How Can They Believe This Crap?

Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.

— William Blum

The Trumpian twaddle that pollutes my social-media streams is deadening.

The obvious question I always return to is: How can so many Americans believe this crap? 

Are they all stupid? 

Or are some stupid and others venal? 

Or are they neither, but brainwashed instead?

Flash back 160 years for the answer.

The Civil War, the greatest trauma to wrack our democracy, was waged because wealthy cotton planters—20% of the South's population—needed cheap labor. 

Those 20% convinced the 80%—one million Southern men altogether—to fight to the death to defend slavery. 

How in the hell did they do that?

Through three cadres of influencers, says Civil War historian Gordon Rhea.

In "Why Non-Slaveholding Southerners Fought," Rhea asks you to "travel back with me to the South of 1860." If you do so, you learn:

• Southerners had no problem enslaving four million Blacks. They weren't real Americans, after all, but "immigrants," as Ben Carson says.
  
  
• Southerners were terrified Blacks would rebel. They'd not just "destroy the suburbs," as it were, but organize and form their own states. John Brown's 1859 Harper's Ferry Raid looked to them a lot like the BLM disturbances this summer.
  
  
• Southerners felt beleaguered by Abolitionists, the critical, cranky "Libtards" of their day.

Rhea says three loud-mouthed groups swayed the 80% of Southerners who owned no slaves to die, if need be, to perpetuate slavery:

• Clergymen. Before there was Fox News, clergymen were the South's broadcasters. Insisting the Bible was infallible, week after week they told churchgoers that slavery had the "sanction of Jehovah" and that Abolitionists were infidels who insulted God's word. One clergyman labeled the Abolitionists "atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, and Jacobins." (AOC, are you wincing?)

• Politicos. In late 1860, five states—Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana—sent traveling envoys throughout the South to speak in public, hand out brochures, and place op-eds in local newspapers. Their message was one-track: Lincoln craved not merely emancipation, but equality for Blacks, which meant "the marriage of your daughters to black husbands.” Like today's Critical Race Theorists, Lincoln wanted to destroy the "American way of life."
  
  
• Local leaders. Local Southern leaders—who tended to be planters—told their communities that Abolitionists were "haters" and the enemies of "law and order." Abolition meant releasing "more than four million of a very poor and ignorant population to ramble in idleness over the country until their wants should drive most of them, first to petty thefts, and afterwards to the bolder crimes of robbery and murder.” Defeating Lincoln, they claimed, was the only way to ensure the "heaven-ordained superiority of the White over the Black."

Don't miss Episode II.

Beatnik Babies

 

We'll get you through your children!

― Allen Ginsberg

In April 1996, I dragged my three then-school-age kids to "Rebel Voices Speak Again," a 12-hour poetry slam hosted by the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery.

Poetry slams were all the rage at the time, and this one promised to be a whopper: a day-long marathon of readings and reminiscences starring slam poetry's originals, the bards of the Beat Generation (the living ones, anyway).

My kids—by far, the youngest listeners in the auditorium—seemed reasonably attentive and were, thank goodness, exceptionally well behaved throughout. 

It probably helped that we went for lunch to the museum cafeteria, where they could eat hot dogs and potato chips.

I sometimes wonder whether that countercultural cavalcade of cool cats and hot chicks—Corso, Creeley, Elmslie, Ginsberg, Jones, Koch, Lauterbach, McClure, Ferlinghetti, Padgett and a half-dozen others—converted my kids from would-be conformists into the three strong, wildly independent, free-thinking adults they are today.

Did the Beats "get me" through my children?

Maybe it's true: poetry is dangerous.

Paris under Lockdown

Never were we freer than under the German occupation.

— Jean Paul Sartre

The exhibition 1940: Parisian Exodus, now on view at the Musée de la Libération de Paris, marks the 80th anniversary of the invasion of the city by Hitler's army.

On June 5, 1940, from positions along the Belgian frontier, the Germans advanced against France's Maginot Line. Hitler's objectives: the capture of Paris and the annihilation of France's government. Panicked by the onslaught, two million French men, women and childen—three-quarters of Paris's population—left the capital in a harried 10-day flight that journalists came to call the "Parisian Exodus."

The exhibition has prompted many Parisians to compare 1940's Exodus and the subsequent German occupation of the city to today's Covid-19 pandemic. Both saw mass flights by civilians, followed by severe lockdowns.

One Parisian who witnessed the German occupation was the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. In an article in The Atlantic, Sartre wrote in 1944, "Never were we freer than under the German occupation." Living “nakedly”—experiencing isolation, hardship, and continuous police surveillance—brought to light Parisians' authentic freedom, Sartre said. "At every instant we lived up to the full sense of this commonplace little phrase: ‘Man is mortal!’ And the choice that each of us made of his life and of his being was an authentic choice because it was made face to face with death."

Contemporary philosopher Julian Baggini, one of the Parisians who likens the current lockdown to the German occupation, believes "the pandemic offers an opportunity to relearn what it means to be free."

Writing in Psyche, Baggini says Covid-19 has driven home for Parisians the fact that, normally, we're trapped. We do most things "wantonly"—on a whim or out of habit; or due to peer-pressure; or because we've been manipulated by media and marketers. 

"Very little of what we do every day is the result of a considered decision," Baggini writes. "Being able to do what we want without constraint, but also without thought, is the lowest and least valuable form of freedom."

But the lockdown has taught Parisians, constrained and facing death, to consider their every choice.

"When my options shrunk and any activity required more planning, the choices I made became more authentic because they had to be more thought-through," Baggini says. "This capacity for reflective decision-making is the highest and most valuable form of freedom a human being can have."

In short, Parisians were never freer than now.

The Happiness Museum

Rules for happiness: something to do,
someone to love, something to hope for.

— Immanuel Kant

Wonderful Copenhagen has opened a Happiness Museum.

Established by the Happiness Research Institute—I want a job there—the museum comprises eight rooms dedicated to the science of joy.

One room features an atlas of the world’s happiest—and unhappiest—nations. Another explores how money and politics contribute to happiness. And still others examine merriment's connection to comfort, pleasure, laughter, and smiling.

“Our hope is guests will leave a little wiser, a little happier and a little more motivated to make the world a better place,” museum director Meik Wiking told Hyperallergic.

Civil Wars

It is possible for highly intelligent people to have a useful but mistaken theory, and we don't have to pretend otherwise to show respect for these people.

— Daniel Dennett

I've given up arguing with reactionaries; I can hardly anymore argue with liberals.

Mistaken theories abound nowadays. 

If you're struggling like me to stay civil, take the advice of Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett.

"Just how charitable are you supposed to be when criticizing the views of an opponent?" he asks in Intuition Pumps.

Dennett offers four rules, based on research in behavioral psychology:

1. Restate your opponent's position clearly, vividly, and fairly—so much so, your opponent thanks you.
   
   
2. List any points of agreement, unless they're points of widespread agreement (such as, "Politicians aren't always candid").
   
   
3. Describe what you've learned from your opponent.
   
   
4. Rebut you opponent only after you've taken Steps 1, 2 and 3.

This four-step process warms your opponent, so she listens to you. You might actually advance your discussion.

And if she doesn't warm to you, remember what Oscar Wilde said: "In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane."