Easy Sunday: Lord of the Flies

     "History teaches us again and again that democracies can fall, they fall to populists, they fall to strongmen, strongmen who beguile their fellow citizens with conspiracy theories and false emergencies."
          Liz Cheney, speaking in Wisconsin this week

I cited these words of Liz Cheney just two days ago, on Friday.

The subject of that post, titled A transformative act of violence, was the appeal of strongman government led by a charismatic leader who promises to get things done without the complications, delays, and "minority rights" impediments of a democracy. Power isn't awarded gently and gracefully unless people consent to that. It can also be seized, because a populist leader demands it and isn't stopped.

Our Constitution was not designed to be efficient. It was designed to allow a rough consensus within a large and complicated nation, through rights assigned to states and national power divided among branches of government. Trump and his supporters spoke last night in Butler, Pennsylvania about Trump's divine anointment. Trump said he "took a bullet" for us, and survived thanks to God's watchful hand. Friday's post observed that Trump was leaning into the necessity of cruel, decisive strongman government. Those people who sought and chased a recalcitrant Mike Pence were patriots, Trump says. He says we need to be "real rough, nasty" to stop crime. He claims the mandate of Heaven and the support of a majority of Americans. It is a fight, he said, between good and evil, and he represents good.

Democracies and constitutional government are fragile. Democracies with the peaceful transition of power are not the equilibrium state of human organization. A book many of us read in high school, Lord of the Flies, explored what happens when a small group of boys are isolated and forced to organize themselves. They did not establish a constitutional democracy. Gerald Murphy taught high school English in California. He describes an assignment he gave his students.  

Gerald Murphy

Guest Post by Gerald Murphy

Lord of the Flies Revisited

The first high school English class I taught had “Lord of the Flies” as required reading. I thought it would be nice for my students to think about how they would behave if they were somehow stranded on an uninhabited island, an island with lots of fruit trees and wild pigs to capture and eat. What would they do for food, shelter, and what sort of a government would they set up?

They came up with a society not unlike Thomas More’s “Utopia,” including communal property and no class distinctions. They thought it would be doable if the work was shared and food distributed equitably.

It could be a little paradise on Earth.

One cynical student, however, brought up the problem of crime. What if someone refused to go along with the majority? What if someone steals, or fights, or destroys the harmony by spreading vicious lies? What’s to be done with them?

The answer came quickly: Build a prison and keep them there until they learned to cooperate.

And if they still won’t obey the majority? Some students suggested torture. Others thought the "bad" people should be exiled to another island. And some proposed execution for the ne’er-do-wells to keep peace and harmony permanent.

In short, it didn’t take my students long to come up with some of the same problems that bedeviled the kids in the novel. You can develop acceptable norms for behavior in any society, but there is always a snake in the tree whispering treacherous thoughts, a jealous Cain willing to knock off his peaceful brother, and a Jack able to convince a sizable group that the way forward requires a strong leader who will eliminate the clumsy and inefficient ways of democratic leaders to give us a shortcut to Utopia. We just need to trust the Dear Leader. And like Jack in the novel, he may not be gentle and kind, but at least he gets things done.

In times like this, we need a man of action to lead us, to protect us. Why not the Dear Leader?

I hear he’s available.

 

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Medford Council approves Fire Station 15

Non-events are news, too.

Simple operations of local government continue. The roads stay paved. Sewer systems work. Fire stations get upgraded.

Thursday night the Medford City Council approved an $8.4 million item to replace Fire Station 15. 

That's it. That's the news.

Fire Station 15 in Medford is past the age of its useful life. It is too small -- about a third the size of the next-smallest station. It has only one bay for fire equipment, and it is too small to handle a ladder truck. That matters because the station services some multi-story apartment houses. The single bay and small living space does not leave room for the EMTs and para-medics who are part of most emergency responses. About 80 percent of emergency calls are medical related or inquiries about something strange and troubling to the caller. The caller dials 911. About 20 percent are reports of smoke and suspected fire.

Medford mayoral candidate Curt Ankerberg wrote a letter to the Medford City Council claiming he could rehabilitate the fire station for $2 million and that the Council members were bumbling idiots, dumbasses, that they lacked talent, took bribes, and were on the take while building "shitty projects." The centerpiece evidence for his claim was that the city made "a NO-BID contract." 

Two problems: The building could not be re-built and it was not a no-bid contract. 

The contract went through the normal public bidding process and generated four bids, from Outlier Construction, Adroit Construction, S + B James Construction, and Vitus Construction. Outlier Construction had the low bid, and city staff concluded they had the personnel and experience to do the project. The contract was approved by the Council, six-zero. 

