Request of my readers

Please take the Political Typology quiz, then email me your result.

FYI: I am an "Establishment Liberal," but readers probably guessed that.

The Pew Research Center does non-partisan political and cultural research polling. They created a questionnaire that attempts to show which of nine different "political typologies" a person belongs. I would like to know more about my readers. 

The questionnaire/poll is anonymous. They don't ask your name or email address. There are 16 questions. It  takes about three minutes.

They divide the American population into plausible political categories. There is a difference between "All-American" faith-and-flag-oriented Republicans motivated by affinity to cultural symbols versus populist Republicans who are motivated by distrust of elites, especially the big media and technology corporations. On the left, there is difference between Biden-supporting liberals, people OK with incremental change, and Bernie-oriented progressives. The political parties are uneasy coalitions of these groups.

Please take the quiz, get the result, and then email me a brief report, e.g. "I am a ________".   Any results I report will be fully anonymized and reported in the aggregate only.

The quiz:  

 https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/quiz/political-typology/

Email me at: peter.w.sage@gmail.com  

If you are reluctant to email me your result, you can click here, in a "survey monkey" site, and register your vote there. All I will get is a tabulation of total results. You can just click once to register your answer, then leave:   https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/9G3KPVB

How sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country

Victory and Death.

I remember feeling shock and awe.

It was my first week at college. Everything was new and special.

The awe came from the cathedral-like setting, the grand marble staircase leading up to the reading room in Harvard's main research library. I was someplace special, almost sacred.  In a landing midway up the staircase I saw this painting. It was dark and a bit hard to figure out at first. 

The shock came from the inscription:

"Happy those who with that glowing faith in one embrace clasped victory and death."

I deciphered the dark image. A soldier in the middle, a winged image meaning victory, another figure was the dark angel of death. The solder looked happy. He stood above a fallen body--his body.

Happy? Say what? Victory? What a crock! World War One geared up the world for even more deaths in World War Two.

I was shocked at the glorification and sanitization of battlefield death that allowed--maybe demanded--more wars. A war was going on right then, 1967, and I might be pulled into the grinder. It was three weeks before my 18th birthday, and on that birthday I would need to make my way to the Cambridge Post Office to register for the draft. The scene didn't feel theoretical or allegorical to me. My government might put me where that soldier was, the real soldier, the one sprawled out on the ground, not the smiling ghost.

I stared at the image and felt my faith evaporate. This was college and I was in its cathedral of knowledge. This secular authority of wisdom, my new university home, was not just wrong, it was profoundly wrong and yet so confident in its wrong-ness that it placed this image here for young men to see. 

Oh, I thought. I felt I had lost something. 

A year later I took a class on Puritan history and learned that they had words for what I felt, their "doctrine of weaned affections." I no longer had the innocent belief and attachment to something worldly, in my case the idea that I could trust what I might suck from Harvard's breast. I needed to beware. Harvard, with all its learning, wasn't necessarily wise nor good. Not at all. Oh.

Not long afterward I stumbled upon this poem doing idle reading on the fourth floor of that library, perhaps the best-known poem to come out of World War One. 

                  Dulce et decorum est

            By Wilfred Owen, 1893-1918

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Veterans Day

The 11th hour:  A quiet walk in the park.

Robert Sage, 1945, Germany

Some soldiers survive a war, come out OK, and get to live their lives.

My father was drafted early in 1942 and spent four years in the army, about six months of it in close combat in Europe. During my boyhood dad said little about those years. There were no stories of danger or heroism. "My job was to get the message through. I had to stay alive to do it," he said.

He survived the war and came back to his boyhood home, Medford and the farm at Table Rock. He had three children. He had a long career as a schoolteacher and principal. He died at home, at age 92, his body worn out from decades of living. Lucky.

Robert Sage, 2003, Germany

At age 80 my father visited the places where he had seen combat and began writing his memoirs. Then the stories came out: Freezing cold, cities bombed, near misses, bodies mangled, soldiers dying. Surviving the war had a big element of random luck, being in the right place at the right time. Or not.

Larry Slessler, too, saw combat--Slessler's in Vietnam. He grew up in Medford and graduated from Medford High in 1957 and the University of Oregon in 1961. He entered the military in the fall of 1961 and served until 1972. His post-military career involved service to veterans and “Welfare to Work” programs. He asked me if I would post this on Veterans Day.

