Current Affairs

I remain both amazed and amused that there are so many self-proclaimed rebels in the modern USA. Everywhere I look there are individuals and groups muttering, fulminating and threatening to overthrow this that or the other.

On one level, it is kind of logical that one would find a rebel mindset in a country that is only 230 or so years old in its modern form, a country founded by rebellion against colonial subjugation.  On another level, there is no current credible existential threat to the physical survival of the USA. (As one humorist sad in Harvard Business Review many years ago, “we may be the world’s biggest debtor nation, but let’s just see them try to collect!”). There are plenty of supposed threats, but they seem in many cases to be the kind of threats that people were making dire predictions about 40+ years ago, and those fears have yet to be converted to reality.

Here are my condensed thoughts on what I term “The Rebellion Thing”. Standard disclaimers apply.

1. It is 230+ years since the USA was created. This makes it, when compared to many countries, an adolescent. However, adolescents eventually (mostly) mature and move into a new phase in their lives. The ones that do not eventually wear out their welcome. Being a rebel is cute at 16, tired at 26, tedious at 36, puzzling at 46 and a real turn off at 56. Holden Caulfield and James Dean were only attractive because they were young and you could think “they don’t know any better”. The people that cannot quit being adolescents usually end up as figures of eye-rolling fun. You might think they are cute in small doses, but you wouldn’t want to spend much time with them. They always seem to be looking for something to rebel against.
2. Famous rebels who obtained success via the overthrow of their opponents, in many cases, made a poor job of actually governing. The founders of the modern USA are one of the shining exceptions. Notice that they actually took time out from rebelling to think long and hard about what they wanted as an end result. The end of British rule was simply a stopping point on the journey. It was a tactic, not the whole strategy.
3. Vague unspecified “I’m a rebel <insert bellicose snarling words>” statements don’t answer the question “what are you rebelling against”. Fine-sounding statements like “I want my country back” or “don’t tread on me” are also merely vague statements of discontent.
4. Being a rebel doesn’t automatically make you a poster child for freedom. It is a feature of history that many rebels, when placed in positions of power, ended up rapidly becoming authoritarian despots. Behind many self-proclaimed charismatic rebels lies a dangerous mix of narcissism and conceit.
5. Rebelling against fundamental items of reality like the federal government, taxes etc. doesn’t make you look principled and valiant. It tends to make you look like the second coming of Don Quixote. If you want to rebel against those entities or ideas, have at it, but bear in mind that everybody who tried that prior to you has, to varying degrees, failed. This probably suggests that the odds are not in your favour. Have you considered, you know, voting for different candidates? Like, candidates not belonging to the mainstream political parties that you always whine about. Just thinking out loud here…
6. If you want to appear to be a credible rebel, it probably isn’t a great idea to use the battle flag of a defeated secessionist movement as an emblem. Defeated losers in wars generally don’t get a do-over. Who are you? The Black Knight from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”?
7. You need to either back talk up with action or risk being seen as a keyboard warrior, a member of the 101^st Chairborne. Threatening to “march on Washington” because of some perceived slight or injustice tends to make you look like the small child throwing toys out of the pram because they couldn’t get their way.
8. Martyrdom is always a good last resort if you really want to take dramatic action. However, you have to be really ready to go through with it. See (6) above. Talking tough like Ted Nugent and then hoping that people forget about it might work for some less thoughtful individuals, but it probably won’t lead most people to take you at all seriously. It’s this little thing called credibility. Even martyrs get mixed reviews in the annals of history.

Some quick observations about the aftermath of what i will call The McKinney Pool Incident.

1. Partisans on both ends of the narrative spectrum are currently engaging in an attempt to control and distort the narrative to fit their pre-conceptions. I am starting to see people on Facebook, Twitter etc. posting, totally uncritically, articles posted on echo chamber websites that seek to impose a glib, judgmental narrative on the events. Be smart, folks. Don’t just promulgate this guff without asking fundamental questions about the credibility of the source, and the way in which the article is written. Also pay attention to the use of coded language in narratives written by partisans. As an example. when I read an article on an authoritarian website asserting that the party organizers “appear to be from Chicago”, I know exactly what that claim is really saying. (Translation:  Chicago – evil den of political corruption controlled by people of the wrong party, you know that one that the POTUS belongs to, hint hint). If you want to understand more, read some of the books by George Lakoff.

2. The city of McKinney has already done one thing right by suspending the officer whose conduct was captured on video. But bear in mind that a lot of the incidents were not captured on video. The evidence for those happenings is anecdotal, and it will take a while to sort out the truth from the guff and misinformation. There is a process called investigation, a skill called critical thinking, and a third important principle called Due Process. They should be allowed to happen.

3. If your community is squarely in a media firestorm, it is not a good idea to create posters that reflexively and uncritically support one side or the other in the dispute. This shows a shocking lack of self-awareness, and if the investigation shows that the people you are claiming to support erred, you are going to look mighty stupid. Also bear in mind that if you have a well-paid job in corporate America, suddenly finding your name perjoratively splashed across social media is not what your employer wants to see. One constant of corporations is that they like publicity but they hate controversy. Since Texas is a “right to work:” state, you can be fired for no reason at all. (Of course there is always a reason, but they don’t have to tell you, and they would be fools to do so).

4. Any person who begins an explanation for their position with a protestation of “I’m not being XXXX, but…” is, most of the time, being XXXX. It is a well-understood reality that people who are telling the truth never claim that they are – they instinctively expect to be believed. It is identical to the “you can trust me” meme. We know this. We know it so well that it is ingrained in humour. Think of all of the jokes based on lines such as “trust me, I’m a doctor/dentist/consultant etc. etc.”. Be wary of these kinds of exculpatory protestations.