Claims like Ankerberg's can take wing on social media. "Crooked city government" is sharable, re-tweet-able, and interesting to contemplate. The wild, obscene claims of a conspiracy-minded provocateur draw attention because they are nasty and extreme. Ankerberg is a local version of Trump. Some people want to believe Ankerberg. Some people want to believe Trump's claims about Obama's birthplace, about 2020 election fraud, and about Haitian immigrants eating your dogs and cats. Flamboyant lies circulate faster than the ho-hum operation of government doing what it should be doing. 

Why am I bothering to write such a boring, nothing-burger post? Because it is a caution to people "doing their own research" by listening to provocateurs, and to people who presume that everything that government does is stupid, ineffective, or corrupt. That's not true. 

The stoplights cycle. The toilets flush and the waste disappears. The roads move traffic. And when you dial 911, people show up.

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A transformative act of violence

There is something deeply satisfying about resolving a complicated problem with a simple, quick act.

Often it is an act of violence.

This morning I watched an MSNBC host wonder aloud how a person like Trump -- guilty of sexual crimes, financial fraud, and openly proud of having attempted to thwart the peaceful transfer of power -- could still be a contender for the highest office. One answer is that people like what he says he will accomplish, and they don't care much how he does it. He says he will end crime, stop illegal immigration, end inflation, bring jobs back to America, stop wars in Ukraine and Israel, make health care available and cheap, and make women happy. What's not to like?

He will do it with a mix of violence, intimidation, and executive orders. 

Last night in Wisconsin Liz Cheney warned of "strongman" tyranny:

"Vance has said repeatedly that . . . he would have thrown out the votes of the people of Wisconsin because he didn't like the way you voted. That is tyranny and that is disqualifying. History teaches us again and again that democracies can fall, they fall to populists, they fall to strongmen, strongmen who beguile their fellow citizens with conspiracy theories and false emergencies.

Trump does not hide from strongman government. He doesn't present it as tyranny. He presents it as solving problems. He understands the appeal of transformative acts of violence. The democratic process is slow and full of choke points. Kamala Harris praises "democracy," but the democratic process in America is a mixed blessing. Process isn't fast and it gets compromised. It isn't clear and decisive. It isn't "masculine."

Polls show a dramatic gender gap in the presidential election. Trump wins a solid majority of the votes of men. Men -- indeed male mammals generally -- are typically more aggressive, more prone to violence against other species and against one another. People can attribute it to DNA, to testosterone, to acculturation. People can argue about whether it is inevitable and enduring, or whether it is disappearing as our species becomes more urbanized and domesticated. Then they can argue about whether its disappearance is good or a disaster. 

That debate is going on, as Republican senators grow beards, write books about manliness, and condemn gender transition. Harris is inevitably thrust into that fight. She presents a nuanced position. She says she has a gun and she praised our military for being "lethal." That is masculine. But she is a woman and she advocates for abortion rights. That's feminine. Yet the process she carried out as a District Attorney and Attorney General was prosecuting crimes. That's masculine. Yet, she respects the rights of immigrant asylum-seekers and condemns cruelty. That's feminine again. It's complicated.

Trump is simple and clear. He leans into being cruel, decisive, dominating, strong, and fearless. He is a Viking raider. He is General Sherman. He is Alexander the Great. He leads Christian solders marching as to war. He is masculine. He will smite and defeat the enemy. He will grab women, and they will let him do it.

Donald Trump in Erie, Pennsylvania this week praised transformative violence: 

"What the hell is going on? See, we have to let the police do their job [crowd cheers]. And if they have to be extraordinarily rough [crowd cheers louder]. . . . You know, if you had one day, like one real rough, nasty day, one rough hour, and I mean real rough, the word will get out and it will end immediately. End immediately. You know, it'll [shoplifting] end immediately.

Trump is appealing to a mix of biology and culture. Whether it is the Trojan Horse, Hiroshima, the cavalry riding into town, or the Lone Ranger's silver bullet, violence transforms. It ends the war or solves the problem. The situation just needs a strong leader who will get things done. This idea is a time bomb for democracy that waited for the right moment and the right catalyst.

Trump's flagrant disregard for rules and constraints isn't a bug. It's a feature. 

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Make every state a battleground state

     "Isn't it crazy that the future of our country will be decided by 50,000 un-engaged low-information voters in Pennsylvania?"
          A man in a diner in Massachusetts (not a swing state)

No wonder people feel frustrated about politics. 

I favor a system where every vote matters. I favor a popular vote for president.

We all know the battleground states. These were the 2020 states. The same states are battlegrounds in 2024.

A popular election would mean that every vote matters. The current system of election by states -- or in Nebraska and Maine by congressional district -- means that the votes for the losing candidate in that state or district are discarded before the final tally. This system has undesirable consequences.