Guest Post by Larry Slessler

Since I was a young lad; time in Lithia Park, Ashland, Oregon has meant a great deal to me. I think it one of best parks in all of Oregon. From the creek that runs its lengths, the tall native trees, benches, secluded picnic tables…the setting is one of peace and tranquility. When I was a boy, the park held a small zoo and I would always visit it and feed leaves to the tame deer that were part of the exhibit.

 

Larry Slessler

When I came home from war in 1966, one of the first things I did was take my two and a half year old son Nathan to the Lithia Park playground. Because of the year I was gone, I was no longer a real person to my children. Playing with Nathan on the swings, slides and other contraptions helped make me real to him. And in a truth, I hated to admit, make him real to me. My son was not the same boy at age two and a half as he had been a year earlier when I left. 

 

The park was a natural selection for Elizabeth’s and my wedding in 1989. She too has fond memories of Lithia Park. Over the years since our wedding, Liz and I take walk’s to the spot near the upper duck pond, where we were married and think back to that time in 1989. 

 

And yet there is one small part of Lithia Park that leads to emotions of sadness and being honest with myself, anger for me. I avoid that small bit of real estate most of the time. However, on some days I am compelled to visit it. 

 

Not many yards from where Liz and I were married is a large stone with a bronze plaque set into the stone. The plaque pays homage to Ashland soldiers killed in WWI. Two parts of that plaque tear into my soul each time I allow myself to view it. First; it pays tribute to the men “…that gave their lives…” At the bottom of the tribute it says; “Dulce et decorum Est pro patria mori.” In English; “How sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country.”

 

Maybe you can identify with, or understand my emotions. In my experience soldiers do not “Give their lives.” Those lives are ripped from them in violent ways and a future life denied. To add that it is sweet and fitting to that violent death is, to me, obscene. 

    

Vietnam 1967, Iraq 2006, or Afghanistan 2014: “Hay Bill, Hank got killed on patrol. That’s sweet Frank…” Are you kidding me! That conversation would get you mentally discharged or; more likely shot.

 

The attached photo, taken by Liz on our walk is a picture of the Lithia Park plaque.

 

Peace and love to each of you.

[Tomorrow: the famous World War One poem, Dulce et decorum, est, by Wilfred Owen]

Enabling a Coup d'état

U.S. Rep. Cliff Bentz (R. Oregon) began a Town Meeting yesterday by saying he supported the 2nd Amendment and Donald Trump.

By random good luck, my ticket number was called and I got to ask a question.

I asked:

You say you support Donald Trump. He actively tried to get governors, election officials, legislatures in Michigan and Wisconsin, and the Vice President to reverse the election results. What does a person have to do to subvert the Constitution and try to overthrow the government to stay in power more than what President Trump did, before you will say 'we can do better than Donald Trump'?

The question got applause from part of the audience; restless boos from others.

U.S. Rep Bentz responded:

As I indicated, uh, the, uh, President Trump's approach to, uh, [interruptions from the crowd shouting "Former! Former president] to approach to things, uh, when it comes to, uh, things is, uh, when it comes to things we talk about, uh, is not necessarily the way I do it. I think he's--his policies are excellent, uh, I'll mention a few. Operation Warp Speed, and regulations [inaudible because of applause] try to make the ESA [Endangered Species Act] work better, try to protect water for farmers, try to stop the tsunami of immigration coming across our border right now, [inaudible because of applause] lower the cost of energy. He lowered taxes. He attracted hundreds of billions of dollars with his tax policies, people forget about all the big corporations that were sheltering all of their money offshore and under the new tax plan, uh, that money comes back here, drove down unemployment for the minorities to the lowest in 50 years, and tried to move jobs to the United States.

Now, is his approach on--uh--how he talks about elections--my own approach? Let me, uh, let me 

[shout from the audience: "Is that a hard question?"] 

