in this “work” while our spirits are intimidated by the prospect of unemployment.  Thus are we neutralized by and for the sake of the one percent.

Neither Graeber nor I feel that teaching is a bullshit job (not even the teaching of anthropology).  Nor is bus driving, nor welding, etc.  These jobs involve making things that people need or providing them with worthwhile services.

      But corporate law?  Now there’s some bullshit.  It seems to me that the job of corporate lawyers is to facilitate the exploitation of 

     1.  the very customers whose dollars ultimately pay the lawyers’ salaries and

2.  the workers who make the products that justify the corporation’s existence.  

In Graeber’s words, “[W]hat does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?”

I’d venture to guess that the only way out of the bullshit-bloated economy that engulfs us is to educate people about the power structure that sustains it.  This belief makes educators like me troublemakers, or it would make us such if we had any influence to speak of.  The real troublemakers are those, like Senator Elizabeth Warren, who not only see through the bullshit, but have a significant power base. 

And how can we get more people like Elizabeth Warren into positions of power?  The first step would be to get private money out of Congressional and Presidential elections.  Let these elections be paid for with public money, and let ExxonMobil, WalMart, the Koch brothers, etc., spend their excess wealth on charity instead of the purchase of political influence.

The root of the problem is that, as of now, finance capital both controls the bullshit economy and virtually owns the government.  Right-wing “populists” claim that government IS the problem, but the real problem is that government can’t properly serve us until it gains some independence from private capital.  Misguided populists want to “shrink” the government, but shrinking the government just makes it that much easier for the moneyed interests to dupe and drain us without restraint.  What we really need is for a powerful government - genuinely responsive to the voters - to kick some corporate butt.  And I'm afraid that won’t happen as long as Conglomocorp owns Congress and Joe Sixpack imagines that Elizabeth Warren is his enemy.

Now, get back to work.