1. There is no electoral incentive to have policies that are especially popular to people of any one state. There is no value in running up the score because a safe 54 percent victory brings no more electoral votes than does a landslide. In the real world, this diminishes the influence of the farm states, since a Republican victory is assumed, and there is no more value in a big win versus a big-enough win. Similarly in the opposite way for blue California. In either case, the "extra" votes are wasted.

2. The system undervalues small states and their voters. This is opposite the usual presumption that a system that gives almost three times the presidential vote weight to low-population states as a large one. In fact, presidential math means that the small states and their voters can essentially be ignored, and in fact they are. Their influence is capped by the three or four votes they bring to the Electoral College. No use pandering to Idaho potato farmers. A Republican candidate has all the votes he needs to get a majority; no use winning extra votes. 

3. Winner-take-all voting by states, in the close elections that we now experience, puts the attention and tipping point decision-making on a small and unrepresentative group of swing voters in swing states. We lose the "wisdom of crowds" by putting our democracy's future in the hands of about one percent of people in seven states, people who are so unusually uninformed and disengaged that they find themselves in October of an election year barely aware of who is running, but possibly willing to be goaded into voting.

4. The current system leaves nearly every voter cheated. Their votes are not part of the national total, which vote is a drop in a bucket, sure, but at least it's a drop. They have skin in the game. But in Oregon, for example, votes in my neighborhood for Trump simply disappear as they are overwhelmed by blue votes in the Portland metropolitan area. All Oregon's electoral votes will go to Harris. Trump got six million votes in California in 2020, but every Trump voter knew full well that their vote never made its way to be part of the final tally. In 42 or 43 states out of 50, its voters are bystanders to the election. 

A national popular vote is legally and politically possible. State legislatures, by law in their states, can agree to cast their electoral votes for the winner of the popular vote. From the National Popular Vote Compact website:

The National Popular Vote Compact has been enacted into law by 17 states and the District of Columbia, including 5 small states (DE, HI, ME, RI, VT), 9 medium-sized states (CO, CT, MD, MA, MN, NJ, NM, OR, WA), and 3 big states (CA, IL, NY). These jurisdictions have 209 of the 270 electoral votes needed to activate the law.

What will it take to get the few additional states to join the compact? Perhaps one more screwy election, only this time with the Republican winning the popular vote and the Democrat winning a couple of battleground states by a tiny margin, and therefore the presidency. There is no guarantee that the Electoral College advantages Republicans, although it has done so in recent elections. A few votes in a few states would change that. If Florida or North Carolina flipped blue by a few votes, the electoral college would advantage Democrats.

Sooner or later enough people will feel fed up that the presidential election decision is made somewhere else by somebody else, and change will happen. In the meantime, keep your eye on that voter in Pennsylvania, that voter who knows nothing and cares little, and who might or might not bother to vote, depending on the weather and what is on TV. That is whose vote decides the future of the country. Not yours.

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Gaslighting.

      “Look, Tim, first of all, it’s really rich for Democratic leaders to say that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power on January the 20th, as we have done for 250 years in this country.”
            JD Vance at last night's debate

Wow.

That was the low point for JD Vance in the minds of post-debate pundits. 

I see it as a high point for Vance. Vance was demonstrating his skill as a sycophant, an actor, a con man, and a worthy successor to Trump. What we saw there was the perfect example of "gaslighting." 

Vance told us not to believe our eyes. Don't believe our memories. It takes skill and practice to create an alternative reality that others will believe. Step number one is to stick to the story.  Don't give away the game by looking away or hesitating. Say it with the same matter-of-fact declarative confidence that you would say that one-plus-one-is-two. Practice the line until it feels natural and true: "He peacefully gave over power on January the 20th, as we have done for 250 years in this country."

If you do it right, people believe you. Or sort of believe you. Or doubt what they remember.

I presume the Harris campaign will make an ad out of this, with an insert of a clip of Trump saying he won and urging the crowd to "be strong." There will surely be images of rioters pushing barricades against the police and people breaking windows. The ad might be the thing with makes the vice presidential debate a draw in its net result. Vance had to know the question was coming so he had his answer prepared, and he handled it as well as it can be handled.

But the debate itself was a win for the Trump-Vance team. Democrats should stop fighting what they saw with their own eyes and not gaslight themselves. Vance won. He looked good; Walz less good. Vance looked younger and sharper than Walz, who grimaced and looked down at the notes he was writing. Vance looked like a TV news anchor. Walz looked like a man in the breakfast diner in Iowa or New Hampshire.