[Inaudible for a few seconds] . . .on January 6, I was actually in my office in, uh, Washington D.C. we were asked to stay there because Nancy Pelosi didn't want people on the floor given the COVID situation, an argument or something going on, so I was on the floor when folks broke into the Capitol, and uh, we watched as that was going on, and, uh, it was one of the saddest things I've seen, and so, after that happened, we went on the floor and we voted on the various states, and we voted on the various states, uh, the way Vice President Pence [inaudible] in order. That's what our Constitution says we do, yeah, we go through that certification process, and we have each state come in and say how it voted. We [inaudible] the people. Our job is basically to listen, and because states are supposed to take care of that [inaudible] by voting. Now the one exception to that, at least in my mind. If those states violate the Constitution, then we have a problem. That's why I voted against Pennsylvania. I voted for certification of Arizona. Why? I didn't see they having violated the Constitution.

Now, I'm calling out what I do, and so what I would suggest right now is that everybody that is talking about January 6 and President Trump is probably more excited about talking about him than they are in talking about President Biden [inaudible]

[call from audience: "Would you say "ex-President Trump]

so it's not to ignore what's going on. I can't think of anything more important right now than convincing people that they should vote, I want them to understand that their vote will be counted. Correctly. How do we get back to that? Because there are a lot of people who don't believe in our systems now.

There's another opportunity in this county just a couple of weeks ago, I'm talking to Charlie about this, he's in charge of taking care of this space, and his idea was, we can have people go in and watch as votes are tabulated, but how do we convince anybody to believe it? So I would challenge everybody here, to your question, how are we going to convince people that our system works?

I returned to the microphone:

The, the one thing we might do is agree that there are some things, like trying to overthrow the government, that is actually, that's too much. [crowd noise, applause]. 'Other than that one little incident, Mrs. Lincoln, how do you feel about the play?' President Trump--I totally get it that you agree with lots of things that President Trump did-- but at some point trying to overthrow the government is too much.

[Crowd noise. Applause. Restless noise. A shout: "Sit down." Scattered voices of disapproval. Some applause.]

A staff person takes charge by stepping to the microphone and firmly calling out "8553," the next number to be drawn at random allowing someone else to ask a question. They were done with me.

Trump enabler.  Bentz defines Trump's attempt to overturn the election as unfortunate, but not dispositive. He avoids direct acknowledgment of what Trump did and is continuing to do, and promptly changes the subject to the many things he likes about Trump. That play Mrs. Lincoln saw---Our American Cousin--was excellent, a lighthearted satire. It made a fine evening.

 

Crowds

E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.

    

A crowd pushed, shoved, trampled, and killed eight people at a concert in Houston.

A member of the crowd told a reporter: 

It’s not the crowd’s fault at all, because there was no way you could even move, it was just like a mass loss of control.

The Travis Scott concert was sold out. He had a reputation for whipping up a crowd. The crowd surged toward the stage. When one person moved, the people around them had to move. 

Concert crowd, before the stampede

Trump had a reputation for whipping up crowds and getting people to chant. "Lock her up. Lock her up." and "Stop the steal. Stop the steal." He told supporters to come to D.C. "It will be wild," he tweeted, and it was. 

We have known from earliest history that crowds are different from individuals. They are capable of mass panic or world-conquering power, depending on whether the crowd maintains leadership and cohesion. When shields were locked together and men operated as a group they were unstoppable. Each shield protected the soldier and the one to his left.

Modern armies understand that drilling as a unit is essential to maintaining cohesion.

I have been in dangerous crowds. The beginnings of marathon races are dangerous. I was a slow runner, so I lined up near the back, but there were others, even slower, behind me. When the starting gun fires, the crowd of runners--20,000 in Rome, 30,000 in Paris--starts moving toward the starting line. The street underfoot is littered with discarded clothes: Trip hazards. The people behind me cannot stop or move to the side if I were to stumble. We are warned to go slowly but we are all excited in the moment. It is starting! We are here!  Go. Go. Go. The crowd shuffles too fast. The crowd is an undisciplined unit.

The end of the race it is entirely different. People have spread out and I am nearly alone among the laggards.

We are affected by people crowded around us. It is not an illusion and it isn't subtle. We take cues and the response is emotional, not rational. Laughter is contagious. Panic is contagious. Rhythm and repetition have power. People respond to drumming, and chanting is a form of group drumming. The woman chanting here at a New Hampshire Democratic convention in 2015 energized her Hillary supporters.  

Each clip below is just a few seconds.