In case you had not yet found out…the city of McKinney is currently in the news for all of the wrong reasons.
There are a few obvious things about how to handle this kind of crisis that i learned when reading the classroom materials from a class that a work colleague attended in 1997 called “how to deal with the media”. There are several simple (and rather obvious) rules:

1. If you screwed up, admit it
This is the most obvious, and the most ignored. The reason for the old saying “it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up” is that humans have a far higher forgiveness threshold for people and organizations who admit to error than they do for people and organizations who obfuscate, bullshit or lie in an attempt to deflect accountability. (Obvious note – with video in existence of at least part of the incident, it is not a good idea for the law enforcement bodies to try to impose a false narrative. Arguing against what people can see or interpret from a video is a Really Really Bad Tactic).
2. Make Good on recompense
The case study for this is Intel, who discovered an obscure (and rarely used) math processing error in their Pentium chip. Rather than sweeping it under the carpet, they admitted to its existence (tick Rule 1). But then they did something far far smarter. They announced that anybody who felt that they no longer had confidence in their Pentium CPU could send it in and get a replacement AT NO COST TO THEM. The gesture removed just about all remaining negative impact from the initial announcement. Intel had stood behind their product and their reputation, and backed it up with action. Their long term reputation was unaffected, and possibly even enhanced.
3. Hold the Right people accountable and show how you held them accountable
This is more tricky. The temptation in large organizations is to circle the wagons and diffuse accountability, via a number of rhetorical devices (prominent among them is the use of the passive “mistakes were made”, which de-personalizes and diffuses accountability). The aim is to ride out the storm. Those tactics communicate that you are not really interested in changing for the better, you just want the noise to go away. The challenge is that it erodes your credibility and trust with the public.

McKinney has a window of opportunity to Do The Right Things. Some of them may be unpalatable in the short term. However, failure to do them will result in Google searches of McKinney returning hits that are a lot more negative than positive in the months to come. (Obvious parallel – google Ferguson).
Ultimately, it is all about credibility. Failure to respond correctly will reduce and possibly eliminate the credibility of the city of McKinney.

“If you don’t like this country, then leave”

“If X happens, I’m going to leave”

I read these statements all of the time. In fact, I have had the first one used against me in Facebook and blog comments.

My first response is usually some variant of “is this all you have”? It’s not an argument. It’s an attempt to shut off the conversation. It is, like many rhetorical tricks used by people who are not into reasoned debate, intellectually risible, unserious nonsense. It reads like childish petulance, the sort of thing you would not tolerate from one of your own children.

It is hardly surprising that these kinds of invitations are usually written by authoritarians. One thing I notice about authoritarians is that many of them have a binary worldview. When they think they are in the ascendant, they suggest or demand that anybody who does not agree with them leave the country. When they fear they are not in the ascendant, they decide that they themselves are going to leave the country.

My response to “If you don’t like it leave” is usually “no, I am a citizen, I am not leaving. Now, do you have an argument?”

What I always think after reading the meme “I’m going to leave the country” is “so where the hell are you going to go?”. The challenge  is that when they say “I am going to leave this country”, that is not all that they are saying. Unspoken is the addition “I am going to go somewhere else and set up a place where We Are In Charge”. That unspoken pre-condition tends to limit where they can go.

Not Europe, that is a socialist hellhole. India is hot and full of people of the wrong color. China is communist and therefore scary. Russia is too cold. Latin America is strange and mostly socialist. The Middle East is full of terrorists…The list goes on.

I can really only think of a handful of countries that authoritarians might decide match their worldview. The snag is that they are all failed states occupied by corrupt venal and dictatorial regimes. And they are in dangerous parts of the world. In short, they would be a long way down any sensible person’s list of places to visit, never mind places to go live. The other thing that they are also overlooking is that they are never going to be In Charge in any countries run by authoritarians, and if they annoy somebody in the government, they will probably start to disappear in the middle of the night, never to be seen again.

As I said, these kinds of petulant foot-stomping comments are unserious.

From time to time i see people posting slogans or images over which somebody has plastered a slogan. You know the sort of thing. The slogan is a variant on “If you don’t like this country. leave”. Or “if you don’t love the country, get out”. There are numerous variants of it.
Folks, it is time to grow up and get real. Life is not binary. Things and people are not all bad or all good, with nothing in between. Countries are the same.
The world in which we live is flawed and imperfect because a lot of it is controlled by humans, who are imperfect, inconsistent and prone to flights of everything ranging from love, vivid fantasy through panic attacks, anger and (sad to say) violence.
Dissent is not disloyalty, and blind obedience to some idealized view of a society or country is not progress. It’s actually the sort of requirement placed on citizens in a totalitarian state, the sort of state that treats citizens as mere subjects, peons who should be seen and not heard, and know their place and obey their superiors. In other words, a country remarkably like some of the countries that the Founding Fathers left in order to form the modern-day United States.
Living in this country does not require you to fail to notice its imperfections, nor does it impose any requirement on you to keep quiet about those imperfections. There is a First Amendment for a good reason. There is also no Constitutional right to not be offended.
There are a number of sub-optimal features in the modern USA. From time to time I will comment on them. If you think that makes me “un-American”, “anti-American”, “unpatriotic” etc. etc.. then so be it, but, frankly, it says more about your binary mindset than it does about my opinions.