The debate won't matter. We are not picking a team. We are picking a symbol, an archetype, and that means choosing between Trump and all he represents (which we know full well) or Harris and what she represents (which we know much less well, except that she isn't Trump.) For a couple of days Democratic punditry will focus on Vance's bit of election gaslighting because it reveals Trump at his most dangerous. Republican punditry and the Trump campaign will celebrate Vance for one day and then put the focus back on Trump. Trump is the center of attention. Vance is an understudy, not the co-star. Trump is the indispensable man, the only one who can save us. The Vance debate "win" shines a poor light onto Trump, who lost his debate. Vance's success undermines the Trump story of indispensability, so we will see little of it.

But mostly, the vice presidential debate won't matter.

If Trump loses this November, Vance won't go away.  He knows he looked good. Better than Trump.

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The desperation period: Tuesday part two

Trump calls Harris "mentally impaired."

“Crooked Joe Biden became mentally impaired, Sad. But lying Kamala Harris, honestly, I believe she was born that way. There’s something wrong with Kamala. And I just don’t know what it is, but there is definitely something missing. And you know what, everybody knows it.”

We have entered a moment of maximum crazy. 

Locally, Curt Ankerberg’s campaign is flailing, making wild accusations in public letters to the Medford City Council. Some Trump-oriented citizens will like Ankerberg's style, but more, I suspect, will consider Ankerberg to be foolish and intemperate. He calls City Council members "bumbling idiots" and worse.

Nationally, Trump sounds rather like Ankerberg. Trump has ramped up from calling Kamala Harris "low-IQ" to saying she has a mental disability. Harris is a college graduate, an attorney, and the debater who is widely acknowledged to have bested Trump by sounding reasonable herself while baiting him into self-defeating rants. Trump looks desperate now in the aftermath of the debate as his language gets cruder. GOP leaders urge him to show some self-discipline, but he cannot help himself.

The crazy is getting higher and higher. 

Trump called his speech "dark." He said we are being invaded by stone-cold killers, dark-skinned foreigners who are nothing like us. He says they will cut your throats when they break into your kitchens. Things are terrible, but he can fix things if he is allowed to take control and be rough, very rough.  

The frantic elevation of this rhetoric reminded me of a moment in the past -- a happier memory.

The end of summer in 1967 did not seem dark to me as I finished up the melon crop before getting onto the airplane to go off to college. A song, "Your Love Keeps Lifting Me Higher and Higher" was recorded in August of 1967, the apogee of the Summer of Love. It was on KYJC and KBOY top-40 radio. The world was full of possibility, and my generation was going to fix what was wrong with everything. There was an up-tempo frantic quality to the song, and more was lifted onto more, and that was lifted onto yet more. But it was okay, because it was love that was getting higher and higher.

Keep my love going, now, higher and higher (lifting me higher and higher, higher)
I said keep on lifting (lifting, lifting, lifting)
Lift me up mama (your love keeps lifting me)
Keep on lifting me (lifting me higher and higher, higher)
Higher and higher

This is the second of two short posts today.

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Tuesday, part one: Kevin Stine, a Medford City Council member, responds to Ankerberg.

Curt Ankerberg is misinformed.

There is public bidding for the Fire Station 15 project.

Kevin Stine, a Medford City Council member for 10 years, responded to Ankerberg's letter to the council.  

Kevin Stine

Stine ignored mayoral candidate Curt Ankerberg's comments calling the City Council "dumbasses" and "corrupt trash." Ankerberg used those and other words in a letter to the Council I published verbatim yesterday. Stine addressed the two substantive elements of Ankerberg's letter. Could Fire Station 15 be repaired rather than replaced, as Ankerberg asserted? And is the contract to rebuild it a "NO-BID contract to Outlier Construction" as Ankerberg also asserted?

Kevin Stine wrote:

No. There is not adequate rehab for the 50 year old building. The station should have been replaced long ago and it is the right move to get it done. Much has been written about the teeter-totter toilets at the current station. The new fire station will be on the same site, but will be bigger and designed in such a way as to hold a second EMS team, being a great benefit for the citizens of Medford.

There was a public RFP for the awardee to be part of the Construction Manager/General Contractor process. Basically this has the architect work with the construction company to look for ways to keep the project moving forward and keep within budget. There can be times where there is value-engineering to keep costs down.

Any comments that Medford doesn't utilize proper processes when agreeing on contracts is erroneous. Oregon law has very strict requirements for building public facilities, and the City of Medford adheres to all laws and regulations.

Kevin Stine lives in West Medford with his wife and daughter. He served nine years in the U.S. Navy with three deployments aboard submarines. He is a Navy Reservist and a substitute teacher in the Medford schools.

Curt Ankerberg is a Republican, a Trump supporter, and a frequent candidate for local political offices.

Note: The City of Medford website currently has this notice of current bid opportunities with a link to announcement of bids for Fire Station 15: Click here.

That link leads to this PDF file:

Click here

This is the first of two short posts today.

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