Greg Walden faced an unhappy crowd in Medford in 2017. The crowd got affirmation from one another. We aren't merely right, we were righteous--damned right!

Four years later at the next Democratic convention in New Hampshire I watched Elizabeth Warren ignite the crowd with a well-organized demonstration. It went on for fifteen minutes. I saw people remove tee shirts for other candidates and join the crowd banging noise-makers and chanting for Warren. 

Many of the January 6 rioters are explaining their actions as having been part of a crowd.  An Ohio defendant said:

I one hundred percent know better than to do what I did that day. . . . I do apologize for my individual actions that day. I did get caught up in the moment.

An ongoing theme of this blog is that humans are not as rational as we think we are. We make political decisions with our guts, then justify them with rationalizations. Being in the presence of crowds that are excited and acting in unison exacerbates this effect, thereby better exposing it. I have observed it. I have felt it.

I have mentioned to others the danger of being in the midst of a marathon starting lineup, and people have asked me a sensible question. Since my running time is based on a chip attached to my shoe and there is no disadvantage whatever to lining up safely, at the back, why don't I?

The answer is irrational but very real. When I am in the middle of that group of runners, ready for the adventure of the run, I get caught up in the moment. It is exhilarating. I feel extraordinarily alive.

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Men are men. Women are women. Or not so much.

      “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

              Jane Austin, Pride and Prejudice, 1813

"Women's liberation" was a movement of the 1960s. It kept on, and some people haven't kept up.  

I learned something new and unexpected about dating practices at a local university. Guys, I was told, don't ask women out on dates in the way I remember from 50 and 60 years ago. In those days guys telephoned a girl; asked her if the two of them could go somewhere; if she agreed, he would go to her place at the appointed time; meet her; and then they would go together to some movie or food or event. He would pay for it. Then he would take her back home. That was a date. 

"Peter, that isn't how it works now," I was told by a female college freshman at the Southern Oregon University Honors College, the one studying Computer Science I wrote about two weeks ago. She was the one who told me something obvious to her, that the "apps" on my phone weren't just spying on me. 

They were sharing what they learned with each other. What happens on Google Maps or Facebook doesn't stay at Google Maps or Facebook. Oh. 

"Now the girl can ask the guy, and it is just about being together, and the girl usually pays for herself. People don't 'date' the way you did back then." Oh.

Gender roles are changing. "Women's liberation" in the 1960s and today address some of the most fundamental elements of human life. Of course there is backlash and resistance.

Trump projects old fashioned masculinity, a throwback to the "great again" pre-women's lib era of Hugh Hefner. Trump is the playboy with financial resources to attract beautiful women--Melania the current proof. He is aggressive, cruel, and belligerent. Trump's "grab pussies" videotape was shocking when it emerged, but perhaps more for the brutal honesty and crude language than for content. "When you are a star, they let you do it," he said. The videotape apparently didn't change many votes. 

Hillary Clinton was the archetype "woman's libber," the upstart speaker at college graduation, the partner in a law firm, and the breadwinner in her Arkansas home. She had a big career--senator then Secretary of State. Her polling negatives were sky high. 

There is a divide in America on traditional binary gender roles. Pew polling shows that 64% of women say gender equality has not gone far enough, compared with 49% of men who say this. The much larger divide is between Democrats and Republicans. Gender equality isn't a woman's idea so much as a modern idea, a Democratic idea, pushing against traditional culture and biology.

Pew, July 2020

Progressive messaging on gender has contained political landmines for Democrats, easy to exploit by cultural conservatives. Trans women in women's bathrooms! Faux women ruining girls' high-school sports! Most Democrats on the national stage have accepted as orthodox thinking that men and women are equal--that is for certain--but also that maleness and femaleness are much less binary and biologically determined than had been understood traditionally. Increasingly for Democrats, gender is a personal choice, complicated by culture and biology, and fluid.

Members of the leftist cultural vanguard report their preferred pronouns when introducing themselves. We are not to take for granted that a person who "presents as a woman" with hips, breasts, and beardless face, wants to be understood as a woman. Worse, making an assumption is not harmless; it is rude, an insulting micro-aggression.

In the modern economy, male upper body strength matters little, and testosterone-generated aggression and risk-taking may be a net negative. Democrats planted their flag. They are the party of women's equality. Gender equality may become the culture in America, but we are not there yet. Old ideas and assumptions persist. Republicans have done better than Democrats in exploiting this mismatch of old and new. Traditionally, men provide resources; women provide domestic nurturing. Men lead, women support.  

Who believes that outdated old-fashioned stuff? A great many people, including women who are in the workforce and voting booth. There just may be some built-in differences between male and female humans that aren't just a matter of culture. It might be biology.

The unvaccinated: picked-on victims of prejudice

"He's going to get caught, just you wait and see.

'Why is everybody always picking on me?'"

                         The Coasters, "Charlie Brown," 1959 

The unvaccinated feel picked on.

Vaccinations got defined as a matter of identity grievance, not a communicable disease.

They are victims, so they can't be dangerous. Right?

Sign at a New York restaurant

A lot of people feel they face prejudice: Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, women, homosexuals, Jews, Muslims, Catholics, Evangelicals, trans, seniors, the obese, and others. There is one new group: The unvaccinated.

Green Bay Packer quarterback Aaron Rodgers is in the news this weekend. He is unvaccinated, having skirted NFL rules to protect the team and league by stating that he "was immunized." He said he didn't lie exactly; he just defined immunity in his own terms. He said his "immunity" consisted of following advice he got from Joe Rogan, which was to be in good shape, to take zinc and ivermectin, and to let your natural immune system protect you.

He tested positive for COVID. He is lashing back at the criticism he is getting for endangering his teammates and others. He said he is the victim of a "witch hunt," and is being put into a "cancel-culture casket."

Look, I'm not some sort of anti-vax, flat-earther. I am somebody who is a critical thinker, you guys know me. I march to my own drum. . ..

I realize I’m in the crosshairs of the woke mob right now. . .. I believe strongly in bodily autonomy and ability to make choices for your body: Not have to acquiesce to some woke culture or crazed group of individuals who say you have to do something.

I hear from readers of this blog who struggle to understand why people have dug in their heels on COVID vaccination. After all, those resisters have almost certainly been vaccinated against smallpox, polio, measles, chicken pox, rubella, hepatitis, and more. Why the resistance here?

Aaron Rodgers and the sign at the restaurant help explain it. The unvaccinated and their enablers are making a category error.  Early messaging from Trump changed the category of COVID from one of the many communicable, infectious diseases, in which one's behavior is a matter of injury or death to others, into the category of identity and private choice, like race, religion, and sexual orientation. Trump's early messaging defined COVID as "just the flu" and warned not to let the cure be worse than the disease. Trump defined efforts to control spread as oppression from the dominant group--i.e. the government infectious disease worry-warts. American culture has an existing mental template for this: Prejudice. People on both left and right are alert for discrimination, adverse profiling, aggressions and micro-aggressions. It is an idea out there in the zeitgeist. Victims of prejudice have a language of push-back: "pride," "identity," "autonomy," and "privacy."

A majority of White Americans, and White Evangelicals especially, tell pollsters they feel themselves to be victims of prejudice. They complain the whole culture defines them as racists, as superstitious, as homophobes, as deplorable. They entered the COVID era already unhappy about government affirmative action programs. COVID protocols fell into that frame, bossy government picking on "normal" people like them.

KDRV-TV-Medford protest supporting un-vaccinated nurses

Seen as victims, vaccination refusers get an excuse from the patriotic duty of care for fellow Americans. Victims are weak. Weak people aren't predators, selfishly endangering others. We do not see street protests on behalf of spouse batterers and kidnappers, people who are exercising their individual autonomy to endanger others. They are understood to be anti-social and strong, i.e. criminals. But we do see gatherings on behalf of nurses who wish to continue doing their hands-on work on fragile patients while being unvaccinated. They are a different mental category: The unvaccinated nurses are victims, victims of prejudice. How can they be dangerous?

In the song Charlie Brown, we know that the deep voice of "Charlie" is blind to his own guilt when he asks "Why is everybody always picking on me?"

Who's always writing on the wall who's always goofing in the hall?
Who's always throwing spit balls guess who (who me – yea you)?

 Aaron Rodgers is blinded by his sense of victimhood: He's the good guy here, being picked on. He was also exhaling up close to others in the huddle calling plays and breathing deep in the locker room. His teammates trusted him. COVID is a communicable disease.